Lynn Williams

A sadly all-too-apposite poem by the late, great Euan MacColl; reproduced from memory so apologies if not completely accurate.

Every accusation is an admission ...

🧵THREAD: I want you to see this clearly. Two hours after a man with a shotgun fired shots at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, sixteen of the most prominent MAGA influencers on X all posted the same message. The message was not "thank God the President is safe." The message was "this is why we need the White House ballroom."

For the first time, documents confirm the CIA carried out tests on North Korean POWs and planned for much more invasive experimentation. interc.pt/4mZJIGE

The solar panels destroyed by Israel's army are used to provide the Lebanese town of Debl with electricity, as well as supply power to its water station. The IDF says the actions seen in the video do not align with their values. 🔗 trib.al/PCHqQAT

The most important thing America exported in the post-WWII period was not consumer goods. It was not democracy. It was not culture, though that came close. It was the dollar. The Bretton Woods system made the dollar the global reserve currency. Every country that wants to trade internationally needs dollars. Every commodity, especially oil, is priced in dollars. Every country must maintain dollar reserves. The United States can run trade deficits indefinitely because demand for its currency is structurally guaranteed by the architecture of global trade. This is called "exorbitant privilege," a phrase coined by a French finance minister in the 1960s who understood exactly what it meant. It means the United States gets to consume more than it produces, indefinitely, because the world needs its currency. It means sanctions are a weapon of mass economic destruction because cutting a country off from dollar systems is cutting it off from the global economy. It means the Federal Reserve's domestic monetary policy decisions, interest rate changes made for American economic reasons, immediately affect the debt servicing costs of every country that has borrowed in dollars, which is most of them. No one elected the Federal Reserve to govern the global economy. It governs the global economy anyway. The ladder was not just industrial policy. The ladder was also this. The ladder was the whole system.

A Persian scholar finished a single math book in 9th century Baghdad that quietly became the foundation for every line of code running on Earth today. I started reading about him at midnight and could not believe how many things in my daily life trace back to one man. His name was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. The book is called The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. Every time you say the word algebra, you are saying his book title. Every time someone says the word algorithm, they are saying his name. Both English words come from him. Both are Latin transliterations of Arabic and of his own identity. The man did not just contribute to mathematics. He named it. Here is the part almost nobody tells you. Al-Khwarizmi was born around 780 CE in Khwarazm, in what is now Uzbekistan. He moved to Baghdad and worked at a research institution called the House of Wisdom, which during the Islamic Golden Age was the single most important center of learning on the planet. The caliph al-Mamun hired the best mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers from across three continents and put them in one building with one job. Translate, study, and produce new knowledge. Al-Khwarizmi finished his book on algebra around 820 CE. The Arabic title contained the word al-jabr, which referred to one of the two operations he used to solve equations. When the book was translated into Latin in the 12th century, the Latin world did not have a word for what he had built. So they kept his Arabic word. Al-jabr became algebra. The discipline was named after a single Arabic word in the title of a single book by a single man. The deeper insight is what he actually changed about how humans think. Before al-Khwarizmi, mathematical problems were solved geometrically. You drew shapes. You measured them. You compared areas. The Greeks had built an entire mathematical tradition on visual proofs and physical constructions. It was beautiful and limited. You could not solve a problem you could not draw. Al-Khwarizmi did something nobody had done before him at this scale. He said you could solve any problem using abstract symbols and rules. You did not need a shape. You needed a procedure. You moved terms across the equation. You cancelled like terms on both sides. You isolated the unknown. He invented the idea that mathematics is a manipulation of symbols according to rules, not a study of physical figures. That single shift made everything that came afterward possible. Calculus. Differential equations. Linear algebra. Quantum mechanics. None of it works if math is locked inside geometry. He pulled it out. The second thing he did is the one that changed how the world counted forever. He took the Hindu numeral system from Indian mathematics, refined it, and wrote a book introducing it to the Arab world. That system included the concept of zero as a placeholder, and a positional notation where the value of a digit depends on its location. Roman numerals could not do complex calculation. Hindu-Arabic numerals could. When his book on numerals was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, the word Algoritmi was just the Latin spelling of his own name. Europeans started calling the new method "doing algorism," then "running an algorithm." The word for the most important concept in computer science is literally his name in Latin. The third thing he did is the part that should haunt anyone who works in tech. His method of solving problems was systematic. Step one, do this. Step two, check that. Step three, if condition A, then do X, otherwise do Y. He wrote down procedures that could be followed by anyone, anywhere, who knew how to read. The procedure did not depend on intuition or genius. It worked because the steps worked. That is exactly what an algorithm is. A finite, deterministic procedure for solving a problem. He did not just give us the word. He gave us the entire concept of programming a thousand years before there was anything to program. When Alan Turing built the first abstract model of computation in 1936, when John von Neumann designed the first stored-program computer in 1945, when every engineer at Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind writes code in 2026, they are working in a paradigm that started with one man in Baghdad twelve centuries ago. The strangest part is what happens when you walk into any tech office in San Francisco or Bangalore or Lahore today. Engineers say the words algebra and algorithm hundreds of times a day. They do not know whose name they are saying. Almost nobody can spell al-Khwarizmi correctly on the first try. His original Arabic manuscript is preserved at Oxford. His book on Hindu numerals survives only in Latin translation. The Latin version was the textbook that taught medieval Europe how to count. The man who built the foundation of the AI revolution did not live to see a calculator. He died around 850 CE, a thousand years before the first electric current was sent through a wire. The civilization he built mathematics for collapsed. The library he wrote in burned. His own grave is unmarked. But every algorithm running on every machine on Earth right now still answers to his name.

Both these youngsters are two of kindest, smartest, most genuine humans you could hope to meet. That the NYP chooses to besmirch them with headlines and claims entirely unrelated to them is a new low, and that's saying something for a ZioNazi rag unfit to wipe your arse with.

@Shut_the_fridge The world through the looking glass is strange indeed

@LynnW192 This HAS to be to do with the fact the Ballroom refurb funds have been denied, Trump has claimed it's entirety is to do with security and the judge disagreed and would only fund it in part.

“Save the one with the functioning brain!!”

@dailybritainonx Grifter

He is funded by a Thailand-based crypto billionaire and a man pardoned by Trump for financial crimes. He declared £384,000 in earnings up to 120 days late. His deputy has two tax scandals. He says he speaks for ordinary working people. One word. Drop it in the comments.

You know what the Gallipoli landing was, Rubes? It was a military folly where thousands of Australian &NZ lives were thrown away in stupid subservience to a misguided, incompetently led, fatally flawed, empire-ordered, doomed campaign. Not unlike the US’s campaign to sucker Australia into your planned war against China. Lest we forget.

CHINA LIGHTS UP CUBA. They finally see the light in Cuba, trapped for months in blackouts of more than 20 hours, finds an ally that won't arrive with oil... but with technology. And what is happening right now is changing everything. The twist is straight: 75 solar plants rising in record time. It's not just a number, it's a declaration of power and strategy. Beijing deploys an army of panels with a clear goal: to reduce energy dependence and stabilize a system that was on the brink of collapse. This is not help... it's influence. We’re seeing the end of an era where oil dominated everything, and the beginning of a China-led model of energy independence.

“If the tailings leach into groundwater, it could contaminate Lake Dunstan & #Clutha River. If the dam were to catastrophically fail in an earthquake it could destroy neighbouring properties and cost lives”. @NZ_PCE on danger of proposed Bendigo NZ mine: thespinoff.co.nz/politics/23-04…

SHE LEAKED THE MEMO THAT COULD HAVE STOPPED THE IRAQ WAR. In January 2003, Katharine Gun was a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence agency. She showed up to work one morning, opened her email, and found a memo that would destroy her career, threaten her marriage, and land her in court facing two years in prison. The email was from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the NSA's regional targets division, asking GCHQ to help spy on the private communications of six UN Security Council nations whose votes would determine whether the world approved an invasion of Iraq. The goal was to gather intelligence that would give US policymakers leverage over smaller nations. Angola. Cameroon. Chile. Guinea. Pakistan. Bulgaria. Countries with no dog in this fight, being bugged so Washington and London could fix the result. Gun printed the email, slipped it into her handbag, and eventually passed it to a journalist. In March 2003 the memo was published by The Observer, creating a media firestorm and raising serious questions about the legality of the Iraq War. Then they came for her. She was charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act in November 2003. She refused to plead guilty. Her legal team decided the best defence was to prove that the war itself was illegal, and demanded the government hand over its own legal advice to Tony Blair. And here is the part that tells you everything you need to know about how power actually works. The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour it was dropped. The prosecution offered no evidence. In May 2019 The Guardian reported the case was dropped because the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge showing that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful. The government could not prosecute the whistleblower without putting the war on trial. So they quietly walked out of court and hoped everyone would forget. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, called Gun's action the most important and courageous leak he had ever seen. Three UK inquiries into the Iraq War never once examined her case. Sources: The Observer / The Guardian

María Vázquez. Le cortaron los pezones, entre otras innombrables barbaries, siendo brutalmente torturada y violada en la prisión de Pontedeume, donde fue conducida a palos tras el golpe militar de 1936, sometida también a escarnio público. Cansados de darle martirio la fusilaron en la playa de Miño – La Coruña el 19 agosto de 1936. Cuando los fascistas quisieron asesinarla por la espalda, a pesar de estar destrozada, sacó fuerzas para plantarles cara y gritarles: «Cobardes, sed valientes y disparad de frente a una mujer». Su casa fue saqueada y sus libros quemados. Su vida, su labor y su memoria sepultadas por el franquismo. El enterrador al ver el estado de su ultrajado cuerpo quedó totalmente conmocionado. Se llamaba María Vázquez Suárez, ejerció durante 12 años como maestra extendiendo los valores pedagógicos gratuitos, humanistas, feministas y laicistas de la segunda república. Quienes la conocieron cuentan que era una persona muy sensible y entregada a su labor. La primera mujer en hablar en público en Miño defendiendo, entre otras causas, los derechos de las mujeres. María Vázquez no fue la única víctima del golpismo fascista y genocida, alrededor de 60.000 maestros y maestras fueron represaliad@s, siendo ellas las que sufrieron una represión más específica, machista y desproporcionada, para eliminar el modelo de mujer liberada de la segunda república, exterminando por ello un número significativo de maestras con extrema violencia de género, con violaciones y torturas previas a los fusilamientos, sobre todo en zonas rurales. La consigna del franquismo era: «Escuelas vacías y más de mujeres» El cura de Miño, Manuel Porta, dijo: «Afirmo con todos los caracteres de la realidad, que las alumnas que ha tenido María llevan en la frente el estigma rojo, que únicamente desaparecerá con la muerte.» Unos días después del fusilamiento de María Vázquez un falangista le espetó en la cara a una de sus alumnas: «¿veis estos zapatos manchados de sangre? Pues es la sangre de vuestra profesora, la maté yo mismo.» Después el franquismo, la sección femenina y los curas empezaron a formar mujeres sumisas y serviles a los hombres y útiles al régimen. P.d. – Dedicado a una alumna mía que dijo hace poco en clase que con Franco se vivía mejor. (Texto original de Jorge Núñez Jiménez)

Bono says the name 'Bono' is of Hebrew origin and means 'man who sells out his principles to the highest bidder'.

"Hunting is a coward's pastime" - Sir Roger Moore

"I've received rape threats against my daughter, my husband has been fired, and my apartment has been seized, because I said that Israel is committing genocide." ❁ Francesca Albanese.

A wool jumper, made in 1985, washed in cold water once a month, worn through three decades of British winters, would currently be sitting in someone's wardrobe doing fine. A polyester fleece, made in 2026, machine-washed weekly, will start to lose its structural integrity within three to five years, shed an estimated 700,000 microfibres per wash into the water system, and end its life in landfill where it will persist for approximately 200 years. The wool jumper: - Came from a sheep - Required grass and rain - Will biodegrade entirely within three years of being buried - Will keep you warm when wet - Will not melt if exposed to a flame - Will probably outlive you - Cost £80 in 1985, which is £230 today, and represents the entire jumper budget for the next forty years The polyester fleece: - Came from an oil refinery in Texas - Required hexane extraction, polymerisation and dyeing in three different factories on three different continents - Will not biodegrade in any human timeframe - Will get cold and clammy when wet - Will melt against your skin if exposed to a flame - Will be in landfill within five years - Cost £40 in 2026, which means you'll buy ten of them across the next forty years for a total of £400, and the planet will still be eating the residue in the year 2226 But yes. The sheep is the problem. The sheep, standing in a field in mid-Wales, growing a renewable fibre from grass and rain. The sheep is the problem.

She was not killed “in” an Israeli strike but “by” an intentional strike. Don’t say anything at all if you’re unwilling to tell the truth. You disrespect the lives of journalists murdered by Israel for trying to bring truth that cuts through this exact propaganda.