#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. - Walt Whitman, c. 1871

From the awesome Hannah Spencer

As a local cllr, I felt quite insulted by the suggestion that all we do is ‘deal with parking & sorting out the bins’, suggesting that because we’re so trivial it’s OK to put up a convicted anti-Semite as a prospective cllr.

Ian Dunt@iandunt.bsky.social · 5h ago

Here are the stupidest things Kemi Badenoch has said so far today inews.co.uk/opinion/kemi...

Hopefully he gets to catch the post-credits scene soon. Also, reminder that folks without housing are way more likely to be the victims of crime.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 6h ago

from the video (on FB) bro got off his electric unicycle (lol) when he heard cries for help and just kind of maneuvered to give the woman a chance to get away. he didn't even end up having to fight the guy. peak performance www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/g...

www.theguardian.com/politics/202... Well, who saw that coming? Such a shame after Kemi gave him such a glowing endorsement.

Former neo-Nazi activist withdraws as Conservative election candidate

Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who was convicted of harassing Jewish MP, says Badenoch has offered him advisory role instead

theguardian.com

Or in other words:

Ryan Enos@ryanenos.bsky.social · 9h ago

Don't posit a theory that is only interesting because it implies X causes variation in Y, test for a statistical relationship between X and Y, but then say you are not interpreting causally. Of course you are interpreting it causally. That was the whole point of what you just did.

Here are the stupidest things Kemi Badenoch has said so far today inews.co.uk/opinion/kemi...

Congrats to everyone who got a shoutout in the Telegraph today, although I don't know where they got the idea that Bluesky is a place where people are kind to each other. This is site is not kind. This is a PvP server where you get randomly matched with an American who has misunderstood your joke.

Mic Wright@brokenbottleboy.bsky.social · 12h ago

I was wondering why I’d got 19 clickthroughs from The Daily Telegraph…

"The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process." -Virginia Woolf

as we saw with Charlie Kirk it’s extremely notable that no fans of Rod Liddle include any of their favourite quotes from him in their tributes

These scenes are shocking. When I was a kid I lived in the UK and remember the absolute delights of a British summer playing in fields and spinneys. Fossil fuel companies and the govts that support them are stealing the simplest pleasures from us all. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Relentless UK heatwaves turn ‘green and pleasant land’ brown

Visible impact of warming climate is impossible to ignore across landscapes that have been starved of rainfall

theguardian.com

Conservatives love being scared shitless by things that never happened and could never have happened. 

The reality of modern work and of the opportunities available.

This sort of attitude would kill 50% of research careers in analytic philosophy

Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social · yesterday

As a writer I try to remember that the fact that something annoys me personally does not necessarily make that thing important enough to write about

I think they want to leave all but the rich behind... Source: NPR share.google/OgR6WvqG3uTa...

Medicaid work rule leaves homeless people in the cold

Conservatives who have long pushed for Medicaid work requirements often said vulnerable people would get a pass. But the federal government's list of exemptions left off homeless people.

share.google

This grotesque headline is from the Telegraph. 3,000 people in Britain have been killed in heatwaves this year so far. 20,000 in Europe. Even if Britain did get to “embrace Mediterranean life”, what about the actual Mediterranean, what do they get to embrace? What about India?

My editor asked me to write about what happened to summer:

We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate warzone | Rebecca Solnit

Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys

theguardian.com

This whole incident is helpfully instructive, isn’t it. Here, we have the country’s worst politicians, including a former Prime Minister, queuing up to salute a bold iconoclast who irreverently spoke truth to power and discomfited the great and good. It makes it pretty clear, does it not.

📍🇮🇷 Behistun Inscriptions, Kermanshah, Iran. 🏛 About 2,500 years ago, when many of today's countries did not yet exist, Iran had already carved its name into stone.

The sad thing is, the US and NATO, when attacking countries with a long rich history like Libya, Syria, Sudan, along with civilian infrastructure, these are high on the list of legitimate targets. The British did so in India and Africa during empire. Destroyed the past, to rewrite it.

Paul Eric@pauleric70.bsky.social · 2d ago

📍🇮🇷 Behistun Inscriptions, Kermanshah, Iran. 🏛 About 2,500 years ago, when many of today's countries did not yet exist, Iran had already carved its name into stone.

🌊 Record heat has shallowed Europe’s rivers, exposing mammoth bones, sunken ships In Bulgaria, a mammoth jawbone and tusks have been found on the bare bottom of the Danube, in Croatia, the cargo ship Fulton, which sank in 1937, and in Serbia, a German warship from World War II.

Hello #GardensHour 4 whites and a pattern for this week's #SixWeeksOfColour theme. Starry white garlic chive flowers, cosmos 'Fizzy White' , sweetpeas 'ice cream' and raspberry ripple border on a white carnation

Matt @MattCartoonist on the #Drought @Telegraph – political cartoon gallery in London original-political-cartoon.com

Fraser Nelson reckons Rod Liddle was “the greatest satirist since Swift” while Michael Gove is comparing him to not just Swift but Orwell. Amazing the comparisons you can get if you’ll pump out exactly the racist opinions even they are too squeamish to commit to print.

Brilliant letter from Stuart Thompson to Jeremy Clarkson about his comments that benefit claimants should write weekly thank you letters to tax payers detailing how they spend their benefits each week.

I hear that some people want the heat to continue because it feels like they're on holiday. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

July was driest month in southern England since records began

England and Wales provisionally record driest July in nearly 200 years, Met Office says

theguardian.com

Rep. Max Miller: ‘I Refuse To Resign Over What My Wife Made Me Do’

Rod Liddle was a piece of shit in both his private and public life, and it speaks to the state of British media that they're praising the man. He presaged the steep downward decline of British broadsheet print columnists into increasingly open racism, misogyny, and hatred of queer people.

www.thetimes.com/uk/media/art... His readers might have but the rest of us?

The Rod Liddle I knew loved his readers — and they loved him

The Sunday Times columnist, who has died aged 66, was joyfully transgressive and there will be nobody else like him, his former editor at the Spectator writes

thetimes.com

At this point I can’t remember rain