Scarficus

@Naturalphilosy 6:30 is a lie in

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” — Charles Bukowski

@norvil_jones @Saganismm You keep telling yourself that pal.

@Saganismm Bertrand Russell was a failure and a shallow thinker - Gödel essentially destroyed him. It was the amazing productivity of capitalism and the wealth it has created, and continues to create, that has allowed more leisure time, not socialism.

"The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion." — Bertrand Russell

@SkyNews Farage is a Trump supporter when Trump is actively damaging the UK economy and siding with Putin against Europe. Farage is a traitor.

Reform UK have won more than 1,000 seats and eight full councils in the local elections - as Sky News projects that Farage's party could become the largest in the country if there was a general election after today's results. 🔗 trib.al/7mGYYju

The sheer propaganda power of a joint UK media smear campaign. Zeteo.com/subscribe

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party . Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

Melanie Phillips is doing exactly what Owen Jones suggests is happening. Note how she refers not to Polanski’s Jewish identity but to his Jewish ancestry.

An obvious antisemitic caricature of Zack Polanski in The Times. But there will be no media or political outrage, which tells you all you need to know.

@AdrianEdmondson For all we know Corbett was the better guitarist.

Just heard someone say 'Who was that guitarist in The Rolling Stones - Ronnie Corbett?'

@anishmoonka Thriller is not a great album though.

Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones listened to 800 songs to find 9. Then Quincy threw out 4 of those 9 and went back into the studio. Beat It, Human Nature, P.Y.T., and The Lady in My Life were emergency replacements for songs that were not good enough. They spent four months just listening. Quincy and Rod Temperton sat in a Los Angeles studio in 1982, going through song after song after song from every songwriter they could pull a favor from. Most got cut after a few seconds. Of the 800, they only ended up recording around 30 with Michael actually singing. Of those 30, only 9 made the final list. And then Quincy listened to the finished album, decided 4 of his own picks were not strong enough, and pulled them. The four songs he replaced them with became some of the most famous in pop music history. The four he cut went on to become hits for other artists. Recording those replacements almost broke the team. During the Beat It sessions, Quincy had three studios running at the same time. Eddie Van Halen was in one of them laying down his guitar solo for free. He had thought the call from Quincy was a prank his friends were pulling on him. Michael was in the next room, singing a vocal part through a cardboard tube. Engineers were mixing in the third studio. They worked five days and five nights with no sleep. At one point the speakers overloaded and caught fire. Quincy later told the BBC they had to carry engineers out of the studio on stretchers. Musicians too. Greg Phillinganes, the keyboard player on the album, said there was a moment where everyone thought it was finished, that they had nothing left to give, and Quincy was still standing there saying "It is not there yet" while Michael, almost falling apart, kept asking what they were supposed to do now. They finally finished mixing in early November. Then they sat down to play the master back, and the album sounded weak. They had crammed too much music onto a normal vinyl record, and the grooves had to be cut so narrow that the punch was gone. So they cut a verse from "The Lady in My Life," shortened the famous 29-second intro of "Billie Jean" that Quincy had been trying to drop the entire time, and remixed almost the whole album from scratch. One song a day. Eight straight days. The only track they left alone was "The Girl Is Mine" because it was already on the radio. The final mix wrapped on November 8, 1982. The album came out 21 days later. The wolves you hear at the start of the song "Thriller" are Michael. The engineer set up tape recorders in a barn overnight to catch his own dog howling, and the dog never made a sound. So Michael did the howls in the booth himself. Some of the background vocals on the same track were sung in the studio's shower stall. Vincent Price did his entire spoken-word horror section in three takes, and the verses he was reading had been written by Rod Temperton in a taxi on the way to the studio that same morning. Michael never wrote his songs on paper. He recorded them on a small handheld tape recorder and then sang them back from memory in the studio. The album ended up selling around 70 million copies. It won 8 Grammys, sat at number one for 37 weeks, and produced 7 Top 10 hits out of 9 songs. At its peak it was moving a million copies a week. But all of that came after the work was done. The work itself was 800 demos, 30 recordings, 4 last-minute saves, three studios running until the speakers caught fire, and a producer who refused to put out something he did not believe in even when it meant pulling his own album apart twice. Nine tracks because they could not find more that were good enough.

@JohnSimpsonNews @paullewismoney To Israel, every Palestinian is a terrorist. The term is meaningless and just functions as a catch all excuse for killing anyone they choose.

To those who believe the journalists killed in Gaza were all Hamas operatives, Israel’s Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center stated that roughly 60% of the media workers and journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023 were linked to "terrorist organisations”. That indicates that 40% (well over a hundred) who were killed were just journalists, plain and simple. This figure alone (and it may be an underestimate) is something to be deeply concerned about.

Gaza levelled, snipers on elevated mounds built from the pulverised earth, shooting anyone who crosses an unmarked line, including children. What word would we use to describe the concentration of a people into a small camp under threat of death?

@JohnSimpsonNews @medialens Because Israel is a terrorist state.

According to Reporters Without Borders, Israel accounted for almost half of the world's journalist deaths this year. It says Israel has now been the deadliest country for journalists for three consecutive years.

@ScarredForLife2 @sutekh69 I can confirm this was absolutely terrifying

THE MAD DEATH (1983): The BBC's brilliant and deeply disturbing drama about a rabies outbreak in Scotland. Bearing in mind that I'd cross the road everytime I saw a stray dog (just in case), The Mad Death scared me so much that I didn't make it to the final episode.

@MikeBales Life is like a pipe and I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside

Hello darkness, my old friend…

@larrylemonmaths @DavidDidau Makes a change from the avalanche of capitalist propaganda.

@DavidDidau It should be replaced as it’s Communist propaganda.

The curriculum is not a mirror. It’s a selection. If we replaced An Inspector Calls, the case for doing so shouldn’t be representational optics but literary and curricular merit. Still, it’s striking how many plausible alternatives exist. What stops us is expedience. open.substack.com/pub/daviddidau…

War criminal wanted by the ICC, who has bombed and murdered innocent children in six different countries in one year, accuses accuses Europe of moral failings because it isn't racist and Islamophobic enough for his tastes...

@jeremycorbyn @garyfoskett Anyone using the word terrorist to refer to Israel's enemies have swallowed Israeli propaganda. The main source of terror in the region is Israel. There is a mass of evidence. If you can't see it you have made yourself wilfully blind.

The world watched as Israel razed Gaza to the ground. Now, the world is watching as Israel razes Lebanon to the ground. War crimes beget war crimes — and the failure to bring Israel to justice for genocide has emboldened it to destroy human life with total impunity.

@FairPointSteve @jeremycorbyn You sound like AI.

How on God's green earth are you still here waffling on about the same old stuff for years, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK Labour Party, was the subject of intense controversy and allegations of antisemitism during his time as leader from 2015 to 2020. An Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation found the party responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination during his tenure.

This is British values - Robert Fisk is a real reporter and he’s spot on here …..

@KeepUKtogether @BuckCllr @realmrsthatcher I was responding to the original tweet which was about taxing the rich. You're right, middle incomes are being squeezed unfairly in comparison. It's not redistribution of wealth to tax middle incomes.

@scarficus @BuckCllr @realmrsthatcher But it’s not only the “very rich” being taxed in UK - middle income families are being disproportionately taxed to support overly generous ‘redistribution’ to benefits, other people’s kids, & fraudsters I’ve resigned from my job due to punitive taxation - how’s that a positive?

Once you compress incentives from the top-down and say, "It doesn't matter how much you earn I'm going to take the lion's share away," they say, "Alright, I'm no longer going to do the lion's part." Then they stop creating the extra wealth which would benefit both themselves and society as a whole.