Best Of

Off topic.
I read PB most days. It’s been ages since I have commented on PB. However:
@Luckyguy1983 recently commented that:
“Burnham's 'clean air zone' in Manchester is a black spot on his reputation.”
Can I ask @Luckyguy1983 what is wrong with trying to improve air quality?
Air pollution caused by vehicle emissions is a disaster for asthmatics and people with respiratory illness.
Does anyone remember Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah?
Google summary. “The case of Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah stands as a pivotal example of how vehicle pollution can lead to asthma-related deaths. Ella, a nine-year-old girl, tragically passed away due to asthma exacerbations caused by air pollution from road traffic. Her inquest revealed that air pollution, particularly from traffic emissions, was a significant contributory factor to her asthma and death.”
I am hugely in favour of low emission zones and attempts to improve air quality. (Wife and I have an EV.)
I have taken asthma medication for almost all of my life, but I don’t have the most serious type. I have only been hospitalised once and that was about 45 years ago.
According to google there are about four asthma deaths in the UK each day.

You have missed the point. Burnham caved on Manchester's clean air zone.

He has missed the point, and so have you.

The clean air zone has come up as a negative (trying to implement it, not caving on it, which shows wisdom if not courage), one of not very many, on the doorsteps of Makerfield. That prepares the ground for Burnham to be portrayed as on the side of green zealotry.

As for Moanrs post, it is dreadfully sad that the young girl died, but she died from asthma. If someone's asthmatic condition means that them being in an area of high road traffic aggravates their condition to a potentially lethal extent, their parents, assisted where possible by the State, should move them somewhere different. The whole city cannot be turned on its axis because of one person's health needs - that is absurd. It is an even more perverse version of locking everyone up to protect the old and unfit during Covid. And it happens for similar reason - giving national power to single interest campaigns and quangos, who can then introduce wreak damaging economic and social havoc on everyone to pursue their single issue goal with no consideration for the wider implications.

Lovely MAGA take. These are the people Farage and Badenoch want us to align to.

There is a MUCH stronger case to be made for invading the UK, toppling its tyrannical government, and liberating its people than for pretty much any regime change war (to include Iran) over the past 30 years.

https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/2067278942545859067#m

Why won’t Farage and Badenoch stand up for Britain?

You kind of hope Badenoch is mixed up in this kind of commentary through being brainwashed - see for example her Education Secretary as Gestapo Officer and Energy Secretary as murderous Nigerian dictator comments - but Farage is borderline traitor in his embracing of these narratives. As well as being a generally immoral individual.

Walsh is a good example of one of the types of accounts you should block or mute on X in order to render it usable.

FPT

Good luck to Andy Burnham today.

We need somebody who can take on Reform and prevent them getting power.

Starmer is clearly not up to that task.

You reckon Burnham is ?

I hope he is but I just think he’s a more charismatic version of Starmer.

I don't think he's up to it. But Starmer has got to go.

Starmer is herpes.

Burnham is syphilis.

You don't really want either, but if you have to choose...

A mantra in my life is that there is a cure for syphilis but there's no cure for regret.

That cheery Christian existentialist Kierkegaard points out that there is no cure for regret because the moment we make a choice we wonder for all time what would have been if we had made the other one. Robert Frost puts it best:


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

That's a funny one for me - I can spend ages agonising over a choice and change my mind at the last moment. But once the decision is made it's not something I revisit or feel regret over. My wife really bugs me on this sometimes: "we should have..." or "if only...", but even with hindsight, you can never really know how those other paths would have turned out.

I'm sure I've made plenty of bad decisions. My life doesn't look like a straight path from A to B, much more like someone blundering around without a map. But I'm happy where I've ended up and changing any of those decisions would put me somewhere else (and quite possibly I'd never have met my wife - our paths only crossed briefly, possibly due to some of my bad decisions).

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig sets this out quite brilliantly.

Or, as Seneca put it somewhat earlier:
“It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants, but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.”

Off topic.
I read PB most days. It’s been ages since I have commented on PB. However:
@Luckyguy1983 recently commented that:
“Burnham's 'clean air zone' in Manchester is a black spot on his reputation.”
Can I ask @Luckyguy1983 what is wrong with trying to improve air quality?
Air pollution caused by vehicle emissions is a disaster for asthmatics and people with respiratory illness.
Does anyone remember Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah?
Google summary. “The case of Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah stands as a pivotal example of how vehicle pollution can lead to asthma-related deaths. Ella, a nine-year-old girl, tragically passed away due to asthma exacerbations caused by air pollution from road traffic. Her inquest revealed that air pollution, particularly from traffic emissions, was a significant contributory factor to her asthma and death.”
I am hugely in favour of low emission zones and attempts to improve air quality. (Wife and I have an EV.)
I have taken asthma medication for almost all of my life, but I don’t have the most serious type. I have only been hospitalised once and that was about 45 years ago.
According to google there are about four asthma deaths in the UK each day.

You have missed the point. Burnham caved on Manchester's clean air zone.

He has missed the point, and so have you.

The clean air zone has come up as a negative (trying to implement it, not caving on it, which shows wisdom if not courage), one of not very many, on the doorsteps of Makerfield. That prepares the ground for Burnham to be portrayed as on the side of green zealotry.

As for Moanrs post, it is dreadfully sad that the young girl died, but she died from asthma. If someone's asthmatic condition means that them being in an area of high road traffic aggravates their condition to a potentially lethal extent, their parents, assisted where possible by the State, should move them somewhere different. The whole city cannot be turned on its axis because of one person's health needs - that is absurd. It is an even more perverse version of locking everyone up to protect the old and unfit during Covid. And it happens for similar reason - giving national power to single interest campaigns and quangos, who can then introduce deeply damaging economic and social havoc on everyone to pursue their single issue goal with no consideration for the wider implications.

Incrementally increasing standards for the environment have been one of the great successes of the late 20th and earlier 21st century.

The bastard who murdered little Preston has been given a full life sentence.

Shouldn't Reform and their friends be demanding white school teachers are vilified across the nation?

Or the banning of adoption by gay men?

That might be quite a likely demand from a hard of thinking politician I would have thought.

The bigger questions need to be asked at the hospital where he had several admissions in a very short space of time.

I have looked in detail at the timeline and with hindsight it is easy to condemn. However the key potential error is the broken elbow on visit three. This seems highly problematic. Lady Brook is not happy. I believe she has lots of questions of medical and social worker staff.

Varley's evil and graphic sexual abuse is beyond contempt. I don't believe a general extrapolation should be made because Varley was either, white, male, a teacher or gay.

Clearly not. But the failure to spot the warning signs will need to be looked at.

My three year old has had a few instances taken to the local out of hours medical service (usually ear infections plus temperatures) and I worried every time about getting on the list as 'parents keep bringing child in'. When my son was a very small baby and we had the routine social worker visits on one occasion I said I was surprised that my son had not had a motion for a couple of days and I asked about this. The social worker gave me a look and asked why I was asking, with me getting the impression that she was suspicious that I had done something. I explained that he was my only child so it was all new to me.

My nephew had his children removed by a children's court by an incompetent social worker after one visit to hospital

As a result I cannot understand how this happened in this case.

In the case of baby P, Shoesmith was obsessed with punishing someone for child abuse.

The person in question was a young social worker who, after a tirade of abuse from a teenager, shouted back. Once.

A big, fat file was opened on this terrible case.

At the same time, the warnings from the same young social worker that baby P was being gradually battered to death, over months, were ignored.

Same shit, different arseholes.

The bastard who murdered little Preston has been given a full life sentence.

Shouldn't Reform and their friends be demanding white school teachers are vilified across the nation?

Or the banning of adoption by gay men?

That might be quite a likely demand from a hard of thinking politician I would have thought.

The bigger questions need to be asked at the hospital where he had several admissions in a very short space of time.

I have looked in detail at the timeline and with hindsight it is easy to condemn. However the key potential error is the broken elbow on visit three. This seems highly problematic. Lady Brook is not happy. I believe she has lots of questions of medical and social worker staff.

Varley's evil and graphic sexual abuse is beyond contempt. I don't believe a general extrapolation should be made because Varley was either, white, male, a teacher or gay.

Clearly not. But the failure to spot the warning signs will need to be looked at.

My three year old has had a few instances taken to the local out of hours medical service (usually ear infections plus temperatures) and I worried every time about getting on the list as 'parents keep bringing child in'. When my son was a very small baby and we had the routine social worker visits on one occasion I said I was surprised that my son had not had a motion for a couple of days and I asked about this. The social worker gave me a look and asked why I was asking, with me getting the impression that she was suspicious that I had done something. I explained that he was my only child so it was all new to me.

My nephew had his children removed by a children's court by an incompetent social worker after one visit to hospital

As a result I cannot understand how this happened in this case.

The bastard who murdered little Preston has been given a full life sentence.

Shouldn't Reform and their friends be demanding white school teachers are vilified across the nation?

Or the banning of adoption by gay men?

That might be quite a likely demand from a hard of thinking politician I would have thought.

The bigger questions need to be asked at the hospital where he had several admissions in a very short space of time.

I have looked in detail at the timeline and with hindsight it is easy to condemn. However the key potential error is the broken elbow on visit three. This seems highly problematic. Lady Brook is not happy. I believe she has lots of questions of medical and social worker staff.

Varley's evil and graphic sexual abuse is beyond contempt. I don't believe a general extrapolation should be made because Varley was either, white, male, a teacher or gay.

I will guess that it will turn out like Baby P.

Multiple people raised the alarm, but were ignored or actively silenced for being inconvenient to their managers. For internal politics, not some woke agenda.

Learns Will Be Learnt.

The ghosts of Ed Balls and Sharon Shoesmith's careers are waving. Sharon Shoesmith from a lovely retirement property purchased courtesy of Ed Balls and the UK Government.

Ed Balls is doing very well for himself right now. His career is up up up the ziggurat, lickety split