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@pgmookster

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Latest posts by @pgmookster

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This is actually a pretty good summary of where we’re at, and how we got here.

02.03.2026 19:54 👍 2803 🔁 1163 💬 170 📌 63

Obscene.

28.02.2026 09:55 👍 725 🔁 158 💬 21 📌 4
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Every senator who voted to confirm RFK Jr owns this tragedy. Every single one.

27.02.2026 14:51 👍 16778 🔁 7026 💬 540 📌 375
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The students claiming uni Covid compensation 'for the principle' Dozens of universities have received legal letters over what students say they missed out on during Covid.

This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

21.02.2026 17:34 👍 457 🔁 137 💬 64 📌 74

This lawsuit seems appalling to me, honestly. I feel for people whose student experience was lousy due to Covid but that's not the fault of universities. "I wanted in-person study." I'm sure you did. Nobody gets what they want in a global pandemic

21.02.2026 17:42 👍 709 🔁 138 💬 60 📌 10
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NEW

How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence

How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir

By me, at FT

www.ft.com/content/5207...

20.02.2026 16:40 👍 1806 🔁 1023 💬 51 📌 23

The US administration’s insanity on vaccines continues to have ramifications across the world – it is not that America will miss out on these potential new vaccines. It is that they simply won’t happen at all. (Or at least they’ll be indefinitely delayed.)

13.02.2026 13:45 👍 122 🔁 66 💬 4 📌 2

@davidallengreen.bsky.social just wanted to say thanks for this and all your posts, I find them super helpful in navigating the legal scenes of these interesting times. Nice one, cheers and all the best (a fellow villa fan)

06.02.2026 22:20 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Why local journalism matters and why you should subscribe to @manchestermill.bsky.social

06.02.2026 18:50 👍 74 🔁 29 💬 1 📌 0

A lot going on here and all ugly, but one thing I still can't get my head around is how any British government can do business with Thiel at this point.

03.02.2026 09:28 👍 759 🔁 254 💬 27 📌 15

Further evidence that neo- liberalism is destroying itself. Privatisation has resulted in less house building, more expensive infrastructure and public transport, generated inter - generational inequality and hollowed out state capacity to respond.

02.02.2026 07:05 👍 163 🔁 53 💬 5 📌 0

Marginal tax rates for graduates with student loans – add interest and another 6% for postgrads.

£25,000: 37%
£50,270: 51%
£100,000: 71%

01.02.2026 15:07 👍 206 🔁 90 💬 26 📌 19
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Trump’s approval rating has held steady at 40% to this week. This post is right that the majority of Americans should come to terms with the fact that 2 out 5 of their fellow citizens want America to be a less competently run and more corrupt version of 1930s Germany.

This is who we are.

31.01.2026 22:06 👍 169 🔁 45 💬 17 📌 4
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Lord Newby on the damage Brexit has caused:

"Brexit will reduce GDP by 4% over a 15-year period."

"UK-EU trade will fall by 15%."

"Brexit has already had a negative impact on the public finances to the tune of over £40 billion over the period to 2024."

30.01.2026 19:15 👍 243 🔁 94 💬 14 📌 3

Hannah Arendt did not mince words, did she?

'Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talents with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.'

From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)

29.01.2026 03:48 👍 899 🔁 352 💬 7 📌 16

The Palantir Payroll connects the dots between Palantir and Washington, making those ties easier to follow and harder to ignore. It’s built to help voters, journalists, and organizers see who’s connected to whom—and what that means for decisions around data mining and mass surveillance.

29.01.2026 22:39 👍 0 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0
A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

27.01.2026 11:00 👍 12014 🔁 5905 💬 237 📌 345
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There's a predictable approach to denial that we're already seeing, which I call the Four Pillars of Disordered Doubt, which allows actors to constantly question evidence that don't fit their preferred narratives.

27.01.2026 12:09 👍 735 🔁 311 💬 23 📌 19

1. The thing about science that these jokers don't understand is that science cannot be vibe-coded.

Whatever its flaws, the point with vibe coding is that you're trying to quickly make something that sorta works, where you can immediately sorta see if it sorta works and then sorta use it.

27.01.2026 22:09 👍 968 🔁 285 💬 26 📌 24

So important. What they say is not the story. That is never the story. What happened is the story. Write what happened.

25.01.2026 00:05 👍 8895 🔁 2798 💬 92 📌 112

1. This short thread is about the issue that dominates almost every aspect of politics, and causes or exacerbates most of our problems: the extreme wealth of a small number of people. Here’s the amazing thing: almost the entire political class aligns with the ultra-rich against the rest. 🧵1/10

23.01.2026 11:30 👍 2033 🔁 981 💬 62 📌 149
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ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials Superintendent says Liam Ramos and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway and sent to Texas

‘Terrible things are happening outside… Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return… to find their families gone.’
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

22.01.2026 07:43 👍 6602 🔁 3324 💬 277 📌 187
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Compare & contrast. This is Trump’s demand for Greenland. And this is Hitler’s for the Sudetenland.

There is no difference. The language. The unstoppable need to dominate. The megalomania. It’s the same.

And Keir Starmer’s response is appeasement. We are in that moment.
1/

20.01.2026 09:00 👍 4131 🔁 1946 💬 150 📌 86
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There is no strategy
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

20.01.2026 06:41 👍 6666 🔁 2095 💬 521 📌 211
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bylinetimes.com/2026/01/15/a...

19.01.2026 21:16 👍 167 🔁 32 💬 5 📌 1
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Archeologists Just Found a 2,000-Year-Old Battle Trumpet That May Be Linked to Queen Boudica This newly discovered Iron Age instrument may have been played in the Celtic resistance against the Roman Empire

This newly discovered Iron Age instrument may have been played in the Celtic resistance against the Roman Empire

13.01.2026 15:37 👍 618 🔁 96 💬 25 📌 16
# ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA

**READERS still planning to use X in 2026 might want to take note of the platform's updated terms of service.**

Coming into force on 16 January, these have been quietly amended to ensure Elon Musk's platform of hate can use anything posted to its platform as training data for its AI systems, terminate a user's account for any reason it chooses, and to effectively monetise anything a user puts on the platform.

Specifically, the wording grants X the right "to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content... for any purpose... these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating"

Meanwhile X is also rolling out a feature allowing anyone to use its AI, Grok, to edit any image posted to the platform directly, devaluing the work of artists and adding another layer of uncertainty around what is and isn't real.

# ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA **READERS still planning to use X in 2026 might want to take note of the platform's updated terms of service.** Coming into force on 16 January, these have been quietly amended to ensure Elon Musk's platform of hate can use anything posted to its platform as training data for its AI systems, terminate a user's account for any reason it chooses, and to effectively monetise anything a user puts on the platform. Specifically, the wording grants X the right "to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content... for any purpose... these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating" Meanwhile X is also rolling out a feature allowing anyone to use its AI, Grok, to edit any image posted to the platform directly, devaluing the work of artists and adding another layer of uncertainty around what is and isn't real.

I largely stopped using X in November 2024. I keep an account there to research the far right (they're all active there, for some reason...)

I'm deleting all of my tweets now - Private Eye reports they will now be used to train Grok, Musk's perverted AI monster. Whether you like it or not. Grim.

13.01.2026 20:12 👍 123 🔁 63 💬 12 📌 5
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Nationally significant Anglo-Saxon burial ground found at Sizewell C site Featured image:Horse burial from early medieval cemetery © Oxford Cotswold Archaeology Archaeologists have uncovered a nationally significant Anglo-Saxon burial ground during excavations for the Si…

heritagesuffolk.wordpress.com/2026/01/12/n...

12.01.2026 18:00 👍 52 🔁 6 💬 3 📌 0
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08.01.2026 14:47 👍 1485 🔁 495 💬 20 📌 14