Best Of

This is such woke nonsense and why we need the BBC.

ITV to screen in-game ad breaks for first time during rugby’s Six Nations

Twenty-second adverts to fill right half of screens

Broadcaster mulling over repeating move for World Cup

ITV will screen in-game commercials for the first time during Thursday’s Six Nations Championship opener between France and Ireland at Stade de France. The broadcaster’s new rights deal includes the option to air two split-screen adverts before a scrum is set in each half of every match of the Six Nations, the Guardian has learned.

ITV is understood to have agreed in-game advertising deals with two major brands, with the screen to be divided in two so viewers do not miss any commentary or live action. The commercials will fill the right half of the screen and last around 20 seconds, with live pictures continuing on the left.

Split-screen in-game advertising has been used by TV networks in the United States for several years and is being trialled by RTE in the Irish national broadcaster’s racing coverage in Ireland.

If the Six Nations experiment is a success , there is a possibility ITV could sell in-game commericals for its coverage of this summer’s World Cup, when there all matches will feature a three-minute water break in the middle of each half to help players cope with the extreme heat.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/feb/04/itv-in-game-ad-breaks-first-time-rugby-six-nations-television?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

This is the sort of thing that makes gridiron unwatchable.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is one of the good guys. He just tweeted this. I make no apologies for its length. Everyone in the world should read it


The images emerging now from Iran of young people, older people, boys and girls, who were murdered in the last few weeks by the Iranian Islamic dictator, the Islamic Corps of Revolutionary Guards, Basij militia and imported killers from Iraq, are heartbreaking but also enraging.

Some depict beautiful people at play, at the gym, dancing, on motorbikes; some makeshift morgues full of bodies; some streetscenes where killers shoot down unarmed protesters; and many show families opening bodybags to find their dead children shot in the head; others discover bodies of protesters wounded then executed in hospital beds and particularly women with uteruses removed or other horrors to conceal brutal rapes... Many are not young but it looks like the slaughter of the best and brightest of Iran Gen Z. Ive tried to repost these here.

I have been contacted by people in Iran (who weirdly read my books in pirated Farsi editions) who manage to come online in various ways and they beg me to keep posting these images and faces and keep talking about them. Embarrassingly they thank me just for doing this! That is why i am writing this now. We must keep going and keep doing so.

The numbers killed are astonishing: based on sources within the murderous dictatorship, it may be as many as 36000 were murdered just in the first days of the terror 8/9 January and more later - making it likely that 40,000 is a horribly plausible estimate.

This makes this event the most greatest massacre in modern Iranian history by far, the greatest single event slaughter in modern MIddle Eastern history since 1900 - along with the Assad's liquidation of an entire town, site of Islamist insurgents, Hama, in 1982 when around 30,000 were killed. Both of them not taking place in wars but in cold blood - and this Iranian atrocity being far more terrible since none of the protesters were armed.

We live in a time of egregious comparisons to the Holocaust when the Holocaust is repellently abused and minimized by cynical cretins - radiohosts, podders, politicians- to criticize anything from vaccination to ICE raids. But here is a comparison that stands in its scale and horror: in size and horror this does resemble the two days of Babi Yar near Kiev in Sept 1941 where 33,000 Jews were killed. It is also worth pointing out that an entire progressive movement arose against the autocracy of the Shah.

And his was an autocracy. But in his forty year one reign, only around 3000 people were killed, mainly in the last year before his downfall.

It is very striking that the UN has barely commented on thiis…

https://x.com/simonmontefiore/status/2018630202482397222?s=46

He goes on in that vein. Excoriating the “progressives”

The UN Security Council is subject to Chinese and Russian vetoes on any serious action.
https://unwatch.org/after-security-council-meeting-balks-on-iran-30-ngos-demand-unhrc-urgent-session/

Those two countries are not exactly progressives.

There's only one country with the power to intervene against the murderous Iranian regime, and it's currently sending Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate with them.

But Monteviore is essentially correct; it is not hyperbole to compare the Iranian regime with that of Stalin at Katyn for example.
(The Holocaust comparison is problematic, since it was different in kind.)

He is and always has been an arch Zionist. If you support Netanyahu's work in Gaza he's your man

That's perhaps what Leon meant by "one of the good guys"?

SSMontefiore is really not an arch-Zionist. Roger is, however, some weird creepy self hating Jew that loathes Israel, and therefore supports Iran, or at least doesn't care what Iran does to its own people, because Iran is anti-Israel so Iran must be good

Quite perverse

You are beginning sound a lot like how they march with Israel flags in Northern Ireland, but anti Israel in Republic of Ireland!

Surely it’s fair to not like what Netanyahu’s regime have done and not like what Iranian regime have done, without making us a supporter of the other side? We really don’t have to pick one side or the other on this, just because are usual antagonists have piled in on the other side. That’s soooo immature.

Sudan conflict is a very different thing - it’s geopolitical land and power grab rather than localism fighting for land and freedom. Foreign fighters signed up as mercenaries killing and displacing locals on behalf of regimes far away. A bit like the thirty years war in Europe.

Billie Eilish might have lost the mid-terms for the Democrats.

https://x.com/cspan/status/2018801306731749705

.@SenTedCruz: "Are we right now on stolen land?"

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: "I have no idea of the history of this land."

Warner Bros. Discovery exec Bruce Campbell: "Nor do I."

Cruz: "That speaks volumes...that neither of you are willing to say 'hell, no.'"

While I think Billie Eilish is great, I doubt her comments are going to have much electoral impact.

But she's right. The US is all stolen land.

Could you not make that argument everywhere though? Is there anywhere that the native population has not been displaced? And what of man? Why does he have right of dominion over nature in lands where there was no man? (Out of Africa and all that?)

The Falkland Islands were uninhabited until the British got there. The Falkland Islanders are the true native (human) population of the islands!

All of the world has seen population movements and changes, sure, but generally you see a mix of continuity and change, so the native population might not be displaced, even while other populations are also moving in. North America saw a near total replacement of one population with another in the modern era, which is less common, although equally true of, say, Australia.

We are all Tanzanians. We all come from the Olduvai Gorge.

Actually that’s not quite as certain as it was. We may have multiple origins in Africa. We may even have multiple origins worldwide

Out of Africa has long been in opposition to a multiple origins theory, even back when I was first reading about Lucy and all. We will never know. At some point I suspect waves of our ancesters left Africa, then lived in isolation for millenia and diverged to some extent from other hominids and then these populations encountered each other again.

Why will we never know?! Quite an odd remark

Aren't you a scientist?

Yes there are things that are maybe beyond our ken. The true nature of the multiverse, whatever

But I am sure we are capable of determining our own ancestry

I think the information just doesn't exist. Think how many humans and then hominids have lived over the last few millions of years. And then how many became fossils that we can study. Think how many artefacts would have been created and how few would be found. We can do a lot with DNA analysis and looking at things such as mitochondrial DNA, but ultimately I think there will not be enough information.

Doesn't mean we should stop looking and asking the questions.

Billie Eilish might have lost the mid-terms for the Democrats.

https://x.com/cspan/status/2018801306731749705

.@SenTedCruz: "Are we right now on stolen land?"

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: "I have no idea of the history of this land."

Warner Bros. Discovery exec Bruce Campbell: "Nor do I."

Cruz: "That speaks volumes...that neither of you are willing to say 'hell, no.'"

While I think Billie Eilish is great, I doubt her comments are going to have much electoral impact.

But she's right. The US is all stolen land.

No it is absolutely not all stolen land.

Much of the land was not previously inhabited, so who was it stolen from?

And many Native American tribes willingly sold land to settlers. How is purchased land stolen?

Some was stolen. All is just nonsense.

What parts of the US were not previously inhabited? OK, maybe bits of Alaska.

Yes, you are right some plots of land were willingly sold to settlers, although most deals were coercive or the tribes and settlers had very different ideas over what rights were being sold.

So, the US is mostly stolen land.

Also, the whole idea that you can simply rock up to a piece of uninhabited land and claim it as yours seems something of a cultural invention.

The whole concept of ownership is something of a cultural intervention.

If you can't own something nobody else owns, then what exactly can you own?

Land stands out as something a bit different because, in principle, anything* else can be produced in sufficient quantity that everyone can own a copy. But land ownership is strictly a zero-sum deal.

* You might counter that not everyone can own a painting by Van Gogh, but this is an interesting example because everyone can own a high-quality print of a Van Gogh - which has pretty much the visual impact of the original - but we've elevated the value of the original so that people can feel good about owning something others cannot.

Billie Eilish might have lost the mid-terms for the Democrats.

https://x.com/cspan/status/2018801306731749705

.@SenTedCruz: "Are we right now on stolen land?"

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: "I have no idea of the history of this land."

Warner Bros. Discovery exec Bruce Campbell: "Nor do I."

Cruz: "That speaks volumes...that neither of you are willing to say 'hell, no.'"

While I think Billie Eilish is great, I doubt her comments are going to have much electoral impact.

But she's right. The US is all stolen land.

No it is absolutely not all stolen land.

Much of the land was not previously inhabited, so who was it stolen from?

And many Native American tribes willingly sold land to settlers. How is purchased land stolen?

Some was stolen. All is just nonsense.

Which bits of America were uninhabited?

You have to be careful about the accounts from earlier settlers. They had an interest in claiming that the natives weren't cultivating the land, because that was the legal basis on which they were allowed to claim it.

I'm not sure that the land sales were necessarily willing. More a matter of accepting the inevitable.

Large areas had no people. Archeology has failed to find any evidence of people there.

In other parts, diseases bought by settlers spread through the locals far ahead of any exploration parties of locals. So by the time the settlers turned up, everyone was dead or moved on.

This is not to diminish what happened. But “popular culture” is wrong - in both directions.