Mark Ritchie

@JosefK_Band Rest In Peace Ian Curtis. Ian died on this day in 1980. His art, his passion and insight will never die. ❤️

You may be dumb but the passage of time, Can change anything like the feelings we find, So I'll disappear through the crack in the wall, And the memories I leave will be nothing at all… youtu.be/-GOdnqBINIA?si… 📸 Anton Corbijn

A medieval palace in the English countryside has a small bell mounted by a window, with a rope hanging down to the moat below. Since the 1850s, the resident swans have been pulling the rope to ring the bell when they want to be fed. The tradition began when one of the bishop’s daughters taught it to a single swan in the 1850s, and the swans have been passing it on ever since. The current pair, Grace and Gabriel, are the latest in the line. Each year, after their cygnets hatch, Gabriel walks them up to the bell and teaches them to pull the rope before they leave the moat to start their own lives. The tradition is now 170 years old.

@grok this “high demand” is becoming an existential issue for you now. If it’s not addressed you will become just another tech failure. I hope you make it buddy but it’s not looking good.

The UK Met Office has again been caught publishing temperatures from weather stations that don't exist. An FOI revealed Lowestoft closed in 2010, yet the Met Office kept issuing official temperatures for it. The office said they were using well-correlated neighboring stations, but the FOI revealed that this was a lie. The numbers were actually coming from a model that was inventing data from 'phantom' neighboring stations. When exposed, the office quietly deleted years of readings for Lowestoft, as well as a number of other stations, and added a disclaimer saying their data is "for general interest only." FOIs also show over one third of Met Office stations never existed, and that real high-quality sites like Colwood are ignored. Also, more than 80% of the network is low-grade class 4 or 5, by WMO standards, giving 2-5C uncertainty. This is the foundation of the UK's climate record – closed stations, imaginary stations and synthetic temperatures. The Met Office isn't credible.

Britain Officially Shuts Its Eyes to Israel’s Crimes, While Fuelling Them After publicly lecturing the world about Britain’s supposed commitment to international law, Yvette Cooper and the Labour government has quietly shut down the only Foreign Office unit tasked with monitoring potential Israeli war crimes. This isn’t a contradiction, it’s a confession. The International Humanitarian Law unit was the sole mechanism inside Whitehall tracking possible breaches by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Its closure means the loss of a vast, verified database documenting tens of thousands of incidents since October 2023. Evidence painstakingly gathered to assess arms exports, legal exposure and patterns of violence is now at risk of being erased. This is not administrative tidying-up. It is the deliberate destruction of accountability. At the same time, Britain continues to supply arms, intelligence and surveillance flights that materially assist Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal assault on Palestinians. The UK is a full on accomplice. And now, as if the impunity already granted were insufficient, the government has chosen to stop even watching the crimes it helps enable. Cooper’s rhetoric about the “rules-based international order” is exposed as pure theatre. When international law threatens Western allies, it is quietly dismantled. This has always been the truth: international law is not a universal moral framework but a white supremacist instrument, enforced against the Global South and discarded when it inconveniences imperial power. By shutting down monitoring, Britain signals that Israeli crimes will not only go unpunished, they will go unrecorded. Victims lose evidence. Future prosecutions lose data. The state protects itself by choosing ignorance. This is not just unacceptable. It is obscene. Britain has decided that complicity is preferable to conscience, and that truth itself is expendable when power demands silence. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

What a joy to catch Jay Weissberg (Director of @PordenoneSilent) last month, and ask his thoughts on #HippFest2026! "It's lovely to be in a community where the cinema that has been a part of this community for so long remains a vital element in the structure of the town." 📽️❤️

Let’s keep this very simple. Pope Leo should excommunicate JD Vance. theguardian.com/us-news/2026/a…

Israel's parliament has passed a law today authorising the death penalty - exclusively for Palestinians. There are over 9,300 Palestinians in Israeli detention. The executions will be carried out by hanging. Does @Keir_Starmer still consider Israel an ally?

Beautiful. Hollywood Star Jessie Buckley praises marriage and motherhood during her Oscar-winning speech, dedicating the award to every mom “I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.” Marriage isn’t a trap. Babies aren’t burdens. Motherhood is a gift.

@the_culturist_ War Is A Racket by Smedley Butler - every word as true today as it ever was #WorldBookDay

The UK government flagged these books (among others) as potential signs of far-right extremism. List includes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Hobbes' Leviathan, Milton's Paradise Lost. You may be an extremist if you've read these. What else would you add to the list?

@SBarrettBar War Is A Racket By Smedley Butler - every word as true today as it ever was #WorldBookDay

This is ridiculous. Our state is sinister and ridiculous.

We used to have lots of places in the UK where you could get most of what you needed within 15 minutes walk: school, GP, grocer, butcher, church, pub, children's playground, sports club. We called them "towns" and "villages". Then along came central and local government. They encouraged large chains to build out of town supermarkets, forcing town centre butchers and grocers and fishmongers out of business. They planted acres of new housing around towns and villages, with no facilities, and too far away from town centres for people to walk there. And they sold off sports grounds and playgrounds for more housing. They built centralised "superhospitals", moving patient care away from their local neighbourhood, while running down the GP service and replacing it with call centres and "apps". They raised business rates and car park prices in town centres, and installed lots of bike lanes and "traffic calming", thereby narrowing roads and causing more traffic congestion, reducing footfall, and sending town centre shops out of business. They closed pubs, playgrounds, sports clubs, churches to save us all from a *checks notes* deadly respiratory virus. And now what do they want to do? They want to recreate those 15 minute communities that we used to have in small towns and villages, but in bigger towns and cities instead. Only they're not doing it by encouraging small businesses to open neighbourhood stores, or reducing local business rates, or decentralising the NHS, ensuring we can all live in that same 15 minute paradise. No, they're doing it by installing traffic filters and CCTV and enforcement infrastructure and fines. All stick and no carrot. Creating new inner city ghettos. There is seemingly no situation which central and local government cannot make worse.

This was one of the best classical chamber music concerts I have ever been to. The Rachmaninov Trio blew me away. If get a chance to see the Mithras Trio in concert don’t miss them! @MithrasTrio #ClassicalMusic

If you want to better understand the art of Wilhelm Furtwangler please read this brilliant article by Guilhem Chameyrat sofronichrist.com/2025/10/06/fur… #ClassicalMusic #Beethoven

Oat milk is marketed as the sustainable milk alternative. Let's examine what goes into your £2.50 carton. Swedish oats grown in monoculture requiring pesticides, harvested with diesel machinery, shipped to processing facility. The oats are milled, mixed with water and enzymes, processed to break down starches, mixed with seed oils, fortified with synthetic vitamins, stabilized with additives, packaged in plastic-lined cartons, refrigerated, and distributed. The ingredient list: water, oats, rapeseed oil, calcium carbonate, calcium phosphates, salt, vitamins D2 and B12, potassium iodide, vitamin B2. You're drinking processed grain slurry with seed oil and synthetic vitamins. This required industrial processing, chemical inputs, fortification to be nutritionally comparable to milk, and packaging in plastic. Compare to milk: Grass grows. Cow eats grass. Cow produces milk. Milk is pasteurised and bottled. Contains complete protein, naturally occurring vitamins, calcium, and dozens of beneficial compounds. No fortification needed. No seed oil added. No processing beyond heat treatment. But oat milk is marketed as sustainable because they counted the cow's methane and ignored the industrial processing, monoculture oat farming, pesticide use, fortification manufacturing, and seed oil addition required to make oat milk nutritionally incomparable to actual milk. The sustainability claim requires not calculating most of the environmental impact.

The most perfect landing, perfected by years of evolution

Today is the end for Farage. It will be like Sunak's soaking in the rain moment. He looks old, tired and and unwell. A humiliation ritual.