Richard Gadsden

Isn't that just some sort of victory celebration after making the dinosaurs extinct?

Then there are new channels like GB News. While BBC producers sit with stopwatches ensuring that political parties all get a fair say, GB News can do what it likes, thanks to the government's decision to shut down broadcast regulator Ofcom. That has allowed the channel to act as a daily booster for one political party. It is impossible to imagine that, had the Department of Culture and Ofcom not shut their doors in 2024, a "news" channel would have been allowed to have a political party leader as a regular host (indeed, had Labour not also abolished the Electoral Commission, it might have been interested in how a channel whose last set of accounts show it losing £33 million can afford to pay Farage more than £400,000 in less than two years).

Rob Hutton’s evisceration of DCMS was the funniest and angriest thing I’ve read in response to what has happened to UK broadcast media

thecritic.co.uk/bring-back-d...

Go try to find any useful information on YouTube about Ukraine and you'll find the spiritual home of the warblogger.

I have been enjoying the "What about the Gays of Hormuz?" puns, though.

Elect Chicago Women should be banned just for the stolen valor of trying to call themselves ECW.

The fact they are a AIPAC front organisation is just cherry on the cake.

They mean that it does the damage through kinetic energy.

A chemical attack does the same damage whether it arrives at 1 mph or 1000mph. A shell fragment after an explosion doesn't.

Some schools have negative mascots, like all the racist ones.

Even if it could get the visuals and voices right, the best case is an Elvis puppet making Humphrey Bogart's acting choices and a Brittany Murphy puppet making Ingrid Bergman's.

And we already know what those acting choices are.

Whatever you think this post is referring to, I promise it is better than you're imagining. As long as you read to #10 on the list.

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

JD Vance trying to explain Jesus to Trump.

DOOM fully rendered in CSS. Every surface is a <div> that has a background image, with a clipping path with 3D transforms applied. Of course CSS does not have a movable camera, so we rotate and translate the scene around the user.

Proxy for Kat's sort of online media. She's in very male-dominated online spaces like Twitch. She's done tons of interviews, but how many of them were being interviewed by a woman? She hasn't done a make-up or a skincare or a GRWM Reel or TikTok, etc.

I suspect women just know her less.

She's doing a lot of promo in male-oriented online spaces and she's not doing that much in female-oriented ones. Note how much higher her awareness is among men than women.

If you think that shipping is cheap, then automated electric trains are significantly cheaper to operate. Infrastructure costs come surprisingly close (modern container ports are expensive), the big problem is that the rail is one trillion+ bill and ports are many separate 50 billion bills.

PS: we should build this massive freight railway. You'd have to tunnel under the Caspian Sea to do it without going through Russia or Iran, but that's not infeasbile, and, while it would be expensive to build, the benefits are huge, and there are very deep pockets available to pay for it.

They'd need to do something on a similar scale to D-Day: multiple divisions landing at once. And D-Day involved two years of build-up and training and was only 40 miles of sea to cross.

Seconding this: Get rid of all the old white dude statues and let's have animals on plinths instead!

A Great Circle Mapper route map from Athens to Delhi and Mumbai, overflowing (variously) Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Why might a Greek airline want to push back the start of its India services?

Now, I'm no expert on the aircraft interiors supply chain or Middle East geopolitics, but — actually wait, I am an expert on both of those things.

*points to map*

Honestly, I was very tongue-in-cheek there.

Just the trade between China and Europe - not counting everything else, just that, would require six railway tracks in each direction carrying a mile-long train every three minutes to move the amount of containers that currently go on ships.

Oh hang on, I can make it at the expense of a transphobe:

Well, there's Toby Keynes...

I could make a very "the lib dems are all gay/lesbian" joke about this, but I can't come up with a version of the joke that doesn't associate body parts with gender and I don't want to be transphobic this morning.

And then make the EU closer and closer until it fully replaces all the functions of the former UK.

We could just all join the EU.

Exactly. And he can go and earn a shit-ton of money as a "consultant" (lobbyist) to pay for the expensive care his son needs.

If we're going to spend insane amounts of money on infrastructure to get around the Strait of Hormuz, then the sensible option is "build a shit-ton of solar and wind farms", but if you insist on oil, then build a pipeline across Saudi to the Red Sea, not this bullshit.

Once again reminding all the usual suspects that you don't understand how big the boats going through that strait are. You think you have an idea in your head of what size the boats are, but you're wrong. You're probably a whole order of magnitude out, even. They're so big, dude.

There are shadow leadership campaigns going on. I suspect that he's planning to resign either this summer or next and has stopped thinking long-term as a result.

Davey will pass Clegg for longest-serving leader since Kennedy next summer, so he's done a full stint.

I sometimes wonder if being a carer for his kid and his wife is taking away the time that other leaders have spent on long-term thinking and planning. He's still doing all the day-to-day stuff of being leader, but previous leaders did strategy and policy programme (or were DPM).