Best Of

So, it begins.

The UK must prepare for an exodus of US citizens seeking shelter.

I am not joking.

These academics are all experts on the nazi. They know what they are seeing.



"Three prominent critics of President Donald Trump are leaving Yale’s faculty — and the United States — amid attacks on higher education to take up positions at the University of Toronto in fall 2025.

Philosophy professor Jason Stanley announced this week that he will leave Yale, while history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married, decided to leave around the November elections. The three professors will work at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy."

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/03/27/three-prominent-yale-professors-depart-for-canadian-university-citing-trump-fears/

Perhaps the NHS will also need extra funding for mental health services for people affected by TDS.

Why? What drugs have you been prescribed for it?

I saw Mr Beer today

That's genuinely his name. The first time I knocked on his door was a very hot summer day. I told him that I got thirsty every time I delivered his mail; he immediately grabbed a bottle of Ramsbury Gold from his beer fridge in the porch and told me to quench my thirst with it when I'd finished work

He also gave me beer for Christmas. So when I started brewing beer, I wanted Mr Beer's endorsement. I gave him a bottle a couple of weeks back, and saw him for the first time since this afternoon

He loved the beer I'd given him, so I gave him a bottle of our latest batch. He gave me a box of Camden Hells lager in return, and said my beer was much better

I think I have a thumbs-up from Mr Beer

With only a little editing this would make vol 48 of the Mr Men series of books I read to my four year old grandson.

Perhaps there should be a grown ups version? Mr Beer, Mr Flaneur, Mr Leon, Mr Cokehead, Mr Alco, Mr Lech, Mr Toad, Mr Liar, Mr Implacable, Mr Gay, Mr Vance, Mr Benefits, Mr Rizz and so on.

Just listened to the Today podcast where Nick and Amol interview Dr James Orr, who is Vance's intellectual apologist in the UK. Extraordinary in two ways: Orr, who is bright and clever was clearly delusional about his friend and what is occurring as USA descends into a police state; and the interviewers, by asking several long questions at a time allowed him to evade all hard issues, which Orr did outstandingly well.

Nothing about Orr's analysis made sense of the Trumpian/Vance wish to absorb friendly sovereign territory - Canada and Greenland - into the USA, and Orr was allowed to evade the issue, and many others.

I've listened and I found the interview to be extraordinarily soft, and notable for the things left out.

No hard questions about Barr's own positions - he is an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and something between a conservative evangelical and a fundamentalist (I have not heard enough to discern just where he stands). People with fairly fixed positions can often be very perceptive analysts of positions they do not hold - see some of the often Far Left analysis of the positions of democratic parties.

And they did not even tackle him on eg Vance's Munich Speech being full of fabrications.

It is interesting that Orr attempts to position David Frum as not being conservative, the 'NatCon view' being that Frum's more internationalist conservatism, which Orr positions as Neocon, is an historical dead end.

Orr calls Vance "an old fashioned realist, that is to say an American Palmerston. He does not believe that there are eternal allies, only eternal interests. There is a ruthless pragmatism."

He allots Vance's ideological formation to National Conservatism in the late 2010s, and Orr met him at that type of conference over 6 or 7 years. He frames it as Nat Con giving a framework for Trumpism.

For more, here is Orr on "Family, Faith, Flag, Freedom" at NatCon 2023. To me he has something of both Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton about him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQrZPvapJQ

and here is a piece for background about how he was converted to Christianity by reading a Greek New Testament.

https://justinbrierley.beehiiv.com/p/conversion-classicist-reading-greek-new-testament-led-james-orr-christ

Vance and Orr don’t understand “realism” in foreign policy.

They assume it’s all about screwing other nations over, for immediate advantage, whilst ignoring the long term advantages to being known as a good actor.

WTAF???

@NOELreports

🇺🇸 Fox News host Jesse Watters: “We don’t need friends. If we have to burn some bridges with Denmark to take Greenland, so be it. We’re big boys. We dropped bombs on Japan, and now they’re our ally. America isn’t handcuffed by history.”

https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1905927108712386791

Time to batten down the hatches. If our principal ally has gone rogue we neen a new one. China or the EU. I'd prefer either to Trump's America

You can't despise Trump more than I do, but to suggest what America under Trump is doing is as bad as what China is doing to the Uighers and Tibetans, or indeed the people of Hong Kong, is simply nonsensical. Cosying up to China to distance ourselves from America would be like trying to bargain with a rattlesnake to take on an enormous blundering elephant.

Perhaps a better analogy is a rattlesnake living quietly resting under a rock or an out of control elephant with a red hot poker shoved up its bum

You think China is 'resting quietly under a rock?' In what way?

My knowlege of China stretches to a book and a documentary by Shirley Maclean and three good friends who now live and work there. The three I know personally two English and one French who are all successful and don't know each other wax lyrical about the country as did Shirley Maclean. America I know well and enough to know it's become a pretty dislikable place

I work for many Chinese clients and have worked for Chinese owned companies in education for many years.

And either your friends are mad, or they're scared.

You think Trump is a gangster? Xi makes Trump look like the Dalai Lama.

You think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bad? What's going on in Xinjiang makes that look like a moderately quiet Friday night in Skegness.

You want to cosy up to China? Madness. Simple madness. America under Trump is unreliable, corrupt as hell, violent and becoming more dystopian by the second - but it has a long way to fall before it is China.

Even if Thames Water isn't fully nationalised - and to be blunt it should be - it is surely high time and long overdue that the government looked at the sort of debt for equity swap they did with RBS and HBOS.

This is just ridiculous.

It absolutely is. WTF should the water customers of Thames have to pay for a wrong call on interest rates by people who have done very nicely indeed out of it to date? Its outrageous.

Tens of billions have been sucked out of customers bank accounts and we get absolutely fuck all in return. The rivers are still polluted and the beaches still have raw sewage (a polite way of saying shit and piss) pumped into the sea on a daily basis even without rain causing overflows. Zero investment, tens of billions in leverage and tens of billions paid out in dividends.

I'm a pretty right wing capitalist but the one area which makes me a raging lefty is the water industry. Bankrupt it all and bar any previous owner of any water company from owning UK infrastructure. They need to be turned into forced sellers of anything else they own too, literal fucking parasites sucking the blood out of the country.