When someone knows they've created lies and a false narrative about you, it doesn't bring them peace; it brings them a shoulder to have to keep looking over, a guilty conscience, and fear that the truth about who they really are and what they did will eventually make its own way out.

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham has announced five "everyday fixes" ahead of the Budget 1. Carer's Allowance will be changed so carers no longer lose their entire benefit when they earn over the limit - instead, their support will reduce by £1 for every extra £1 they earn 2. Import tariffs will be removed on more than 100 products, including baked beans, chocolate and gherkins, to save households up to £21 on their food shop a year 3. Tax-free mileage rates for workers using their own cars will be made permanent at 55p per mile for the first 10,000 miles, with the rate for additional miles rising from 25p to 35p 4. Parental pay will be extended to over 150,000 more parents a year, including self-employed fathers and partners 5. Hundreds more Post Office drop boxes will be rolled out to save people queueing at branches

It's a bit of a dick move - running away to leave those behind to deal with the consequences! #ThisCityIsOurs

Late one evening in 2003, Emma Thompson sat alone in her London flat, surrounded by the wreckage of a very public divorce The press had been relentless. Her marriage to Kenneth Branagh had ended amid scandal, and the woman who'd won an Oscar for bringing Jane Austen's words to life couldn't find any of her own. Then came a knock at the door. Alan Rickman stood there holding a bottle of wine and nothing else—no advice, no pity, no expectations. He walked in, sat down, and stayed through the night. He didn't ask her to explain. He didn't tell her it would be okay. He just sat with her in the darkness, offering the rarest gift one human can give another: silent, judgment-free presence. "You saved me without trying," Thompson later wrote to him. "And that's the kind of love I trust most." Their friendship had begun years earlier during a 1980s stage production, when Thompson met a man whose fierce gaze and commanding silence intimidated most people. But she saw past the intensity to something tender underneath. "I recognized a fellow creature," she said, "one who felt deeply but rarely said as much." By the time they filmed "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995, their bond had deepened into something rare in Hollywood—a friendship built on creative trust and emotional safety. While Thompson juggled the impossible pressure of starring in and adapting a beloved classic, Rickman quietly anchored her. "Alan had a way of being in the room that made you feel you belonged there too," she remembered. What made their connection extraordinary wasn't grand gestures or public declarations. It was the accumulation of small, sacred moments. The long conversations about betrayal and forgiveness during "Love Actually." The way he never demanded she be strong when she was breaking. The trust that allowed complete vulnerability without fear. Then, years later, Rickman fell ill. For a long time, he told almost no one about his cancer diagnosis. But Thompson knew. She noticed how he tired more easily, how his already quiet nature turned more introspective. One afternoon during a charity film shoot, he finally told her. They stood in silence for several moments. "Alright," she said simply. "Then we walk through this together." In those final years, Rickman opened up in ways he never had before—sharing memories, regrets, and hopes with the one person he trusted completely. Thompson told him she had loved him from the beginning, though they'd never crossed the lines of friendship. He laughed. "You would've ruined me." "No, Alan," she replied. "I would've healed you." When Rickman died in 2016, Thompson released a letter calling him "the truest of friends." Their bond had never been about celebrity or performance. It had been real, raw, and sacred—a story written in glances, in trust, in the knowledge that some people don't come into your life to dazzle you, but to hold a steady light. Thompson keeps one of his handwritten notes tucked in her wallet: "Always speak the truth. It costs less." And she still visits their favorite café, orders two teas, and talks to him like he's still listening—because the truest friendships never really end. They just change form, becoming something even more permanent: memory transformed into grace, loss transformed into gratitude, and silence transformed into the loudest kind of love.

People know when they've wronged you. But those same people often create a story in their minds to justify their actions. They do this to ease their guilt. It's not that they don't realize the truth, it's that they're so aware of it that they've convinced themselves otherwise.

Gossip is one of the highest forms of witchcraft. You don't need spells or rituals when you can plant a lie in someone's mind and watch them spread it like it's the fucking truth. Get enough people believing the same story about someone, and suddenly a false narrative becomes their reputation. That's how powerful words are. People will swear they know you when all they really know is what someone else told them.

Adult bullying is far more calculated than people realize. It is destroying someone's reputation with lies, turning people against them, humiliating them in public, deliberately excluding them, and withholding information to watch them fail. It is knowing exactly how to hurt someone while making it look like they are the problem. And some of the worst bullying happens among fully grown adults who should know better

At some point in your life, someone will hurt you deeply and never acknowledge what they did. They may never apologise, take accountability or understand the damage they caused. And one of the hardest things you’ll have to learn is that you can’t keep putting your healing in the hands of the person who hurt you. You might spend months trying to understand how they could hurt you and carry on as though nothing happened. You might wait for the day they finally recognise your pain and give you the acknowledgment you deserved all along. But you can’t put your life on hold waiting for someone else to develop the self-awareness to understand what they did to you. Their refusal to take accountability does not make your pain any less real and their inability to apologise does not mean you have to keep carrying what happened. Moving on means accepting that you may never get the apology you deserve. You do not need their permission to make peace with something they never had the courage to own.

Today's front page 📰

Based on: avaresearch.com/files/Unskil…

This paper answers why confident idiots run the world. Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy. It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception. And the results are wild. participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile. they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence. the paper revealed a brutal paradox: the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain. if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing. this creates a dangerous systemic loop. the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions. meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse. top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else. they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add. we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence. the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't. the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.

A billionaire calling a vulnerable minority "elitist" oh the irony

my biggest hater is someone I've helped for free