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TPQ
Dixie Elliot ✊I have noticed that the Far-Right here in Ireland are still spreading the black propaganda of the Epstein Axis of Evil, Trump and Netanyahu, that the Iranians admitted to accidently bombing the girls' primary school in Southern Iran.
 
The Iranians admitted nothing of the sort, and it has since been proven that the lie began when a fake post appeared on social media claiming that Iran had made the admission and was quickly spread by cretins who feed on racial hatred and gleefully support the genocide of innocents.
 
Yesterday, March 2nd, the United Nations Educational Agency, UNESCO, released a statement condemning the bombing of the Iranian girls school which killed around 150.
 
It said that 'the school was struck during US and Israel military attacks on Iran on Saturday.'

These screenshots should be used to counter the black lies of the Epstein Axis of Evil and the human maggots who spread them . . . 









Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Black Lies

Barry Gilheany ✍😔 Writing about the proliferation of far right loudmouths like the white US supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and the UK anti-Islam, anti-immigration figure Tommy Robinson on social media who seem to outbid each other to say the most outrageous and offensive things, the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes that they are competing in an attention economy.[1] 

For the past few years, writers and reformers have issued siren warnings about how platforms like X/Twitter have become a toxic sludge of hate speech and disinformation giving a bully pulpit to extreme voices such Advance UK, a political party that now includes Tommy Robinson and that vows to ban indefinite leave to remain, ban the foreign -born from becoming British citizens and encourage all settled migrants to leave. That its candidate polled less than the Monster Raving Looney Party candidate in last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election and that it is competing with other micro outfits like Reclaim UK and Restore UK to leech support away from, in the words of Elon Musk, the “weak sauce” of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK does not detract from its contribution to the, as the late E.L. Doctorow put it, the steady “enshittification” of the internet. But it is the role of the attention economy in facilitating surveillance capitalism and its colonisation of humanity’s cognitive and deliberative capacities and one very real human casualty of it – the death by suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell that is the overarching concern of this article.

In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon, when pondering the problem of information overload, opined that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Since his primary interest was in organisations, Simon saw this as a problem to be solved. In the 1990s, the moguls of Silicon Valley seized upon this opportunity. For if attention had become the scarce commodity in a newly networked economy, if it was possible to capture it, sell access to it to advertisers and monitor what it revealed, the world could be your oyster. It was the beginning of what the writer Michael Goldhaber called the “attention economy.” First out of the traps was Google with its user friendly, all things to all people search engine – the Universal Library of Things. It monitored what the users searched for and used the resulting data to improve the search engine. However this did not satisfy the company’s venture capital investors who demanded a business model. The Google bros then realised that they could use their monitoring data as raw material for a machine learning algorithm that provided outputted information about users whom advertisers might be interested in.[2]

Thus was born what the Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff has labelled “surveillance capitalism.” In its Manifesto for Attention Liberation, The Friends of Attention describes how both surveillance capitalism and the attention economy have created a business model for us. Over the past three decades, the explosive growth of the internet and the global proliferation of data devices have meshed with a series of shortsighted political decisions: along the way, the entrepreneurial savviness of the Tech Bros has produced, in effect, an ostensibly “free” digital universe – whose hidden operating cost is the depletion and pollution of the minds and sense of its users.[3]

For attention activists, the business model of the “attention economy” is a globe-spanning industrial farm that extracts money from a billion vegetative humans suspended in an infinite web, eyes glazed. In this dystopia, humanity devotes almost the entirety of its waking hours in digital spaces substantially financed by extractive profit models that systematically tap human beings for the monetary value of our eyeballs. This twelve-trillion-dollar operation motors a global-scale, computationally intensive, and commercially lucrative system for the sourcing, aggregation, and nonstop auction-market of human attention. The fundamental immorality of analysing this business model in cost-benefit terms is that our dehumanisation cannot be quantified. In the words of Burnett et al, this is not a conversation about trade-offs. It is a conversation about coercion, theft, and the instrumentalization of human life.[4]

The global behemoth that is the attention economy is comprised of the world’s largest five companies who are all technology providers (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet or Google, and Amazon) and who are each valued at more than two trillion.  Four of the five have billions of customers who use their products more or less continuously, and whose data-commodification constitutes a central business operation. The fifth makes the chips that power the processing and manipulation of that data by means of algorithmic AI. The Big Tech empire exploits the invisible iron cage ubiquity of its digital platforms to garner information about us – our clicks and keystrokes, our blinks and grimaces, our typos, and our personality types – and then input these data into giant predictive technologies. In turn our profiles, preferences, foibles, and projected future personalities are sold off to the highest bidder.[5]

The harms of this new economy are conceptualised by the Attention Liberation Movement as “human fracking.” For just as petroleum fracking is wreaking irreversible damage to our external environment (our woods and fields, our water and sky), while the human frackers are inflicting possibly permanent damage to our interior environment (our minds and hearts, our thinking and deliberative abilities, and our ability to be and to suit with ourselves and the people we love.[6]

The advent of the app ChatGPT in November 2022 which rapidly became the fastest-growing app in the world has raised for some commentators the prospect of the demise of the attention economy. For why not type that search which one would have automatically inputted into Google into ChatGPT instead. Surely the innovation of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) would sound the death knell of the attention economy. This conundrum is addressed by the Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review where they develop their thesis on the “intention economy” a prospect which they view as a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent,” from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates. This model is one of a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs. In the view of John Naughton, this differs from the attention economy in that it trades on users’ limited attention spans through advertising whereas the difference in the beast that is the intention economy trades on signals that predict, shape and game human intention before actions occur and so facilitates much deeper psychological manipulation through personalised AI interactions. This MO enables “conversation” with chatbots in free and unguarded ways heightening the risk of signposting to dangerous forums such as pro-anorexia and suicide websites. The plausibility and false authenticity is powered by the ability of LLMs to infer private attributes from conversations (while, incidentally, bypassing the cookie restrictions which so aggravate the advertisers and hucksters of the supposedly ancient attention economy).[7]

Regardless of any such academic or structural differentials within the new information economy, the human casualties of the aforementioned models and the deleterious effects on public life are stark. Be it the harvesting of the data of unsuspecting Facebook users by the rogue research company Cambridge Analytica in order to facilitate the victory of Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK; the flooding of the zone by shit (in Steve Bannon’s words) generated by the bot factories in St Petersburg to cause maximum disruption of US Presidential election and to bolster Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and the coarsening of public discourse by the rage machine that is Twitter; social media networks appear to have lost their emancipatory lure and potential since the heady days of the Arab Spring. The foremost critic of the erosion of democracy is Shoshana Zuboff who in her 2019 seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power documents the conditions of online surveillance we all live under, the covert harvesting of private data that enables targeted advertising and allows for our emotional manipulation. This week will see on both cinematic and television screen the fruits of her collaboration with the British film maker film-maker Marc Silver the documentary Molly vs the Machines which was due to be shown at the Glasgow film festival on 1 March, having its simultaneous UK premiere, before being broadcast on Channel 4 on 5 March.[8]

The shift in the global economic paradigm that Zuboff so meticulously and coruscatingly documents in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is heartbreakingly humanised the destructive effects of Big Tech’s business model on the most interpersonal level. Molly was recorded and monitored for most of her adolescence, particularly after she downloaded Instagram and Pininterest. These apps function by tracking their “users” (drugs and social media – those are the only times they become “users” [“customers,” anybody?] and supplying them with the content that will keep them using. Though clearly struggling and negotiating with the ordinary pressures and unhappiness of adolescence, the algorithms Molly encountered online were tailored by an inhumane mechanism, supplying her content that reflected her unhappiness until it became unbearable.[9]

The coroner at Molly’s inquest ruled that she died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” The most poignant and powerful testimony in the film comes from Molly’s schoolfriends who concur with the coroner’s verdict. They saw they were shocked to learn after her death how she had been persistently measuring her stomach and looking at so much negative self-imagery. Guiltily, most of them confess they still look at Instagram on their own phones. For Zuboff, they are all victims of the tech monopolies’ strategy: “Where the algorithm senses high levels of engagement, it gives that material pride of place,” she says. “It will amplify it and it will send it out, as happened to Molly in the last months of her young life. She received hundreds of grotesque messages and images depicting suicide and self-harm.” Thus Molly Russell has yet another example of how, in Zuboff’s trenchant words, of how society has sent its precious young “like canaries in the coalmine” into a “death march with the all-seeing algorithm.”[10]

So the short span of Molly’s life parallels the trajectory of the development of the social media platforms, as they first learned to harvest and monetise our private information, then to predict our habits and eventually to shape them. Her story is the haunting backdrop to, and shadow of the “breakthrough idea that human behaviour should be treated as a commodity” [11]the genealogy of which Zuboff has so diligently and starkly chronicled.

The addictive nature of much social media output and their role in fuelling not just the global Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth but their assault on privacy and the developmental health of young people has led to a growing national and international clamour for the prohibition of access to social media to young people under the age of sixteen. Just such a ban has been instituted in Australia. Similar restrictions are coming down the track in France and Spain, and at least 15 European governments are looking at comparative measures. Last month, Keir Starmer gave full backing to establishing a consultation for a British minimum age for social media age. 

For Shoshana Zuboff, the iniquity of Big Tech’s attacks on privacy and the democracy of the public square is a moral crusade of our time, comparable to the abolition of slavery and child labour. For her the abolition of the business model behind the MO of the sites that Big Tech runs is essential rather than a mere prohibition for children. A social media ban for children is opposed by Ian Russell, father of Molly, who now chairs the Molly Rose Foundation and has, through grief, become an advocate to the accountability of social media platforms. 

The toxic effects on the developing minds and brains of children and young people of bad actors on social media are undeniable. But should the baby of the totality of digital media be thrown out with the bathwater of the effluent of the sites like the algorithm ones that drove a 14-year-old girl with all her life and potential in front of her to her death? How would such a ban be practically enforced? Human nature being what it is, prohibition always creates the allure of the forbidden fruit for those predisposed to testing boundaries. Is there universal consensus as to the inherent dangers to health of social media sites as there is in relation to tobacco and certain controlled drugs? While child protection must always be an overriding public duty and societal value, can some latitude be afforded to children’s natural curiosity and desire for experimentation? Debate around an under 16 ban still leaves unaddressed the wider harms of the monetised and behaviour altering model of the digital information economy whether in its attention or intention formats. The reclamation of our futures from the empire builders of Silicon Valley has to be an animating cause, even crusade, for our times.
 
References

[1] Jonathan Freedland. Here are the powerful men making racists feel great again. Guardian Journal. 14 February 2026 pp.1-2

[2] John Naughton, Big tach profited from our attention – now AI wants to monetise intentions. The Observer - Science & Tech 22 February 2026 p.19

[3] D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, eds. (2026). The Friends of Attention Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. London: Particular Books p.25

[4] Ibid, pp.25-26

[5] Ibid, p.26

[6] Ibid, pp.33-35

[7] Naughton, op cit.

[8] Abolition is the correct response to a moral catastrophe. The Observer - Interview 22 February 2026 pp.17-18

[9] Nicholas Harris. The cost of an online childhood. New Statesman -Television 27 February – 5 March 2026 pp. 60-61

[10] Observer - Interview, p.18

[11] Ibid 

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

It’s The Attention Economy, Stupid 🪶 The World Of Information Dystopia And Its Human Casualties

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Ninety Nine

 

A Morning Thought @ 3075

Maryam Namazie 🎤 This is an edited transcript of Rod Liddle’s interview with Maryam Namazie on Iran protests, Times Radio, 17-January-2026.


Rod Liddle: The uprising or revolution whatever you want to call it in Iran seems to be at something of a crossroads. The Iranian regime has not it as it suggested executed any of the protesters it has arrested, nor has there been a continuation of the violent repression which has seen as many as 12,000 people killed in the totalitarian Islamic republic. But the protests seem to have subsided too, and one begins to wonder if what the West was heralding as the final toppling of the brutal clerical rule in Iran may simply have been another outpouring of anger quickly stilled from the benighted people of that country.

Maryam Namazie is an Iranian dissident who has lived in London for many years, a Marxist, she was a member of the Iranian Worker-Communist Party and she has seen many uprisings before, subjected to a fatwa by the mullahs, she has also faced threats from the Iranian regime. I asked her if the uprising was now dwindling a little.

Maryam Namazie: There is a generation now in Iran that will not tolerate an Islamic theocracy. They don’t buy into Islamic reform, Islamic feminism, Islamic democracy. They don’t accept a reformist so-called faction of the Islamic regime of Iran; they don’t want a theocracy. It’s a movement and protest that needs to be supported across the globe, not of course by regime change from above. It’s a very important movement. My heart goes out and my condolences goes out to all those who’ve lost family members and loved ones. There have been huge amounts of killings. People are talking about massacres that have taken place. The numbers are unclear. There are reports of over 12,000 people being killed.

Over here, this has been portrayed as a revolution which has been provoked largely not by the ideological objection to an Islamic theocracy but through economic necessity as the economy has crashed and people are broke. My point is, however, that the economic catastrophe is part and parcel of a catastrophe and crisis when it comes to personal and civil liberties as well. Every aspect of people’s lives is in crisis because of this regime – either it’s mismanagement, its corruption or its all-out repression; the fact that a theocracy is antithetical to the lives of 21st century human beings.

You can’t foresee when this regime is going to end but that break has been made and there is no turning back from where the people of Iran are today. They don’t want a theocracy.

Rod Liddle: There are these appalling things happening. 12,000 dead, you say, a violent authoritarian crackdown on the protests and the threats of hangings, the threats of shootings and so on. And yet you say this must be a revolution which happens from within. Were it not for Donald Trump’s insistence that unless the Iranian revolutionary guard and the government stopped these massacres and ceased any threat to hang protesters then there would be an immediate response from America. That is outside help and it works, doesn’t it?

Maryam Namazie: That is a lot of posturing really to be frank because if you look at a report from a human rights organisation that covers executions in Iran, from the period of January 5-14th, 52 prisoners were executed in 42 prisons. So, the regime has continued their executions and they will continue their executions because this is a regime that has done this for the past 47 years. The political posturing and geopolitical manipulations in various self-interests of governments doesn’t really address the huge catastrophe and tragedy that is taking place for the people of Iran; it doesn’t address human rights.

Rod Liddle: Hang on Maryam, just to pick up one point there. It was said that that one particular Iranian protester, the owner of a clothes shop in Iran was going to be hanged yesterday. Trump intervened and he wasn’t hanged. That’s surely beneficial, isn’t it? That you can’t argue against that, can you?

Maryam Namazie: Erfan Sultani is the person you are referring to. Let’s be clear, there are thousands waiting to be executed. The regime itself has said they have arrested thousands that will be executed as enemies against God. The executions will happen. We’ve had many examples, of course, where public pressure has stopped an execution. Give credit also to a vast diaspora as well as people in Iran and the mass protests of organisations and individuals demanding an end to executions. We can’t give credit only to Donald Trump for this.

Rod Liddle: I wasn’t suggesting you give credit only to Donald Trump. You talk about all these executions and the murder of so many people. Doesn’t that beg for outside interference to stop that murder?

Maryam Namazie: It does. Of course, you’re right. It does beg for outside interference in the sense that it begs for solidarity and support for the people of Iran in this revolution that is underway. But I think the question is whether US militarism is the solution. If we look at the region, if we look at Afghanistan, if you look at Iraq, if we look at what is happening in Syria for example, this is not the solution. Also, in the Palestinian territories. Militarism is not the solution to bringing peace and prosperity and rights for the people of Iran who deserve a lot more than that. For me, when Donald Trump postures and says he stopped 800 executions, therefore he’s not going to intervene – these are geopolitical posturings. What governments can do is not to impose regime change from above, but to actually stop providing support directly or indirectly to the Islamic regime of Iran. Why are the Islamic regime of Iran’s embassies still open? Why are the assets of the revolutionary guards not being seized? Why are government officials that travel outside not arrested for crimes against humanity? I think there are so many political and diplomatic measures to put this regime under intense pressure that isn’t happening. There’s a lot of sloganeering, a lot of statements and hashtags, but nothing that really helps the people of Iran. And the other issue is the communication and internet blackout. We know that when the regime does this, it is because it is slaughtering people and doesn’t want witnesses. It has imposed martial law. It has issued a statement to say that anybody who is publicising information about what’s happening in Iran will be executed as a spy for Israel and the United States. So opening Starlink, opening up communications, cyber intelligence against the regime… All of these are ways in which pressure could be brought on the regime and people of Iran supported in order to continue their revolutionary movement against a theocracy. I mean this is Handmaid’s Tale in real life.

Rod Liddle: Are the people of Iran, the people who are taking part in these demonstrations, are they fully behind the son of the Shah? And are we being told the truth over here when we’re told that they wish for his return to the country and that he might mediate and provide some sort of government in the future?

Maryam Namazie: In all honesty, monarchists are a political trend in Iran, as are communists, as are secularists, as are Republicans. Iran is a huge country of 90 million people with a vast plurality of backgrounds as well as opinions. It is now portrayed as if “Long Live the King” is the main slogan of people in Iran and the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution has been rebranded as an Iranian national revolution by a diaspora media like Iran International. These are all posturings in order to impose regime change from above and to contain a Woman, Life, Freedom revolution that doesn’t want the same old, same old. We don’t want to move from the Shah’s dictatorship to an Islamic dictatorship to another form of dictatorship. People in Iran deserve better. And I personally wouldn’t accept any diaspora leader. There is a huge movement in Iran, progressive, secular, modern. Evin prison and prisons across Iran are filled with political prisoners, women and men who have been campaigning and organising for decades for people’s civil rights and for an end to this regime. The leadership of Iran, the future of Iran is going to be female. It’s going to be secular. And the leadership of this movement is going to be found in Iran, not abroad and not in some exiled prince who’s living off the money his father stole.

Reza Pahlavi has dreams of reinstating a monarchy, that was oppressive. I’ve even had to go to the police not only about threats that I faced from the Islamic regime of Iran, but threats from his supporters. In the diaspora, the monarchists have beaten up opponents, broken PA systems of others, torn down banners of any opposition that doesn’t support the monarchy. They have threatened to find me and kill me because I don’t agree with the monarchy. Reza Pahlavi is not going to be a change for us. They defend Savak, the old Shah’s secret police and say that it didn’t go far enough. Once of their slogans is “death to Mullahs, Leftists and Mojahedin.” Of course, you can be against any ideology and any system but to call for the death of people is incitement to violence. I don’t agree with the Mojahedin. I wouldn’t even accept any leftist leader from abroad taking over the leadership in Iran, even though I am on the left. Because the future leaders of Iran are in Iran itself, not the diaspora. With all its threats and violence, the monarchist opposition gives us very clear signals of what they intend to do when they return to Iran. Will we even be able to return to Iran if they come to power? That’s a big question for a lot of us in the diaspora that don’t support the monarchy. I think people in Iran have a right to finally – after 100 years of dictatorship – decide their own fate.

Rod Liddle: Well, there you are. That was Maryam Namazie, Iranian dissident who I spoke to late last night. And at this very moment, she’s on a demonstration in Paris.

The above is an edited interview with Times Radio.

Maryam Namazie is a political activist, campaigner and blogger

After 100 years Of Dictatorship, People In Iran Have A Right To Decide Their Own Fate

Azar Majedi ✊ Humanity must rise against them!


Damn! I'm so angry and despaired. 

They are creating another Libya, Iraq or Syria in Iran with more than 90 million people. 

They are creating a dark scenario in Iran, Balkanisation of Iran.

I have fought against this regime since the day it was born. Lost friends and comrades and suffered, but war is not the answer. 

The warmongers don't want freedom or a more equal and just society, they don't care about people's lives, hopes or wishes. They want ruin. 

This is the New Middle East and greater Israel script. As US ambassador to Israel said: This is Genesis: The whole region, the whole Levant is Israel. 

They don't hide it. They have started it decades ago. They escalated since 2000 and in the past two and a half years, they have relentlessly, shamelessly, been killing and wiping out Palestinians, killing and ruins in Lebanon and Syria, and now Iran. 

They are threatening Turkey as well. They must be stopped. Humanity must rise to stop these Evils.

People want to overthrow this bloody regime. They don't want to die with it.


⏩ Asar Majed is a Member of Hekmatist Party leadership & Chairperson of Organisation for Women’s Liberation.

Bombs And Killings For The New Middle East And Greater Israel Project!

Dr John Coulter ✍ The bitter medicine which we Royalists have to swallow is that the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor situation has landed the entire institution of the British Monarchy into a crisis. 

It has all become tarred with the same brush.

Those folk in society who want the United Kingdom to become a republic with a president rather than a king to be a head of state are having a field day with the debacle which has enveloped the former Prince Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles III.

Could it be a case of history repeating itself on a number of fronts? Previous monarchs called Charles have had a poor history. Charles the First was executed following the bloody English Civil War when Britain became a commonwealth.

Following the Restoration of the Monarchy a few decades later, Charles II was such a poor king, he sowed the seeds of doom in terms of English succession, and paved the way for King William III, aka King Billy, to come from Holland and restore order.

While the current King Charles III is doing his level best to wash his hands of any alleged activities or scandal caused by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the bitter reality which the Royal Family must face, is that the entire institution of the Monarchy has become tainted by the Epstein saga.

Whilst there has been much talk in Northern Ireland of the need to reform the Stormont institutions, could this atmosphere of reforming seep across the Irish Sea to mainland Britain with a growing desire to see the Monarchy itself reformed?

The United Kingdom boasts one of the most high profile Monarchies in the world compared to the profile and position of other Royal Families across the globe.

Put bluntly, perhaps the time has come for the Royals to take urgent action and for King Charles III to break the supposed ‘curse of the Charles’ and abdicate to make way for his eldest son, Prince William, to ascend to the Throne with the latter’s wife, as Queen Catherine, alongside him?

I don’t have much time politically for former Labour PM Tony Blair, but he has to be given credit for calling William’s mother, Diana, the ‘People’s Princess’ after her tragic death in the Paris road crash in the late 1990s.

As a life-long Royalist, I have always remained a so-called ‘Diana Loyalist’, believing she was the Queen we never had.

Granted, since Diana’s tragic death, public relations gurus have burned the midnight oil to rebrand the former Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles as a future queen.

Since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, that campaign has been in hyper-drive to ensure that the concept of ‘Queen Camilla’ becomes part of the Royal furniture at Buckingham Palace.

Whilst ardent republicans want to see an end to the Monarchy, some of us so-called ‘Diana Loyalists’ want to see ‘Queen Camilla’ replaced as soon as possible by a Queen Catherine.

The Royal brand of William and Kate has stood the test of time. They have three wonderful children, and Kate has coped admirably with her cancer challenge. They are the future of the Monarchy and the sooner they are given that opportunity to reign, the better.

I don’t wish the current King Charles III any harm, but if he is blessed with the same longevity as his late mother and grandmother, the late Queen Mother, William - like his dad Charles - could be near pension age before he is crowned in the aftermath of Charles’ death.

Put equally bluntly, William should not be waiting on dead man’s shoes before he is handed the Royal crown.

Like it or not, the alleged activities and notoriety of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have placed the Monarchy in a 1930s-style abdication scenario when the then King Edward VIII abdicated to allow him to marry his American divorcee lover Wallis Simpson.

The Royal Family simply cannot afford to hide away in their homes, palaces and castles and pretend to carry on as if nothing has happened. The Firm, as it is affectionately known, needs to take drastic action before any current Labour administration at Westminster passes legislation which reforms the Monarchy into a European-style, lowkey institution.

A King Billy saved the British Monarchy from disaster in the late 17th century. A new King Billy is urgently needed to perform the same saving manoeuvre in the latter years of this decade.  

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

King Billy Needed To Save The Monarchy!

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Ninety Eight

 

A Morning Thought @ 3074

Anthony McIntyre ðŸŽ¥ My daughter recommended we watch this blend of sci-fi and psychological thriller.

She had previously viewed it in the cinema and explained that it was essentially a body horror movie - not a concept I was familiar with until I watched it - that satirically eviscerates the American entertainment industry.

The elixir of youth, much like the Philosopher's Stone of Indiana Jones fame, has for aeons found itself being pursued by a posse of age averse death evaders. The elixir unlike the stone has remained beyond reach although it has not dampened the enthusiasm for the search parties eager to hold back death anxiety.

Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle and puts in a sparkling performance. Acting non-sexual nude scenes at 60 showed a robust character, not in the slightest deterred by her equally naked, and equally brilliant, co-actress Margaret Qually, thirty years her junior. A long time star, age became a hindrance to Elizabeth because of the demands of her boss, Harvey (a telling choice of name). His interest in Elizabeth began to wane as her marketability began to wither. She was replaced as the face of a popular television morning aerobics show. Having lived with fame and face recognition for so much of her life, she was alarmed at the void opening up in front of her, a fame-free future, once Harvey told her that her presence on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was superfluous to requirement. 

Anxious and anguished, not quite ready to walk off the stage, with the termination notice to the fore of her mind, her drive through city streets leads to her finding herself distracted by her image being erased from a billboard. In the second it took her to glance away she lost control of her vehicle. The camera work from inside the car was done with aplomb, causing more than one wince and a gasp in the living room, as Ms Sparkle was thrown around like a rag doll. Suddenly it seemed the light might be going out in her life. 

No more Ms Sparkle was avoided by good luck, which was explained to her by the hospital doctor who fortunately gave her the all-clear before telling her that his wife loved her TV show. Not so fortunately, the male nurse examining her gave her information about The Substance that could change her life. With the sparkle having gone out of her career thanks to the avarice of Harvey, the chance to reignite the flame of fame was too much of an allure. Seemingly on the up . . . so began her descent into Hell.

The Substance is a green liquid that restores youthful vitality but it can only work via the emergence of a new person. A secular version of the biblical myth where a woman is created from a rib, the only concession to feminism lies in the figurative rib from which Sue was created belonging to Elizabeth. The profiteering suppliers of The Substance explain that there are not two people but one. If the viewer can grasp the Catholic theological Blessed Trinity idea they can get their head around Elizabeth and Sue being the same person existing in two bodies.

Success in a cutthroat world inevitably sees someone's throat cut. Failure for somebody is invariably the price of success for someone else. The younger Sue soars while the older Elizabeth sinks. Feast of fame for one, famine of fading for the other, the inevitable internal conflict is set in motion.

The script could have been written by Stephen King, not just because of the horror dimension - while the supernatural is not at work in the film, The Dark Half invites comparisons - but because of the cut throat rat race that defines US capitalism into which King sketched a window with The Running Man, under the pseudonym Richard Bachmann. Parallels may also be found in the sporting world where performance enhancing drugs have at times caused a very corrosive effect on authentic competition. The final part of the two and half hour movie has echoes of Marry Shelley's Frankenstein. A movie, not of the horror genre but which serves up horror nonetheless.

Written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a film of the Me Too era, a pushback against the Harvey ilk of this world who denigrate and destroy in their own rapacious race to the top that sends so many others spiralling to the bottom. Those who are singularly committed to the objectification of women and reduce them to mere chattel are not the heroes of this film. No heroines emerge either, just women crushed by the relentless lust of the male gaze. A sad denouement where Fargeat plants a thought in the minds of her viewers as to how such an ugly industry ever became known as the beauty industry.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

The Substance

Event   ★ A Hands Of Iran Protest will take place tomorrow in Dublin.

Date: 2-March-2026

Time: 1800

Venue: The Spire 


Hands Off Iran

Friendly Atheist ★ A new analysis shows how Republicans are increasingly embracing religious extremism while abandoning constitutional principles.

The Republican Party is rapidly becoming a Christian Nationalist organization, according to a new analysis from PRRI. The polling group found that while about one-third of Americans are “adherents” or “sympathizers” of Christian Nationalism, the number jumps to 56% among Republicans.

It’s a sign that the GOP will continue ignoring the Constitution and church/state separation while doubling down on the false beliefs that we were founded as a “Christian nation” and should be governed by whatever conservative claim are Christian values. I would add that these same people have no problem ignoring the blatant rejection of those values by their own political leaders, whether we’re talking about affairs, corruption, or whatever else Ken Paxton is up to today. And that’s before we even get into how all these people are attempting to brush aside the Epstein-Trump Scandal.

The percentages of Americans who support or reject Christian Nationalism have held relatively steady for the past few years. But because it’s becoming more possible to live in your own reality bubble, we can now see precisely where the extremism is fomenting. 

Christian Nationalism Has Captured The Republican Party

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Ninety Seven

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