It's going to be even worse the next time they appoint Peter Mandelson

On top of everything else, the level of 'embattled' behaviour going on with senior ministers and their comfort zone of lashing out of their traditional supporters shows the government is both in disarray and denial.

it’s not that the broad center-left/democratic party is blameless or that the political right is never reacting to changes/provocations or the like, but that victory and defeat, success and failure are shaped by actors on both sides, as well as broad forces and the contingency of human events

if the right is successful, it must be because the liberals possess some fatal shortcoming or overreached in a way that mechanically produced backlash. the idea that the political right is its own thing with its own aims, can harness discontent and take advantage of contingency is verboten i guess

flipping through a proof of yet another book from a somewhat well known liberal voice diagnosing “where the left went wrong” and i’m struck, again, by the fact that a large part (if not most) of the liberal commentariat simply does not believe that the political right has agency.

"Muskism gets stuff done…sometimes. At a cost. A high cost. Tarnoff and Slobodian count that cost, identify who pays it, and conjure up the world in which those costs continue to mount for all of us."

Miliband doubles down on net zero - Energy Live News Labour to announce breaking the link between gas and electricity prices and more renewables push

Ed Miliband today: "The era of fossil fuel security is over and the era of clean energy security must come of age....To ignore two crises in less than five years would be completely irresponsible… our action must now be faster deeper and more wide ranging.”

Sorry for being stupid, but could you explain?

I half agree. Suspect the winners will be those who can combine intimacy with scale, that is:

-bespoke, finely-tuned, locally-specific approach that dynamically adapts.
AND
-able to deploy lots of those intimate approach in many different situations, to which the specific approach adapts.

The extent to which YIMBY and techbro influencers in the 2020s get hyped up about centralised megaprojects is eerily reminiscent of the poetic odes 1920 and 30s Communist intellectuals churned out about steelworks and dams at the heart of Stalinist 5 year plans

Agree.

The pattern from history: the cover up ends up hurting the politician more than the original infraction.

But Starmer will now have to also apologise for all the obfuscation. So, harder tactic than if he’d done it straight away.

For those keeping track at home. The Iranians have now blockaded the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US blockading it because the Iranians had blockaded it, in response to the US attacking Iran to ensure that the Strait which was fully open at the time wasn't blockaded.

Picard ethics tip: The fact that a conflict has many sides does not imply that every side has merit.

No scenario in latest Mandelson drama makes Keir Starmer look good Something has gone badly wrong in communication between Downing Street and government departments

Today's newsletter: although of the three scenarios that would explain 'he's failed his developed vetting - oh well!', only one is traditionally a resigning matter, all three reveal a man either unwilling or unfit to do the actual job of prime minister.

Apparently it’s
International Haiku Day.
I shall ignore it.

“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

The nub of so many of this government’s problems is that there is a Keir Starmer where the prime minister should be.

Probably be fine.

Tweet from Elon Musk: "*Soros Organization has taken over Hungary"

Antisemitism is structurally necessary for Elon Musk's politics, because he wants to brand himself as the insurgent populist fighting the elite, but as the world's wealthiest person, he needs a definition of "elite" that is not strictly rooted in wealth or corporate ownership.

The Brexit delusion is dead – so now Keir Starmer doesn’t need to pretend any more | Rafael Behr To rebuild relations with Europe in a dangerous world, the prime minister needs to win big arguments, not hide behind outdated red lines, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

This is right, but I'd go further: winning the domestic argument on the free movement of people is what's needed to unlock anything further than the reset. That means Starmer has to repudiate many of his own arguments on migration.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

As I noted yesterday, if Labour had not lost so many votes to the Greens and Lib Dems they would be AHEAD of Reform in the polling and the narrative would look extremely different. I also suspect May will be Reform's ultimate peak in electoral success. But will Labour now be the beneficiaries?

Beyond rage-inducing.

Shutting down USAID has likely led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...

I’m a broken record on this, but the Strategic Defence Review was arguably *the best* opportunity to government had to build political consent for higher broad-based taxes (as voters have enough sense of history to see why a more dangerous world would necessitate it). But alas, they didn’t take it.

Historic collaboration between petrostates: working together they will accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

Wasn’t on my 2016 bingo card.

Just recorded a great pod, and I gotta say ... solar and batteries are going to win. They are the main dish. Everything else is a side dish. In 10 years, you won't be able to find anyone who disagrees with this.

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia E. Butler, 1998:

If it’s such a ‘gold mine’ why did the 14 year period of the last Conservative government, throughout which it pursued a policy of issuing licenses and maximising oil and gas production, end up being defined by austerity and the worst wage growth since the Napoleonic era?

FACTCHECK UPDATE: No, the UK can't "be more like Norway" in the North Sea

🇬🇧 extracted most of its oil & gas after privatisation
🇳🇴 has much more left due to state stewardship
🤔Lawson spent UK windfall on tax cuts; Norway got a sovereign wealth fund

www.carbonbrief.org/...

1)We need some energy capacity for when renewables can’t deliver.
2)Various improving technologies that address 1) (see @volts.wtf episode).
3)Nuclear track record: late, over-budget, limited cost reductions over time.
4) People obsessed with 3) rarely understand 2).

www.volts.wtf/p/what-the-s...

If I could change almost any recent fact of British political history, it'd be to have Jeremy Clarkson lead the remain campaign.

We'd have won by a landslide.