I spent a week and a bit in Mallorca, Burnham started his new government,and Farage is up against Count Binface.

Diary

Mallorca

Spent some time holidaying in Mallorca Hotel had a busy pool. Spent some days hanging out by the pool reading, had a massage. Occasional dips in the water to cool off.

Found myself quite jealous of the full-board people not paying for their drinks.But really I was only at the hotel less than half the days.

Went out on a jet ski while there. That was good fun. You should totally go ride a jet ski and jump from wave to wave, catching air.

Also swam with the fishes.Did some underwater photography with the phone.Having a clear waterproof camera case is scary stuff. No backup phone when abroad. Paid off though. One underwater-shot in 20 is all right.And not only did the bag not leak,it saved me from losing the power buttonwhich decided to start falling out that week.Without the bag it’d have fallen out anywhere.

On the final day at the resort there was a girl there, barely a teen, beautiful swimmer. Running rings around everyone else with her underwater twirls and dives and handstands. Inspiring me to also swim along the bottom as long as I can. Stand on my hands. Turn over in the water and fill my nose with chlorine.

I definitely used to be able to sit on the bottom and deep dive, but now I’m so fat I can’t sink. Active effort required to get to the floor of the pool or sink below the surface.

Visited the Aquarium on the last day before flying homein the evening. Cool sharks. Axolotl. More beach timefinishing off that book.

On the way back, Whizz Air have this scam where they have a smaller under-seat-bag test than all the other airlines.

So when you head there with your standard under-seat bag that you use everywhere else, and that fits fine under the seat in reality, they still make you pay another 70 euros for it to go in overhead just because it won’t fit in their super-tiny extra-small testing bay.

The plane was half empty too, so it not like they really needed to ration the overhead space.

Then landed at 1am with no trains running that late,so another hundred quid for a taxi home.

Eeep.

Expensive end to a good fun holiday.

Burnham

Opening Speech

Burnham has been made leader of the Labour party.

No other candidates got the required number of nominations so it’s a coronation.

He had a few things to say on day one.

He’s proud. The party is united, he says, and now they’ll put that power of unity to give people hope back. And he is ready to build on Kier’s foundation. Thanks Kier, for all the NHS work and renters rights and rebuilding the nation’s reputation (??).

He does like to name-check all the various towns and unions of the country. Just listing them. They made Labour, apparently.

We must recognize that this generation of politicians, including Burnham himself, have failed. Four decades of neoliberalism have not been kind to all those places he listed.

He pledges to be better, and will do five things.

Work relentlessly to build a culture of one Labour team. No infighting. Wants to eradicate the split. End factional politics.

I guess end Starmer’s war on the left then? 🤨

Work to build a new politics. This is the last chance for change, and we must take it together. Tell people what Labour will do, not just pick fights with other parties. Seek consensus with those other parties instead, to improve the political discourse.
Change political direction: know exactly where he stands and set a direction that is distinctively Labour. No out-greening greens or out-reforming reform or wearing tory clothes. Boldly confidently authentically Labour.

Housing, water, energy, transport, all broken due to privatization and concentration of wealth and power.

Four decades of political power draining from regions to corporations and central government ends now.

Take back the slogan “take back control” from the right, who gave away power to corps and quangos.

Life should be more affordable.

Be a leader for the north, south, east and west, for Scotland and Northern Ireland (aw, shame for the midlanders 🤣 ).

Gonna do to everywhere what he done for Manchester he reckons.

Kids shouldn’t have to leave their home towns to prosper.

Take power back from westminster and give it to the place where you live.

More power for regions, to run trains for passengers not shareholders. Improve high-streets, and back shops and pubs, and education, and reindustrialization.

He’s gonna be pro-business.

Add all that together and he reckons we’ll bring back hope.

Thanks a few people in particular.

He says he knows what he believes and what he wants to do, he has a plan. He wants change, to be close to the people.

He wants it to be Andy 4 us. Labour 4 us. Bring back hope.

Maybe all you really can hope for from an acceptance speech is a bit of empty rhetoric, but that is indeed what we got here.

Unity and decentralization and a promise that he has a plan.

Unity is easy to say, but requires unity to achieve since you ain’t in control of all the factions.

Decentralization tends to be fought by centralized powers, and is a tactic really not a strategy. What do you hope to achieve with it? Can end up just remote offices for centralized power.

Burn ham or Burn Oil?

He says he’s going to be “pragmatic” about new oil projects,and take control of water companies.

Note that more oil drilling will NOT reduce the price of energy to the consumer, nor do much to increase sovereign energy independence. It will however mean lots of profits to the party donors from the oil industry, and of course mean more heat-domes and wildfires and floods and rising sea levels. More death from heatstroke.

Note also that “control” of Thames Water is not nationalization, not “ownership”, it’s just really more (likely toothless) regulation of private industry.

Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.

On the other hand, first day, he reckons that first things first, he’s going to end rough-sleeping. Apparently something they tell me he achieved in Manchester.

Corbyn’s big first day announcement if he won was going to bethat he would end homelessness immediately.

Which can only really mean putting the homeless into hostels and hotels.

But good. Certainly that’s an about-fucking-time sort of announcement.

If he ends people having to sleep on the streets in the first week then I can only approve of that.

Week two

Congratulations to Andy Burnham’s new government in their huge achievement of arresting hundreds of terrorists today. What a coop! The streets will be safer tonight thanks to Burnham’s quick thinking action in arresting hundreds of people for…

What? Really?

..arresting hundreds of people for planning to read poems in a terrorising manor, saying “Good Morning” to some protestors in a terroristic way, setting up a terror stage for terror music to be played on, clapping terroristicly, and holdingup terror signs against genocide.

Some might say it’s the state and police forces doing the terrorising here but of course don’t say it in public or you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail for terrorism.

Burnham Summary

He is indeed doing better than Starmer, is at least making announcementson things he will do to help. Government policy hasn’t changedat all where it matters: Wars in Iraq and Palestine, relationship with Europe, position on immigration,the role of government, fiscal rules, fiscal multiplies.

But if homelessness can be ended and end of life carefixed and ID cards ended and bus fares made cheaper andhouses can be built at least that’s something.

Farage vs Binface

The press have been hounding Farage. Pointing out his corruption. Asking what he has spent the millions of pounds he’s been gifted on.

Question doesn’t really make sense to me. Money is fungible. The money went onto his money pile. He’s spent money since, but was it that money? Or different money? How do you even know or measure that?

Anyway, he’s fed up with it all so is standing down to cause a by election. At which he will stand. Imaging, wrongly, that this might make corruption charges go away. Other parties seem to be saying they won’t dignify it with a contest, so he might be unopposed.

Could be just him and Count Binface. Would be properly hilarious if Binface won. I’d vote Binface in that case for sure.

He has an actual chance of becoming an mp and ousting Farage.

What a country.

Cometh the time, cometh the bin.

The full list of candidates was a record number. 34.

I heard a rumour that Farage failed to file in time, but that seems not to be true.

Twenty independents, Three candidates from the Monster Raving Loony party, a bunch of small parties, and the two fore-runners: Nigel Farage and Count Binface

One clear unity candidate. Every vote for the Count counts!

Official Binface Video

It’ll be like comic-con up on that stage.

Eighth time lucky?Richard Herring re-released his Binface interview from about a year ago in honour of the by-election in Clacton.

Worth a watch if you didn’t see it before.

Owen Jones went down and interviewed some randoms. Only seems to have found one sane one.

Not a great deal of hope for Binface fans here though I’m afraid.

Farage’s supporters are so cynical about politics they don’t care, they’re all like “all politicians are doing it” which isn’t true at all but they doesn’t get through to people

That sense of cynicism and pessimism saturates this country

Will Binface win? About 10% chance the bookies and predictionmarkets seem to think. We’ll find out in a week or two.

Reading

Doppelganger

I read Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger”, mostly by the pool or the beach while on holiday last week.

It isn’t really about her being confused with Naomi Wolf, except on a surface level. Or even really about Wolf moving from left feminism towards right wing conspiracy theory.

Really it’s about how political culture has changed as the world has moved more online and suffered the consequences of a pandemic and the often wrongheaded political responses to that.

Conspiracy thinking and a whole culture concentrating on reticence and reactionary thinking instead of evidence and logic.

While reading it I was hanging out with some folks who are much more right wing than I generally do. Here’s some things they said:

I don’t believe in Sunscreen. Isn’t it funny how skin cancer rates have gone up as sunscreen becomes more popular.

I don’t believe in COVID.

Carbon Warming models don’t even take into account the sun.

I thought Chemtrails were a conspiracy theory, but came to believe it.

Claiming to believe in freedom while also wanting a crack-down on asylum-seekers, thinking they are destroying society.

So it’s easy to believe Klein’s basic thesis here, the worry that reactionary conspiracy thinking is breaking the entire body politic.I don’t think it’s that people have lost all rationality. It’s that people are wearing their conspiracy theories as badges, identifying them as a member of a group. Like religious beliefs that bind a group, the more stupid and outrageous they are the more those badges work to identify the ingroup from the outgroup.

The worry is always when they decide the outgroup need punishing for not taking on those conspiracy beliefs and turn to suppression and violence.

Watching

Plur1bus

Finally got around to watching Plur1bus on AppleTV and yes it is indeed as great as everyone says, and yes it does indeed seem to a allegory about AI as much as about an alien hive-mind virus.

In order to really know if you’re for or against this kind of world peace, you gotta question it about the progress of the arts and sciences. About what it’s civilizational mission is, what it is trying to do other than just grab more minds for the hive.

The culinary arts are all dead presumably. Everyone just drinking Hive Human Protein Huel.

Is there a Theatre where plays are being performed by the hive for the hive? Presumably not. Likewise film-making: can’t really do a surprise ending for a film at least. Would anyone want to watch a film when they were the entire company making it?

No rock and roll any more? They do some singing at one point but that seems to be mostly for an unjoined ceremony. No point in all the communicative arts if everyone’s mind is one.

Science does seem to be progressing a little, in that they are discovering things about their own hive-mind. Researchers still doing research.

Has there been progress in maths, or in painting, or what newart has been made other than for the unjoined?

These are crucial questions nobody seems to want to ask in the show.

There’s also questions about how the telepathy works. Looks like radio-signals somehow. Does locking an individual in a faraday cage cut them off? What’s the range? Does the signal spread at the speed of light? What determined the character of the hive, it it just the average of all humans? Or was it determined in the code originally sent though space? Is the hive researching all this?

Great show anyway. Look forward so S2.

Releases

Farage Vs Binface

I did a tarot show on Link https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2026-07-21-faragevsbinface/ Farage Vs Binface

Links

Goodbye Gary

Final Show - Gary Stevenson

Just as Jesus went to heaven leaving his disciples to spread the word, and as Satoshi deleted his private keys leaving the core dev team to spread the word, so now does ary Stevenson stop his weekly shows to leave spreading the word to his karaoke influences.

Thanks for the good work Gary. Look forward to the more irregular monthly shows and maybe podcast after you long holiday.

AI

Child’s Play - Sam Kriss

Great essay from Sam Kriss following around San Fran AI folks:

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it.

The Escape

This month’s AI news is that OpenAI’s agent software escapedto the internet to hack someone else’s computer to get theanswers to the test it was set.

This is a crude graphical description of the OpenAI’s agent under test attacking Hugging Face.

Around the Fediverse

There’s a space on the internet that nobody ownsand can’t be bought by crypto billionaires andisn’t corrupted by adverts or selection algorithms.

Some stuff I boosted there this month.

Internet

cwebber@social.coop - The Social Internet

What happened to the fight for the internet?

A new blogpost from me. I believe the fight for keeping the internet free is more important than ever but also under more threats than ever.

And the irony is, centralization is partly to blame: people don’t feel like the internet is theirs anymore.

But we can’t leave it there.

We HAVE to act.

For our sake, for our kids’ sake, for ourselves, for the future.

aral@mastodon.ar.al on W-Social

Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…

So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).

Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.

That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)

…Continues

AI Financing

Lana@beige.party on AI financing

Okay I’m a teacher. So let me explain this to you in as simple a way as I can.

Let’s say I want to buy a cake. But not just any cake. A specialty cake for my nieces quinceañera. A cake like that costs at least $100 bucks. But I don’t have $100 bucks. What do?

Well, I could save up to buy the cake. But that might take a long time and by then her quinceañera would be long over and gone. I could go take out a loan for the $100 bucks. But I don’t want to take out a loan because it might make my credit look bad to have that much debt. So what’s the solution?

Well if I’m particularly creative and not overburdened by an abundance of morality, the solution is easy. I make another me. A special me. A me designed for one purpose only - to saddle with debt.

So I create another Lana. A legal fiction. Let’s call her Twona. Twona’s only purpose in life is to get a bunch of credit cards and then cakes for my niece’s quinceañera.