Ultimately this is what the anti-trans panic is about, despising the fact people don’t want to be categorised and trying to segregate the entire population along identity lines invented by somebody else. It is profoundly authoritarian and that affects everyone.
Rain, Steam and Speed, The Great Western Railway, oil on canvas, 1844, by JMW Turner, great English Romantic artist, inspired Monet & other French impressionists; born #OTD 1775.
An early GWR broad gauge locomotive crossing Brunel’s Maidenhead Bridge.
National Gallery London
🚨 NEW: Inside Big Oil's campaign to push Labour to drill the North Sea
Oil & gas lobbyists have met UK and Scottish ministers more than once a week since Labour took office
MPs have asked questions in Parliament after meeting lobbyists, and more 🧵
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-h...
A long, skinny map titled: "Life and Travels of the European Eel" with a subtitle reading: "From the Eel's Perspective." A label at the bottom of the map reads: "Begin Here." The map top half of the map is an mirror copy of the bottom half. The map goes from the bottom of the page up, starting in the Sargasso Sea. An set of arrows show the eels paths to shore, then up a river and into a marshland. The arrows continue up the page to show the eel leaving the marshland and heading back downstream, and out to sea. The land is green and verdant at the bottom of the map, because the eels migrate upstream in the spring. The land is brown and dry at the top of the map, because eels migrate downstream in the autumn. A column of text on the side tells about the eels' journeys and changes. It is more text than I can relate in the space allowed here. Each paragraph has an arrow pointing up to the next one, and they are designed to be read from the bottom of the page going upwards.
How does an eel think about its life? What are the steps? And when should it start to eat its own bones?
This map tells you!
“But SEH,” you say. “I don’t want to come here every time I need to see this!”
Good news, friends! You can buy it here as a poster and put it on your wall!
etsy.me/3Nvk5jK
The "death" of English departments and other liberal arts fields is not about their obsolescence but about the fact that they're being actively *killed* by institutions that don't value them on principle, not because of any evidence. Glad ppl are catching up. www.nybooks.com/online/2023/...
rest well jh prynne, the / mere & lovely centre, of the earth
What Starmer didn’t do.
And of course, it's a 60s academic, so you always get one of these in the introduction
A hundred years ago, the U.S. had a nationwide network of short-line railroads that connected most urban and rural communities. By the 1940s, most of it had been dismantled ... by the barons of the auto and oil industries. 😑
Absolutely incredible.
NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II, took this footage from the far side of the Moon with his iPhone.
Watch with sound on.
If you step back, it is truly extraordinary that so many people went to such great lengths and broke so many conventions and risked their political careers and the only outcome of all these efforts and risks was appointing a washed-up old spinner to an ambassadorial post
A slightly smug-looking man in tweeds, with a beard, looking at camera as he smokes (or poses with) a pipe
It’s the 78th anniversary of Oxford graduate (with a first), bestselling author, Fabian, public philosopher, after-dinner speaker, parliamentary candidate, and BBC radio ‘Brains Trust’ personality Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad monumentally fucking over his own career by being done for fare-dodging 🧵
The JC has published an op ed by Nigel Farage rallying against Jew-hatred.
This is a man who sang antisemitic songs, and supposedly said “Hitler was right”, “Gas them” during school days
news.sky.com/story/nigel-...
theguardian.com/politics/202...
thejc.com/opinion/jews...
Oh nice!!
There are small examples of the system just not working properly that have repeatedly frustrated me, like the lack of a “pensions dashboard” telling you the more than slightly basic information of what pensions you have. Remember this being talked about a decade ago…
Saturday Laundry #4
• Delivering single-sex spaces on the basis of biological sex, in NHS wards, schools, sport and everyday life by upholding the Equality Act and delivering clear instructions to public services on how to comply with their legal obligations to women and to trans people. • Keeping women's prisons for women, instructing the Scottish Prison Service to remove all biologically male prisoners from women's prisons within days of the election. • Recommit the NHS to delivering single sex wards on the basis of biological sex, and ensuring patients can request same sex provision wherever possible.
Scottish Labour manifesto is out, don’t vote for them
New substack: income inequality has fallen slightly, but inequalities of power are a big problem: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/one-cheer-...
I don't think anything more usefully summarises the UK than seeing the "left wing" government kick the fuck out of one of the few genuinely successful export sectors of the last ten years because racist pensioners who will never vote for them don't like foreigners.
Thought this was an interesting little chunk. The people running this government have forgotten how to make a sincere argument for what they are doing.
Pierre Mendes France was the Prime Minister of France.
ORBÁN CONCEDED
Let's not forget. The UK government has cut incapacity by half for people who have been found unfit for work
When Angela Rayner underpaid £40,000 stamp duty on her flat, Richard Tice said it was "morally completely indefensible” and she should immediately resign if she had “any moral decency”.
Now we learn he personally made £91,000 in excess payments by failing to pay the tax his company legally owed
Without having yet read the book, I’d say that in reality the purpose of UK immigration policy is to placate the racists without destroying the economy. That’s purely descriptive.
A member of the government comes clean.
The idea Starmer has ‘kept Britain out of this illegal war’ has been a lie.
The variety of German bees before the Industrial Revolution (187, top) vs after the introduction of pesticides (43, bottom), DHM
I don't remember seeing an image of Earth before that captures the (thin, fragile, tiny layer of) atmosphere so clearly. I mean, look at that.
