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Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

I would genuinely love to know what specifically has caused this cold feet at almost the last minute.

Lads you gave yourself an extra month or so to get this right.

Meanwhile people briefed on the revised plans said Reeves would also rely heavily on what has been dubbed the "smorgasbord" approach of increasing a
range of narrowly-drawn taxes.

November 13, 2025 at 11:36 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

November 13, 2025 at 5:08 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

it's somewhat insane that you can flick through the Epstein cache randomly and find stuff like this. drive.google.com/drive/folder...

rom:
Sent: 9/17/2016 11:51:24 AM
To: jeffrey E. [jeeyacation@gmail.com]
Subject: Re:
Importance: High
We already have plans on Sunday as I didn't hear from you. I don't think I can change them.
Sent from Soon-Yi's iPhone
On Sep 17, 2016, at 6:50 AM, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:
trumps guys changing their plans . all at the trump hotel right down the street from the white house. its a
bad movie, president trump. down the street from trump hotel. deepak chopra, again, sunday, I know you
moved krause to tonight. .
please note
The information contained in this communication is
confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may
constitute inside information, and is intended only for
the use of the addressee. It is the property of
JEE
Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this
communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited
and may be unlawful. If you have received this
communication in error, please notify us immediately by
return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and
destroy this communication and all copies thereof,
including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 032296

November 13, 2025 at 2:55 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Always interesting when conventions start to get bent. (Where I don't take a purist moralist view is that there is a perfectly reasonable use for these journalistic conventions, similar to the Chatham House Rule)

But the past few days have hardened the conviction in the mind of MPs, donors and other power brokers that Starmer doesn’t have what it takes to govern or to revive himself. Starmer’s claim that he will not tolerate this kind of briefing only deepens the problem, because most MPs think that it is screamingly obvious that this briefing came from McSweeney, and the failure to take action makes them think less of the prime minister. However, I don’t think that it has sped up the moment when Starmer gets sent to the rubbish tip: it has just confirmed in more minds that it will happen sooner or later. Cabinet ministers will step up their attempts to woo Labour MPs, trade union leaders and donors. Labour MPs will expect more and more wooing.

November 13, 2025 at 10:58 AM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

The PLP and party members (illustrated)

November 12, 2025 at 9:08 AM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Tfw an editor has clearly just down the obvious search and replace to change American to British spellings (in a book by a British author too oddly)

Quinn leads Morgan up the short forest track to the stone's perimetre, and then right, following its perimetre, in its shadow. It is a wet

November 11, 2025 at 6:52 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

On Remembrance Day, a little known piece of writing by Thackeray in 1845 or so I happened across a week or so ago on his thoughts from visiting the Waterloo battlefield three decades later

There indeea
Colonel This of the Guards, Captain That of the Hussars, Major So-and-so of the Dragoons, brave men and good who did their duty by their country on that day, and died in the performance of it.
Amen: but I confess fairly that, in looking at these tablets, I felt very much disappointed at not seeing the names of the men as well as the officers. Are they to be counted for naught ? A few more inches of marble to each monument would have given space for all the names of the men; and the men of that day were the winners of the battle.
We have a right to be as grateful individually to any given private as to any given officer : their duties were very much the same. Why should the country reserve its gratitude for the genteel occupiers of the Army List, and forget the gallant fellows whose humble names were written in the regimental books? In reading of the Wellington wars, and the conduct of the men engaged in them, I don't know whether to respect them or to wonder at them most. They have death, wounds, and poverty in contemplation; in possession, poverty, hard labour, hard fare, and small thanks. If they do wrong, they are handed over to the inevitable provost-marshal; if they are heroes, heroes they may be, but they remain privates still, handling the old Brown Bess, starving on the old twopence a day. They grow grey in battle and victory, and, after thirty years of bloody service, a young gentleman of fifteen, fresh from a preparatory school, who can scarcely read, and came but yesterday with a pinafore in to papa's dessert such a young gentieman, I say, arrives in a spick-and-span red coat, and calmly takes the command over our veteran,
who obeys him as if God and nature had ordained that so throughout time it should be.
That privates should obey, and that they should be smartly punished if they disobey, this one can understan very well. But to say obey for ever and ever to say tha Private John Styles is, by some physical disproportion, hopelessly inferior…

November 11, 2025 at 3:42 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Absolutely not the family background I’d have expected to be fair

CONTESTED SPACES: GROWING UP IN IRELAND, WALES, AND ENGLAND
The spaces of William Johnston's early life were fraught with conflict from before his birth. When the new Irish Free State was established in 1921, Johnston's father, a civil servant who was also named William, doubted its viability and remained in the north, where William Jr. later recalled that Protestants "held the money, the property, and the good jobs, while the Catholic minority were hewers of wood and drawers of water."' In 1921, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast was intense, and his parents came to believe the space where they lived in a Protestant neighborhood in Belfast was too dangerous for Catholics; they found a Protestant man who lived in Falls Road and who similarly thought his space was too dangerous for a Protestant.
So the Johnston family traded their house for that of the Protestant man, giving each side at least a perception of relatively greater safety. Johnston was born four years later in 1925, during a time of intense conflict in Irish society.
Johnston's birthplace in the Falls Road was the center of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) district, and his family strongly supported the IRA. He described his mother, Winnie Clearkin, as "something of a feminist before her time," both a member of the woman's division of the IRA and a member of the Third Order of St.
Dominic; she was proud that an IRA leader had once spent a night in her home?
As Johnston was growing up, the spaces around him were chronically charged with conflict. Protestants regularly expressed hatred for the pope, and on one occasion Johnston's father was watching a crowd of Protestants singing and dancing in the street to an anti-papal song; suddenly there were three gunshots, and three Protestant dancers lay dead. The crowd dispersed.
In 1932, when Johnston was seven years old, his father was transferred to a position in North Wales against his will, and the family had to move. In this new space y…

November 10, 2025 at 10:50 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Something unusual in the translator’s bio too

WILLIAM JOHNSTON
William Johnston was born in 1925 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He ined the Jesuit Order in 1943 and after completing his studies at the University of Dublin, travelled to Japan in 1951. There, he taught English literature while earning a PhD in Theology, and later wrote a number of books on religion and mysticism. He died in 2010 at the age of 85.

November 10, 2025 at 10:38 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

A lot of people (absolutely not me) will be in pain at this image.

November 10, 2025 at 8:25 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Actually tell a lie, this is more you

store.steampowered.com/app/994730/B...

Banner of the Maid is a mix of turn-based strategy and JRPG. Set in an alternate French Revolution with fantasy elements. As the young officer Pauline Bonaparte you will have to lead your troops to battle and play a role in the political vortex of Paris

November 10, 2025 at 7:49 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Just for you

By focusing on choice, Spears and Geruso are trying to resist depopulation determinism.
There is an argument that female education means an inevitable decline in birth rates (the
British historian Lucy Worsley once said she had been 'educated out of the natural reproductive function'). It is certainly true that countries which increase educational opportunities for women also see a sharp decline in the TFR; high TFRs exist only in societies with very limited female education. This is both cause and effect: educational access means more reproductive choice; more choice makes it easier to access education.
But when a society's fertility falls below replacement level the story gets more complicated. There is some evidence that women with PhDs are more likely to have children than those who have undergraduate degrees. This is presumably because having an academic career, though far from ideal, has become a more child-friendly option than some other professions. A recent report identified British women who were the first generation in their family to go to university as the cohort least likely to have children.
That means second and future generations might be different: to be the child of a woman who went to university shows it is at least feasible to do both. The direction of travel is not only one way.

November 10, 2025 at 7:46 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Physicists never living down the reputation

Choro and his companions had gathered around Professor Seiki and were engaged in heated discussion. "Who on earth really perfected this work? Was it Compton? Or was it Lawrence?" "You can be sure that Einstein played an important role. And then Bohr and Fermi and the other scientists who were exiled from Europe to the United States." "Then the British scientist Chadwick who discovered the neutron-and the French, the Joliot-Curies." "We've been cut off from scientific research for years now and the important literature hasn't been published. So I don't really know. But quite certainly new scientists have emerged. And then, knowing the United States, you can be sure that thousands of scientists were mobilized. No doubt they divided up the research and worked with tremendous efficiency."
Takashi Nagai
The Bells of Nagasaki: A first-hand account of the catastrophic atomic bombing
#kindlequotes

November 10, 2025 at 6:40 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

At a secret gathering in May south of London, the head of Britain's domestic security service asked Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, for help.
British security officials rely on the bureau for high-tech surveillance tools - the kind they might need to monitor a new embassy that China wants to build near the Tower of London.
The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, asked Mr.
Patel to protect the job of an F.B.I. agent based in London who dealt with that technology, according to several current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the episode.
Mr. Patel agreed to find funding to keep the posting, the officials said. But the job had already been slated to disappear as the White House moved to slash the F.B.I. budget. The agent moved to a different job back in the United States, saving the F.B.I. money but leaving MI5 officials incredulous.

Slated to land at Stansted Airport outside London, he sought to fly to an airport closer to the hotel. British officials denied the request, making clear that dignitaries must use Stansted for security reasons, according to one of the former officials and another person familiar with the interactions.
They said that during the trip, the Royalty and Specialist Protection Command of the Metropolitan Police told the F.B.I. that Mr.
Patel's security detail could not be armed.
Britain has strict gun-control laws, and the police limit armed details based on risk assessments. The police assessment on Mr.
Patel found he didn't meet the threshold for an exemption.
The details for the heads of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency were armed, another U.S. official said. That discrepancy prompted an emergency meeting between the F.B.I. and British security officials. The British officials held firm.

The conference had a detailed agenda. Mr. Patel complained about the number of meetings, one of the former officials said, a well-known gripe of his. The F.B.I. official said Mr. Patel did not object to meetings but rather was trying to figure out which ones were essential so he could fit in other important work.

November 10, 2025 at 6:33 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

In the intervening 75 years, Luxembourgs population has doubled and it is one of the world’s richest countries per capita. Obviously an anomalously small case, but it does sort of show why there is a very simple solution to the problem that the right are v much in the active denial phase of

What can make depopulation difficult to fathom is the different timescales on which it operates. In one way, it has come about very quickly. In 1950 Luxembourg was the only country in the world with a TFR of less than 2, which is the magic number above which human populations grow and beneath which they start to shrink (the cut-off is actually closer to 2.1 because of infant mortality and gender imbalances, but the round figure is still a useful marker). A TFR under 2 - even if it's 1.9, Luxembourg's figure in 1950 - is called a
'below-replacement fertility rate'.
' Today roughly

November 10, 2025 at 5:55 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

FINALLY

November 10, 2025 at 5:26 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

aha - it is real. (and to rip off someone else's observation, the flags are upside down)

November 10, 2025 at 3:26 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

just searched for Students4reform and got the X link announcing it.

November 10, 2025 at 3:25 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

Unrealtedly
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_...

n 2023, the CCRC confirmed that they would review Yam's case a second time in response to new developments in DNA testing which had led to the exoneration of Andrew Malkinson earlier in the year.[21]

November 10, 2025 at 2:47 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

November 10, 2025 at 2:45 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

You shouldn’t make fun of people for their apparence but

November 10, 2025 at 12:29 PM

Richard J

@preachypreach.bsky.social

huh, this chart of where relative non-compliance with the NMW occurs is slightly odd. I'd have guessed NW England and maybe Greater London, but the compliant areas are odd.