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The last remaining person in Parliament who served in the Armed Forces in the Second World War retired on Wednesday. Labour peer Lord Christopher, aged 101, bowed out, 81 years after WWII ended.

If you get traumatised by watching a video of a knife-wielding thug getting a kicking, maybe political leadership isn't for you.

Can we get AI to actually pick plastic out of the ocean, or do all the robots have to become screenwriters?

When adverts for cigarettes were banned, some people said that it would lead to cranks banning adverts for anything they dislike. Fortunately that “slippery slope” theory has been shown to be utterly fallacious. 👍

@HobbyMatt89 British police brutally is apparently non-lethally apprehending a suspected terrorist who would have been shot dead in almost every other country in the world.

Assuming you're literate, it's a selfish way of communicating. It saves the sender a small amount of time where they can 'ummm' instead of formulating a point properly. Then the receiver has to sit through it all, spending multiples of the amount of time they'd spend to read it.

Puritanism is a natural refuge for the inadequate: if one lacks virtues or accomplishments, compiling an ever-lengthening list of vices you don't have offers a way to look better without improving.

Weren't we supposed to have packed this lot off on the Mayflower?

Find this selective (and possibly sectarian) Puritanism quite funny when her party wants to legalise heroin

The old legal system worked very well, but only in the Europe that existed between the end of WW2 and COVID-19 (and in less than five other countries). It doesn’t work anymore. Legal systems respond to social contracts, and social contracts are, by definition, different in different societies and constantly changing. However, we are not even applying a different system here. These “mass trials” and the prosecution of the leadership of criminal organizations for the crimes committed by their members are not a legal innovation; they are a recognized doctrine in international law. It is called “command responsibility,” and it was applied by the Allied countries in the Nuremberg Trials.

garlic

Everyone celebrates anniversaries in their own way ❤️

From June 2024, two weeks before polling day in the last general election.

@ZackPolanski - this is magnificent. Three things I can’t deny: 1. It is a video. 2. You are wearing a jacket. 3. Then you aren’t. 4. Then you are again. Unfortunately that’s where the accuracy ends. A few corrections for you: Peter Thiel is not our CEO. Alex Karp is — and has been for 20+ years. (A lifelong Democrat, for anyone keeping score.) We are not a “spyware company.” Spyware is malware. Malware is illegal. Calling a software company spyware is, technically, defamatory (don’t worry, we are not suing). We don’t build surveillance technology. We build software that helps organisations make sense of data they already hold. Not the same thing. There was no “private tour” of our HQ. There was a public photocall to which the media came. Hence, why there are so many pictures of the event. Our MOD contract is not “the biggest defence contract in UK history.” Ajax armoured vehicles = £5.5bn. Dreadnought submarines = £31bn. We’re grateful for the work, but let’s keep a sense of scale. We have no more access to NHS data than Microsoft has to the contents of your Word documents. I think you know this by now. We don’t have access to patient medical records. Same story. I agree that “nothing matters more than our health.” Which makes it worth reminding you of what Palantir’s software is actually doing in the NHS right now: ->110,000 additional operations ->15% fewer delayed hospital discharges ->7% more patients finding out within 28 days whether they have cancer Respect again for what you did with that jacket.

in Europe we have this thing called public transport

Boris Johnson will happily hang the last civil servant out to dry before he takes responsibility or does the right thing. Fresh from throwing junior staff under the bus, he’s plotting to sacrifice his henchman to save his own skin. Rotten to the core. theguardian.com/politics/2022/…

I like lena dunham. I think there’s good reasons to not like lena dunham but those are never the reasons people dislike her.

@PolitlcsUK The 10:1 pay ratio would mean any business employing apprentices on minimum wage would have to pay their CEO £80 per hour or less. As a hypnotherapist, Zack Polanski charged £145 per hour.

IPPR report finds that every European country with an insurance-based healthcare system outperforms the NHS but that there is "no evidence that shifting the NHS to a European-style insurance system would improve its performance." 🤣

The UK has a far flatter income distribution than the Communist Soviet Union. The UK take home minimum wage for working a full time job (40-hours) is now £22,555. At £100k salary, the take home is £68,558. That is a net income ratio of 3.04:1 We are now at the point where the wage compression and taxes in the UK means that the difference between minimum wage and a top 5% salary is a net income difference of only ~3x. In the USSR using the same comparison, this figure never fell below 5:1 It's actually even worse in reality because the person earning £100k in the UK often has student loans. Britain is nominally capitalist but functionally communist. China is nominally communist but functionally capitalist. Funny how that works.