I’ve posted this multiple times before, but I’m going to say it again as my mind is still blasted from knowing this:

• Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff took a “career break” in the 1980s to run a pub in South Armagh (which to the unfamiliar was an area of, shall we say, “active community involvement” in the fight for Irish freedom)
• Keir Starmer defended Berlusconi as part of his legal team during his appeal at the European Court of Human Rights
• Keir Starmer was part of the legal team that got the murder conviction of Sergeant Lee Clegg quashed
• Keir Starmer played with the Parachute Regiment in an 11-a-side football “grudge” match against the Royal Military Police
• Keir Starmer decided as Director of Public Prosecutions that an MI5 agent should not face torture charges for participating in interrogation at Guantanamo Bay. Starmer then attended the leaving party of the head of MI5 a year later
• Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions when the Criminal Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute Jimmy Savile in 2009
• Keir Starmer is advised by Peter Mandelson, who according to an internal report by JP Morgan had “a particularly close relationship” with Jeffrey Epstein
• Keir Starmer served on the Trilateral Commission
• Keir Starmer secretly assembled a leadership campaign team days after Mike Pompeo’s private comments were “leaked” to the press wherein Pompeo pledged to “do [his] level best” to prevent a Corbyn premiership
• Keir Starmer’s campaign instructed its candidate running against Nigel Farage to leave the constituency, banned from printing leaflets, blocked from using campaigning software and had access to the campaign’s social media overridden. This happened after the candidate started being a threat to Farage. Farage’s party’s vote share drove Labour’s victory, in a reversal of what happened in 2019.

But reassured, Keith is a normal, regular guy who doesn’t work after 6pm on a Friday.

Hooooo boy, if you think tech bros were annoying, wait until you meet an Israeli one

Looking back at the last 7 years and how UK politics went from Corbyn being an accidental “joke” leader of the Labour Party to a scenario where the British security state installed a government through a deal with the fascist Reform Party. Given these events, I’m now inclined to believe almost anything.

The mental image of soppy Keith being chummy and playing football with paras is just utterly bizarre to me

It still makes me giggle that the British establishment was so scared of a bumbling Social Democrat hippie in the midst of rapidly deteriorating material conditions that they just installed an MI5 government.

If I were a QAnon chud, I’d be having the time of my life - the bar that Starmer’s Chief of Staff ran in the 1980s (when fun things were happening) is now a daycare

Can’t remembered who it was that shared the Eyup Lovely Twitter account on here, but it’s both hilarious and illuminating. Without it, I wouldn’t have learned that Starmer’s Chief of Staff is almost certainly intelligence services:

Gray took a career break in the 1980s, a step described by journalist Sam McBride as “strikingly unorthodox”. During this time, she ran the Cove Bar, a pub in Newry, a border town in Northern Ireland, during The Troubles, with her husband Bill Conlon, a country music singer from Portaferry, County Down. Peter Caldwell, a former special adviser to several ministers, said it had been speculated Gray was a spy at this time, though Gray denied it. According to the Belfast Telegraph, her car was stopped one night by IRA paramilitaries who wanted to take it, only for her to be allowed to pass after a voice said “that’s Sue Gray from The Cove, let her go on”

…

Former cabinet minister Oliver Letwin wrote of her: "Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen. Cabinet reshuffles, departmental reorganizations, the whole lot – it’s all down to Sue

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Gray_(political_adviser)

Much remains unknown about the 60-year-old, who in the 1980s took a strikingly unorthodox career break to run a pub in Newry, a hotbed of IRA and security force activity.

In 2015, BBC Newsnight’s policy editor Chris Cook described Mrs Gray as “the most powerful civil servant you’ve never heard of” and “also perhaps the most secretive you could ever hope to meet”.

He said that she had “astounding” influence and was “notorious for her determination not to leave a document trail”, adding that “even when a document trail exists, Ms Gray is enthusiastic about keeping it a secret”, advising special advisers of how they could destroy emails to thwart potential Freedom of Information requests.

In his memoirs, former Lib Dem minister David Laws recounted a conversation with Conservative minister Oliver Letwin in which he said: “Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray, the Head of Ethics or something in the Cabinet Office.

• https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/secretive-senior-whitehall-official-astounding-power-surprise-move-belfast-120201

Nothing to see here, just a Londoner casually taking a career break in the 1980s to run a pub in a majority Catholic border town that saw significant IRA activity, then being lauded by a former minister Tory as the person who actually runs the country.

I still see Seek and Merlin are starting points for imagining what ML could be under communism. As a birder/nature lover, these apps enhance my understanding of the natural world - and make it easier fo me to learn bird song, etc., rather than necessarily replacing that interaction I have with nature. The research possibilities are incredible too - being able to automatically track overnight bird migration paths, for instance.

This happens, and then DuPont create an anti-bacterial plastic to allow the treats to continue to flow. This causes MRSA to evolve to gain sentience. Biden is used as an example in a Supreme Court case that allows the MRSA to run for president.

My poorly thought out conspiracy take on the election:

In 2019, Farage and the Brexit Party did not contest Tory seats, which protected the right wing vote and helped retain a Tory majority.

In this year’s election, Farage emerged late in the race and ran, bringing huge attention to Reform and destroying the Tory vote, thus leading to a Labour landslide. Curiously, Labour pulled their candidate in Clacton (Farage’s constituency) after he started to gain traction against Farage. In hindsight, did Keith make a deal with Farage to run for Reform in exchange for not directly contesting him? Getting fascists elected seems like a very on-brand thing for him to do.

Edit: the candidate that was running in Clacton doesn’t even seem to be a Corbyn guy, he’s following the Starmerite line on a “changed Labour Party”.

He beat Starmer on personal votes in their constituencies this time round, too!

48% of those votes for Labour were to get the Tories out, with 5% agreeing with Labour policy. 1% of the electorate agree with the policies of the party who just established a 180 seat majority

Keith has achieved the lowest voteshare of a single party majority government in UK history, with his voteshare gains over 2019 accounted for by Scotland where the SNP imploded after a scandal. Cannot overstate how fragile their massive majority is, and is simply a freak outcome of the FPTP system.

Given Labour’s shit showing in the vote share and Andrew Feinstein’s performance in Keith’s constituency, I’m genuinely optimistic he’s gonna lose his seat in the next election

speaking of

Edit: damnit, I want “Just calling to see if you knew anything about Keir Starmer having an extramarital affair and ejaculating inside his mistress… It lead to a pregnancy” as a site tagline now

Starmer has referenced a “changed Labour Party” 8 times in his victory speech so far. The man is utterly fucking haunted by Corbyn, he won a massive landslide but he’s still saying this shit

Edit: 11 times now

WASHINGTON, July 2 (Reuters) - One in three Democrats think U.S. President Joe Biden should end his reelection bid following last week’s debate against Republican Donald Trump, but no prominent elected Democrat does any better than Biden in a hypothetical matchup against Trump, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Tuesday.

The two-day poll found that both Trump, 78, and Biden, 81, maintain the support of 40% of registered voters, suggesting that Biden has not lost ground since the debate. Election Day is Nov. 5.

Among the names of top Democrats put before respondents, only Michelle Obama, wife of former Democratic President Barack Obama, outperformed Biden and led Trump 50% to 39% in a hypothetical matchup. Michelle Obama, author of the best-selling 2018 memoir “Becoming,” has said repeatedly she does not intend to run for president.

…

Biden has vowed to stay in the race. But should he exit, the Democrats whose names emerge as possible replacements perform only as well or worse than Biden against Trump in hypothetical matchups, according to the poll. Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, trailed Trump by one percentage point, 42% to 43%, a difference that was well within the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error, making Harris’ showing statistically just as strong as Biden’s.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/one-three-democrats-think-biden-should-quit-race-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2024-07-02/

Apparently some dem internal polling leaked and it looks hilariously bad for Sleepy Joe. Although this scenario is not likely, it’s within the margin of error of their data:

https://x.com/connoramulhern/status/1808206615964758179

YOU’RE NOT PUSHING ME OUT, FAT, I’M GOING DOWN WITH THE SHIP

Quentin Fucks

If you’ll vote for her, she’ll win: UK Edition