Moderate socialist Antonio Jose Seguro came out on top in the first round of Portugal’s presidential election on Sunday, followed by the far-right leader Andre Ventura, and the two will face off in a runoff on 8 February.
The “far-right” is somewhat to the left of Macmillan and the moderate socialist just wants to starve the kulaks slowly…..
What ultra-processed foods really do to your body
With UPFs making up 56 per cent of the average UK diet, experts reveal how over-consumption of them can impact our organs and overall health
A properly conservative newspaper would be shouting “Fie!” to these morons. But nooooo:
David Cox
Health and medical journalist
Sigh:
“Overall, poor diet has overtaken tobacco globally as the leading cause of early death,” says Chris van Tulleken, a professor at University College London and author of Ultra-Processed People.
Complete bollocks of course. Unless we’re talking famine which does still kill people.
A nurse who was disciplined for calling a transgender paedophile “Mr” is facing dismissal for allegedly speaking publicly about her ordeal.
Jennifer Melle, 40, was issued with a final written warning after misgendering the patient at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Surrey, in May 2024.
Ms Melle said she referred to the individual, an inmate from a high-security men’s prison listed as male on their medical record, as “Mr” and “he” while discussing the use of a catheter.
She told them: “Sorry I cannot refer to you as ‘her’ or ‘she’, as it’s against my faith and Christian values but I can call you by your name.”
The use of a catheter would seem to be one of those times when biological sex – in hte absence of anyone having had the chop – was the operating necessity, no?
But being sensible isn’t any part of gender politics now, is it?
One story I’ve heard is of a laddie having 30 birdshot plucked out of his legs while lying on mother’s sofa. Can’t go to hospital, d’ye see, not with wounds from having been a protestor?
So, the Progressive International peeps, they c’n fuck off ‘n’all. Which includes that James Schneider laddie.
Ah, yes:
I have argued that AI can, and probably will, cause inflation, and it can, and probably will, cause unemployment,
It’s difficult to understand how AI can create inflation and it’s really, near impossible to grasp how it will create both inflation and unemployment. But, you know, Spudnomics, a rare and different beast.
That combination of high inflation and increasing unemployment is, however, something that is said to be impossible in orthodox economic models.
Quite. But apparently….
That threat from AI has to be dealt with by regulation. It can’t be dealt with by the standard techniques of inflation management that we’ve got now, because they won’t work because there are no relationships left which they are meant to manage
Oh, right, now that will make the economy more efficient then, right? A speshul price for electricity for what btw? Running a data centre? But cat pictures are not AI. But AI is done in the same data centres, no?
Instead, we have to challenge AI directly by charging it for the whole cost of its electricity.
Sigh.
That’s the key point now. AI cannot run the economy into the ground; it should instead be managed. The government needs to stay in charge.
That typical Spudcraftian Horror that something might happen without a tick on a clipboard.
The rest of it’s just a rehash – AI is the new excuse that is.
The latest sorry saga featuring a multimillionaire celebrity and a hapless nepo baby centres on Rolling Stones guitarist, Ronnie Wood, and his son, Jesse. It was revealed this week, as Jesse appeared in court on speeding charges, that he is unemployed and living off savings of barely £1,000 a month.
Savings of £1k a month, eh?
Income from savings of £1k a month, OK, maybe. So, what, £120k to £240k in assets? About?
But savings of £1k a month – is there some reason the paper refuses to commission me any more?
ChatGPT is to begin showing users adverts for the first time unless they pay for a monthly subscription.
OpenAI, the bot’s developer, said it would start displaying adverts in the coming weeks based on what people ask ChatGPT.
However, it pledged not to sell users’ data and said the adverts would not influence what ChatGPT itself says.
Someone will, inevitably, start claiming what is denied there. That the company displyaing the ads sells our data to hte advertisers. Which isn’t what happens at all, of course.
Rather, the displaying company says to hte would be advertiser, well, we can slice and dice our audience these myriad ways. Male, female, age, likes to look at pages about the Roman Empire, has looked at ads for Italian property recently and so on. But they do not sell that data to the advertiser. That’s wholly an invention of those who would REEEE. Instead, the displaying company offers the advertiser the opportunity to advertise to those who meet those demographics. No one ever gets sent the information – they get allowed to use it to direct ads.
This whole idea that – say – Facebooks “sells our information” just isn’t true. But given how many people believe it it’s been a pretty effective lie now, hasn’t it?
If you were stuck in the waiting room at the fictional Pittsburgh trauma medical center (PTMC) – and, as is the case with most real emergency rooms, to be at “the Pitt” almost certainly means waiting for hours (unless you’re imminently dying, but even then …) – you would at least have a lot to read. Paperwork and entry forms, for one. Signs warning that “aggressive behavior will not be tolerated”, a response to the real uptick in violence against healthcare workers.
Except no US medical drama would have real NHS waiting times as a plot point. No American would possibly believe such a stretching of what could possibly be true.
In the meantime, there is something small everyone in the world can do – and that is to give the battered and besieged people of Iran our attention. After the massacres, the protests seem to have reduced in intensity – the natural consequence of fear. But as they have receded, so has media coverage and political discussion, even as thousands of corpses from a colossal slaughter are barely cold. Many of those who usually pride themselves on their solidarity with the oppressed of the Middle East have been uncharacteristically restrained this time and oddly quick to move on, perhaps reluctant to be too hostile to an Iranian regime that defines itself as the foe of the US and Israel. Maybe they think that any enemy of Trump’s is automatically a friend of theirs. Maybe they fear it weakens their support for the Palestinians to oppose a regime that wants to see Israel destroyed.
Like Owen Jones’ little piece earlier in the week which blamed the whole thing on the CIA for overthrowing Mossadegh. Vile little shit that he is.
A company linked to financier Lex Greensill “failed to act in good faith” by lending £250m more than it should have to businesses owned by steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta during the pandemic, the high court has been told.
Greensill Bank AG (GBAG) is suing the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) for about £331m over claims it wrongly terminated guarantees it agreed with Greensill Capital UK (GCUK) on Covid loans given to businesses.
GBAG and GCUK were part of the Greensill Group, a collection of companies connected to the Australian financier.
Before its collapse in 2021, GCUK was the principal financial backer of Gupta’s GFG Alliance, which includes Liberty Steel. Gupta built up a collection of metals businesses around the world, and forged a close relationship with Greensill to finance them.
The Greensill collapse caused severe problems for the GFG Alliance. In 2021 the UK’s Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation into suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to its financing from GCUK. Gupta has since lost control of several of his steel and aluminium businesses in the UK, Europe and Australia after the Greensill collapse prompted a desperate scramble to secure new financing.
Lawyers for GBAG told a hearing on Thursday the government breached its contract with GCUK and acted “capriciously” by terminating the guarantees, and is seeking more than £331m in damages.
Just to remind, Greensill was the company David Cameron pushed in return for a promise of some equity at a quotation. To the point that the head Ozzie farmboy running it got No 10 business cards and a desk if I’m recalling correctly.
A Dutch anti-immigration influencer who has promoted conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” appears to have had her authorisation for visa-free travel to the UK revoked.
Migration numbers certainly lend some support to that replacement idea. So what is it that makes it a conspiracy theory?
And yes, we need something more than that it is either wrong or unfashionable.
The multimillionaire financier who has been made leader of Reform UK in Scotland has refused to say how wealthy he is, claiming that is a private matter.
Do we know Ed Miliband’s net worth? The Balls family?
Someone we all know has decided to analyse a post about liberalism. In doing so they’ve moved the meaning of “liberal” from the use in the original post being analysed – the American meaning of liberal – to the British one – classical liberalism.
Hilarity ensues.
There is no coincidence here, at all, of course. When draconian politics wants to suppress debate, it has a new weapon to do so, and one that is immediately effective. It just turns off the internet, and the whole population affected is discombobulated as a result.
Let’s be candid: that would be the consequence here, and let’s not pretend it could not happen, because it very obviously could.
Do we need to worry about a world in which that might happen, and how we could communicate in that case, not least when traditional telecommunication networks have, very conveniently, disappeared? I am not listing it as a high priority right now. I am noting it as an issue. How could we communicate in that case?
This following his clipping of this:
We’d all use Starlink, from Elon Musk. As my mate from Iran is trying to do in his reporting on events there.
Sigh.
He was interested in the traffic data for my YouTube channel. I suggested that so far this year, we are averaging 95,000 views a day.
Hmmm. YouTube runs on 45% to Google, 55% to creator. Ad rates are $3 to $5/mille.
£60k a year? -ish? Worth doing, obviously. But once the laddie is paid – gotta be min wage at least, right? – that’s £40k, spread around the household and…..we can see why he was mentioning that he’d like a grant or three that paid him to just think, right?
Also, my base prejudice about the internet. If you can gain a big US following then you can do fine. Other markets not so much. Not that I’m going to but if I were then anything I did would be aimed at the US market for this and this reason alone. That same level of “mid-level success” is 10x what anything UK is.
But it does not follow that pensions are the problem. On the contrary, state pensions are one of the defining achievements of the modern welfare state. Invented by Bismarck, of all people, they are a promise that old age will not mean destitution, dependency, or fear. And they were never meant to function only when the demography is convenient. They were meant to exist precisely because human lives do not run to the demands of Treasury spreadsheets.
The more important point to note is this. When the Financial Times implies that if we want to keep pension spending high then we have to raise taxes, it slips in an assumption that is almost never made explicit. It implies that the only way to manage pension spending is either to cut it or to increase the tax burden on those who work. It also implies, by omission, that wealth, and the huge unearned incomes it generates, are largely untouchable in this and any other debate on the contributions to be made by way of taxation to managing the finances of the state.
That is the real issue here. Pension reform has become code for telling ordinary people to work longer, accept less security, and shoulder more risk, while the owners of property and financial assets continue to accumulate returns with remarkably little obligation to the societies from which those returns are extracted, and yet it is not pensions that have undermined Europe’s capacity to cope with ageing. What has undermined it is chronic underinvestment, weak wage growth, and a housing system that facilitates rent extraction while the state refuses to act as a builder of productive and social capacity. If the economy cannot support its pensioners, it is not because pensioners exist. It is because too much of the economy has been structured to serve wealth rather than wellbeing.
If European states want pension systems that endure, the answer is not austerity by demography. It is to rebuild real economic capacity, and to tax income and gains from wealth, and even wealth itself, properly. That is not an extreme position. It is what a serious society would do.
So, taxes have to rise if we’re to continue with decent pensions then. OK. He’s spent a lot of effort there proving what he desires to deny really…..
On X, a woman posts a photo in a sari, and within minutes, various users are underneath the post tagging Grok to strip her down to a bikini. It is a shocking violation of privacy, but now a familiar and commonplace practice. Between June 2025 and January 2026, I documented 565 instances of users requesting Grok to create nonconsensual intimate imagery. Of these, 389 were requested in just one day.
Last Friday, after a backlash against the platform’s ability to create such nonconsensual sexual images, X announced that Grok’s AI image generation feature would only be available to subscribers. Reports suggest that the bot now no longer responds to prompts to generate images of women in bikinis (although apparently will still do so for requests about men).
But as the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, rightly states, this action “does not go anywhere near far enough”.
Why is a piccie in a bikini a sexual image?
Sure, sure, at one point in society a glimpse of ankle was enough. But we’re different now. Standard dress for teenage girls walking down the street these days is little more than a bikini. And don’t you dare say that’s flashing you misogynist you.
“It’s the actual back and forth of it, [trying] to shut someone down by saying, ‘Grok, put her in a bikini,’” she said.
“The performance of it is really important there, and really shows the misogynistic undertones of it, trying to punish or silence women. That also has a cascading effect on democratic norms and women’s role in society.”
Why is this misogyny? Why does it shut women down?
They are at least admitting the obvious here:
“There are hundreds of apps hosted on mainstream app stores like Apple and Google that make this possible,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who co-founded the American Sunlight Project. “Much of the infrastructure of deepfake sexual abuse is supported by companies that we all use on a daily basis.”
OK, the tools exist. They will be used. What’s going to happen is that they’ll just become the background to a normal life. Because that’s what happens to things that are ubiquitous. Give it 6 months and it’ll be “Oh, that’s AI. And?”
It opened in 2013 and gained its first Michelin star a year later. It received another in 2022, making it the first site in Wales to win two stars. Prices start at £468 per person.
The restaurant scored one out of five from a visit by Food Standards Agency officers on 5 November, meaning “major improvement” is necessary.
Now, whether this defence is true or not is another matter. But it’s an interesting defence:
“I’m buying sashimi-grade fish from Japan and they’re questioning, ‘Well, we don’t know the water, so how do we know it’s sashimi grade?’
“Well, it is sashimi grade, this stuff’s eaten raw all over the world and just because our rules don’t fit their rules, they’re questioning it … I’ve got a salt chamber for ageing fish but they obviously don’t like the idea of ageing stuff.
Who to believe, eh, who to believe?
It’s so difficult getting to grips with the idea that the local council employees are ignorant cretins, isn;t it…..
Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown over use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world’s richest man eat a shit sandwich on a global stage represents a rare win for sovereign democracy.
Yes, it goes on like that for paragrpah after paragraph.
Over Grok’s piccies.
Still, if the mad in Oz (this is van Badham) think this is a grand victory then let ’em. Leaves the rest of us to get on with life as normal, right?
