German Customs Made Secret Messenger Surveillance Permanent Reclaim the Net
Birdwatching Is Good For Your Mental Health. Listening Is Too All About Birds
Gutless Gibney’s fatal flaw of fabricating a false film
Monday, September 21, 2026
MobLand’s second season is pure television crack
MobLand’s second season is
pure television crack
Guy Ritchie directs a stacked cast led by
Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren in a
soap-opera-meets-gangster franchise with polish.
Terry PontikosTV reviewer
MobLand S2, UK, crime-thriller ★★★
Chalk it up to the luck of the Irish. The Harrigan crime dynasty perfectly embodies this expression, which roughly equates to undeserved success through “dumb luck”. This is one of the most ludicrous crime families on television. A mafia with no need for outside enemies, considering the range of Machiavellian plots occurring inside their Cotswolds stronghold. It’s like Succession with shooters. MobLand is back in all its blood-soaked bastardly and betrayal. Episodes are set for weekly release after a premiere double, with the streamer offering up the first four for review.
The family’s led by dangerous nutter Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) and his equally psychotic wife Maeve (Helen Mirren). These two crazed codgers allow Tom Hardy to calmly stride onto centre stage as fixer Harry Da Souza, sorting out their self-inflicted problems. The likes of which remarkably never jeopardised Harrigan supremacy over North London’s criminal underworld – until now. After seeing off rivals, the Stevensons (i.e. mercilessly butchering them all in season one), MobLand’s second season focuses on machinations within the clan, as various players scheme for ascension to Conrad’s throne.
She’s back: Helen Mirren returns as psychotic family matriarch, Maeve Harrigan.
Murderous violence flares early when a routine meeting with the top brass of an affiliated Turkish gang goes haywire at a greyhound track. Conrad feels disrespect from his opposite’s no-show, triggering a wild gunfight in a private box. Meanwhile, Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine) continues to feud with his father while contemplating a move to snatch control of a vast drug empire. As ever, Harry is the chips in the buttie, with loyalties torn between his best pal and career employer.
Harry’s busier than bacteria. At times he babysits five mobiles, a sight to have anyone reaching for the painkillers. His marriage to the mob exacts a destructive toll on his other marriage to Jan (Joanne Froggatt), who’s filing for divorce. Daughter Gina (Teddie Allen) teams with Eddie Harrigan (Anson Boon) in a business shaking down rich YouTubers. Joining the mix is Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon), Conrad’s daughter by another mother, allying with the shadowy American influence-peddler Kat McAllister (Janet McTeer).
Backed by the clout of a US diplomatic role, Kat’s out to crush the Harrigans in response to Harry’s rejection of her employment offer. Also taking a number is new-age hitman Frank Cooper (Johnny Flynn). He’s been unearthed by corrupt, high-ranking police operative Colin Tattersall (Toby Jones), formerly entrenched within the Stevenson cartel. He wants in, approaching Kat to bring Cooper on board as her incursive spearhead. Meanwhile, Conrad secretly undertakes cognition testing. To nobody’s surprise, he’s discovered to be a hothead displaying poor judgment and rash decision-making.
This season wades directly into a pit of past traumas. There’s Kevin’s vengeful retaliation over his mistreatment at the hands of a prison “screw” decades before. Wife Bella (Lara Pulver), Conrad’s former mistress who bore his child/grandchild Eddie, stitches up her own childhood abuser. Seraphina’s closeness to Conrad earns Maeve’s constant scorn, leading her to take the action of an enemy. Eddie continues to be played by his grand-mum/step-mum. We also lurch into murkier incestuous territory as Maeve continues to express herself inappropriately around him.
Created by Ronan Bennett with Guy Ritchie as a director, MobLand made it clear from the start it was less committed to realism or nuance than it was to explosive action, cartoon thuggery and an industrial strength body count. Undoubtedly important to the show’s success is the dream pairing of Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan. The veterans share great chemistry, as evidenced in The Thursday Murder Club, and clearly enjoy inhabiting their dastardly characters. Conrad is an untethered lunatic who’d give the Kray brothers pause for thought in doing business with him. The delightfully demented Maeve is a conniving puppeteer, playing Conrad and Eddie like a pair of sociopathic marionettes.
In a stacked cast Tom Hardy continues to be MobLand’s centrepiece with his quietly menacing mister fixit commanding plenty of screen time. Kevin is more important this season but Paddy Considine is still wasted, spending too long in the background sitting on sofas and scowling in corners. The quiet strength of this season is the inclusion of Johnny Flynn, delivering great humour in the guise of whimsical scooter-riding gun for hire, Frank Cooper. So too, Emmett J. Scanlan as Conrad’s head lackey Paul, who’s always off to the side, comically mumbling cold truths as the family’s madness envelops him.
MobLand is a strange brew. The show suffers from overused genre tropes and plays like a soap opera, with unrealistic scenarios in an over-the-top presentation of cockney crims. Tracking the body count practically calls for an Excel spreadsheet. But the series is also moreish in the same way any soap can be – once viewers have picked sides – and it boasts the action and polish of a top-class gangster franchise. Holding everything together is Hardy. Virtually the only Harrigan hood with the required smarts, Harry is at his most persuasive here, with and without leverage. It’s the gift of the gab – a sure sign that he’s kissed the Blarney Stone.
The best of travel, fashion, cars and more, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our weekly newsletter.
Terry Pontikos is an avowed cinephile who in recent years has turned his focus to premium streaming series. He has worked in major media outlets in Sydney and Hong Kong since the early 1990s.
The Census Bureau Is Overrun With Staffers From a MAGA Think Tank
The Census Bureau Is Overrun With Staffers From a MAGA Think Tank
Wired – “The US Census is home to vast troves of sensitive data on nearly every person living in the country, which is used for apportioning and drawing congressional districts as well as allocating federal funding based on population sizes.
Multiple staffers at a Trump-aligned policy think tank have burrowed their way into the US Census Bureau, where they have access to sensitive data and have contributed to a public report that bolsters conspiracy theories undermining trust in elections ahead of the midterms. In August, the Census Bureau published an anonymously authored reporttitled “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis,” claiming to show that thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 election.
A WIRED investigation revealed that the report appeared to employ faulty methodology, casting its conclusions into doubt, and that two of its authors work for the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank with deep ties to the Trump administration.
Now WIRED has found that the two authors are part of a larger team, made up almost entirely of AFPI members, who have been detailed to the Census Bureau and given access to its data. The Census Bureau is home to vast troves of sensitive data on nearly every person living in the country, which is used for apportioning and drawing congressional districts as well as allocating federal funding based on population sizes.
Experts and Census employees who spoke to WIRED worry that the noncitizen voting report is the first salvo in Census data possibly being used to undermine the results of the upcoming midterms or the 2028 presidential election.
A Census employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity says that there has historically been “nothing close” to what AFPI is doing at the bureau. “Frankly, it’s disrespectful to the institution,” they say. The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to cast doubt on the accuracy of Census data in order to reshape elections.
Earlier this year, WIRED reported that the Department of Commerce, which oversees the bureau, was circulating a rule changethat would eliminate noncitizens from being counted in the Census, a move that could drastically reshape how Congressional districts are drawn. Republicans also took aim at a little-known statistical method called differential privacy that is used to protect the privacy of individual respondents, alleging that it makes the Census count inaccurate in ways that favor Democrats in congressional apportionment..”
Moose on the loose at Warsaw’s main station brings trains to a standstill Notes from Poland. Micael T: “So it is a Putin-moose that sabotage the trains from Poland to Kiev?”
Secret Banking Database Used For Pre-crimeDeeper States
Happy birthday Aga and Ruby
Birthday wishes From Sydney to High Tatras
"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."
~ William Shakespeare
Happy Birthday 🎈 Wishing you a beautiful day and many blessings for the year ahead. 🎂
May your birthdays be the start of a year filled with new opportunities, accomplishments, and endless joy…
From Jozef Imrich and William Shakespeare 🫶
"Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake."
~ Jozef Imrich
"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
~ Lucille Ball
"Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest."
~ Larry Lorenzoni
"Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
~ Jack Benny
"Age is a matter of feeling, not of years."
~ George William Curtis
"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old."
~ Mark Twain
"As men get older, the toys get more expensive."
~ Marvin Davis
"Age is not important unless you're a cheese."
~ Helen Hayes
"You are only young once, but you can be immature for a lifetime."
~ John Grier
"Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional."
~ Chili Davis
When I have a birthday, I take the day off. But when my wife has a birthday, she takes a year or two off."
;-)
21 September 2026
“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
— Zelda Fitzgerald
Sunday, September 20, 2026
What if Elon Musk Was Always Elon Musk?
Elon Musk attacks film-maker behind documentary about him
Is there anything more to know about the world’s richest man? And more importantly, do you want to know it? Elon Musk is such a titanic figure—in both the size and the shipwreck sense—that Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday and heads next to Toronto before opening in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16, doesn’t have enough space to be comprehensive. (Where, for example, is the fact that Musk, according to the book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, bears such an intense antipathy for the number nine that he wouldn’t allow it to appear on Tesla’s website?) And it’s far too long for the casually interested, if there is anyone left who has not yet formed an opinion of this messianic monster. But perhaps it is for those who know that Musk is bad, but not how bad, or who don’t quite grasp how he, and we, got to the point where he became one of history’s most powerful figures, and one of its most unhinged.
Four hours of Musk is oddly compelling
The Alex Gibney documentary presents a power-hungry megalomaniacal con man with a god complex. The Tesla and SpaceX chief is not happy about it.
The documentary details how Elon Musk supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix”. AP
Almost four hours with Elon Musk. That’s Alex Gibney’s proposal.
The filmmaker, once described by Esquire as “becoming the most important documentarian of our time”, has tackled Enron, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, Vladimir Putin and disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Now, he’s turned his eyes to the richest man in history.
The three-hour-and-forty-five minute Musk(plus a 10-minute intermission) hits cinemas in the United States on October 16, but it’s already causing a stir.
The documentary, which spans from Musk’s early Silicon Valley days through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dalliances and Twitter acquisition to his White House ascent, paints the world’s first trillionaire as an emotionally unstable grifter with more power and influence than perhaps any other human who has ever lived.
Gibney pulls no punches, neither in the documentary nor in interviews about it, in which he has called Musk’s power and influence “extremely dangerous to world democracy”.
“What I discovered was that the story of Musk was not a new tech story,” Gibney told reporters in a news conference at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, adding that it was “really the story of an old wine in a new bottle. His story turns out to be the story of the confidence man, the stock pumper. His wealth and power comes from inflated stock, and so I had told that story before with Enron and with Elizabeth Holmes, and so it was a story that was oddly familiar to me.”
As you might expect, Musk is not exactly flattered by the depiction.
“Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind),” he tweeted last week. “He has ZERO integrity. Horrible human.”
Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, sent Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions a letter threatening to file a defamation suit, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The claims centre on a text exchange between Musk and Ashley St. Clair, a former girlfriend with whom he has a child, which is presented in the film.
In the exchange, Musk tells St. Clair he’s feeling more optimistic about the 2024 election, in which he supported President Donald Trump, because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix”. He adds, “I have over 10 thousand lasers in space right now.”
Gibney’s film is long but moves fluidly. It helps that it’s deeply comprehensive, beginning with Musk co-founding Zip2 in 1995 and running through the Department of Defence’s embrace of Grok this year.
The movie doesn’t hit the audience with any atom bombs of new information. Instead, it weaves all the random strings of Musk’s empire and life with which you probably have a vague familiarity – Tesla, SpaceX, his extreme pronatalism, his shifting politics, Grok, Twitter, DOGE, Starlink – into a stark character study of a man who may have once been a true believer in futurism and helping humanity but, as presented by the documentary, has become a power-hungry megalomaniacal con man with a god complex.
Zoë Schiffer, Alex Gibney and Musk’s former girlfriend Ashley St. Clair at the Musk premier at the Venice Film Festival on September 8. Getty
The movie begins with Musk discussing simulation theory, the idea that we’re all actually living in a computer simulation. To explain why he believes this could be true, he points to the rapid advancement of video games from Pong to hyperrealistic, dynamic massively multiplayer online role-playing games that thousands of people around the globe play simultaneously. If we can make that leap in 50 years, he reasons, how could we not have already reached a point of creating a true simulation of life?
When the documentary was announced, before Gibney approached Musk for an interview, the tech titan tweeted: “Gibney is a douche.” You can safely assume he does not participate in the film.
As a work-around, Gibney turned to Musk’s interest in the simulation theory, feeding AI every public statement Musk has made then generating an uncanny, eerie, animated digital avatar of Musk to speak the very words fed into it.
Gibney takes things further, using a video game motif throughout the movie (a nod to Musk’s adoration of gaming). When Musk is making massive cuts throughout the federal government as the head of DOGE, for example, the movie turns into a first-person shooter video game in which Musk wields an animated chainsaw.
Musk’s private (oh, so private) life
The most emotionally fraught aspects of the film come during interviews with Musk’s former romantic partners.
His first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he had six children, says she learnt the term “gaslighting” through their relationship.
Their first child, Nevada, died of sudden infant death syndrome 10 weeks after birth. In November 2022, Musk tweeted: “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat.”
But Justine says that she, in fact, was holding Nevada.
In a shaky voice, Justine says it wasn’t uncommon for Musk to bend reality and present it as truth, to criticise her, to try to control her. While dancing on their wedding night, Musk told her: “I am the alpha in this relationship.”
“He would invent the arena of the conversation and knock you out of it,” she says, adding that their marriage was “war, peace, war, peace”.
“I am your wife, not your employee,” she recalls telling him again and again. Then, she recalls his response: “If you were my employee, I would fire you.”
According to St. Clair, the former MAGA influencer with whom Musk has a child, Musk tries desperately to keep his private life private. Musk offered her $US15 million and $US100,000 a month for 21 years to sign a non-disclosure agreement requiring her not to share the paternity of her son Romulus with anyone except Romulus himself.
Musk first approached her via Twitter, which she says is not unusual for him. She says she’s since heard from many other young women whom Musk approached on Twitter with the offer to donate his sperm to them in his ardent pronatalist attempt to populate the world with his offspring.
“It’s like a Gatling gun of sperm in his DMs,” she says.
The musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, also briefly appears in the documentary. While they were having their second child together, Musk secretly had twins with colleague Shivon Zilis via in vitro fertilisation.
Grimes and Musk later had a custody battle over their three children, whom Grimes claimed he took from her.
One of Musk’s goals, the documentary posits, is to have as many children as possible. He texted St. Clair he wants to create “a legion of children before the civil war”.
In a voice-over, Gibney says there are 14 known children of Musk’s but probably many more. Musk has built a compound in Austin for the children and their mothers.
His thinking, according to tech journalist Kara Swisher: “I have superior genes, and I need to procreate.”
Musk’s parents also appear in the documentary. His father, Errol, it should be noted, told The Sunin 2022: “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.” He was defending having a second child with his stepdaughter. (You read that correctly.) Errol describes his son’s childhood as one rife with bullying and beatdowns.
His mother, Maye, meanwhile describes a chaotic household in which Errol would tell her three times a day how stupid and ugly she was, before occasionally beating her.
‘Skilled inventor of his own value’
One of Gibney’s tricks as a filmmaker is showing how Musk presents his businesses and accomplishments before showing the reality of them.
“He was a skilled inventor of his own value,” Gibney says in voice-over.
One of the film’s lengthier subjects focuses on Tesla, showing several incongruities between public statement and fact.
During one presentation, Musk claims to have solved the biggest hurdle electric cars face – a limited battery life – by creating stations that quickly swap out the almost 500-kilogram battery for another. The film then cuts to the only actual station that was built, a pilot one in Harris Ranch, California.
Gibney’s main interest in Tesla, though, is Musk’s frequent claims that the cars could simply drive themselves. He shows multiple clips of Musk saying you can play video games or take a nap and let the car drive. He shows the famous Paint It Black video, which supposedly demonstrated this technology, only to have a former Tesla engineer admit he was in the car writing code on the fly to make it work – and the video still required editing.
To save money, the film adds, Tesla used cameras instead of the advanced lidar sensors to guide the autopilot. The film then presents gut-wrenching footage of fatal crashes, which it alleges were caused by autopilot.
So far, faulty autopilot has allegedly caused more than 60 deaths. Details of most cases are not known because Tesla settled with most of the victims’ families.
Musk’s shift to the right
Throughout the movie, we watch as Musk reverses previously held positions when it can benefit him, such as his flip from stark AI sceptic who believes it will exterminate humanity (if it doesn’t keep us around as pets) to one of the loudest pro-AI voices out there who has integrated his chatbot Grok into the US military.
For most of his time on the public stage, Musk was nonpolitical. In one clip, he says he’s socially liberal and economically in the centre. Then came the pandemic.
“COVID is when some switch got flipped in his brain,” says neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris, who was close with Musk until they fell out after Musk began tweeting that “the coronavirus panic is dumb”.
Musk became one of the loudest critics of lockdown, reopening a Tesla factory in Alameda County despite its lockdown rules. Roughly 450 cases of COVID-19 were subsequently reported.
Meanwhile, the government opened several investigations into Musk and his companies. The documentary argues this was the real reason behind his embrace of Trump: to shut those down.
“If Kamala Harris wins, his goose is cooked,” Swisher says. “His only choice was helping Trump and Trump would leave him alone.”
Or, as Tucker Carlson told him before the election: “If he loses, man, you’re f---ed, dude.”
“If he loses, I’m f---ed,” Musk responds.
This barely scrapes the surface of Musk, a triumphant work of documentary that seeks to answer a question St. Clair poses: “What is Elon actually building? What are his goals?”
There’s Twitter/X. There’s SpaceX. There’s DOGE. There’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development and the global fallout. There are lawsuits claiming Grok is used to create child porn. There’s Starlink. There’s the way it’s all interconnected.
Gibney doesn’t end with a conclusion, instead allowing the audience to decide for themselves what to make of this almost mythical figure.
For her part, though, St. Clair has decided: “Elon is a nuke.”
Washington Post
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)