Neil Brighton @NeilBrighton

I’ve been writing about Andy Burnham in Manchester for a while. We’ve had a few run-ins but I think he has qualities that many people don’t appreciate and weaknesses that spell trouble. I wrote this for @ManchesterMill - I hope it’s insightful and fair. manchestermill.co.uk/stop-looking-f…

What's really grim about Christian trad culture is that in the end this content, all these pastors and influencers can sell you is resentment. Not happiness. Just anger you're not happy. What unites every piece of trad media I've looked at is that it has a tortured relationship

Elon Musk has today updated the formula that decides if you see this tweet. Each tweet is scored. S=Σ (probability of reaction × value of reaction) A like = 0.5 points. A reply = 13.5. A full argument? 75+ That’s why outrage travels faster than facts. thetimes.com/comment/column…

A friend of mine messaged me this week, more than a little frustrated at what she feels is silence from people who she would expect to be vocal in calling out antisemitism in public. She’s Jewish, her children are escorted to their sports field by security guards and now there are police guarding the school too. “Wouldn’t it be nice if people posted their support for the U.K. Jewish community” she wrote. I felt a bit uneasy replying - won’t it look like I’m claiming some understanding of a community I’m not part of? Is it a bit performative? Is there something more useful I can do? But she’s right - it’s gross that children can’t play sport without a security escort. Can you imagine how you’d feel if that was your child? You’d be wildly angry and you’d want everyone to be shouting about it. And we’re not, not really. Often, I think, because people are afraid to be drawn into a political debate they don’t fully understand or feel comfortable with and they just don’t want the hassle. But this isn’t a political debate. It’s about people turning on our friends and threatening them, attacking them and killing them and it’s happening here. It’s that simple. I am ashamed that children can’t go to school here without a police escort - something has gone horribly wrong. And I’m sorry that we haven’t been more vocal, we should be. It is that simple. This article struck a chord, but I don’t think it applies only to British Muslims. It applies to us all. Silence on antisemitism shames us as British Muslims thetimes.com/article/d93a13…

This Two Ronnies sketch was never televised originally (it appeared many years later), but I’ve no idea why. It was written by Ronnie Barker, under the pseudonym Gerald Wiley, and for my money it gives Four Candles a run for it’s money. Seriously, if I’d written something this good I’d just retire immediately. What a talent! Good morning.

Whatever the outcome of this committee hearing #Robbins is coming across as a brilliant civil servant - who is entirely in control of the facts, the sensitivity, the code and the principles of his job. And he is exposing the PM as a leader who either didnt grasp the facts, ignored smart advice - or has chosen to appear outraged when he should not have been.

All recorded earthquake worldwide from 2015-2025

@CaraBentley @TimesRadio you do a great job!

@NewReaganCaucus It may seem imprudent but as a Brit it feels as if the US is fast becoming a significant threat for us and Western liberal democracy. Behind Russia and radical (mostly Islamic) terrorism but ahead of China.

Oxford University researchers have discovered the densest element yet known to science... The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

"Trump, the Mar-a-Lago golfer, is the only bull in the world who walks around with his own china shop. When a clown takes over the Palace, he doesn't become King. It's the Palace that becomes a circus" French senator Claude Malhuret once again nails it. You won't hear a better indictment of Trump and his Gulf war than this. Well worth 5 minutes of your time My English s/t 👇

I have deleted my original debunk of this story as it appears it is actually an amalgamation of 2 stories... (Don't let anyone tell you I'm not prepared to be corrected!!) So let's look at them individually: We'll start with the photo... So what's going on? 🧵1/12

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

This is remarkable, old-fashioned parliamentary oratory at its best, regardless of one’s agreement or disagreement. Observe the rhetorical tropes, the voice, the movement, and the vocabulary. A vanishing art in the Commons.

David Davis MP @DavidDavisMP

3 months ago

For those of you interested in jury trials, this is Parliament at its best. 👇

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If this current situation shows anything. It is that the UK really needs to get to grips with defence procurement and spending asap. To be clear eyed about the threats we might face and how to defend ourselves (and others) from them.

Deborah Haynes @haynesdeborah

3 months ago

BREAKING: The UK is considering sending a major warship to Cyprus to help defend a Royal Air Force base from the threat of attack by Iranian drones and missiles, it is understood. Discussions are taking place about deploying a Type 45 destroyer. It is the only piece of equipment

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@PaulAnleitner If you compare with Europe I suspect that secularisation in the US may have a way to run yet. Without checking all the refs you use, the reminder that corellation doesn't equal causation may apply and the danger of picking/fitting data to our preconceptions.

Regular listeners to our show will know how often I am upbraided for being gloomy about AI. “The Industrial Revolution didn’t end jobs, it will all be fine!”, they shout. This from an expert in the field tells us all how utterly fucked we all are.

Matt Shumer @mattshumer_

4 months ago

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@Tim_Roca As a constituent I'm happy w/this; but gov needs to get better at coms, a serious focus on economic growth, constraining welfare spending (by helping ppl return to work, supporting mental H etc), increase defence spending & focusing on medium term improvements eg: NHS, deficit.

I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1789

The Peruvian Embassy, London.