A wilding

Someone said something on Elon Musk's glorious new Twitter? It must be true then!

Well we don't know do we? There is obviously something there, but exactly what remains to be seen, as does the mother's motives. But the current BBC management would certainly suspend someone just on an allegation, especially when the government has been leaning on them about it and there is a tabloid outcry. They suspended Gary Linneker for example.

Double post.

It does seem that the mother and daughter are estranged. Which does cast a little doubt on the mother's motives.

Just in case you really don't understand the meaning of the word "projection", it means that you are accusing Ukraine of something that Russia has been doing vastly more of. And while your "kidnap off the streets" is massively inflated hyperbole in the case of Ukraine, it is hardly any exaggeration at all of what Russia has been doing.

The projection is strong in that sentence.

Which does seem somewhat possible. The motives of people giving stories to the Sun can sometimes not be entirely pure.

@dog-days Actually, I am still a little annoyed about been suckered into buying a copy of the book in my pre-lockdown buying spree (mostly on the recommendation of a friend, who judgment I will be more doubtful about in future, though they did withdraw the recommendation after reading the next book). So I have dug it out of our "for charity shops" pile and semi randomly picked a page to criticise. Here goes. Our protagonist, Oblong, a newcomer to the town, has come equal first in a festival race. A book of protocol is consulted and it is determined that there must be a tie-breaker. The winners must race to the top of the church tower, apparently without being allowed to enter the church. Now read on: Stone rungs? On the outside of an ancient church and still able to bear a man's weight? Really? A gust of wind strong enough to knock a man off a wall and then sideways though a shuttered window? Into a room that has a thick carpet of dust that this gust apparently did not disturb? Not only was Oblong miraculously thrown though the window, he appears to also be miraculously completely unhurt. Yet he does not give his experience a second thought, then or afterwards. I guess those frescos really did draw his attention! What did the crowd think of all this? We are not told, but when Oblong eventually emerges from the church they are busy feting the winner and ignore him. Nobody ever shows the least interest in fixing those slats/shutters. Though to be fair I don't remember any mention of the church having services in it, or even having a vicar.

Not easy for submerged submarines to find each other? At least with only WW2 technology.

As for the missile attacks on Ukraine, the nadir for me was during Eurovision 2023 when the Russians attacked the hometown of the Ukrainian entry while they were performing their song. A couple of people were injured and there was some property damage. An act of impotent rage and pathetic spite.

It does publish bad stuff about itself. Which the tabloids then endlessly talk up as part of their long running campaign to get it closed down. While scandals involving the tabloids (phone hacking, abusive behaviour, parties during Covid lockdown, etc, etc) are generally swept under the carpet as far as possible, other than getting some coverage on the BBC and a few independent outlets.

I have been reading Arcadia by Iain Pears after a tip off by @Starkess Unlike some of his other books, this is clever and entertaining rather than deep, except perhaps for the ending, which needs some thinking through. The story does not so much borrow from a range of other authors as gleefully steal from them. I spotted Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, William Gibson, Shakespeare and John Le Carre, and I am sure there were others. One of two of these authors actually have cameo roles in the story. Basically it is a bit of fun, despite some very dark stuff which nearly all happens off stage. The associated app would appear to be a bit of a gimmick, which allows you to read the story in a different order. Though I understand it contains a certain amount of extra material. As the story involves multiple PoVs, from several alternate worlds (of a sort), and time travel (again of a sort), many reading orders are indeed possible.

My gripe with Banks was that he tried for a sort of edgy realism, but it never quite worked. As an example. One book starts with two policemen randomly encountering a particularly nasty serial killer just after he has finished off his latest victim. (The serial killer is of a sort that thankfully is vanishingly rare in the UK, and yes he targets young women.) The killer resists arrest with a machete and in the resulting fracas kills one of the policemen, but is fatally injured himself. What follows is, I suppose, a mild spoiler:

The Maggie Thatcher case was complicated by a bunch of right wingers trying to use her death to canonise her. I still remember clearly someone on the BBC describe her as being "uniquely revered". Not surprising that people felt the need to push back against that.

Late to the party, but I read the first one when short of books in Covid lockdown and it was dreadful. I imagine it only got published because of the author's connections. I was going to do a snark, but never got around to it.

I remember an entertaining review of the series that said "Roy Marsden underplays Dalgliesh to the point of making him nearly invisible."

I am tempted to cheer the committee. This is the report that it would produce in a sane timeline. Somehow it has crossed over into ours. Most of all, the report says that he:

Agreed. Those people who voted Brexit to get a better funded NHS? (Of whom I know a couple.) They should just endure the NHS collapsing and not "go on about it". They should just accept that "how things work" is that politicians tell blatant lies all the time, and that they can't tell what they will actually do if they get voted in. They should just give up and accept their lot. Lets forget about having a functional democracy then.

Though I note that the moderators don't agree about not being able to spot the AI posts. Obviously not 100%, but pretty accurately. They typically have their own expect knowledge for example. And apparently often they are very obvious - e.g. a new user posting large numbers of verbose answers to a wide range of questions in very quick succession. Or posts flagged by multiple other users as being garbage. Also the owners seem to be arguing in bad faith - claiming that the moderators are using tools to identify the AI posts, when most of the moderators say that they re not.

Agreed. The short sightedness of allowing it is horrifying.

Just to be clear. You are saying that the leaver camp made a Big Lie the centrepiece of their campaign, with the deliberate aim of making the remain campaign "get into a dribbling mess about" spending bandwidth explaining in detail why it was wrong. And you are also saying that remainers still being annoyed at how this Big Lie was used to sell Brexit is simply them being naive about "how these things work". Edit: and on the more productive discussion, the Tories are looking at being slaughtered now versus being slaughtered next year. Naturally most of their MPs want to hang on for that extra year so as to arrange something for themselves if/when they lose their seats. Hence what appears to have been a plan for several of them to resign now and force multiple by-elections seems to have fallen flat.

Boris Johnson, having been sent a pre-release of the Partygate Report, is resigning as an MP with immediate effect. It must be bad ... Edit: Ninjaed

I don't think the Drake equation is implying that evolution has a direction or that sentience is inevitable. It simply has a term: So it does not regard the evolution of intelligent life as in any way inevitable, just as possible - and we know that it has happened once, here. (At least, after a fashion.)

It is not a new idea though. It goes back at least as far as Greg Bear's Forge of God/Anvil of Stars duology. (Incidentally, Forge of God also explores the idea that the personal weaknesses of a US president might be used to paralyse the US).

A small customer service rant. Today I phoned an insurance company. While I waited in the inevitable queue to speak to a real person, ignoring all the stuff about it being easier to do everything online (not in this case) they played me a message. Paraphrasing somewhat it was: "We pride ourselves on our exceptional customer service. Therefore, during this exceptionally busy period, when you get through to a customer service agent, please be polite." I had plenty of time to think about this message while I waited and it was played at me twice more before I eventually got through to someone (who was able to deal with my problem). Firstly, every single time I have phoned some customer service for the last many years I have invariably been told that they were in an exceptionally busy period. Hire some more staff, or own up to the fact that you have budgeted for customers having a significant wait! Secondly, being English, I am always polite. Especially when what I am saying is particularly vicious. But mainly I was just deconstructing that message. They pride themselves on their exceptional customer service, apparently without even noticing that the "exceptionally" long wait means they have clearly failed to provide it. But it felt more fundamental than that. They don't care what their actual customer service is. They take pride in the simple fact of projecting a PR image of themselves as providing an exceptional service, and the reality is irrelevant. Whoever came up with that script needs to get over themselves because the cracks are showing.