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October 2025

Odd language

It has also emerged that he appears to have had Islamic marriages to three women in towns across the north of England at the same time, fathering two young children to one of them.

Farthering on, farthering with but fathering to?

Civil liberties, eh?

Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

With some very civil libertarian ideas:

But now more than ever, Europe should hold large US tech firms accountable for anti-competitive market rigging, snooping on Europeans, and preying on our children. Brussels must hold Ireland accountable for failing to enforce Europe’s digital rules on US firms. Enforcement is not enough, however. Europe must progressively replace all non-EU “big tech” platforms and cloud services over the next decade with homegrown alternatives.

Can’t have the Yanks providing things the peeps like.

Along with the anti-coercion instrument, Europe should shut down social media “for you”-style algorithms, that recommend content the user has not asked for, on European soil until they are proven safe for democracy. Citizens – not the algorithms of foreign oligarchs beholden to foreign interests – should have the freedom to decide for themselves what they see and share online.

Civil liberty means only being allowed what the EU bureaucracy thinks you should have or see.

Provided most European governments agree, the European Commission could kick US goods and services out of Europe’s market, or apply tariffs to them. It can strip their intellectual property rights, block their investments and require reparations as a condition of readmittance to Europe’s market.

This is civil liberty apparently.

For decades Brussels has claimed that its market of 450 million rich people gives it unanswerable sway in trade negotiations.

Which is one of those areas where this whole idea goes wrong. The benefit of trade is the imports, not the existence of consumers. Forgetting that is what leads you into this sort of nonsense.

But then Ireland, eh? They didn;t so much get rid of the overwhelming influence of the Catholic Church in what you may see or do as switch that religious extremism to the EU. The attitude is still there – the priesthood should be controlling your life.

So, the EU is run by and for farmers then

Veggie burgers, tofu steak and cauliflower schnitzel will be off the menu if the European parliament gets its way after a vote on food names.

MEPs voted on Wednesday by 355 in favour to 247 against to reserve names such as “steak”, “burger” and “sausage” exclusively for products derived from meat, a longstanding demand of farm unions.

In order to come into effect, the idea would have to be approved by a majority of the EU’s 27 member states, which is far from certain.

The vote is a victory for the French centre-right MEP Céline Imart, who drafted the amendment to legislation intended to strengthen the position of farmers in the food supply chain.

Given that we’ve only got 30k farmers – actual real farmers that is, not including the hobbyists – that’s an organisation we do not wish to belong to then.

Good, glad we’ve got that settled then.

Abject Twattery is apparently in the genes

Well, OK, this still leaves that difficulty of nature and nurture I guess.

According to Breast Cancer UK, quoted in a recent article in The Independent, one in three people say that they need alcohol to get on the dancefloor. In other words, one in three people cannot walk into a social space without a drink in their hand. This rises to forty per cent amongst people aged 18 to 24, but this is not a quirky statistic about youth culture; it is a direct indictment of our cities, our policies, and our collective priorities.

If alternative hubs of connection existed, whether they be cafes, libraries, or community centres that are all too often invisible after dark, people would not be dependent upon locations where alcohol has to be used as a drug to overcome social fear of interaction. Young people are not choosing to drink; they are being forced into it. And society is quietly letting it happen.

Booze loosens social inhibitions. This will be true however many cafes, libraries and community centres there are.

Sheesh and Jeez etc.

Ho, right

The conversation that I was concluding was with my son, Tom, who, for the past eighteen months, has been behind the camera for every YouTube video we’ve made. For the first time, he came out from behind the lens to talk about something that directly affects his generation: how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping employment, and what that means for young people trying to enter the world of work.

The conversation ranged from personal experience to hard data, and from graduate disillusionment to the new inequalities of AI. What emerged was a sobering, and at times disturbing, portrait of a labour market being transformed faster than most people — including employers — can comprehend.

So bloke who uses AI to create entire new – and insane – theory about quantum economics bemoans the effect of AI on his son’s ability to get a job.

Rightie Ho then.

A possible way to read this

The Duke of Sussex’s conservation charity has been removed from its role managing protected parks in Chad after the government accused it of arrogance, serious financial misconduct and failing to protect wildlife.

In a statement announcing the end of the 15-year partnership “with immediate effect”, Hassan Bakhit Djamous, Chad’s environment minister, said the charity, African Parks, had displayed a “recurring, indelicate and disrespectful attitude towards the government”.

Over four pages, the ministry alleged grave breaches of contract and financial irregularities, accusing the charity of keeping unaudited accounts and not being transparent over how funds were raised, managed and spent.

It alleged that the charity illegally collected tourism revenues, used tax-haven bank accounts in the Isle of Man and transferred capital and foreign exchange abroad “to the detriment of Chad and in flagrant violation of national banking and tax regulations”.

One way – a possible way shall we say – is that they’re pissed the money is abroad because that means it’s not locally where they can steal it.

How very fun indeed

White House says furloughed federal workers not entitled to back pay amid shutdown
OMB argues an amendment to a 2019 act would not guarantee furloughed workers post-shutdown pay

The White House’s office of management and budget (OMB) is arguing that federal workers who are furloughed amid the ongoing government shutdown are not entitled to back pay.

Whether it’s wholly true or not is another matter. But it’s very fun all the same.

This is just so unusual, right?

I’m a gay man in my late 40s. Since the age of 19, I’ve spent many, mostly enjoyable, years engaging in casual sex with other men. In my 30s I had a serious relationship that lasted four years, but it never fully satisfied me, in that I felt neither loved nor sexually nourished. The fact is that I have always craved casual sex. Whenever I start to date any man, when the initial excitement dwindles, I always get the urge to have sex with other men again.

No other male sexuality has ever been like this at all.

Well, I dunno really

Today’s Ireland is experiencing significant ethnic and racial diversity for the first time in its history, and the country’s new look has undoubtedly made some Irish feel uncomfortable.

There have been a couple of attempts – the Normans, the Plantation – and it’s not wholly certain that either of them worked out wholly all that well.

Unkind but it is what I think

A new peer-reviewed study of the Cass Review, the UK project that was used to stop trans teens’ healthcare, has been published.

The shrieking about this is because those who have made the decision as adults – and good luck to ’em, wholly free to do so – require their decision to be validated by the next generation containing more people taking the same decision.

For, if people look at the decisions taken by the generation ahead then say “Naaah, Mate” then and therefore those decisions taken by that earlier generation are called into question. Sure, sure, this happens to everyone and every generation. What in buggery were beehive hairdos, Cadbury’s Smash or Oasis ever about, eh? But when it comes to hacking your own genitals off there’s a little less willingness to go ah, well, mistakes and a little more insistence upon being confirmed in that choice by those following.

Har, har, har, har

Her friendships with the future Queen Camilla and Major Ronald Ferguson were much reported, as was her row with her friend Princess Michael of Kent when Cooper wrote an article about her that appeared under the headline “The Pushy Princess”. Princess Michael sent her 30 pieces of silver — 5p coins. Leo put the money on a horse and won, and sent some of the winnings to the princess “as I know you are a bit short”.

Female competition, eh?

Ciro Quispe López, 51, the bishop of Juli in Peru has handed in his resignation to Pope Leo after a Vatican investigation interviewed three of the bishop’s alleged lovers as well as his cleaning lady, who supplied details about what she saw in his bedroom.

“A nun who was one of Quispe’s lovers was jealous of a lawyer the bishop was also seeing and sent information about his affairs to a third lover who got into a fight with the lawyer,” said Paola Ugaz, a Peruvian journalist who has seen a Vatican document detailing the investigation.

Apparently there were 17 such lovers in total.

Still, until the denouement being a Bishop sounds like a handy way of being up to the knees in it. Everyone has to keep being a lover a secret, you’ve never got to take them out anywhere. Works…….

…..well, until…..

Polly is a one, eh?

Britain badly needs a grownup party of the centre right. It won’t come from Badenoch – it may come from a new generation of one-nationers

The thing is, one nation Tories are no longer the centre right. That’s the centre left these days. Which explains why Polly likes ’em but not much else.

Ooooh, I dunno

Because of its 20th-century history, Spain had long appeared resistant to the recent rise of the populist right. That exceptionalism is no longer true, but how do we explain Vox’s growing appeal among a new generation of youngerSpanish voters?

The young look upon the world the politics of their parents made and think “Fuck that”?

Like, say, the world’s worst (OK, rich country world’s worst) youth unemployment rate because no one can ever be fired and think, well, no?

Ooooh, oooh, Teach, I know!

Donald Trump has not had the opportunity to pack the US supreme court to nearly the same degree. Nor has he, despite his brash, bullying ways, done much to pressure or browbeat the court’s nine justices. Nevertheless, the court’s conservative supermajority has ruled time after time in favor of Trump since he returned to office. The six conservative justices have fallen into line much like Hungary’s and Turkey’s judges, even though the supreme court’s justices have life tenure to insulate them from political pressures.

Possibly because what Trump’s doing – or at least those issues whoch have reached the SC – is constitutional and legal?

Inequality expert, eh?

Boom time for US billionaires: why the system perpetuates wealth inequality
As the super rich grow even richer, inequality expert Chuck Collins says the system is broken – but it can be fixed

Without having read the piece yet I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that he might be an expert in why inequality is a bad thing…..

“[The wealthy] have bought their jets, they’ve bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they’re buying senators and media outlets,” Collins told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re now entering this other chapter of hyper-extraction where the wealthy are preying on the system of inequality.”

My word, how did I guess?

he is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires

Surprise!

“It’s the distinction between individual behaviors and a system of rules and policies,” Collins said. “We should be concerned about an economic system that funnels so much wealth upward to the billionaires.”

Ah, a twat then. Because the distinguishing feature of this capitalist free marketry is that you get rich by producing value for consumers. And if you’re not going to count that richness going to consumers then you’re going to get everything wrong, aren’t you?

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