Here’s a little tip. If you’re making a pasta sauce with chilli, garlic and tomatoes and the tomatoes aren’t as sweet as you’d like, add a pinch of ground cinnamon and dial back a little on the chilli.

Basildon town centre.

Seagulls exploded by the Westferry Deathray over Newfoundland Wharf

The last days of Robin Hood Gardens

I saw this bird by Hallsville Road in Canning Town on Saturday. It was too quick for me and flew off before I could get a good photo. I think it’s a kestrel.

Photographing the sunset on the Royal Docks

Insect learning centre, Stratford

US trade officials scour the globe for more eggs as woke, cultural Marxist, leftists push up prices egging Teslas.

A stickered telecommunications box in Hackney

How do you tell Labour and Tories apart? Both are dogmatically neoliberal with apparently no clue how to address Britain’s serious structural problems. One way is to remember that Tories scapegoat immigrants first and “feckless benefits cheats” second. For Labour it’s the other way round

How do we raise the money to defend our country and preserve our values in an ever more dangerous and uncertain world?

By ditching our values and creating a society that is not worth defending.

Starmer decries ‘worst of all worlds’ benefits system ahead of deep cuts

Keir Starmer is so not the prime minister the UK needs during the breakdown of the post-war liberal order. A man completely lacking in vision, despite regular donations of spectacles.

Starmer slashes aid to fund major increase in defence spending

These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.

Starmer and Lammy absolutely craven on Trump today.

Sir Neville Starmer and his foreign secretary are flying out to Washington to meet the Musk-Trump co-presidency at the MAGA Laager. Will they be back with a piece of paper bringing peace in our time?

The right are doing with “net zero” what they did with “woke”. Woke is “freedom, fairness, community” - few are against that. Call it “woke” and you have something to attack. Net zero is “efficient transport, comfortable homes and workplaces, low cost energy”. Few were against that until “net zero”.

Instead of producing migrant deportation porn to show how out of ideas it is, the Labour government could take a leaf out of Trump’s “stick it to the elites” book but actually do something useful with it - like nationalising the water industry, starting with Thames Water. The finance-rentier oligarchy and tbeir economist-apologists would vomit more shit than a Thames Water sewage farm about how contrary this is to the rules and norms of the “free market”. But rather than a destructive, Trumpian bearding of elites, renationalising water actually is a good idea and a net win for the country that is opposed with specious ideological justification by a group of greedy rentiers.

Well, know we know: “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all … [and] … making AI sustainable for people and the planet” is “not in UK national interests”.

www.theguardian.com/technolog…

Timothy Snyder, getting the ongoing coup in the US about right.

The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth.

Liberal democracy just died. It’s been on life support for some time now. And when the alarm sounded, when the patient flatlined, did we call for the crash-cart? No, we ambled down the corridor to get fresh coffee.

Q: What will Labour centrist politicians do now that the collapse of neoliberalism into the degenerate matter of oligarchic authoritarianism is inevitable?

A: Leverage their networks to secure lucrative consultancies to revolve into at the end of their one-term government.

Preparations for Winter Lights

A gull keeps Bird Boy company

An English to English translation error in Windows 11