Best Of

From a post on Bluesky

"The United States has informed its NATO allies of its decision to cease participation in the planning of future military exercises in Europe.

It is expected to affect exercises that are still in the planning stages or in the conceptual phase.

US will shift focus to the Indo-Pacific region."

Once again, the speed with which this is moving is shocking. Trump at least learned 1 thing from his first administration.

NATO needs replaced now. Only when we know what the alternative is can we work out properly what we need to do.

It makes me pessimistic about my predictions already. This year is going to be far more unstable than I had realised.

I said a couple of days ago that we should stop pretending the US is acting as an ally. I’m becoming increasingly convinced it doesn’t do much of anything towards preventing Trump acting against us, and is very probably counterproductive.

There’s no good reason to openly call him an enemy (whether or not some of us might think that), but rather simply treat the US as a country for now acting only in what it (wrongly) sees as its own interests, which on several rather important matters are completely at odds with our interests.

Trump has no better nature to appeal to - but he does respect strength. Grovelling means you still get told to do what he wants.

FPT

The biggest takeaway for me from the four juries I sat on was that they varied enormously in quality. In fact I came away with the distinct view that if you were a guilty defendant, the stupider the jury, the better your chances of getting away with it.

One juror was so illiterate he couldn't read the oath. In the jury room he just nodded along with the prevailing sentiment which was that most of the jurors just wanted to get home and as a not guilty verdict was the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, he got off. The judge made it clear that he thought this was the wrong verdict, and i am sure he was right.

By contrast, in a much more serious case, it was clear that the entire court thought the defendant would get off, but it was his misfortune to have some very smart people on the jury, some of whom had picked up on things missed by the court. The discussion was detailed, rational and highly responsible. To this day I am certin the guilty verdict was correct, and the defendant was simply unlucky to have so many smart people ruling on his case.

The one serious contentious case with which I am deeply familiar is the A6 murder for which James Hanratty was hanged. There is little doubt that a material contributory factor in the guilty verdict was that the case, unusually, was held at Bedford rather than the Old Bailey. Bedford was close to the scene of the crime and feelings were running high at the time.

I am not saying these examples makes the jury system bad, and I certainly don't have any magic formula for improving it, but the nature of the jury and the way it is selected seems to me a neglected area of study. If we understood more about it, some of the miscarriages we hear of might be avoided.

Ukraine gave up nukes, post-soviet era, in exchange for security guarantees from USA.

UK threw everything it had post- war into the special USA relationship tightly bound on security, intelligence, equipment, policy - even sharing nukes. We gave them airfields and bases and went to war with them against their enemies as in Iraq.

Both betrayed.

But betraying allies is an ancient American tradition - not joining the League of Nations after World War I, which they themselves had insisted on including in the Treaty of Versailles, being willing to fight to the last Brit in World War II until the Japanese attacked them, stabbking us in the back over Suez, then bitching that we didn't back them over Vietnam, cutting and running on the South Vietnamese, and in more recent times, betraying the Kurds (twice), the Afghans and now NATO and the Ukrainians.

They are a faithless and untrustworthy ally. It's what you'd expect from a self-obsessed, insular and ignorant people.

And it makes their occasional bursts of altruistic internationalism, such as the Marshall Plan, all the more exceptional.

Reform civil war continues to escalate:

https://x.com/rupertlowe10/status/1898454825366393311

Nigel Farage needs to take back control of Reform, and sack Zia Yusuf.

Seems Rupert is having second thoughts and hoping the whole thing can be hung around Zia Yusuf.

Nigel.

I have enormous respect for you, but you know that this is an entirely false and poisonous narrative. Why remove the whip before any investigation has even started? Don’t you believe that we are all innocent until proven guilty? Why launch this malicious attack the day after my reasonable concerns were made public?

The timing is suspect, to say the least.

To suggest that my questions came after this vindictive process began is a falsehood. I gave the interview to the Daily Mail on the 25th of February in Westminster. I first received word of the Reform proceedings against me on the 28th of February. On a Friday afternoon from Lee Anderson, with no prior warning. What professionalism.

Honestly, the process has been handled so appallingly. I don’t even know if I remain in the party or not. Amateur is generous.

Asking reasonable questions of Reform structure, policy and communication may be awkward and uncomfortable, but it is entirely necessary. I will continue to do so. Difficult interrogation will only make any party stronger.

As you know, I have tried and tried to have a civilised dinner with you to discuss all of this. You have repeatedly refused. I offered once more today, again no response. This should have ALL happened behind closed doors. As I pushed for, over and over again.

This isn’t about me, or you, or any petty personal differences you may have with me.

This is about our members, our supporters, and our country.

This isn’t about us. It’s about them.

That's very polite of you, William, and I have enormous respect for you, too.

But I'm afraid I've no idea what you're on about.

Can’t argue with any of this.

Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History

https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-six-weeks-in-this-white-house-is-on-its-way-to-being-the-most-corrupt-in-us-history
… I’m a big Boston Red Sox fan. One of the most famous players in Red Sox recent history is Manny Ramirez. Manny Ramirez was a good baseball player, but he had a habit of doing some pretty ridiculous things on the field and off the field that were really detrimental to the team, some really bizarre on-field behavior – cutting off throws from other outfielders before they got to the infield – bizarre off-the-field behavior that disrupted the team. It became so regular that a phrase was adopted among the Red Sox fans: ‘That's just Manny being Manny.’ Over the years it just was accepted that every year Manny Ramirez was going to do a whole bunch of stuff that was really detrimental to the team. And over time, it just kind of became accepted, that that was a fact of life, a way of life with Manny Ramirez. And as time went on, people reacted less hostilely. It barely got noticed in some cases when he was engaged in these detrimental forms of conduct.

“And I tell that story because it stands for kind of a universal concept: when bad behavior gets normalized, it no longer feels like bad behavior. Even if that behavior is hurting people. Today, the world is littered with corrupt governments, governments where the leaders and the really rich men who surround the leaders – the oligarchs – steal from people…

“Vladimir Putin, for instance, has never had a job outside of government, but he's reportedly worth $200 billion. … They've been doing this so openly and brazenly, they're so public in their corruption in Russia, that it's just accepted. It's just mainstream, the fact that Putin and his cronies steal from the Russian people.

“That's what's happening in America today. And it's heartbreaking for me to say this, but in the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption – or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it's happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it's really nothing new.

“But this is not how government works…

It is now.

It may be what is happening. But if government "works" like this, then the system collapses.

If the rule of law has indeed collapsed, then the entire basis of the American economy, from regulation to contract law is compromised.

The result is that US Asset prices fall from AAA reserve currency levels down to A rating price levels: effectively a 40% price fall. Then there is a permanent increase in US structural inflation as a result of a drastically less efficient economy and much higher borrowing costs.

A shock to confidence on that scale ca not be hidden and it is mot hypothetical. The strong rise in the Euro this week tells you that the bond market is putting the US under notice.

Reality will collide with the witless lies of this appalling administration. In the end I could see the Americans putting the whole lot of them against the wall: Trump, Vance, Musk et al.

That could be a wall the Mexicans would pay for…