Best Of

Are we seriously back talking about what “A” customs union, rather than “THE” customs union, looks like in practice?

Ask the Turks what “A” CU looks like, it’s terribly one-sided.

Good morning, everyone.

Mr. Sandpit, easier (and less honest) to try and get us closer and closer to the EU then say "We may as well join seeing as we're already bound by their decisions but currently have no say" than it is to actually make a case for rejoining.

That approach has consistently failed to win over public opinion in Norway, however. But Norway was never foolish enough to volunteer for a damaging separation, and we would have been less foolish to have copied the Norwegian approach from the beginning.

Certainly. But then wankers like Ed Davey and Keir Starmer refused to map anything like that through Parliament when May would have agreed to it and now they are desperately trying to magic up what they could have had if they hadnt been prats.

What makes you think May would have agreed it, since it clearly breached her red lines?

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-governments-negotiating-objectives-for-exiting-the-eu-pm-speech

If she was prepared to agree to a Norwegian approach why the feck didn't she herself propose it? She was after all the Prime Minister.

The only two logical positions in the long term are full fat Rejoin and and full Juche Brexit.

The salami treatment on Brexit of Customs Union, then Single Market are just steps on the way.

In truth, the only two coherent positions during our entire period of trying to join, joining, trying to leave and then leaving the EEC and the EU all the way from Messina to Brexit were, to quote the old song "put your whole self in, your whole self out".

We should EITHER have had nothing to do with the EEC/EU but wished it well and worked from the outside to obtain advantageous trading terms for the UK OR we should have gone in as enthusiastic members, taking on the Euro (renaming it the Crown or Florin perhaps), Schengen and pushing for full political and economic union (welcome to EuroFed).

We wasted more than 60 years on a half-hearted, mean-spirited, rebate obsessed, banana fixated notion of membership because the shadow of WW2 hung over us and we couldn't work out what our relationship with Europe was or should be. We thought we were an Imperial power and Europe needed us more than we needed them. That view was re-enforced by the nostalgia-obsessed media and cultural mores.

Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.

Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.

A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.

You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.

Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.

I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.

Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.

Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.

Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.

As someone who worked in the industry rather more recently than Roger -

The scene you're looking for is the scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just to sell them drugs. Then gets angry. "Don't you understand? I'm just here to sell you more meth."

That is social media in a nutshell.

It's a dopamine hit designed to keep you scrolling for just long enough that the algo can a) learn a bit more about what pushes your buttons and b) can serve you an ad it thinks you will click. And it doesn't care if it pushes the worst shit imaginable on you, all it wants is to keep you scrolling for long enough to sell you that click

I have not used social media in five years and I used to sell it for a living. Take that for what you will.

It's a pretty awful set of services across the industry - and you can understand (for instance) the EU's attempts to regulate/fine or the Aussie teen ban, even if you disagree with the policy detail.

I still haven't found a better news feed than X, but it's a constant struggle to keep it bearable.

The only other thing I use is WhatsApp, which is OK (but crippled) if you turn off notifications completely. Otherwise it's just irritating.

My go-to 'news feed' is PB. Here I am, not long woken up, idly looking to see if anything important has happened. It hasn't, so off back to bed for an hour.

Good morning, everyone.

Are we seriously back talking about what “A” customs union, rather than “THE” customs union, looks like in practice?

Ask the Turks what “A” CU looks like, it’s terribly one-sided.

Good morning, everyone.

Mr. Sandpit, easier (and less honest) to try and get us closer and closer to the EU then say "We may as well join seeing as we're already bound by their decisions but currently have no say" than it is to actually make a case for rejoining.

That approach has consistently failed to win over public opinion in Norway, however. But Norway was never foolish enough to volunteer for a damaging separation, and we would have been less foolish to have copied the Norwegian approach from the beginning.

Certainly. But then wankers like Ed Davey and Keir Starmer refused to map anything like that through Parliament when May would have agreed to it and now they are desperately trying to magic up what they could have had if they hadnt been prats.

I think this mostly shows that successful people invent stories about their past that may -or may not- match reality.

Not really. First, it looks plausible in that the brighter, charismatic kids get to play the leads and do better in life.

And second, you could shuffle most of those parts and it would still look plausible.

But most Josephs will be at state schools and private schools will have to have their share of all the other parts, and yet we know how important the private/state split is in terms of future success, so all those private school shepherds will earn more than those state school Josephs.

Yes but you've got the state school shepherds and the private school Josephs as well, so it is all averaged out.

And one reason private schools do better, even in showbiz, is that (certainly the boarding schools) do so much more drama, with house plays and school plays every few weeks, presumably on the grounds that it keeps them off street corners.

And for many children, the nativity play will be the first taste of that. Learning to project and hold an audience.

I'd imagine that the children who are given the speaking parts are relatively more articulate and confident and that might carry through to adulthood. I played Joseph in a nativity play at school and Pontius Pilate in a Passion Play as an adult. I played him as a harassed bureaucrat which allowed me to draw from my experience as a harassed bureaucrat.

There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?

• Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
  
• It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
  
• What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
  

I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life

Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.

Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.

I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.

[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.

Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.

"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.

The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals

Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.

There's no reference to an innkeeper either.

Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.

The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.

There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.

The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.

The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.

I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.

The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.

All the way to modern times, admittedly now only in more traditional societies, it was common for travellers to travel very light and expect to be fed and put up by strangers, in exchange for either casual chores or simply news of the wider world. This is how the poor travelled, and it only really stopped with the age of mass transport and communication.

It’s something that would seem outlandish to us - the idea of asking a stranger if you could stay the night. But, it features in old novels, and earlier, monasteries were expected to accommodate travellers.

But yes, there were thousands of ways that peasants looked out for each other, in the expectation that this would be reciprocated.

Where we are so different to the past is how individualistic we are, and the way that for a lot of people, the goal is to maximise profit. Whereas, in the past, the goal was to avoid catastrophe.

Labour seeks to ban trail hunting in the New Year

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9y20j259o

I can see no reason for this except spite.

In the words of the Labour manifesto 'it is being used as a smokescreen for the hunting of wild animals' and in fairness this is true. There have been so many examples. Only the other week hunt saboteurs recorded exactly this from a drone - clear hunting of a fox.

The hunts only have themselves to blame for this. It is a shame because a British tradition could have been kept if it had adapted, but they seem incapable of doing so and keeping to the law.

The original ban was done out of spite too and has made it difficult to keep fox numbers down and protect sheep and livestock and pet rabbits etc

They should do zoning for fox hunting. Focus on urban areas.

Plenty of potential demand for hunts here in the South East London suburbs. It seems there’s a fox in every back garden, and another rifling through every food caddy that’s not been tightly clipped shut.

The height of the walls and fences might be a challenge for the horses though.

We have to feed ours every night. It's a sort of protection racket they run. If you don't you end up having to pick up their crap in the back garden every morning.