My dad claimed to have seen one of these inside a plane when he was in the RAF, although he referred to it as ball lightning.

That wasn’t what Brexiteers were campaigning for. They were going for the type of sovereignty in William Rees-Mogg’s book “The Sovereign Individual”, in which he defines one as someone who earns more than $200,000 a year (in 1990s money) and uses their wealth and influence to act above the laws of any nation. The EU stood to prevent that, so they pushed for the UK to leave - and duped a bunch of gullible fools into believing it was about them and “hour removedry”.

The sad thing is they pulled the same tricks again in 2019 to get Boris into 10 Downing St. Facebook ads targeted at people who would lap it up, things like showing bread lines and saying this is what Corbyn would have brought. Such ads excluded those that would challenge them and call out the lies, leaving people in a nice little echo chamber with no time to be corrected before they went to the polls.

In the words of Zuckerberg, the dumb fucks.

Did they think twice with Rwanda?

I’m gonna go against the grain and no doubt be downvoted, but surely this is overblown compared to the level of actual harm it causes? They’re not real images, almost everyone is aware they’re not real images, they don’t have a negative impact on the lives of the victim beyond them being creeped out that people are perving over them (but again, everyone knows it’s not really them).

I can see it has the potential for leading to actual harm, eg a stalker developing worse behaviour, but I don’t really see that it meets the threshold in and of itself. It’s only slightly worse than doing something someone else doesn’t like or saying something offensive.

Well maybe the government should stop being so objectionable, and instead represent the people. You know, the thing they’re employed to do.

This makes me want to sing the Tetris theme.

That’s because there haven’t been any successful economic policies since then.

85% of the UK are criminals, I thought Australia was supposed to solve that for us.

The modernisation of the royal palace has long been used to justify increases in the sovereign grant, which was just £31m when it was first introduced in 2012-2013. Under a “golden ratchet” clause in the Sovereign Grant Act, the amount of money handed to the monarch can never fall, even if the crown estate’s profits decrease.

A Treasury spokesperson said: “The grant has been largely unchanged since 2020 and this temporary increase covers the remainder of the Buckingham Palace refurbishment. We will review the grant in 2026, expecting to bring it back down in 2027.”

How can they bring it down in 2027 when there’s this golden ratchet clause that says it never goes down?

Drax helps the UK government meet its climate targets because, on paper at least, the power station is treated as emission-free. This is because international carbon accounting rules state that greenhouse gas emissions from burning wood are counted in the country where the trees are felled as opposed to where they are burned.

Such bullshit. All the emissions happen here, but they don’t get counted here.