D@v!D

[i/o @avidseries]

There was no limit on the distance I could walk or bike when I was 10 years old, let alone 14 years old. School was 10 blocks away, and I walked to and from it every day. Downtown was more than a mile away, and I regularly rode my bike there. I'd ride my bike past the town limits when I was 10, miles from home.

Containing a 14 year-old boy within a block is nonsensical at the individual level, and at a societal level will have far-reaching and deeply deleterious implications when these boys become men.

The goal of every parent should be to raise children who, when they reach 18, have the practical experience and skillset to quickly become independent and fully functioning adults. I can't imagine that keeping teenagers from venturing alone more than a block from their home is going to help parents reliably achieve that goal.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

A lot of chin-stroking over on BlueSky about why there's so much interest in the Arday story. It's because it beautifully and hilariously exposes the intellectual dishonesty of your worldview guys, of course you don't get it! 🤪

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

Denmark just passed a law that every person owns a copyright to their own face, voice, and body. In the age of AI, this places more legal control in a person's hands, and there are real, large consequences and fines for breaking this law.

We need to make this worldwide.

[Music over time🎻 @Peal8888]

The 90s were so special and nobody knew it at the time...

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

A Fire, Three Armchairs, and a Dangerous Amount of Common Sense

John Cleese: You know what fascinates me? We have more information than any civilization in history… and yet people appear to have outsourced thinking.

Ricky Gervais: Thinking’s exhausting. Much easier to download your opinion from social media before breakfast.

Rowan Atkinson: The remarkable thing isn’t that people disagree. It’s that so many have stopped asking the obvious question: “Does this make any sense?”

Cleese: Common sense has become a revolutionary act.

Gervais: It’s brilliant. You point out that two plus two equals four and suddenly you’re “creating an unsafe environment.”

Atkinson: We used to laugh at absurdity. Now we hire consultants to explain why it’s actually profound.

Cleese: Bureaucracy has always had that gift. It can transform complete nonsense into a seventy-page policy document.

Gervais: With an executive summary nobody reads.

Atkinson: And a diversity statement.

Cleese: Naturally.

(They laugh.)

Gervais: Here’s the strange part. Everyone claims to love free speech… right up until somebody says something they dislike.

Cleese: That’s because many people don’t actually want freedom. They want confirmation.

Atkinson: The purpose of free speech was never to protect popular opinions. Popular opinions don’t require protection.

Gervais: Exactly! Nobody gets cancelled for saying puppies are nice.

Cleese: Yet humour has always been civilisation’s quality-control mechanism. If something cannot survive a joke, perhaps it wasn’t particularly sturdy.

Atkinson: Humour punctures pomposity. That’s why pompous people dislike comedians.

Gervais: They hate being reminded they’re ridiculous.

Cleese: The world has become rather fond of taking itself incredibly seriously.

Atkinson: Which is ironic, because seriousness and wisdom are entirely different things.

Gervais: The cleverest people I know usually laugh first.

(A log collapses in the fireplace.)

Cleese: Politics, these days, resembles amateur theatre.

Gervais: No, that’s unfair.

Cleese: To whom?

Gervais: Amateur theatre.

(More laughter.)

Atkinson: Perhaps the problem isn’t left or right.

Cleese: Go on.

Atkinson: Perhaps it’s reality versus performance. Solving problems is difficult. Looking as though you’re solving them is much easier.

Gervais: That’s social media in one sentence.

Cleese: And a fair amount of government.

Atkinson: Common sense asks inconvenient questions. Does it work? Does it improve lives? Is it true?

Gervais: Instead we ask, “Will people clap?”

Cleese: Applause has become a substitute for evidence.

Atkinson: Which explains a great many things.

(Silence for a moment as they sip their tea.)

Gervais: You know what gives me hope?

Cleese: Go on.

Gervais: Ordinary people. Most of them haven’t gone mad. They still know when something feels fake. They still recognise honesty. They still laugh at the obvious.

Atkinson: Common sense is remarkably resilient.

Cleese: It merely spends long periods hiding from fashionable stupidity.

Gervais: Then here’s a toast.

Atkinson: To what?

Gervais: To curiosity.

Cleese: To laughter.

Atkinson: And to the quiet courage of saying, politely but firmly…

All three: “I’m sorry—but that’s complete nonsense.”

[The Spectator @spectator]

When a famous right-wing, straight white male dies, if your first instinct isn't to gloat and trash his reputation then you clearly have no idea what it takes to be a progressive.

The death of Rod Liddle is currently being celebrated by all of us on the right side of history. And because we announce our pronouns and wear keffiyehs, we can refer to him as a scumbag who deserves to burn in Hell and everyone will know that we're actually incredibly compassionate.

✍️ Titania McGrath

Article | https://t.co/LeSZy78xtg

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

The Arday scandal revealed the rot in our universities - a guy producing reams of meaningless garbage was promoted & praised to high heaven. But he's not unique. My new piece looks at the growth of DEI / critical theory rubbish in our universities, using large datasets:
(1/10)

[lisa keeble 😊 @lisakeb007]

In the last 10 years

NHS bed numbers have not increased

Prison places have not increased

No new resevoirs have been built

Only 24 miles of new roads have been built

And yet, the population has increased by 5 MILLION.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Even now the BBC has to be community-noted on the subject.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

I know why everything sucks...

...and it's because everything is fake

We are voting for fake candidates, who run on fake promises, inside a fake system that was never designed to fix anything.

We are raising kids in fake schools that teach fake history, fake science, which quietly produce fake adults who can't think for themselves.

Then they are getting fake college degrees that cost 4 years and six figures that teach fake education and they get fake jobs.

We are eating fake food, with fake ingredients, funded by fake research.

We are scrolling through fake lives, with fake relationships, who take fake, curated vacations to promote brands that make fake products.

We are watching fake news, about fake crises, produced by fake journalists, for fake outrage.

We are borrowing fake money that was printed from nothing, to fund a fake economy that would collapse in an afternoon if people stopped pretending it was real.

We are buying fake organic food that's just a paid label, and drinking fake juice with two percent juice in it, and putting fake cheese on cheeseburgers that's just "cheese product" on fake burger meat.

We are donating to fake nonprofits where the moeny never makes it to the people and then funding fake foreign aid that buys real weapons to prop up fake governments.

We are going to fake therapy that teaches fake coping skills instead of telling you hard truths.

We are buying fake furniture made of fake wood that's actually compressed sawdust and glue that looks like wood, ships in fourteen boxes with instructions written in a fake language that isn't quite any language, requires tools it doesn't include, takes 4 hours to build, wobbles on day 1, and is totally destroyed in 6 months.

We are downloading fake "free" apps that charge a subscription after three days for AI features that don't work, hidden behind a paywall we didn't see, protected by a privacy policy we didn't read, buried inside Terms of Service written by lawyers specifically so we wouldn't read them, that we agreed to by tapping a button the size of a thumbnail, that gave a company we've never heard of the right to sell our data to companies we'll never hear of, to build a profile on us we'll never see, to influence decisions we'll never know were made.

IT. IS. ALL. SO. FREAKING. FAKE.

And we all yearn for what was once real.

Don't you remember? Did you forget?

There was a time with a simple handshake between men was a contract.

When bread went stale because... well, that's what real bread does!

When kids played outside all day until it was dark, and nobody tracked them.

When a family could live off a single income.

When music was made by people who LIVED something real and you could feel it.

When schools was HARD... and that was the point!

When doctors knew your name and your family, they even came to your house,

When you bought something once... and it was yours forever.

When the chair your grandmother bought once lasted 70 years and she passed it onto your dad.

And now nothing is real, and that's why everything sucks.

[Oracle @biggle1908]

Andy Burnham has appointed 28 ministers in the new cabinet.

Here is a total of their private sector experience.

Andy Burnham: three years at a publishing company after university.
Louise Haigh: three years middle management at Aviva which ended with fraud conviction.

THATS ALL FOLKS!

A team with no business, finance or management experience are about to run a £3tn economy.

Just stop and think about that for a minute.

We are led by loons.

[Liam Out Loud @liam_out_loud]

Leftist "Empathy" is Actually Narcissism

A worldview that persists despite its unending list of failures is not interested in truth or empathy but power.

The social status payoff for these luxury beliefs is immediate; the collapse that follows takes decades.

They get all the short-term personal benefits, while collectivizing the long-term downfall.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

The most uplifting architectural revival happening today is in Budapest.

Budapest is erasing the brutalist blight from its communist past. This building at Kossuth Square has been restored according to its original plans from the 1920s. Many such examples around the city.

[World's Amazing Things @Hana_b30]

Why did we stop caring about beauty?

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Bingo.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Do as I say, but not as I do.”

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Here’s some gloriously old school Billy Connolly calling out the politically correct, woke “beigeists”. As he said, “these bastards are in control.”

[Charlie Walsham @CharlieWalsham_]

The BBC’s biggest problem isn’t that it makes bad programmes. It’s that too many of the people making them believe their job is to change your beliefs rather than entertain or inform you.

[Jane Rochford Boleyn 🇬🇧 @VictoriaHa50399]

& THIS is where our money is going!

Just look at the names of these so called "charities"

This is just a tiny snap shot of the giant web of NGO's in our country.

It reminds me of reading the "Grants" list for BBC "Children in Need" where not one charity was for British children.
The BBC used to post it's Grants List every year, until they stopped doing it in 2016, as people were getting wise to it.

[Captain Helix @captainhelix]

The rejection of greatness is honestly the deepest tragedy of modern western culture. The irony is that Hollywood conditioned the audience to reject greatness, to believe it is synonymous with oppression and privilege. And now Nolan says that the audience won’t accept greatness, and therefore it must be dismantled.

Elevating those who triumph against all odds into great heroes creates the myths that inspire younger generations to believe they can achieve the impossible.

This is the spirit that built America. That is only way civilization progresses.