Duncan Parsons

@penfriendrocks @lizzlipscombe @johnhackettband Oh.. and a video I'm very pleased with, quirky pop about Temptation - Lead Us Not Literal vibes. youtube.com/watch?v=hIUk5d… Bass on this by @lelandsklar :-)

It was his registered UK address when he was begging supporters for donations ahead of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Today, that company no longer exists. Thinking Independent Media Ltd, the entity behind Tommy Robinson’s fundraising operation, was officially dissolved on 19 May 2026. The final Gazette notice confirming the strike-off appeared just days after the rally. The company failed to file its first set of accounts, which had been due since November 2025. And this is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. The Times previously reported that Robinson and associates were linked to a network of companies that generated more than £1.6 million in profits while leaving substantial tax liabilities unpaid. Hope & Pride Ltd reportedly owed HMRC an estimated £317,000 in corporation tax. Freestyle Freelance Ltd, which traded as Urban Scoop, reportedly owed a further £10,750. Companies disappeared. New ones appeared. Then came Thinking Independent Media Ltd. Set up in 2023. No accounts filed. Dissolved in 2026. Yet right up until the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, supporters were still receiving fundraising emails tied to that UK operation. Robinson claimed the event had become “one of the biggest patriotic gatherings Britain has ever seen.” In reality, the rally was nowhere near the scale supporters had promised for months. And far from “uniting the Kingdom”, much of the event descended into the usual anti-Muslim baiting, conspiracy rhetoric and culture war grievance politics that have become Robinson’s entire business model. Now the same operation appears to have shifted to Portugal under the Urban Scoop banner. Same faces. Same messaging. Same donation appeals. And this is the real Tommy Robinson. A man who screams about migrants “taking from Britain” while companies linked to his own operation repeatedly collapse under unpaid obligations and missing accounts. A man who wraps himself in the Union Jack while apparently doing everything possible to avoid properly contributing to the country he claims to love. He tells struggling working people to be patriotic, make sacrifices and defend Britain, while his own financial trail reads like a masterclass in disappearing companies, unpaid liabilities and donation grifting. Not a patriot. Just another professional outrage merchant flogging nationalism to his supporters while the taxman and the British public pick up the tab. Credit: Truth Against Hate

‘GPs will no longer issue "sick notes" under a government trial. People will be directed to social prescribers instead. This is peak neoliberal governance: a structural refusal to allow people to be ill, rest, or temporarily step outside a certain model of productivity.

Here's what the internet will soon become because of AI: An infinite library, with infinite truths and infinite falsehoods, and a complete inability to tell those two things apart. This is straight from the 1941 Jorge Luis Borges story “The Library of Babel”. In it, he imagines an infinite library made up of books of random letters. Because it is infinite, it contains not only every book ever written, but every book that could possibly be written. It contains every possible truth as well as an infinite number of falsehoods. The secrets of the universe, of life, of everything, are hidden somewhere in that library. The only issue is: that magical book is impossible to find. And if you found it, how would you ever know you found the book of truth, and not one of the infinite books of lies that surround it?

FYI, DuckDuckGo not only allows you to totally disable AI summaries but also allows you to filter out AI images.

Tonight! You doubtless need a break from the relentlessness of the World at the moment.. If you're in #Sheffield, an oasis turns from mirage to reality in the form of an #acoustic night at @CrookesSocial! Doors at 19:00 See you there :-)

A new population-based study from Japan on Long COVID is out - the Yao COVID-19 Study. After quite a long gap, we finally have another useful community prevalence study - and importantly, it can distinguish Alpha/Delta from Omicron🧵

terrible. 20 yrs ago, the internet was full of hobbyist blogs and forums. over time, these have been replaced by paywalled substacks and private discord channels, each a walled garden. google's decision to prioritize AI just makes it less likely ppl will create free, public info

Just throwing it out there that the lane is wiiiiiiiiide open for a tech company to get insanely rich by just replicating the 2010 version of big websites like Google while explicitly stating that they hate AI.

A new name for the working class, 'lower-value human capital'. They don't give a shit about you and your family.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers. When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it. They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long. In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it. The flowers attract a standing army to our fields. We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

They knew by 1974. An industry insider wrote that there was "serious doubt" plastic recycling could "ever be made viable on an economic basis." Internal reports said plastic degrades every time it's reprocessed and that there is "no recovery from obsolete products." They knew. They ran the recycling ads anyway. A former head of the industry's own lobbying group later admitted it out loud: if the public thinks recycling is working, they are not going to be as concerned about the environment. The chasing-arrows symbol on the bottom of plastic is an industry-designed logo that was lobbied onto products in 40 states, including ones that can't be recycled at all. It's always been pure marketing, nothing else. The actual US plastic recycling rate has never broken 10%. It's around 5 to 6% today, and it's been falling, not rising. Most plastic can be reprocessed once or twice before it's landfill. Glass and aluminum can cycle effectively forever. Buy less plastic. It's the only part of this that was ever in your hands.

Within two hours of being named the Reform candidate for Makerfield, Robert Kenyon seems to have already deleted nearly all his social media. Sounds promising...

The first major university that publicly commits to a total AI ban in its undergrad teaching (no AI in class, in creating syllabi or class prep, creating & completing assignments, or grading) and makes that part of its brand will see a major surge in applications & enrollment.

If you haven’t visited the The V&A Storehouse in East London) you should consider it. It’s a wonderful repository of stuff. When museums have stuff they don’t need fancy touch screens & interactive displays. People just want to see the stuff

Magic: The Gathering writing has a short half-life. Historically-important articles are taken offline every year. This sucks. That's why I'm launching Library of Leng, an index of 32 years of Magic writing. 150k+ articles, 20+ sites, fully searchable. library-of-leng.com

And she was right.

My grandfather said he’d never move into a retirement home. He said, “Too expensive… and the food tastes like someone boiled sadness.” Instead, he checked into a beachfront hotel. We asked, “Grandpa, isn’t that even more expensive?” He smiled and said, “Not really. At the retirement home, I’d pay $200 a day for cold meatloaf and no visitors. But here? For $150 a day, I get ocean views, room service, fresh towels, a pool… …and suddenly all my grandkids remember I exist every weekend.” Then he leaned back in his chair and delivered the final line like a mob boss: “And if I die in the hotel lobby, the manager will actually look disappointed. But at the nursing home? They just call it Tuesday.”

Never forget that Grenfell Tower was only fitted with cladding in the first place because a Tory council considered it to be an eyesore for the wealthier residents of Kensington & Chelsea

The most striking thing about capitalism is that every year, through technological advancements workers produce more in the same amount of time, yet none of this has ever translated into reduced working hours, improved labor conditions, or increased leisure time.

Your receptors are fried. A stabbing? Forgotten in 24 hours. Government corruption? Meme for a day, Digital ID, facial recognition, another speech law. Nobody even reacts anymore. The system floods people with so much chaos, outrage and noise that the average person can’t hold focus long enough to understand what’s actually happening to their country. Twenty years ago one major scandal would dominate the nation for months, today ten things happen before breakfast and most people just shrug because their brains have been conditioned to move on instantly. It’s insane how quickly abnormal becomes normal once your senses are burnt out.