You’d have thought that offloading some of their worst on Reform should have improved the average yet somehow it hasn’t.

Did somebody in that marina mention that they didn’t like walruses?

the Labour Party will never love its actual voters as much as it loves its imagined ideal voters (who do not, in fact, vote for them)

Bizarre to think that half my son’s class at school will be legally allowed to do something the other half can‘t for their entire adult lives. Feels unworkable.

Meme. Picture: Sesame Street. Elmo, Grover, Cookie Monster, Bert, and Ernie, talking to a Dalek. Caption: Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letter E.

Today's inspirational message:

The USA suffered more deaths from disease than from combat in EVERY war prior to 1941.

This is actually used as a plot device in E.L.Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’.

Why won’t the Brits join us in our war with Iran? * - also we are going to count WW2 as including those 2 years and 3 months when the USA didn’t join in their war with Germany.

* Yes I know we kind of did join.

The peculiar horror of the current situation is that people who have a decent publication record amassed during two or even three ‘early career’ posts are now competing for jobs with people who have been made redundant after ten or twenty years in a full time post.

Stop ruining Mad Max for us. How dare you just drive around in Australia using free, reliable and abundant energy rather than engaging in a Hobbesian struggle for resources in a post Apocalyptic wilderness.

Missed out ‘and nominating the narcissist in chief for the Nobel Peace Prize’ which was probably the most important thing.

There was a tipping point somewhere in the 2000s when there started to be people with a monograph and decent articles who couldn’t get a permanent job. That didn’t happen much before then.

I just tried to quantify it based on recent experiences and conversations with colleagues. In the nineties there would typically be a group of people you met whilst interviewing for permanent jobs and after each round you’d know one good competitor was gone. In the end perhaps half got jobs…

The difference is that in the eighties there would be perhaps ten very well qualified applicants for a permanent job in any history field, in 2010 there would be roughly twenty and today there are at least one hundred.

To a large extent this has been true for my entire life in academia- senior academics were telling me it was all over in the 1980s. But the job market has moved from grim and depressing to completely apocalyptic in the last five years.

Honestly unsure if this is intended to be satire.

The only way Hilton wins California is running against another Republican. Otherwise he gets flattened like Wil.E.Coyote.

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

In a strange way, it says something about how effective the oceanic Pax Americana has been since 1945 that 'blockade functioning normally in a war' is such a strange sight that folks respond with shock.

This used to be a regular occurrence!

TBH rather impressed if a nearly eighty year old man thwarted one terrorist attack - even Harrison Ford hasn’t done that lately.

One day I hope to see The Onion as owners of Fox News.

Lord Clarke of Stone cum Ebony died last week. That is why we can’t do it.

This is just covering for the fact that no one knows how to run an Admiralty Prize Court these days…

Fisher-Price Is Pivoting to AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons Manufacturing “We at Fisher-Price have always believed in the power of imagination. In discovery. In the joy of a child pressing a button and hearing a satisfying sound. T...

"As a company founded in 1930 on the principles of 'safety, durability, and play value,' we felt the logical next step was autonomous kill drones."

Thread

Members of the team were recruited for an exhibition match against the occupiers which they won - then allegedly some were arrested and executed. But the causal link is uncertain at best.

Although having just looked this up there are apparently some real issues with the quality of the research and the repetition of some Soviet era myths which had already been debunked in Ukraine by the time of publication. I read it 20 odd years ago so didn‘t know that.

A bit - although the story is even more grim.

Possibly the nearest I got to participating in either was picketing the South African Ambassador who was invited to debate at the Cambridge Union in 1983.
IIRC he subsequently called the protestors ‘jackbooted thugs’ and claimed Apartheid South Africa was a land of free speech.

10 years in Cambridge as UG, PG and Research Fellow and 29 years in Oxford in the History Faculty and never attended a debate in either the Cambridge or Oxford Unions. Never saw them as having any relationship at all with the intellectual life of the university.