My thoughts today are with friends in America, some of whom I’ve known since I was twelve, none of whom will have wanted this. I hope you get through it. I hope we all do.
Honey Disconnect the Phone
Why limit the gloom to Britain, when it’s the last day of a sane American administration for who knows how long?
How kompromat works. Trump was bailed out of bankruptcy by Russian crime bosses. Trump’s longstanding mob connections. A message to the American media. Trump’s attack on a reporter’s disability versus reality.
Tales from the frontlines of viral photography. Trump’s ridiculous inauguration poem. I started to write a spoof of that, but rapidly lost the will to live. Instead, here’s Mark Hamill reading Trump’s tweets as the Joker.
Russia: the threat, the international order, and the way forward, by the outgoing US Ambassador to the UN. Comey refuses to discuss a possible Trump-Russia investigation because he only does that with Hillary Clinton.
A guide to joining Twitter now it’s an unremittingly bleak document of how awful everything is.
Standing in the English Rain
Owen Jones and Nick Clegg discuss Brexit. Nationalism and Brexit. A full English Brexit is on the menu. Whether you’re leave or remain, Theresa May just betrayed you. We clearly don’t understand sovereignty. Brexiters are destroying this country.
As an Australian who’s lived in Britain for over fifteen years, I’ve naturally kept an eye on GBP-AUD exchange rates. Here’s the rate on this day in 2007: £1 = A$2.48. In 2011 it was A$1.60. In 2016, after clawing back from the credit crunch: A$2.07. Today it’s back at A$1.63.
Tell me again, o Leavers and media, how the referendum result has had no economic impact. (And I wish everyone would stop saying that Brexit has had no impact. Brexit still hasn’t happened yet. Heaven help us if it does.) Here’s something I wrote in October, which remains (ha) bitterly relevant.
Apparently, Brexit means Brexit:
For Prime Minister May, Britain’s exit
From Europe is certain.
May May end up hurtin’
Our future? I reckon this wrecks it.
Bamboom
How the gains we make in AI could ultimately destroy us.
Limmy’s techno version of an old Fry’s Turkish Delight ad.
The linguistic evolution of “like”.
The parts of a good apology and a bad one.
Scots have more words for rain than the Inuit have for snow.
Why are Dutch children the happiest in the world? We’re really good at judging parents.
Thanks to my blogless mate Paul for some of the above.
I hadn’t posted anything new to Found in five years, but the findings kept on coming—albeit at a much slower rate than they once did—so yesterday I added this (and these and these and this).
Here’s another gallery for Detail, based on a folder of holiday snaps I’ve been meaning to turn into one for years: a few days of an English summer in Yorkshire and Lincoln.
Time to start adding galleries again to Detail, with a third collection of panoramas from the past few years of camping trips, mini-breaks and outings around Scotland. I have some international ones in the wings as well.
In With the New
And so we collapse into 2017, waiting to see just how dire the Trump administration will be, whether Brexit really will mean Brexit, and who next among the West’s democracies will follow Britain and the US down the road to nowhere. It’s enough to take the wind out of any little-read blog’s sails. I do have a few ideas about more substantial projects for coming months, but for the moment only a few links.