#Brexit Proposal

[mariacallous]

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.

4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan. Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.

5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.

6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.

7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.

12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.

13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.

15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”

16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.

17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”

18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.

19 Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.

20 They are not gods. Tech billionaires are over-entitled nerds with the extraordinary historical luck of being born at the exact right moment in history. Treat them accordingly.

There is much much more to say on all of the above and that’s my plan. But please do share this with anyone who needs to hear it.

How to Survive the Broligarchy: a new podcast

A month ago, I was feeling floored: at the moment in which everything I’ve been warning about for the last eight years suddenly became overwhelmingly real, I was also being dislodged from my journalistic home. The Guardian, my seat of operations for the last 20 years, the last nearly ten of which have been focussed squarely on this subject, has done a deal, in the face of fierce opposition from its journalists, to give away a core part of the organisation. More than 100+ journalists will leave the organisation, including me.

This week, the Guardian confirmed that the last edition of the Observer would be April 20 and my 20-year employment with the organisation would be terminated then. The same day, Tortoise Media, the new home of the Observer, wrote to tell me that they would not be offering me a contract. But now, instead of feeling floored, I feel energised. You’ll hear some of that energy, I hope, in this first episode of the new podcast that I made a pilot for this week. It’s embedded at the top of this newsletter and - when I figure out the backend - will be available on Apple and Spotify and everywhere else too. I have an idea that I explore in this first episode with two people much smarter than me that this might be the start of a journey to a creating a independent, open, collaborative transparent form of ‘live’ journalism.

My investigation of big tech, power, politics, the weaponisation of data, foreign interference, Russian oligarchs and social media has always traversed subjects and specialisms. I’ve drawn on the expertise of so many people along the way and in trying to understand this moment, I realised they are not only the people I want to speak to now, they are also the expert voices that everyone needs to hear. My idea is to make these conversations public and to build a community - a feedback loop - contributing ideas and suggestions and, hopefully, networks of action.

I’ve been doing some of this work with the Citizens, the non-profit, I founded back in 2020 (sign up to their newsletter here), but there is a small ray of hope, in the midst of the current crisis, independent media is in a huge moment of growth and the green shoots of a non-corporate, non-oligarch owned media system are springing up everywhere. I’m hugely grateful to the 55,000 people who’ve signed up to this newsletter so far but there’s so much more we can do.

I’d been kicking around this idea for a new podcast for the last few weeks and then a call with my friend, Claire Wardle, spurred me into action. Claire is a professor at Cornell, an Ivy League university in upstate New York, where she studies as as she puts it “our crazy information environment”. I first met Claire when giving evidence to a parliamentary committee back in 2017 and then we re-met at the TED conference in Vancouver in 2019 where we were both due to give talks and hung out in between paralysing bouts of fear and imposter syndrome.

That TED talk led to a years-long lawsuit for me. And Claire, who founded a non-profit called First Draft that co-ordinated newsrooms and researchers to fight mis- and disinformation, has also found herself under attack. She and more than 100 other researchers in the field have been subpoenaed by a congressional committee who accused them of being part of the ‘censorship industrial complex’.

It’s these sorts of attacks that are now coming for so many other people. My ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ column, above, was intended as both a handbook - how do we protect ourselves? - and a manifesto, how do we fightback against these companies? And that’s the ethos of this podcast too, bringing together a network of people who have the knowledge we need for this next stage.

Claire and I decided this first conversation should be about how the media is covering this moment and its inability to shake off the “business as normal” framing of the authoritarian takeover of the US government.

I include a voice note from Roger McNamee in the first episode, a tech investor - he introduced Mark Zuckberg to Sheryl Sandberg - who’s now one of the most trenchant critics of both Silicon Valley and the media. And Mark Little, an Irish foreign correspondent turned tech entrepreneur (one of his claims to fame is being aquired by Rupert Murdoch), who’s pioneered new media models joined us to talk about solutions.

The best and most enjoyable journalism I’ve done in recent times is two investigative, narrative podcasts. Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring debuted in December at number one in the Apple podcast chart and the BBC’s Stalked is currently sitting at the top of the true crime and series charts.

And what Mark pointed out, which I hadn’t thought about before, is that it’s the “process” of these real-time investigative podcasts that young listeners like. And it’s true that what we’re doing in Stalked is really punchy: this week, we name the suspect who we believe to be Hannah, my ex-stepdaughter’s, cyberstalker, something the police abjectly failed to do. In Sergei, we uncovered a UK government cover-up of foreign interference. We’re doing both of these live, transparently, and showing our workings.

As Mark teases it out, this is the impulse behind this podcast pilot too. It’s also a “true crime” story: democracy has been murdered and there’s a serial killer on the loose. It’s a race against time to prevent the perpetrator devastating the US beyond repair and racking up a bodycount in Europe. (If you can’t or don’t want to listen to it, there’s a transcript here.)

If that all sounds a bit weird and experimental but also ambitious and unlikely, I’d have to agree. But the whole point is that we have entered a wholly dangerous new era and we need new ways of communicating, of doing journalism, of storytelling, of reaching new audiences. It may very well not work in which case I’ll try something else but I’d love your feedback in the comments below. If you have ideas for collaborations or building this network, you can email me at survivingbroligarchy@proton.me.

[lisbeth-kk]

As proposed by @fluffbruary, I have made a Valentine's rec list. Now that I've read through it, It seems to have become more of a love letter...

First of all, I want to thank someone special in the Sherlock fandom - the remarkably talented podficcer extraordinaire @podfixx There isn't a day that goes by without that comforting voice weaving its way to my heart and core. Picking a favourite is almost impossible, because every single one is a gem. But, there is one I will promote a little extra on this romantic day.

The Wedding Garments by cwb

Summary: This is the story of a young consulting detective who wants nothing to do with marriage and an army doctor who wants to find true love. It's 2020 post-Brexit England and the British government is encouraging arranged marriages. Candidates meet through state-run agencies and date in hopes of finding love (and tax benefits). Sherlock doesn't need or want a spouse, at least not until John Watson shows up. Hesitant to give in to his more carnal urges because of the way they derail his mind, how will Sherlock progress toward the more intimate aspects of a relationship? The answer lies in a very special wedding gift.

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There are authors and fics out there that get less attention than they deserve. This story is just one example of that. It's utterly sweet and there's a dog! Sherlock's dog. Please, give it some love!

Late Nigh Emergency by consult_this_prick

Summary: Sherlock shows up late one night with his sick dog at the doors of John's veterinarian clinic.

There is a collection on AO3 I want to direct your attention to. It's called Johnlock on Holiday in FTH 2024 The title says it all, really. Perhaps you'll find some holiday tips.

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Of course, you don't won't to miss anything the giants of this fandom has written. (I'm only going to name a few of them)

Kaleidoscope by @totallysilvergirl

The Last Envoy by @calaisreno

John Watson's Big Adventure by @mydogwatson

The Wisteria Tree by @silentauroriamthereal

A Quiet Life by @discordantwords

The Silence Between the Notes by @jbaillier

Lost in a Good Book by @khorazir

To Stand Before the Storm by @arwamachine

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Honourable mentions of writers that never dissapoint:

A Strange Encounter by @holmesianlove

Rache (German for Revenge) by @blogstandbygo

By the Bi by @keirgreeneyes

When the Worst Parts Begins by @thalialunacy

Without Complexities or Pride by @raina-at

White Pony Tattoo by @meetinginsamarra

The Murder of Sir Emory J. Amat by @chriscalledmesweetie

Kinesis by @stellacartography

An Experiment in Ethanol by @the-reading-lemon

Like a Man by @hubblegleeflower

The Gilded Cage by @the-pen-pot

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It wont't do to forget the fantastic artists this fandom is so lucky to be blessed with. Go visit their blog to see their portfolio.

@petite-madame @bluebellofbakerstreet @helloliriels @justanobsessedpan @gooolabatooo @ceruleanmindpalace @nitaelwyart @a-victorian-girl @starrosea

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And last, but certainly not least, the fandom's librarian, the keeper of lists for every possible and impossible prompt, AU, trope, etc - Steph @inevitably-johnlocked

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We have a saying where I live: no one mentioned, no one forgotten, and I am certain that I have forgotten many amazing people, but not mentioning anyone would undermine the task completely, so there's that. It is what it is...

Much love to you all!

[toaarcan]

Rishi Sunak and the D-Day Disaster

Babes wake up, Rishi Sunak did a fuckup again!

Hokay, so, at time of writing, yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings during World War II. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons, D-Day is one of the most significant events in the largest and most destructive war humanity ever fought, and this is likely to be the last major anniversary that the surviving veterans will be alive and well enough to attend.

Political leaders from the world over made their way to the Normandy beaches for a commemoration. Biden, Trudeau, Macron, Scholz, and Zelenskyy were present. Keir Starmer was there, as were King Prince Charles and Prince William, but the UK government proper was represented by Rishi Sunak and David Hameron.

Until suddenly it wasn't!

Let's run down everything (that I'm aware of) that went wrong!

As part of the British event, army paratroopers landed on the beach... and then had to reconvene in a tent to get their credentials checked by the French authorities. Because Brexit happened and we don't have free movement any more! Pro-Brexit nimrods have, predictably, complained about getting exactly what they voted for.

Once each nation's part of the proceedings were done, they were to reconvene at Omaha Beach for an International commemoration. Speeches, medals being awarded, that sort of thing. Except... Rishi Sunak was not present.

No, see, Rishi "The Least Elected PM Ever" Sunak had stayed until the end of the British event and then promptly fucked off back to England, snubbing the leaders of America, France, Canada, Germany, and Ukraine and leaving everything in the hands of the Hameron, his also-unelected foreign secretary that last rubbed shoulders with any International politicians when he was fucking everything up in 2016. Also, in the hands of his main rival, Starmer (Okay calling Starmer and Sunak rivals is a bit unfair, it implies Sunak has a snowball's chance in hell, which he does not).

Naturally, people were pretty fuckin' steamed about this, and put Rishi on blast for showing enormous disrespect to... literally everyone involved. Especially since this is right on the heels of Sunak proposing that they bring back National Service to "fill young British people with loyalty and honour."

Don't worry it gets worse.

Naturally, there are a lot of journalists with cameras present, and this means that we get to see images like these:

Image Description: Left to right, David Cameron, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Joe Biden, standing in front of a partially cloud blue sky. Macron, Scholz, and Biden are lit by the sun, while Cameron appears to be in the shade.

Image Description: Keir Starmer sits, centrally-framed, among D-Day veterans in ceremonial dress uniforms. To the right of the frame sits Emmanuel Macron.

Image Description: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Keir Starmer talking, with a photojournalist in the background aiming his camera at them. Both are smiling.

Quote Pippa Crerar, writing for the Guardian (You may remember her from that time she blew the lid off of Partygate!), Starmer is "already looking like a Prime Minister."

So this is really, really bad for Rishi. Britain has been keen to support Ukraine lately, and we've actually shipped a supply of our Challenger 2 tanks over to them for their use. The impact from this hasn't been as massive as you'd hope, largely because the British military has been absolutely gutted under the Tories, for reasons that I'm sure had absolutely nothing to do with all the financial support David Cameron got from Russians, but Britain has been trying to help.

Boris Johnson in particular liked to really stress the Ukraine point whenever he was losing control of the narrative, essentially making Ukraine's plight and his support for them a shield from criticism. And now, here's the leader of the opposition being photographed in a positive light with Zelenskyy. The optics are incredibly bad for Rishi.

But surely, Rishi had a reason why he had to zip back to British soil post haste? Maybe an emergency that he had to resolve?

No, he needed to record an interview with ITV, for his election campaign. That was it.

Well, interviews in election cycles become outdated pretty quickly. Normally a few days is enough to render them outdated. It must've been pretty urgent.

No, the interview is scheduled for release in six days' time.

That's an eternity in election season. There's a high chance that more than half of its content will be void by the time it airs.

As a reminder, we are four weeks from the big day. In fact, yesterday was exactly four weeks before election night. Time is very short.

Well, maybe this was the only time they could fit him in?

Nope, Paul Brand of ITV has confirmed that this was the date and time Rishi wanted, and they could've moved it to prevent scheduling conflicts!

So, how did a fuckup on such a grand magnitude happen? How did Rishi manage to create a clash between the 80th anniversary commemoration of an event with a specific date (6th June, 1944 is not hard to remember, my guy!) and the election that he called? Well that's very simple! He didn't want to be there at all.

Yes, it seems that Rishi had already told the French government a week ago that he wouldn't be attending at all. Someone seems to have convinced him that skipping the event entirely was a bad idea, but not enough for him to actually commit to it.

Image Description: A block of text reading "The French government was told a week ago that Rishi Sunak would not attend the D-Day 80th commemoration, Tory sources have confirmed. The message to Paris from his team was that he would be too busy campaigning in the general election to make the trip. The decision was reversed, and a short visit was the compromise, but it is extraordinary that an attendance by a Conservative PM, or any PM, was ever in doubt."

Rishi has denied this, however, so the whether it's true or Sunak has elected to not lie for once, well, that remains to be seen.

Quote John Healey, Labour's defence spokesperson, “Given that the prime minister has been campaigning on the idea young people should complete a year’s national service, what does it say that he appears to have been unable to complete a single afternoon of it?”

Conservative commentator Tim Montgomery called it "political malpractice."

And so, after thumbing his nose at half the world in order to pursue an already-foundering election campaign, Rishi Sunak decided that he needed to apologise. Via tweet.

It's been a very bad day for Rishi Sunak.

[justforbooks]

Trump is pushing the world towards recession.

By learning the lessons of 2008, we can still prevent it. As I discovered then, global problems need international responses. By working together, we can protect jobs and living standards

No more than a narrow window of opportunity remains if we are to prevent an unnecessary global recession. As China and the US decouple, disruptive trade wars are intensifying and threaten to descend into currency wars; import, export, investment and technology bans; and financial fire sales that will destroy millions of jobs worldwide. It seems barely credible that the world is being brought to its knees by one economy, outside of which live 96% of the population, who produce 84% of the world’s manufactured goods. But even though US officials have previously talked of a tariff policy of “escalate to de-escalate”, Donald Trump’s aim is to force manufacturing back to the US, and his 90-day relaxation of some tariffs does not mean he intends to defuse the crisis.

Keir Starmer warned that the world will never be the same again, and reminded us that “attempting to manage crises without fundamental change just leads to managed decline”. He is right. As I learned in the financial crisis of 2008, global problems require globally coordinated solutions. We need a bold, international response that measures up to the scale of the emergency. In the same way that, to his great credit, the prime minister has been building a coalition in defence of Ukraine, we need an economic coalition of the willing: like-minded global leaders who believe that, in an interdependent world, we have to coordinate economic policies across continents if we are to safeguard jobs and living standards.

The immediate challenge is to mitigate the supply-side shocks caused by the Trump tariff wall. As Rachel Reeves is proposing, we need to keep world trade moving. No two crises are ever the same, but offering extended credit to exporting and importing firms was central to the global response as trade collapsed in 2009. We also have to remind China that if it is to present itself as a champion of free trade, it is in its interests to focus more on expanding domestic consumption than flooding the world’s markets with cut-price goods it cannot now sell in the US.

Yet the global challenges go well beyond managing the tariff shock. Resuscitating trade will not be easy without coordinating macroeconomic and financial policies across continents. Global inflation will rise, even after taking into account the deflationary impact of low-priced Asian exports. But this shock is outweighed by a bigger problem: collapsing consumer confidence and declining business investment. That means we may need a synchronised reduction in interest rates – an initiative the US might well join – backed by fiscal activism in the countries where there is space to expand.

Our international economic institutions were built on a belief that if prosperity is to be sustained it has to be shared, and that you cannot have economic success everywhere unless you are prepared to act anywhere where there is need. With or without the US’s help, we must immediately mobilise the $150bn grant and loan-making capacity of the World Bank and the $1tn financial power of the International Monetary Fund, not least to help the most vulnerable, tariff-hit developing economies. In 2009, it was the combination of trade credits and multilateral bank money that underpinned the world economy by $1.1tn and prevented recession descending into depression.

A coordinated approach offers us the chance not just to stabilise the world economy but – to use a phrase from 2020 – “build back better”. For the UK, that means working ever-more closely with the EU. Indeed, the changes under way in Europe make possible a collaboration that is even more extensive than removing post-Brexit trade barriers. There has always been a tension between Europe’s desire to lead, which makes it bold, and its desire to stay united, which makes it timid, but today Europe has lower inflation than the US, and it can reduce interest rates faster.

US deficit spending since 2010 has been many multiples of the euro area, leaving Germany in particular with proportionately far lower debt than the US. With the fiscal flexibility that the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the EU have created, new resources can be injected into the global economy. This can be done by implementing the Draghi report on European competitiveness and would complement China’s spending boost. At the same time, the UK-EU defence cooperation agreement should be extended to enable joint and more cost-effective weapons procurement. And, to release resources elsewhere, we should advance discussions on a Europe-wide, off-balance-sheet, special-purpose defence and security fund.

Europe may be required to lead in another respect if the US’s willingness to act as a lender of last resort to the world is ever in doubt. The global Financial Stability Board should be asked to report immediately on what risks to stability may need to be addressed within the bank and non-banking sectors. If it became necessary, the European Central Bank could also be asked to fill a gap left by the US (and which China has been trying to occupy) by extending currency swaps to a wider group of countries in need of liquidity support.

Coordinated multilateral action is essential if Britain is to secure the export-led growth we need. That growth will be turbocharged by refocusing industrial policy on boosting internationally competitive sectors – from life sciences and AI, to the energy transition and the creative industries. Promoting such world-beating clusters requires us, as the chancellor has said, to invest more heavily in research and development and high-level skills. But it also demands that we champion a pro-competition regime that does not favour the tech giants at the expense of their smaller UK competitors, or dilute copyright and intellectual property laws so vital to creative talent.

It is not only the multilateral economic system that is under assault, but every single pillar of the rules-based order, from respect for the law to the self-determination of nations and historic commitments to humanitarian aid. Indeed, we are seeing a simultaneous breakdown in economic and geopolitical orders. In a follow-up article, I will suggest how we might build a new order out of what are fast becoming the ruins of the old. But first, we need to show that the world can act together to support people’s living standards. Doing so will demonstrate the fundamental principles at stake: that international cooperation is in our collective interests, and that a zero-sum world of competing nationalisms leaves us all poorer and less secure.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[collapsedsquid]

But the same analysis tells us [MAGA/brexit/whatever]’re fake solutions. You can’t promise a simpler world – that’s equivalent to claiming to be able to reverse the direction of time. And if you are promising to restore the broken communication channels, you need to say how. These channels used to be made up of layer upon layer of middle managers and civil servants. Not only would it be extremely costly to bring them back, it’s not obvious that anyone would thank you for doing so. It’s definitely not what the populists are proposing – there’s no March for Bureaucracy, nobody’s slogan is ‘Red Tape Holds Us Together’.

Clearly Daniel has not been reading JC Medlock

[reading-writing-revolution]

(via IT IS A COUP - by Carole Cadwalladr - The Power)

A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole.

[eaglesnick]

“So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction.” - Wyndham Lewis

The austerity years under Conservative-led governments from 2010 onward have been widely critiqued for theirdeep and lasting impact on public services, inequality, and democratic institutions. Here's a breakdown of the major criticisms:

Public Services Hollowed Out

NHS under strain: Chronic underfunding led to staff shortages, long waiting lists, and deteriorating infrastructure.

Education cuts: Spending per pupil fell by 8%, with adult education and youth services slashed by over 60%.

Local councils gutted: Central government funding dropped by nearly a third, forcing councils to sell off public assets and cut libraries, swimming pools, and youth centres.

Rising Poverty and Inequality

Child poverty surged: Over 3.4 million children born after 2010 now live in poverty, with infant mortality rising for the first time in two generations.

Food bank usage exploded: A 5,000% increase in emergency food parcels distributed since 2008.

Housing crisis: Affordable housing stock declined while homelessness and rough sleeping rose sharply.

Justice and Democracy Undermined

Legal aid gutted: An 82% drop in access within five years, skewing justice toward the wealthy.

Court closures: Nearly half of court buildings were sold off, contributing to massive case backlogs.

Jury trials threatened: Proposals to restrict jury trials are seen as authoritarian responses to system collapse caused by austerity.

Economic Mismanagement

Stalled life expectancy: Especially in poorer regions like Blackpool and Liverpool.

Youth debt crisis: Young people are seven times more likely than their grandparents to take on new debt.

Local government insolvency: Councils like Woking and Thurrock went bankrupt after risky investments made to offset funding cuts.

Mental Health Fallout

Mental health services overwhelmed: Over 2.5 million people sought help in 2017/18, up from 1.5 million in 2011/12.

Youth mental health crisis: One in five young people missed school

Not before time, at the last general election, the people of Britain finally voted to cast the Tory Party and its MP’s into the dustbin of history.  We voiced our desire for CHANGE and a different approach to running the economy and the institutions within it. Unfortunately, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, purged of left-wing personnel and ideas,   has offered us more of the same and has continued the Austerity policies of the Tories.

In their desperation for real change the people of Britain are turning more and more to Nigel Farage and Reform UK as the true alternative to both the Labour and Conservative parties.

THEY COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG!

Reform UK is basically made up of the same Tories who gave us Austerity.

This week saw two high-profile defections from the Conservative Party: Sir Jake Berry and David Jones, both former Cabinet ministers. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, these two see Reform UK as their life raft back to political power. They are not the only ones. Below is a list of former Conservative party members, donors and MP’s who have switched their allegiance to Reform UK.

Former Tory MPs now with Reform UK

At least eight former Conservative MPs have joined Reform UK, including:

Sir Jake Berry – Former Tory chairman and cabinet minister under Liz Truss

David Jones – Ex-Welsh Secretary and cabinet minister

Dame Andrea Jenkyns – Now mayor of Greater Lincolnshire

Marco Longhi

Anne Marie Morris

Ross Thomson

Aiden Burley

Lee Anderson – MP for Ashfield

Former Tory donors now backing Reform UK

Reform UK has also drawn support from at least eight major former Conservative donors, including:

Bassim Haidar – Previously donated £675,000 to the Conservatives

Mohamed Amersi – Over £500,000 in past Tory donations

Robin Birley – Hosted Reform’s Mayfair fundraiser

Jeremy Hosking – Former Brexit Party donor, now backing Reform

Nick Candy – Former Tory donor, now Reform’s fundraising chief

Arron Banks – Prominent Brexit campaign backer

Andrew Reid – Former UKIP treasurer, attended Reform fundraiser

Myles Barclay – Member of the Barclay banking family

Let’s not forget that Nigel Farage was himself a former member of the Tory Party, along with Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf.

Clearly, a vote for Reform UK will not be the vote for change people hope for but be a vote for the same politicians who gave us Austerity measures.

[luthienebonyx]

I've seen some misinformation spreading around tumblr about the Australian Voice referendum to be held this Saturday, 14 October 2023, so here are some actual facts about what it is and why Australians should PLEASE vote YES.

So, what is the referendum question?

The referendum question is about recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, and setting up a body to be known as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, so that Indigenous representatives have the right to provide advice to government about decisions that affect Indigenous people.

Here’s the actual referendum question:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?

The new chapter and section to be added to the constitution are:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

S 129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Source and more info

That’s it. That’s all it is.

The No campaign is spreading lies about the Voice, suggesting that it will somehow take rights or property away from non-Indigenous Australians. They’ve also been using social media - and some elements of mainstream media - to stir up fear and racism, using tactics with a vibe that will be all too familiar to our American friends who have lived through Trump, or our British friends who have been through Brexit.

Here are a few simple facts to counter some of the misinformation that's out there.

Why do we need a body like the Voice?

Indigenous people experience a level of disadvantage that applies to no other group of Australians. As the Prime Minister has said on numerous occasions, a young Indigenous man in this country today is more likely to go to jail than to go to university. Meanwhile, the periodic closing the gap reports show that Australian governments continue to fail in their aim for Indigenous Australians’ health and life expectancy to be equal to that of other Australians.

These sorts of outcomes are typical of a system that has always been about doing things to Indigenous people, rather than with them. Indigenous people need to be in the room when decisions are made about matters that affect them.

So yeah, we need an advisory body that has the ear of politicians. Seems simple enough, so why not just legislate it?

That’s the thing: we’ve already tried that.

We need an advisory body like the Voice to be enshrined in the Constitution because we’ve HAD advisory bodies before – bodies like the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). ATSIC was abolished in 2005 by a government that was hostile to ATSIC’s aims – something that government could easily do since there was no obligation for a body like that to exist. Other similar bodies have gone the same way. 

Putting the Voice in the constitution means that it will always exist. The actual decision-making power continues to reside with our elected politicians, but having the Voice means that they will be obligated to listen to the perspective and suggestions of Indigenous representatives before they (the politicians) make decisions affecting Indigenous people.

The politicians will still have the power to legislate the details of how the Voice works, just like any other body set up under legislation - but once it's in the constitution, they don't get to decide whether it exists or not.

Where did the idea for the Voice come from?

Indigenous people have been calling for something like the Voice since the 1920s, but the current proposition originated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This is a petition created by Indigenous delegates to the First Nations National Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in 2017. The Uluru statement from the heart is only 439 words, but they’re very powerful words. Read it here

So if you hear the No campaign trying to say that the idea for the Voice comes from Canberra or from politicians: no, it doesn’t. It comes from Uluru, in central Australia, and it comes from a request by representatives of a large number of Indigenous people. The government is responding to that request by holding this referendum.

Do all Indigenous Australians support the Voice?

Have you ever known any group of people that share 100% support for anything? Of course there isn’t agreement by every single Indigenous person that this is the right way to proceed. HOWEVER, that said, polling shows that around 80% of Indigenous Australians  support the Voice, and of the remaining approximately 20%, many don’t support the Voice because they believe it doesn’t go far enough. Some want a treaty before anything else.

But you wouldn’t know that by the way the Australian media has reported the campaign.

I’m not going to repeat that No campaign slogan. If you’ve watched or read any reporting about this issue, you know the one I mean. The one that panders to ignorance and fear.

Instead, I’m just going to say: if you don’t know, FIND OUT. And then VOTE YES.

[darkmaga-returns]

Putin-Trump phone conversation. UK, France, Canada warn Israel, Netanyahu responds. Khamenei Calls Trump a Liar. Iran-UK ties tank. Starmer BETRAYS Brexit. Canada Wants to Kill Its Vulnerable Children

Lioness of Judah Ministry

May 20, 2025

Putin-Trump phone conversation: As it happened

The Russian and US presidents spoke on phone for over two hours

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone with his US counterpart, Donald Trump. The conversation on Monday focused on the Ukraine conflict and a possible ceasefire between Moscow and Kiev. The phone call was initially announced by Trump on Saturday. The US president said the discussion will focus on “stopping the ‘bloodbath’” between Russia and Ukraine, as well as on bilateral trade issues.

Trump: Russia, Ukraine Will Immediately Begin ‘Negotiations Toward a Ceasefire

President Donald Trump announced Monday that Ukraine and Russia will begin negotiations toward a ceasefire and suggested that talks could take place at the Vatican.

Trump took to Truth Social after a two-hour conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to share that it “went very well.” “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War,” Trump wrote. “The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of,” he added. Trump said that Russia looks to engage in “large-scale trade” with the United States once peace is reached.

Putin outlines results of his conversation with Trump (FULL SPEECH)

The Russian president has described his Monday phone call with Donald Trump as “substantive and quite candid”

Moscow is ready to work with Kiev on drafting a memorandum on a potential future peace agreement, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said following his phone call with American counterpart Donald Trump. He described the exchange as productive, “substantive and quite candid.” The conversation on Monday lasted for over two hours and focused primarily on the Ukraine conflict. In a brief address to journalists after the call, Putin said the two leaders had agreed that Russia would propose a memorandum specifying principles and timing for a possible peace deal, as well as other matters, “including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements be reached.”

Zelensky creates permanent negotiating team for talks with Russia

US President Donald Trump later claimed that Moscow and Kiev “will immediately start” negotiations

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky ordered the creation of a “permanent expanded national negotiating group” following recent Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul, Türkiye. Last Friday’s meeting between the representatives of Kiev and Moscow was the two sides’ first direct engagement since 2022. It was preceded by a proposal from Russian President Vladimir Putin to resume peace talks without any preconditions. During the two-hour negotiations, Russia and Ukraine agreed to conduct a large-scale prisoner swap, as well as to exchange preliminary terms for a potential ceasefire and discuss a follow-up round of talks.

China is sending an important signal to the entire world

Beijing’s first-ever white paper on national security clearly shows that it now sees itself as an indispensable global force

Last week, China released its first-ever white paper on national security. While the document brings no major breakthroughs, its publication is significant. It signals two key developments: Chinese leaders are increasingly concerned about the intensifying geopolitical confrontation, and they are ready to play a more assertive role in global affairs – challenging US dominance in the process. The economy-first reform pattern that characterized the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his successors effectively ended with Xi Jinping’s rise to power. The Chinese often refer to the current phase as a ‘new era’, marked by profound changes both domestically and globally.

China to launch world’s first drone ‘mother ship’ (VIDEO)

The Jiu Tian has been designed to deploy up to 100 AI-guided UAVs during high-altitude missions

China is preparing to launch what it says is the world’s first “drone carrier” aircraft, capable of releasing swarms of AI-guided kamikaze drones during high-altitude missions. The Jiu Tian, or ‘High Sky’ UAV, is scheduled to complete its first test mission by the end of June, according to the state broadcaster CCTV. The aircraft is said to have a maximum takeoff weight of 16 tonnes and a wingspan of 25 meters. It can reportedly cruise at altitudes up to 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) – higher than most common medium-range air defense systems – and has a range of approximately 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles).

Taiwan president reiterates willingness to talk to China

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te on Tuesday reiterated his willingness to talk to China, as he marked one year since taking office.

Lai told reporters at the presidential office that he sought peace, but that Taiwan also needs to continue strengthening its defenses.

[thoughtlessarse]

Keir Starmer is under growing pressure to forge closer economic links with Europe five years on from Brexit, as a major new poll shows voters clearly favour prioritising more trade with the EU over the US. The MRP survey of almost 15,000 people by YouGov for the Best for Britain thinktank shows more people in every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales back closer arrangements with the EU rather than more transatlantic trade with Washington. MRP polls use large data samples to estimate opinion at a local level. Even in Nigel Farage’s seat of Clacton, more people think the UK is better off trading more with its neighbours on the continent than with the US under the Reform UK leader’s ally Donald Trump. The findings come as the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, on Sunday tells the Observer that Brexit has harmed the UK economy and that she is determined to claw back some of the lost gross domestic product (GDP) by reducing trade frictions for UK small businesses wherever possible. In one of the clearest statements by a senior government minister on Brexit, Reeves answered yes when asked if she was clear that leaving the EU had damaged the UK’s financial position. The chancellor, who discussed possible ways to improve trade with EU finance ministers and others at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, said there were “loads of external estimates” showing the negative impact of Brexit on the UK economy and added: “What I want to do is get some of that GDP back by having a better trading relationship with the European Union.” Reeves also enthused about one specific proposal, saying it was “great”, made by the EU’s new trade chief responsible for post-Brexit negotiations, Maroš Šefčovič , who floated the idea of the UK joining the Pan-Euro Mediterranean convention (PEM). The PEM is a set of common rules for sourcing parts and ingredients for use in tariff-free trade.

continue reading

Reeves might have enthused about the proposal, but the message from No. 10 was 'not yet'.

[beardedmrbean]

The home secretary has said the new migrant returns scheme agreed with France on Thursday is "robust" enough to withstand potential legal challenges.

Yvette Cooper said she had been in close contact with European governments which have expressed concerns about the "one in, one out" deal, saying the European Union had been "very supportive and helpful".

She told BBC Breakfast the government had done "a lot of work to make sure that the system is robust to legal challenges", which hampered the previous Conservative government's efforts to deport some illegal migrants to Rwanda.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp described the plan to return an expected 50 migrants a week to France as a "gimmick".

The deal was signed and announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, at the end of his three-day state visit to the UK.

The scheme - which will initially run as a pilot - proposes that for each migrant the UK returns, Britain will accept another who has made a legal claim in France.

Both countries say the "ground-breaking" plan would help "break the model" of the people smugglers and deter migrants from crossing the Channel in small boats.

Cooper would not be drawn on how many migrants would be exchanged under the deal, though it is expected the pilot will involve about 50 people a week.

She said the government would "provide updates" on figures as the pilot progressed.

Cooper said the UK and France were "not fixing the ultimate figures either for the pilot or further phases of this", adding: "We will want to extend it as far as we're able to."

The home secretary said the pilot scheme would be accompanied by a plan to target those working illegally in the UK, which she said was a pull factor driving small boat crossings.

Cooper said migrants who attempted to come back a second time, having already been sent back to France, would be "immediately returned again" and "banned from entering the UK asylum system".

"They will be paying thousands of pounds to people smugglers to no avail," Cooper said.

Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Services Union said it was "entirely possible" the plan could come into force next week but warned legal challenges linked to the scheme "could take a year".

She said individuals selected for return to France could mount a legal challenge over how they were chosen.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Moreton asked whether a criteria would be set or whether it would just be the first 50 people who arrive, and said there could be a "legal challenge that flows from that".

Philp dismissed the plan as "another gimmick" that will allow the majority of illegal migrants to remain in the UK, and said Labour's pledge to "smash the gangs" had not worked.

He said the Rwanda scheme originally proposed by Boris Johnson would have seen "100% of illegal arrivals being removed" and described Sir Keir's decision to axe the plan as a "catastrophic" mistake.

Cooper said only four migrants had ever been sent to Rwanda and on a voluntary basis, and described the previous government's approach to migration as "chaos".

Since 2018, when figures began to be gathered, more than 170,000 people have arrived in the UK in small boats.

Numbers this year have reached record levels with nearly 20,000 arriving in the first six months of 2025.

On Thursday, Macron suggested Brexit had made it harder for the UK to tackle illegal migration.

[mariacallous]

A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That’s a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as normal when it’s anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual. I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: “Of course it’s a coup.”

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.

Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do the honours.

He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he’s been participating in ‘War Game’ exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t see this. It’s even worse than they feared.

“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions. “So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?”

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.

Musk’s troops - because that’s what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now.”

It’s a coup

I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab”. It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is “business as usual.”

Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump’s Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that’s before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

It’s a coup

We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

It’s a coup

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t happening? Really? That’s the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I’ve thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I’d be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I’d also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that’s the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

[lahore2toronto]

The End of Control: Brexit, MAGA, and the Global North’s Identity Crisis

By Qaisar Iqbal Janjua

For centuries, the world tilted north. From the British Empire to American exceptionalism, the West called the shots — economically, politically, and culturally. But today, that world is cracking. The rise of slogans like “Take Back Control” in the UK and “Make America Great Again” in the U.S. are not signs of confidence — they are symptoms of panic.

This is not just about Brexit or Trump. It’s about an entire civilizational identity crisis. The Global North, long the unchallenged steward of world affairs, is confronting a terrifying realization: the world is moving on.

Brexit and MAGA: The Politics of Nostalgia

On the surface, Brexit and MAGA appear to be separate political events. One is Britain leaving the European Union. The other is an American populist movement that took over the Republican Party. But under the surface, they share the same emotional fuel: fear of loss.

   •   Loss of sovereignty (even if symbolic)

   •   Loss of racial or cultural dominance

   •   Loss of economic stability for the working class

   •   Loss of certainty in a globalized world

Brexit promised Britons they could “take back control” — but of what? Immigration? Trade? Sovereignty? Most of those powers weren’t really lost — they were shared. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the feeling of decline.

MAGA ran on similar fumes: “We don’t win anymore,” said Donald Trump. But America hadn’t stopped winning — it just wasn’t winning alone. That distinction matters. Sharing power feels like losing power to those used to having it all.

Globalization: The Great Equalizer (and Disruptor)

The 21st century globalized not only trade and travel — it globalized culture, technology, and aspiration.

   •   China rose as a tech and economic powerhouse.

   •   India became the back-office and the brain behind global innovation.

   •   Africa’s youth became a demographic force, with smartphones and stories ready to reshape the narrative.

   •   Latino, Asian, Arab, and African diasporas demanded visibility and equity in places that long ignored them.

The Global North, used to being the producers of culture and power, was suddenly facing a world where it was no longer the center — just one of many voices in the chorus. For many in the West, this was not an invitation to collaborate; it felt like an existential threat.

The Myth of “Taking Back Control”

What did the UK actually gain from Brexit?

   •   Trade friction with the EU, its largest partner

   •   Economic decline, with slower growth and lower investment

   •   Increased political instability and internal division (especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland)

   •   Immigration still high — just from different places

   •   A National Health Service in crisis, despite the “£350 million per week” promise

And what did America gain from MAGA?

   •   A more divided society, politically and racially

   •   Isolationism in global affairs

   •   A weakened international reputation

   •   Policy whiplash every election cycle

The “control” both movements sought was largely illusory. Because the real loss wasn’t control — it was global dominance.

The Global North’s Identity Crisis

Here’s the truth few politicians dare admit: The era of Western hegemony is ending.

Not because of war or collapse, but because the rest of the world has caught up — economically, intellectually, and creatively.

The Global South is no longer waiting for permission. It’s launching satellites, producing films, designing software, and writing its own story.

   •   South-South trade is booming.

   •   BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are proposing alternatives to the Western-led order.

   •   Youth populations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are more ambitious, connected, and capable than ever.

This doesn’t mean the North is irrelevant. But it does mean it has to let go of its monopoly.

Where Will the Global North Be in 50 Years?

That depends entirely on the choices it makes now.

Path 1: Reinvention

   •   Embrace multicultural democracy

   •   Invest in education, green technology, and global collaboration

   •   Respect rising nations as partners, not subordinates

   •   Let go of imperial nostalgia and zero-sum thinking

Path 2: Resistance and Decline

   •   Cling to nationalism and nostalgia

   •   Blame immigrants and outsiders

   •   Elect populists who offer slogans instead of solutions

   •   Sink into cultural and economic irrelevance

Empires don’t last forever. But civilizations that evolve — do.

A New Kind of Power

The future will not be dominated by one power or region. It will be multipolar, diverse, and dynamic. Power will flow through ideas, networks, culture, and technology — not just weapons and wealth.

The Global North must decide: Does it want to be part of that future? Or stand in its way?

Brexit and MAGA may have felt like revolutions. But history may remember them as the last cries of an old world unwilling to accept a new one.

And for those of us watching — from the Global South or as migrants within the North — we understand:

This isn’t the end of power. It’s just the end of domination. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

[thoughtportal]

4 December 2024

The French government has collapsed after Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted in a no-confidence vote.

MPs voted overwhelmingly in support of the motion against him - just three months after he was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron.

Opposition parties had tabled the motion after the former Brexit negotiator controversially used special powers to force through his budget without a vote.

It marks the first time the country's government has collapsed in a no-confidence vote since 1962.

The development will further France's political instability, after snap elections in summer led to no single group having a majority in parliament.

MPs were required to either vote yes or abstain from Wednesday's vote, with 288 votes needed for the motion to pass. A total of 331 voted in support of the motion.

Barnier is now obliged to present the resignation of his government, and the budget which triggered his downfall is defunct.

However, he is likely to stay on as caretaker prime minister while Macron chooses a successor.

Both the left and far right had tabled motions of no-confidence after Barnier pushed through reforms to social security by invoking presidential decree on Monday, after failing to win enough support for the measures.

The left-wing alliance New Popular Front (NFP), which won the most seats in the parliamentary elections, had previously criticised Macron's decision to appoint centrist Barnier as prime minister over its own candidate.

Alongside the far-right National Rally (RN), it deemed Barnier's budget - which included €60bn (£49bn) in deficit reduction - unacceptable.

Marine Le Pen, the RN leader, said the budget was "toxic for the French".

Ahead of the vote, Barnier told the National Assembly that voting him out of office would not solve the country's financial problems.

"We have reached a moment of truth, of responsibility," he said, adding that "we need to look at the realities of our debt".

"It is not a pleasure that I propose difficult measures."

In an interview with French broadcaster TF1 on Wednesday, Le Pen said there was "no other solution" than to remove Barnier.

Asked about the French president's prospects, she replied: "I am not asking for the resignation of Emmanuel Macron."

However, Le Pen added that "if we do not respect the voice of voters and show respect for political forces and respect for elections", then pressure on the president will "obviously be stronger and stronger".

Macron, who has returned to France following a state visit to Saudi Arabia, is due to give a televised speech to the nation on Thursday evening.

He is not directly affected by the result of the vote, as France votes for its president separately from its government.

Macron had said he would not resign whatever the outcome of Wednesday's vote.

He is expected to name a new prime minister swiftly to avoid the embarrassment of a non-existent government - not least because US President-elect Donald Trump is due in Paris this weekend for the reopening of the Notre-Dame cathedral.

No new parliamentary elections can be held until July, so the current deadlock in the Assembly - where no group can hope to have a working majority - is set to continue.

[the-lost-archivist]

So I’m not thinking this post through, it could be a terrible idea but I had a thought

Reform UK is taking over politics which is terrible but people in my life at least don’t realise that reform is the brexit party, rebranded

reform has a deadname so to speak

And reform is transphobic so would be against people transitioning and changing their names (even if they are perfectly happy to change their party name)

And brexit destroyed the UK, there’s no doubt about that

What I propose is we deadname reform because it would help people realise that it’s the brexit party and also what are they going to do about it? They do not care about other people and would happily deadname trans people so it seems fair game for us to all collectively deadname an evil political party (deadnaming individuals is obviously wrong but this is a political party who hates nearly everyone’s existence and since it’s a party it doesn’t have feelings and even if it did I wouldn’t care about them)

[countriesgame]

Please reblog for a bigger sample size!

If you have any fun fact about the European Union, please tell us and I'll reblog it!

Be respectful in your comments. You can criticize a government without offending its people.