Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
He was supposed to be on suicide watch, but the guards were asleep, the cameras not working, and the post-mortem suggested his injuries could be from strangulation rather than hanging.
Now, it could all be co-incidence, he saw an opportunity and went for it in a clumsy way. But the conspiracy theorists are indeed having a field day with the story. There were definitely an awful lot of people happy to see him dead.
Thanks. I assume Maxwell will be watched extremely carefully - a second suicide/'suicide' would set the twittersphere alight.
I think taking Test matches off free to air TV was a huge mistake. There's no way I'd have been interested in cricket without being exposed to cricket on TV as a child.
You couldn't put a test match on free to air TV, as there would be something more profitable to show.
"English cricket is at risk of becoming a metaphor for Brexit, deluded about its abilities and achievements, promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not, and resentful of its critics." Martin Kettle...
....Cricket is ruled by upper-class white men, deluded about their abilities. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the Ashes shambles and Brexit
My word, we were shit before Brexit but I can see why the analogy appeals to some.
That is absolute tosh. England white ball has been revolutionised over the past few years and enormous strength in depth. England could put out a 3rd XI in ODis or T20s and still be competitive with any nation.
Test cricket, nobody is deluded that there is an issue there, it is because of the focus on the former.
The question is how to change it, when all the teenage cricketers coming through know they can earn six figures in a month playing whack-ball in India?
Can they raise enough cash for central Test contracts, to make it worthwhile for players to persue Test cricket as a viable career? Would probably need to be a couple of million a year, spread over half a dozen core team members who will only play first class cricket.
I don't know the solution. The other problem is English players used to spend the off season in places like Australia or South Africa, now there is always some whack it cricket to play instead, where few weeks work is worth a years salary.
It’s a difficult one, and throwing money at it is required but still might not be enough.
We can’t stop the $200k salaries at the top of the IPL, and the worry over time is that these can end up being $400k or $500k, there’s so much money in that competition and many other T20 competitions. Look at what’s happened in football, with rampant player salary inflation and average players now making £5m a year at top clubs.
Can the ECB afford £400k or £500k for exclusive red-ball contracts, and keep up as the T20 salaries increase? Maybe they need to get some more commercial partnerships going at Lord’s, to raise more cash for the Test team.
The question is do young players even want to. Being a one day specalist is a lot more fun, easier on the body, get to travel the world, the big fan bases, the commercial opportunities....its a tough sell to say ignore all that, slog it out for peanuts playing 4 day cricket around the world in front of nobody.
And if the money is with one day or shorter cricket, isn't that because that's where the public interest is?
First class cricket is a glorious thing, but that's not enough to ensure its survival. For a long time, county championship cricket has survived on cross-subsidy, and Test cricket might be going the same way.
"English cricket is at risk of becoming a metaphor for Brexit, deluded about its abilities and achievements, promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not, and resentful of its critics." Martin Kettle...
....Cricket is ruled by upper-class white men, deluded about their abilities. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the Ashes shambles and Brexit
My word, we were shit before Brexit but I can see why the analogy appeals to some.
That is absolute tosh. England white ball has been revolutionised over the past few years and enormous strength in depth. England could put out a 3rd XI in ODis or T20s and still be competitive with any nation.
Test cricket, nobody is deluded that there is an issue there, it is because of the focus on the former.
The question is how to change it, when all the teenage cricketers coming through know they can earn six figures in a month playing whack-ball in India?
Can they raise enough cash for central Test contracts, to make it worthwhile for players to persue Test cricket as a viable career? Would probably need to be a couple of million a year, spread over half a dozen core team members who will only play first class cricket.
I don't know the solution. The other problem is English players used to spend the off season in places like Australia or South Africa, now there is always some whack it cricket to play instead, where few weeks work is worth a years salary.
I’ve seen a few ex pro’s saying pretty much the same thing as this Nick Compton tweet. Coaching and learning technique. Coaches want to be peoples mates. I don’t know myself but this seems a theme. Matt Prior wrote about coaching being an issue yesterday too.
But the young players coming through have great technique.....just for a different game. They have all hit shots that no old school pro could ever imagine doing. It was jaw dropping when KP switch hit a shot, now its standard tool in the tool box.
If you watched the Hundred every team had 20 year old English players who could just play incredible shots, score at 2 a ball with ease....this is where the money is.
And the analysis of this is incredible. Its totally revolutionised the game.
Even more than KP Morgan changed the face and priorities of English cricket. Much though I love test cricket I completely agree that his mantle, now picked up by the likes of Livingston, has broadened the range of shots players can try beyond anything even imaginable in my youth. It has also had an incredible effect on fielding. These insane relay catches on the boundary rope never existed before because who would bother practising for a shot that might come at you once a season? It has also changed bowling. It has got much, much more accurate and also more defensive. Its a different game and although I miss the traditions and building tensions of old style test matches I cannot deny it is entertaining.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
"The EU and the US reached a Halloween agreement to remove tariffs on a quota of steel and aluminium imported from the bloc into the US from 1 January, but tariffs will remain on all UK steel and aluminium exports after government talks failed to secure a matching breakthrough."
That is Good News for blighty. We don't want to be glad-handed with some namby-pamby European agreement. We want our OWN agreement with the US to make our steel 10% cheaper than the Europeans. That way by the time we add on the cost of customs to ship our part-made steel to the EU and back again (having shut UK finishing plants for various things we need) it will be the same price. Huzzah!
How do you make it cheaper than zero tariff?
The EU is going to chip in the other 10% for us, because it's only fair. Just think of how much we contributed to an organisation that we're not even a member of any more.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
If you believe the conspiracy theorists, the Queen, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Donald Trump would all be on a videocall this morning deciding Ghislaine's fate. Ludicrous of course
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
I think taking Test matches off free to air TV was a huge mistake. There's no way I'd have been interested in cricket without being exposed to cricket on TV as a child.
You couldn't put a test match on free to air TV, as there would be something more profitable to show.
On ITV4?
Imagine if the ECB split the Test and one-day stuff in the TV contract. I reckon the Tests would sell for more.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
You have this strange view that everyone is “shouting you down”.
You made a point. @edmundintokyo responded on a gentle but somewhat acerbic style as is his wont. You can respond or not as you see fit.
And you can sod off and stop wading into my comments at every turn, have a lovely day Charles
The same people that said Delta was nothing to worry about, are those that are saying Omicron is nothing to worry about.
So is anyone who said Delta was nothing to worry about, going to stick their head up and say this is different
Who said Delta is nothing to worry about?
I don't recall you calling for a lockdown when Delta was around, we didn't need one was what you and several others said. I remember arguing with you about it
That's not the same thing, is it?
My point is you were wrong then and so I am interested in people that did call for a lockdown then who don't think there is anything to worry about now.
What I am hearing now is the same people that initially said "nothing to worry about" then said "lockdown isn't needed" then said "lockdown 2.0 isn't needed". It's the same people
You keep making these massive sweeping generalisations.
I have generally preferred not to make generalisations.
And with that, good night.
But the French elite are so paranoid about Brexit, so allergic to it and fearful of it, they set a low bar for its success. Britain surviving intact and not starving to death will probably seem quite successful to them. given their direful predictions of total British implosion.
Then the next time the EU does something widely unpopular, eurosceptics across the continent will start to look longingly at independent London.
This is the great French fear. By this guy's account it does stalk their nightmares.
The French are trying to restrict travel to essential only.
By blocking British residents of Belgium or the Netherlands who want to use EuroTunnel and transit France?
Are the blocking British? Or just anyone who isn't EU/Schengen?
Travel from the UK to France
URGENT UPDATE FOR BRITISH RESIDENTS IN EU
Following a French Government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU.
Exactly. They aren't treating us differently. They're applying the 3rd country rules which our government demanded be imposed upon us.
What’s the warning
Be careful what you wish for - it may become true.
I don't understand the complaints. What did they think "3rd country" meant? This is what they demanded and they've succeeded in being treated thus.
Just wait until next week when the usual suspects try and blame the French for our lack of Border Control Posts, staff or computers.
Except the rights of British citizens with legal residency in the EU that pre-dates Brexit have their rights protected by treaty.
I think this is just Macron being a twat again, assuming the allegation is true.
Blocking the UK, when Belgium had had case rates twice as high as our peak at that point for weeks was the action of a kneejerking numpty.
It’s totally Macron being a twat.
But it’s the resounding silence from the Remoaners that amuses
Why should we comment? This is what Leavers wanted. To be outside the EU and to be treated like outsiders.
Well congrats!
Because it’s a breach of the Withdrawal Treaty in the same way that they got very excited about the administrative procedures on settled status.
It is - in the same way that other border closures were breaches of other treaties like Schengen. But its a pandemic - temporary breaches are permitted.
Again, we are being treated as we demanded - as a 3rd country. They had to arbitrate on which exceptions to their medically induced ban would exist and they have tret us like the rest of the world not Europe. At our request.
You and others complaining demonstrates English exceptionalism at its finest. That "treat us like a 3rd country" actually meant "we don't want to be European but you will do what we bally well say because we are English and that means we get to make all the rules".
I think Macron’s bring a bit silly but I don’t really care about it.
My comment is really about the hypocrisy of people who launch into the UK for a reasonable administrative procedure and find excuses when an EU country does something that is equally in breach of the treaty.
But they “have a good reason” which makes it all ok…
Recently Foxy had commented that hospital staff ought to be provided with pukka masks in view of their constant exposure to TBV (the bloody virus), but that this had been denied.
This morning I saw a medic interviewed on my partner's TV saying very well the same thing, but, diplomatically, not mentioning any denial.
Private Eye has recently published one of their "special reports" entitled PROFITS OF DOOM, describing profiteering over the virus.
Perhaps we could hope that the intervention that caused a 'plane load of dogs to be flown out of Kabul (at public expense I have heard)---when we were desperately trying to evacuate endangered Afghans---could be called upon to switch their influence to favor hospital workers over animals.
"English cricket is at risk of becoming a metaphor for Brexit, deluded about its abilities and achievements, promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not, and resentful of its critics." Martin Kettle...
....Cricket is ruled by upper-class white men, deluded about their abilities. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the Ashes shambles and Brexit
My word, we were shit before Brexit but I can see why the analogy appeals to some.
Peak Guardian.
They do realise the England cricket team was regularly thrashed 5-0 in Australia before Brexit.
As had been pointed out too England only won the world Cup after the Brexit vote
I think the cricket/Brexit analogy is a stretch. But I do think that if the selectors were able/willing to tap into a broader talent pool then England might have a better chance of winning. Cricket has become very much a minority sport, with most of the team drawn from a narrow base of privately educated players. If you ignore 90% of your potential player pool you're bound to miss a lot of talent. And then there's the experience of ethnic minority players, too, eg the problems at Yorkshire. Cricket needs to become far more diverse and reach outside its posh white bloke comfort zone if England is going to reach its potential.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
And they chose Johnson over Hunt. Perhaps it's time for some more opposition.
"The EU and the US reached a Halloween agreement to remove tariffs on a quota of steel and aluminium imported from the bloc into the US from 1 January, but tariffs will remain on all UK steel and aluminium exports after government talks failed to secure a matching breakthrough."
That is Good News for blighty. We don't want to be glad-handed with some namby-pamby European agreement. We want our OWN agreement with the US to make our steel 10% cheaper than the Europeans. That way by the time we add on the cost of customs to ship our part-made steel to the EU and back again (having shut UK finishing plants for various things we need) it will be the same price. Huzzah!
Tbf, given the transport costs involved, it's a puzzle to me why steel is exported between the EU/US/UK at all.
I mean, I appreciate not all of those entities has a long tradition of making steel themselves. Oh, wait...
The same people that said Delta was nothing to worry about, are those that are saying Omicron is nothing to worry about.
So is anyone who said Delta was nothing to worry about, going to stick their head up and say this is different
Who said Delta is nothing to worry about?
I don't recall you calling for a lockdown when Delta was around, we didn't need one was what you and several others said. I remember arguing with you about it
That's not the same thing, is it?
My point is you were wrong then and so I am interested in people that did call for a lockdown then who don't think there is anything to worry about now.
What I am hearing now is the same people that initially said "nothing to worry about" then said "lockdown isn't needed" then said "lockdown 2.0 isn't needed". It's the same people
You keep making these massive sweeping generalisations.
I have generally preferred not to make generalisations.
And with that, good night.
But the French elite are so paranoid about Brexit, so allergic to it and fearful of it, they set a low bar for its success. Britain surviving intact and not starving to death will probably seem quite successful to them. given their direful predictions of total British implosion.
Then the next time the EU does something widely unpopular, eurosceptics across the continent will start to look longingly at independent London.
This is the great French fear. By this guy's account it does stalk their nightmares.
The French are trying to restrict travel to essential only.
By blocking British residents of Belgium or the Netherlands who want to use EuroTunnel and transit France?
Are the blocking British? Or just anyone who isn't EU/Schengen?
Travel from the UK to France
URGENT UPDATE FOR BRITISH RESIDENTS IN EU
Following a French Government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU.
Exactly. They aren't treating us differently. They're applying the 3rd country rules which our government demanded be imposed upon us.
What’s the warning
Be careful what you wish for - it may become true.
I don't understand the complaints. What did they think "3rd country" meant? This is what they demanded and they've succeeded in being treated thus.
Just wait until next week when the usual suspects try and blame the French for our lack of Border Control Posts, staff or computers.
Except the rights of British citizens with legal residency in the EU that pre-dates Brexit have their rights protected by treaty.
I think this is just Macron being a twat again, assuming the allegation is true.
Blocking the UK, when Belgium had had case rates twice as high as our peak at that point for weeks was the action of a kneejerking numpty.
It’s totally Macron being a twat.
But it’s the resounding silence from the Remoaners that amuses
Why should we comment? This is what Leavers wanted. To be outside the EU and to be treated like outsiders.
Well congrats!
Because it’s a breach of the Withdrawal Treaty in the same way that they got very excited about the administrative procedures on settled status.
It is - in the same way that other border closures were breaches of other treaties like Schengen. But its a pandemic - temporary breaches are permitted.
Again, we are being treated as we demanded - as a 3rd country. They had to arbitrate on which exceptions to their medically induced ban would exist and they have tret us like the rest of the world not Europe. At our request.
You and others complaining demonstrates English exceptionalism at its finest. That "treat us like a 3rd country" actually meant "we don't want to be European but you will do what we bally well say because we are English and that means we get to make all the rules".
Yes, there were plenty on here saying "ban all travel". Now the French are trying it (which personally I think is a waste of time) the same posters are trying to make a point of it.
On test cricket. Aren't we at risk of just using the dominance of white-ball cricket as an excuse for England's poor performance, and not a very good one? After all, white-ball /short-form cricket is now dominant globally, and is the only really lucrative form.
And yet other countries, notably Australia, India, Pakistan and New Zealand seem perfectly capable of producing players, including batsmen, with the requisite skills to play five-day cricket.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
As far as I understand it, I think she meant that there are only two sexes.
I have no idea what she meant and I am not getting into a dull and sterile debate.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
The problem is that it's highly contentious for the reasons @edmundintokyo talked about - mainly because both parties talk at cross purposes and never seem to understand that
1) both sides do actually have valid points but 2) what they are asking for is impossible because their desired fix creates the problem the other side is worried about (and is a problem that the other side just doesn't seem able to grasp or see) 3) and no compromise is possible because it's very much a binary result that the other side cannot accept.
We've covered the same issue here multiple times when talking about rapists ending up in Scottish Women's prisons because self identifying as a women is their "right". As it never ends well it's best to try and avoid the topic.
I am LGBTQIwhatever and my 20 year-old non-binary offspring has had a couple of trans boyfriends. So I do care about trans issues. But you can't override every other issue with trans rights - be sensitive to their rights and also the rights of women.
The problem with Ms Rowling is that she took a clear and previously uncontroversial stance in favour of protecting women's rights in their ongoing struggle against real misogyny. Fatal error. "YOU'RE TRANSPHOBIC" they howl even though she had made it clear she isn't.
People like my whatever-the-gender-neutral-alternative-to-son's ex BFs and my old mate who is trans male to female and *genuine* should be absolutely supported. That is not the same as dodgy Dave the deviant suddenly self-identifying as female demanding access to a women's refuge.
That people on both sides of the debate cannot understand the difference is baffling to me. So I largely stay out of it.
I think taking Test matches off free to air TV was a huge mistake. There's no way I'd have been interested in cricket without being exposed to cricket on TV as a child.
I keep reading your first sentence, then the second. Then back to the first. But somewhere between the two, the logic simply doesn't compute.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
You have this strange view that everyone is “shouting you down”.
You made a point. @edmundintokyo responded on a gentle but somewhat acerbic style as is his wont. You can respond or not as you see fit.
Horse is highly strung. Tickle him under the chin and behind the ear, and speak gently.
I think taking Test matches off free to air TV was a huge mistake. There's no way I'd have been interested in cricket without being exposed to cricket on TV as a child.
You couldn't put a test match on free to air TV, as there would be something more profitable to show.
So that would make it public service broadcasting, perfect for the BBC to show value for their licence fee. Educate the kids that proper cricket is what it’s all about.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
As far as I understand it, I think she meant that there are only two sexes.
I have no idea what she meant and I am not getting into a dull and sterile debate.
🔴 NEW: Sajid Javid has told MPs there will be "no quick fix" to the growing Covid testing crisis, with officials warning that the system will be overwhelmed within days
Looking calmly ahead for a moment, unless we get to a situation which normalises a pandemic as an endemic condition pretty quickly - say by mid 2022 - we are all going to go mad. This requires both facts (nearly everyone has had it, been vaccinated and continues to be, is a special case so in hiding, is already dead, or is in the Piers Corbyn camp so willingly accepts whatever comes their way from benign mother nature) and a collective effort of the will to see the matter in the same light as flu and other things which are around and can kill, but don't kill most of the people most of the time.
The availability of testing is, for this future purpose, almost worthless. I should think there are literally millions of people who have (quietly) not yet Covid tested themselves on a single occasion. Let's get used to it.
I've not yet had a Covid test. But then I don't go out much.
We had them when my daughter got a positive test. Since then we have used LFTs as a precautionary step, my daughter (same one) took one yesterday when she had a really sore throat and was feeling ill before she went for her driving lesson because she thought that was only fair when she was going to be in the car with her instructor for an hour. It was clear.
900k PCR tests a day is a truly incredible number out of an adult population of roughly 55m. It is an astounding logistical achievement but it does seem inevitable as the current peak of Omicron cases occurs that it will be insufficient for a time if people use them the way I did, by having a test when a close contact from your household is positive.
There has to be limits and there has to be priorities. I am disappointed that @Foxy's blood oxygen test is not being used more widely. It seems better suited to identify those who actually need help.
The blood oxygen test is great for telling you you need to go to hospital now - it's not so great for saying whether what you've got is Covid, a cold, flu or something else.
I think the fact you really need to go to hospital, now, is very useful information. Much more useful than the fact that you are positive for a virus that is not making you ill and is unlikely to make your vaccinated friends ill.
I think taking Test matches off free to air TV was a huge mistake. There's no way I'd have been interested in cricket without being exposed to cricket on TV as a child.
That's the same with me, and yet, as we can see, the key problem the longer format has is that it doesn't make as much money as T20 cricket, and selling the rights to Sky is at least a way of making some money from the game.
I listen to TMS, look at the scorecards on cricinfo, and Test cricket receives not a penny from me.
If I were a zero information voter faced with a choice for my school of:
A Smith, Independent Parent B Jones, Republican/Democrat
I would almost certainly pick Mr Smith. Parents want someone who will listen to them, not to their political masters.
I would like to agree and hope you are right, but my experience of low key UK elections, typically parish but also borough is where it's an independent vs a political opponent the Indy wins, but as soon as two or more political opponents are involved it becomes political and the Indy gets squeezed.
A nice illustration of how many of the votes for a party political candidate are actually votes against the other one!
Interesting point. For all my long party membership I could imagine voting for someone else in a parish council election, if it wasn't seen as politically significant. But I'd want to know more about what A. Smith actually thought. Virtually nobody is an entirely blank sheet of paper in politics, and issues with a political flavour are going to come up from time to time - curriculum issues, how to handle troublemakers, etc. If Smith said "Oh, I'm just a parent, I'll apply common sense" I'd see it as evasive or evidence that Smith has really never given serious issues a thought and is therefore unsuitable.
The idea of electing school board officials is bonkers. That its now turning into a battleground because some uppity school boards have refused to accept the Don't Look Up mandate of "great leaders" like Governor DeSantis is bonkers on stilts.
But its America. Best to let them get on with it - it's their country.
"English cricket is at risk of becoming a metaphor for Brexit, deluded about its abilities and achievements, promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not, and resentful of its critics." Martin Kettle...
....Cricket is ruled by upper-class white men, deluded about their abilities. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the Ashes shambles and Brexit
My word, we were shit before Brexit but I can see why the analogy appeals to some.
That is absolute tosh. England white ball has been revolutionised over the past few years and enormous strength in depth. England could put out a 3rd XI in ODis or T20s and still be competitive with any nation.
Test cricket, nobody is deluded that there is an issue there, it is because of the focus on the former.
The question is how to change it, when all the teenage cricketers coming through know they can earn six figures in a month playing whack-ball in India?
Can they raise enough cash for central Test contracts, to make it worthwhile for players to persue Test cricket as a viable career? Would probably need to be a couple of million a year, spread over half a dozen core team members who will only play first class cricket.
I don't know the solution. The other problem is English players used to spend the off season in places like Australia or South Africa, now there is always some whack it cricket to play instead, where few weeks work is worth a years salary.
I’ve seen a few ex pro’s saying pretty much the same thing as this Nick Compton tweet. Coaching and learning technique. Coaches want to be peoples mates. I don’t know myself but this seems a theme. Matt Prior wrote about coaching being an issue yesterday too.
But the young players coming through have great technique.....just for a different game. They have all hit shots that no old school pro could ever imagine doing. It was jaw dropping when KP switch hit a shot, now its standard tool in the tool box.
If you watched the Hundred every team had 20 year old English players who could just play incredible shots, score at 2 a ball with ease....this is where the money is.
And the analysis of this is incredible. Its totally revolutionised the game.
Even more than KP Morgan changed the face and priorities of English cricket. Much though I love test cricket I completely agree that his mantle, now picked up by the likes of Livingston, has broadened the range of shots players can try beyond anything even imaginable in my youth. It has also had an incredible effect on fielding. These insane relay catches on the boundary rope never existed before because who would bother practising for a shot that might come at you once a season? It has also changed bowling. It has got much, much more accurate and also more defensive. Its a different game and although I miss the traditions and building tensions of old style test matches I cannot deny it is entertaining.
Not just defensive bowling, but bowling a different ball every time, and with all these variations like the knuckle ball, which are only effective because the batsmen are trying to hit you for 6s. And pace on, can be a huge negative, especially pitched up full pace. Mills and Archer for instance rarely send down the 95mph ball, its lots of fake outs at varying speeds below that.
Again, this isn't much good for test cricket, where its the ability to bowl fast, accurate and let the ball swing and seam, with the idea you don't give bad balls away. Anderson isn't trying to bowl 6 different balls an over at 6 different paces.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
On test cricket. Aren't we at risk of just using the dominance of white-ball cricket as an excuse for England's poor performance, and not a very good one? After all, white-ball /short-form cricket is now dominant globally, and is the only really lucrative form.
And yet other countries, notably Australia, India, Pakistan and New Zealand seem perfectly capable of producing players, including batsmen, with the requisite skills to play five-day cricket.
Yes, India won in Australia last winter. We've always struggled to produce batsmen than travel well, but sticking the four day games at the start and end of the summer has made things worse, in my opinion.
Why won't these NHS managers with their facts listen to the PB Virology experts. Tis but a cold, there is no threat to the NHS, drop all restrictions, huzzah!
I'm pretty sure the "PB Virology experts" general opinion is that anyone unvaccinated who gets infected should be treated in a tent and leave the real beds to other people.
So it seems like the NHS Managers are listening to us. Good job!
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
If I were a zero information voter faced with a choice for my school of:
A Smith, Independent Parent B Jones, Republican/Democrat
I would almost certainly pick Mr Smith. Parents want someone who will listen to them, not to their political masters.
I would like to agree and hope you are right, but my experience of low key UK elections, typically parish but also borough is where it's an independent vs a political opponent the Indy wins, but as soon as two or more political opponents are involved it becomes political and the Indy gets squeezed.
A nice illustration of how many of the votes for a party political candidate are actually votes against the other one!
Interesting point. For all my long party membership I could imagine voting for someone else in a parish council election, if it wasn't seen as politically significant. But I'd want to know more about what A. Smith actually thought. Virtually nobody is an entirely blank sheet of paper in politics, and issues with a political flavour are going to come up from time to time - curriculum issues, how to handle troublemakers, etc. If Smith said "Oh, I'm just a parent, I'll apply common sense" I'd see it as evasive or evidence that Smith has really never given serious issues a thought and is therefore unsuitable.
The idea of electing school board officials is bonkers. That its now turning into a battleground because some uppity school boards have refused to accept the Don't Look Up mandate of "great leaders" like Governor DeSantis is bonkers on stilts.
But its America. Best to let them get on with it - it's their country.
Yet we have elections here for parent School Governors.
The issues are:
1) non parents being allowed to be involved 2) the way everything in America is becoming politics first...
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
I heard a great 'Tarquin and Jemima' story the other day.
Friends of inlaws decided against spending Christmas at their place in France this year. They were concerned that if there were restrictions on coming back they would risk missing their flight for their holiday in America.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
We stop this middle class obsession of doing a LFT every day and start doing the level of testing other western countries do.
I've had Radio 5 on for over half an hour and the only thing they've talked about is the shortage of tests.
I am sure they are being fair and balanced and comparing the shear magnitude the number of tests the UK does compare to every other European country and that for instance Germanys testing system has bascially shut down for Christmas and they said they didn't cope with Delta demand ler alone Omicron.....or probably not.
"English cricket is at risk of becoming a metaphor for Brexit, deluded about its abilities and achievements, promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not, and resentful of its critics." Martin Kettle...
....Cricket is ruled by upper-class white men, deluded about their abilities. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the Ashes shambles and Brexit
My word, we were shit before Brexit but I can see why the analogy appeals to some.
That is absolute tosh. England white ball has been revolutionised over the past few years and enormous strength in depth. England could put out a 3rd XI in ODis or T20s and still be competitive with any nation.
Test cricket, nobody is deluded that there is an issue there, it is because of the focus on the former.
The question is how to change it, when all the teenage cricketers coming through know they can earn six figures in a month playing whack-ball in India?
Can they raise enough cash for central Test contracts, to make it worthwhile for players to persue Test cricket as a viable career? Would probably need to be a couple of million a year, spread over half a dozen core team members who will only play first class cricket.
They need to somehow make a domestic first-class competition pay out, so that the players who might become good enough for the Test team can get paid good money while they try to get good enough.
But I don't see any way that first-class cricket can compete with T20 and raise the same amount of money. Chances have to be high that cricket will ultimately become T20, and maybe one-dayers, with the multi-day matches being played occasionally as a novelty. That's already the status quo in women's cricket.
The only way I could see a domestic FC competition paying out, would be to significantly reduce the number of sides. The problem with which is the existing county structure. You’d need maybe half a dozen sides, perhaps with invitational teams from SA and Aus added. There’s pretty much no gate revenue, so you’d need to sell it to TV, who much prefer the crash-bang-wallop product. You’d need to pay those 100 ish players £100k each too, as 18 year olds. So you’ve gone from needing £2-3m for a Test side, to needing £12-13m for a whole layer of cricket below.
I remember back in 2009, so before most people had smartphones, being cajoled into visiting Castle Drogo on a sunny day, and being eagerly greeted by the NT employee in the car park with the question, "Do you know the latest score in the Test match?"
One of the beauties of the multi-day matches is that you can follow a game without necessarily watching every single ball. You can dip in for half an hour, catch an update a bit later, etc. Somehow they need to sell that aspect of an unfolding story, and monetize it.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
The problem is that it's highly contentious for the reasons @edmundintokyo talked about - mainly because both parties talk at cross purposes and never seem to understand that
1) both sides do actually have valid points but 2) what they are asking for is impossible because their desired fix creates the problem the other side is worried about (and is a problem that the other side just doesn't seem able to grasp or see) 3) and no compromise is possible because it's very much a binary result that the other side cannot accept.
We've covered the same issue here multiple times when talking about rapists ending up in Scottish Women's prisons because self identifying as a women is their "right". As it never ends well it's best to try and avoid the topic.
I am LGBTQIwhatever and my 20 year-old non-binary offspring has had a couple of trans boyfriends. So I do care about trans issues. But you can't override every other issue with trans rights - be sensitive to their rights and also the rights of women.
The problem with Ms Rowling is that she took a clear and previously uncontroversial stance in favour of protecting women's rights in their ongoing struggle against real misogyny. Fatal error. "YOU'RE TRANSPHOBIC" they howl even though she had made it clear she isn't.
People like my whatever-the-gender-neutral-alternative-to-son's ex BFs and my old mate who is trans male to female and *genuine* should be absolutely supported. That is not the same as dodgy Dave the deviant suddenly self-identifying as female demanding access to a women's refuge.
That people on both sides of the debate cannot understand the difference is baffling to me. So I largely stay out of it.
The problem comes down to self identification.
For pro trans people its a magic fix that solves all problems For womens rights it creates a whole new set of issues that the pro trans people just don't seem to understand.
As I said the problem just isn't fixable so I try and keep as far away from it as possible.
The other issue is that you simply can't put a complete argument in 280 characters so anything you post on this topic on twitter will result in 1 tweet being taken out of context and used against you for every more.
At least on here you can post something long enough that it's impossible to use part of your argument completely out of context
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
"The EU and the US reached a Halloween agreement to remove tariffs on a quota of steel and aluminium imported from the bloc into the US from 1 January, but tariffs will remain on all UK steel and aluminium exports after government talks failed to secure a matching breakthrough."
That is Good News for blighty. We don't want to be glad-handed with some namby-pamby European agreement. We want our OWN agreement with the US to make our steel 10% cheaper than the Europeans. That way by the time we add on the cost of customs to ship our part-made steel to the EU and back again (having shut UK finishing plants for various things we need) it will be the same price. Huzzah!
How do you make it cheaper than zero tariff?
You think the cost of filling in endless paperwork is only in the tariff? I'm lucky enough to have zero tariff zero VAT products. Declaring all of that is a bastard - and get any detail wrong and its not coming in zero tariff or not.
Anyway, Brexit is really now highlighting the short-termism of our economic policies of the post industrial era. Yes globalisation, yes we can make a profit by selling something off, but we're now absolutely reliant on foreign owners and foreign production. "Save British Steel" some people are saying but we don't own it and we don't have the capability to make what we need.
Other countries seem to have managed through this era without making the same mistakes. Look at Germany - still owns stuff, still produces stuff, still invests for the long term. This isn't party political as we've had Tory Labour and Coalition governments in the 1980 - 2016 era - all doing the same stupiud.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
If you believe the conspiracy theorists, the Queen, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Donald Trump would all be on a videocall this morning deciding Ghislaine's fate. Ludicrous of course
Surely they should have had rigged the jury to ensure she was acquitted. They missed a trick there.
I heard a great 'Tarquin and Jemima' story the other day.
Friends of inlaws decided against spending Christmas at their place in France this year. They were concerned that if there were restrictions on coming back they would risk missing their flight for their holiday in America.
How do these people cope?
We sold our place in France for this reason. It was just getting too hard to get there reliably. It wasn't a problem for me because I upgraded to an EU passport and wasn't averse to a high speed midnight run through the porous Franco-Belgian border in the Ardennes but Mrs DA only has a British passport. We just couldn't count on being able to travel as planned on any day.
The same people that said Delta was nothing to worry about, are those that are saying Omicron is nothing to worry about.
So is anyone who said Delta was nothing to worry about, going to stick their head up and say this is different
Who said Delta is nothing to worry about?
I don't recall you calling for a lockdown when Delta was around, we didn't need one was what you and several others said. I remember arguing with you about it
That's not the same thing, is it?
My point is you were wrong then and so I am interested in people that did call for a lockdown then who don't think there is anything to worry about now.
What I am hearing now is the same people that initially said "nothing to worry about" then said "lockdown isn't needed" then said "lockdown 2.0 isn't needed". It's the same people
You keep making these massive sweeping generalisations.
I have generally preferred not to make generalisations.
And with that, good night.
But the French elite are so paranoid about Brexit, so allergic to it and fearful of it, they set a low bar for its success. Britain surviving intact and not starving to death will probably seem quite successful to them. given their direful predictions of total British implosion.
Then the next time the EU does something widely unpopular, eurosceptics across the continent will start to look longingly at independent London.
This is the great French fear. By this guy's account it does stalk their nightmares.
The French are trying to restrict travel to essential only.
By blocking British residents of Belgium or the Netherlands who want to use EuroTunnel and transit France?
Are the blocking British? Or just anyone who isn't EU/Schengen?
Travel from the UK to France
URGENT UPDATE FOR BRITISH RESIDENTS IN EU
Following a French Government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU.
Exactly. They aren't treating us differently. They're applying the 3rd country rules which our government demanded be imposed upon us.
What’s the warning
Be careful what you wish for - it may become true.
I don't understand the complaints. What did they think "3rd country" meant? This is what they demanded and they've succeeded in being treated thus.
Just wait until next week when the usual suspects try and blame the French for our lack of Border Control Posts, staff or computers.
Except the rights of British citizens with legal residency in the EU that pre-dates Brexit have their rights protected by treaty.
I think this is just Macron being a twat again, assuming the allegation is true.
Blocking the UK, when Belgium had had case rates twice as high as our peak at that point for weeks was the action of a kneejerking numpty.
It’s totally Macron being a twat.
But it’s the resounding silence from the Remoaners that amuses
Why should we comment? This is what Leavers wanted. To be outside the EU and to be treated like outsiders.
Well congrats!
Because it’s a breach of the Withdrawal Treaty in the same way that they got very excited about the administrative procedures on settled status.
It is - in the same way that other border closures were breaches of other treaties like Schengen. But its a pandemic - temporary breaches are permitted.
Again, we are being treated as we demanded - as a 3rd country. They had to arbitrate on which exceptions to their medically induced ban would exist and they have tret us like the rest of the world not Europe. At our request.
You and others complaining demonstrates English exceptionalism at its finest. That "treat us like a 3rd country" actually meant "we don't want to be European but you will do what we bally well say because we are English and that means we get to make all the rules".
I think Macron’s bring a bit silly but I don’t really care about it.
My comment is really about the hypocrisy of people who launch into the UK for a reasonable administrative procedure and find excuses when an EU country does something that is equally in breach of the treaty.
But they “have a good reason” which makes it all ok…
Pretty much English exceptionalism in a neat summary post, thanks. "Reasonable Administrative Procedure" indeed.
"English cricket is at risk of becoming a metaphor for Brexit, deluded about its abilities and achievements, promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not, and resentful of its critics." Martin Kettle...
....Cricket is ruled by upper-class white men, deluded about their abilities. It’s hard not to see a parallel between the Ashes shambles and Brexit
My word, we were shit before Brexit but I can see why the analogy appeals to some.
That is absolute tosh. England white ball has been revolutionised over the past few years and enormous strength in depth. England could put out a 3rd XI in ODis or T20s and still be competitive with any nation.
Test cricket, nobody is deluded that there is an issue there, it is because of the focus on the former.
The question is how to change it, when all the teenage cricketers coming through know they can earn six figures in a month playing whack-ball in India?
Can they raise enough cash for central Test contracts, to make it worthwhile for players to persue Test cricket as a viable career? Would probably need to be a couple of million a year, spread over half a dozen core team members who will only play first class cricket.
I don't know the solution. The other problem is English players used to spend the off season in places like Australia or South Africa, now there is always some whack it cricket to play instead, where few weeks work is worth a years salary.
I’ve seen a few ex pro’s saying pretty much the same thing as this Nick Compton tweet. Coaching and learning technique. Coaches want to be peoples mates. I don’t know myself but this seems a theme. Matt Prior wrote about coaching being an issue yesterday too.
But the young players coming through have great technique.....just for a different game. They have all hit shots that no old school pro could ever imagine doing. It was jaw dropping when KP switch hit a shot, now its standard tool in the tool box.
If you watched the Hundred every team had 20 year old English players who could just play incredible shots, score at 2 a ball with ease....this is where the money is.
And the analysis of this is incredible. Its totally revolutionised the game.
Even more than KP Morgan changed the face and priorities of English cricket. Much though I love test cricket I completely agree that his mantle, now picked up by the likes of Livingston, has broadened the range of shots players can try beyond anything even imaginable in my youth. It has also had an incredible effect on fielding. These insane relay catches on the boundary rope never existed before because who would bother practising for a shot that might come at you once a season? It has also changed bowling. It has got much, much more accurate and also more defensive. Its a different game and although I miss the traditions and building tensions of old style test matches I cannot deny it is entertaining.
Not just defensive bowling, but bowling a different ball every time, and with all these variations like the knuckle ball, which are only effective because the batsmen are trying to hit you for 6s. And pace on, can be a huge negative, especially pitched up full pace. Mills and Archer for instance rarely send down the 95mph ball, its lots of fake outs at varying speeds below that.
Again, this isn't much good for test cricket, where its the ability to bowl fast, accurate and let the ball swing and seam, with the idea you don't give bad balls away. Anderson isn't trying to bowl 6 different balls an over at 6 different paces.
Another big problem is English conditions - combined with T20 its going to result in a whole heap of absolute trash medium pace going forward.
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
We stop this middle class obsession of doing a LFT every day and start doing the level of testing other western countries do.
I know someone who is doing 5 tests a day just because someone they saw someone a week ago who now has Omicron. If that type of behaviour is being repeated then no wonder there are supply problems for tests.
Yesterday in SA they did 34,753 tests some of which had to be paid for by the person taking the test.
In the UK we did 1,476,216 tests all of which were free.
At the heart of the issue is whether, as some argue, “gender trumps biological sex” and what flows from that. Notably she is a lot more civil and polite than some of her critics, and has not yet doxed or threatened to murder any of them.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
The trouble with Boris is that when he's good he's very, very good and when he's bad he's terrible, and there's precious little in between. For my money, he has done a great job in implementing the result of the 2016 referendum, which destroyed his last two predecessors and paralysed politics for three years, in the stunning triumph of our vaccine programme, in seeing off Jeremy Corbyn and in avoiding the worst barbarities of continental or Chinese lockdowns during this epidemic.
But the extended crises of the last five years could be coming to a close. And, as is well known, the mundane, routine stuff of every day economic and social policy with its tradeoffs and need to consider dozens of factors and come to usually fudged decisions is too detailed and tedious for his toddler-length attention span. He is intellectually lazy, so will always go with the big government, high spending solution. And his only defence, entirely true, is that Starmer would be even worse.
Also, is being PM really compatible with having a couple of babies in the house?
"The EU and the US reached a Halloween agreement to remove tariffs on a quota of steel and aluminium imported from the bloc into the US from 1 January, but tariffs will remain on all UK steel and aluminium exports after government talks failed to secure a matching breakthrough."
That is Good News for blighty. We don't want to be glad-handed with some namby-pamby European agreement. We want our OWN agreement with the US to make our steel 10% cheaper than the Europeans. That way by the time we add on the cost of customs to ship our part-made steel to the EU and back again (having shut UK finishing plants for various things we need) it will be the same price. Huzzah!
Tbf, given the transport costs involved, it's a puzzle to me why steel is exported between the EU/US/UK at all.
I mean, I appreciate not all of those entities has a long tradition of making steel themselves. Oh, wait...
The bloke who puts shoes on my horses, buys ready made shoes on Amazon, from China, despite there being UK horse shoe makers and indeed being perfectly capable of making shoes from scratch himself.
What is really weird is his preferred brand of nail comes from Colombia. Perhaps they are particularly good at shipping relatively small parcels internationally.
"The EU and the US reached a Halloween agreement to remove tariffs on a quota of steel and aluminium imported from the bloc into the US from 1 January, but tariffs will remain on all UK steel and aluminium exports after government talks failed to secure a matching breakthrough."
That is Good News for blighty. We don't want to be glad-handed with some namby-pamby European agreement. We want our OWN agreement with the US to make our steel 10% cheaper than the Europeans. That way by the time we add on the cost of customs to ship our part-made steel to the EU and back again (having shut UK finishing plants for various things we need) it will be the same price. Huzzah!
How do you make it cheaper than zero tariff?
You think the cost of filling in endless paperwork is only in the tariff? I'm lucky enough to have zero tariff zero VAT products. Declaring all of that is a bastard - and get any detail wrong and its not coming in zero tariff or not.
Anyway, Brexit is really now highlighting the short-termism of our economic policies of the post industrial era. Yes globalisation, yes we can make a profit by selling something off, but we're now absolutely reliant on foreign owners and foreign production. "Save British Steel" some people are saying but we don't own it and we don't have the capability to make what we need.
Other countries seem to have managed through this era without making the same mistakes. Look at Germany - still owns stuff, still produces stuff, still invests for the long term. This isn't party political as we've had Tory Labour and Coalition governments in the 1980 - 2016 era - all doing the same stupiud.
Nope - I know that the paperwork is the real killer here.
But our MPs are thick and my local MP thinks that all paperwork can be automated away. Which is not surprising as he's a lawyer and I'm just the person who earns £100k + year creating those automated systems.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
Gay people used to face this same kind of "moral panic" cr*p. Giving trans people rights does not take rights away from women any more than taking giving gay people rights took them away from straight people.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
Haha, I like the idea that taxpayers are an endangered species in Scotland (a slight exaggeration of the recent SPICe report).
The same people that said Delta was nothing to worry about, are those that are saying Omicron is nothing to worry about.
So is anyone who said Delta was nothing to worry about, going to stick their head up and say this is different
Who said Delta is nothing to worry about?
I don't recall you calling for a lockdown when Delta was around, we didn't need one was what you and several others said. I remember arguing with you about it
That's not the same thing, is it?
My point is you were wrong then and so I am interested in people that did call for a lockdown then who don't think there is anything to worry about now.
What I am hearing now is the same people that initially said "nothing to worry about" then said "lockdown isn't needed" then said "lockdown 2.0 isn't needed". It's the same people
You keep making these massive sweeping generalisations.
I have generally preferred not to make generalisations.
And with that, good night.
But the French elite are so paranoid about Brexit, so allergic to it and fearful of it, they set a low bar for its success. Britain surviving intact and not starving to death will probably seem quite successful to them. given their direful predictions of total British implosion.
Then the next time the EU does something widely unpopular, eurosceptics across the continent will start to look longingly at independent London.
This is the great French fear. By this guy's account it does stalk their nightmares.
The French are trying to restrict travel to essential only.
By blocking British residents of Belgium or the Netherlands who want to use EuroTunnel and transit France?
Are the blocking British? Or just anyone who isn't EU/Schengen?
Travel from the UK to France
URGENT UPDATE FOR BRITISH RESIDENTS IN EU
Following a French Government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU.
Exactly. They aren't treating us differently. They're applying the 3rd country rules which our government demanded be imposed upon us.
What’s the warning
Be careful what you wish for - it may become true.
I don't understand the complaints. What did they think "3rd country" meant? This is what they demanded and they've succeeded in being treated thus.
Just wait until next week when the usual suspects try and blame the French for our lack of Border Control Posts, staff or computers.
Except the rights of British citizens with legal residency in the EU that pre-dates Brexit have their rights protected by treaty.
I think this is just Macron being a twat again, assuming the allegation is true.
Blocking the UK, when Belgium had had case rates twice as high as our peak at that point for weeks was the action of a kneejerking numpty.
It’s totally Macron being a twat.
But it’s the resounding silence from the Remoaners that amuses
Why should we comment? This is what Leavers wanted. To be outside the EU and to be treated like outsiders.
Well congrats!
Because it’s a breach of the Withdrawal Treaty in the same way that they got very excited about the administrative procedures on settled status.
It is - in the same way that other border closures were breaches of other treaties like Schengen. But its a pandemic - temporary breaches are permitted.
Again, we are being treated as we demanded - as a 3rd country. They had to arbitrate on which exceptions to their medically induced ban would exist and they have tret us like the rest of the world not Europe. At our request.
You and others complaining demonstrates English exceptionalism at its finest. That "treat us like a 3rd country" actually meant "we don't want to be European but you will do what we bally well say because we are English and that means we get to make all the rules".
Yes, there were plenty on here saying "ban all travel". Now the French are trying it (which personally I think is a waste of time) the same posters are trying to make a point of it.
Its totally a waste of time - they already have Omicron so they're as fucked as their neighbours.
But - and its a very bit but - it is an established principle that countries have the absolute right in an emergency to change processes even if written into treaty. This was the point being made last March "THEY CAN'T CLOSE THEIR BORDERS COS SCHENGEN" and yet they did close their borders and we didn't.
How a nation chooses to draw up its pandemic emergency powers is up to that nation. Some of our red list country bans have made no sense at all, yet here we are shouting at the French for doing the same. Instead of an arbitrary red list they have done an arbitrary EU list. We aren't EU, we demanded not to be EU and be tret like ROW and now we're Outraged that we're seen as not EU and as ROW.
What the frack is wrong with some people? This is what you wanted!
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
It'll be interesting to scrutinise this page of endorsements from the 2019 Tory leadership election to see how many of, say, Jeremy Hunt's supporters are still in the Commons following GE2019.
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
We stop this middle class obsession of doing a LFT every day and start doing the level of testing other western countries do.
It is government policy rather than a middle-class obsession that we take an LFT test before going out or having friends round, or twice a week if we have no friends, and daily if we are isolating after a close contact with a plague carrier.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
Gay people used to face this same kind of "moral panic" cr*p. Giving trans people rights does not take rights away from women any more than taking giving gay people rights took them away from straight people.
Well done in confirming my point that most trans "supporters" don't have a first clue about what the actual issue is.
A lot of women need safe women only / man free spaces because of past issues / trauma they have experienced.
Its a lie....We did this earlier. And every day for the past 3-4 days. Slots are made available, they fill up. At midday they release more slots. I looked there were slots available everywhere. Its a deliberate demand management strategy and the media have been told this repeatedly.
Will the system finally fall over at some point, I am sure it will. You have to pick some limit and 900k PCR test capacity is extremely large, but I am pretty sure it won't take much of something to go wrong and the elastic to finally snap.
And people are treating LFT tests like sweeties, some doing multiple a day or just doing them daily because why not, they are free. Then running out and getting pissed off they can't get another 20 of them instantly. It is clear there is very large demand and so take some personal responsibility and plan to use them when necessary.
My friend in Newcastle tried to book a PCR at 3pm. Was offered only Kelso at 3:30 - nothing else available.
I had to wait one day at Prestwick, they have 1200 slots a day , very busy but they put next day out in the pm. No desperation for anyone to get PCR immediately.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
Gay people used to face this same kind of "moral panic" cr*p. Giving trans people rights does not take rights away from women any more than taking giving gay people rights took them away from straight people.
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
We stop this middle class obsession of doing a LFT every day and start doing the level of testing other western countries do.
If it stops the NHS getting overwhelmed and keeps restrictions at bay then we should do as many as possible.
We need to survive this surge and then we can think about reducing testing rates as Covid burns itself out .
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
The problem is that it's highly contentious for the reasons @edmundintokyo talked about - mainly because both parties talk at cross purposes and never seem to understand that
1) both sides do actually have valid points but 2) what they are asking for is impossible because their desired fix creates the problem the other side is worried about (and is a problem that the other side just doesn't seem able to grasp or see) 3) and no compromise is possible because it's very much a binary result that the other side cannot accept.
We've covered the same issue here multiple times when talking about rapists ending up in Scottish Women's prisons because self identifying as a women is their "right". As it never ends well it's best to try and avoid the topic.
I am LGBTQIwhatever and my 20 year-old non-binary offspring has had a couple of trans boyfriends. So I do care about trans issues. But you can't override every other issue with trans rights - be sensitive to their rights and also the rights of women.
The problem with Ms Rowling is that she took a clear and previously uncontroversial stance in favour of protecting women's rights in their ongoing struggle against real misogyny. Fatal error. "YOU'RE TRANSPHOBIC" they howl even though she had made it clear she isn't.
People like my whatever-the-gender-neutral-alternative-to-son's ex BFs and my old mate who is trans male to female and *genuine* should be absolutely supported. That is not the same as dodgy Dave the deviant suddenly self-identifying as female demanding access to a women's refuge.
That people on both sides of the debate cannot understand the difference is baffling to me. So I largely stay out of it.
post something long enough that it's impossible to use
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
The trouble with Boris is that when he's good he's very, very good and when he's bad he's terrible, and there's precious little in between. For my money, he has done a great job in implementing the result of the 2016 referendum, which destroyed his last two predecessors and paralysed politics for three years, in the stunning triumph of our vaccine programme, in seeing off Jeremy Corbyn and in avoiding the worst barbarities of continental or Chinese lockdowns during this epidemic.
But the extended crises of the last five years could be coming to a close. And, as is well known, the mundane, routine stuff of every day economic and social policy with its tradeoffs and need to consider dozens of factors and come to usually fudged decisions is too detailed and tedious for his toddler-length attention span. He is intellectually lazy, so will always go with the big government, high spending solution. And his only defence, entirely true, is that Starmer would be even worse.
Also, is being PM really compatible with having a couple of babies in the house?
Excellent summary, except I'm not sure I agree with the last point (Blair and Cameron both both had a baby in the house too).
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
We stop this middle class obsession of doing a LFT every day and start doing the level of testing other western countries do.
I know someone who is doing 5 tests a day just because someone they saw someone a week ago who now has Omicron. If that type of behaviour is being repeated then no wonder there are supply problems for tests.
Yesterday in SA they did 34,753 tests some of which had to be paid for by the person taking the test.
In the UK we did 1,476,216 tests all of which were free.
And our testing system is a "shambles"
The 1,476,216 were the tests reported.
There were likely millions of negative tests taken and not reported.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
The problem is that it's highly contentious for the reasons @edmundintokyo talked about - mainly because both parties talk at cross purposes and never seem to understand that
1) both sides do actually have valid points but 2) what they are asking for is impossible because their desired fix creates the problem the other side is worried about (and is a problem that the other side just doesn't seem able to grasp or see) 3) and no compromise is possible because it's very much a binary result that the other side cannot accept.
We've covered the same issue here multiple times when talking about rapists ending up in Scottish Women's prisons because self identifying as a women is their "right". As it never ends well it's best to try and avoid the topic.
I am LGBTQIwhatever and my 20 year-old non-binary offspring has had a couple of trans boyfriends. So I do care about trans issues. But you can't override every other issue with trans rights - be sensitive to their rights and also the rights of women.
The problem with Ms Rowling is that she took a clear and previously uncontroversial stance in favour of protecting women's rights in their ongoing struggle against real misogyny. Fatal error. "YOU'RE TRANSPHOBIC" they howl even though she had made it clear she isn't.
People like my whatever-the-gender-neutral-alternative-to-son's ex BFs and my old mate who is trans male to female and *genuine* should be absolutely supported. That is not the same as dodgy Dave the deviant suddenly self-identifying as female demanding access to a women's refuge.
That people on both sides of the debate cannot understand the difference is baffling to me. So I largely stay out of it.
The problem comes down to self identification.
For pro trans people its a magic fix that solves all problems For womens rights it creates a whole new set of issues that the pro trans people just don't seem to understand.
As I said the problem just isn't fixable so I try and keep as far away from it as possible.
The other issue is that you simply can't put a complete argument in 280 characters so anything you post on this topic on twitter will result in 1 tweet being taken out of context and used against you for every more.
At least on here you can post something long enough that it's impossible to use part of your argument completely out of context
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
If that was done, one day we (or those that follow us) will know. People rarely keep quiet for ever.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
On topic, the question was "can anyone explain the mindset". I guess if people feel like they're being pushed around, that naturally creates a reaction where people rebel against doing what they're told. There's then an internet dynamic where because the medium promotes drama, once a community starts to form and develop its own worldview it will get pulled towards more extreme positions.
I think what we're seeing right now is that countries that have tended to be more coercive in dealing with the virus are now getting a bigger counter-reaction. It's obviously hard to separate cause and effect here but for instance Japan's response to covid was almost entirely voluntary, and the resistance has largely fizzled, despite traditionally having quite a strong antivaxx undercurrent.
The same people that said Delta was nothing to worry about, are those that are saying Omicron is nothing to worry about.
So is anyone who said Delta was nothing to worry about, going to stick their head up and say this is different
Who said Delta is nothing to worry about?
I don't recall you calling for a lockdown when Delta was around, we didn't need one was what you and several others said. I remember arguing with you about it
That's not the same thing, is it?
My point is you were wrong then and so I am interested in people that did call for a lockdown then who don't think there is anything to worry about now.
What I am hearing now is the same people that initially said "nothing to worry about" then said "lockdown isn't needed" then said "lockdown 2.0 isn't needed". It's the same people
You keep making these massive sweeping generalisations.
I have generally preferred not to make generalisations.
And with that, good night.
But the French elite are so paranoid about Brexit, so allergic to it and fearful of it, they set a low bar for its success. Britain surviving intact and not starving to death will probably seem quite successful to them. given their direful predictions of total British implosion.
Then the next time the EU does something widely unpopular, eurosceptics across the continent will start to look longingly at independent London.
This is the great French fear. By this guy's account it does stalk their nightmares.
The French are trying to restrict travel to essential only.
By blocking British residents of Belgium or the Netherlands who want to use EuroTunnel and transit France?
Are the blocking British? Or just anyone who isn't EU/Schengen?
Travel from the UK to France
URGENT UPDATE FOR BRITISH RESIDENTS IN EU
Following a French Government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU.
Exactly. They aren't treating us differently. They're applying the 3rd country rules which our government demanded be imposed upon us.
What’s the warning
Be careful what you wish for - it may become true.
I don't understand the complaints. What did they think "3rd country" meant? This is what they demanded and they've succeeded in being treated thus.
Just wait until next week when the usual suspects try and blame the French for our lack of Border Control Posts, staff or computers.
Except the rights of British citizens with legal residency in the EU that pre-dates Brexit have their rights protected by treaty.
I think this is just Macron being a twat again, assuming the allegation is true.
Blocking the UK, when Belgium had had case rates twice as high as our peak at that point for weeks was the action of a kneejerking numpty.
It’s totally Macron being a twat.
But it’s the resounding silence from the Remoaners that amuses
Why should we comment? This is what Leavers wanted. To be outside the EU and to be treated like outsiders.
Well congrats!
Because it’s a breach of the Withdrawal Treaty in the same way that they got very excited about the administrative procedures on settled status.
It is - in the same way that other border closures were breaches of other treaties like Schengen. But its a pandemic - temporary breaches are permitted.
Again, we are being treated as we demanded - as a 3rd country. They had to arbitrate on which exceptions to their medically induced ban would exist and they have tret us like the rest of the world not Europe. At our request.
You and others complaining demonstrates English exceptionalism at its finest. That "treat us like a 3rd country" actually meant "we don't want to be European but you will do what we bally well say because we are English and that means we get to make all the rules".
Yes, there were plenty on here saying "ban all travel". Now the French are trying it (which personally I think is a waste of time) the same posters are trying to make a point of it.
Its totally a waste of time - they already have Omicron so they're as fucked as their neighbours.
But - and its a very bit but - it is an established principle that countries have the absolute right in an emergency to change processes even if written into treaty. This was the point being made last March "THEY CAN'T CLOSE THEIR BORDERS COS SCHENGEN" and yet they did close their borders and we didn't.
How a nation chooses to draw up its pandemic emergency powers is up to that nation. Some of our red list country bans have made no sense at all, yet here we are shouting at the French for doing the same. Instead of an arbitrary red list they have done an arbitrary EU list. We aren't EU, we demanded not to be EU and be tret like ROW and now we're Outraged that we're seen as not EU and as ROW.
What the frack is wrong with some people? This is what you wanted!
As I posted yesterday
Be careful what you wish for, it may become true.
Surely every single story about being granted x wishes should tell you things never end up the way you want.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
The trouble with Boris is that when he's good he's very, very good and when he's bad he's terrible, and there's precious little in between. For my money, he has done a great job in implementing the result of the 2016 referendum, which destroyed his last two predecessors and paralysed politics for three years, in the stunning triumph of our vaccine programme, in seeing off Jeremy Corbyn and in avoiding the worst barbarities of continental or Chinese lockdowns during this epidemic.
But the extended crises of the last five years could be coming to a close. And, as is well known, the mundane, routine stuff of every day economic and social policy with its tradeoffs and need to consider dozens of factors and come to usually fudged decisions is too detailed and tedious for his toddler-length attention span. He is intellectually lazy, so will always go with the big government, high spending solution. And his only defence, entirely true, is that Starmer would be even worse.
Also, is being PM really compatible with having a couple of babies in the house?
I rather think it's the third baby in the house that is the problem.
"The EU and the US reached a Halloween agreement to remove tariffs on a quota of steel and aluminium imported from the bloc into the US from 1 January, but tariffs will remain on all UK steel and aluminium exports after government talks failed to secure a matching breakthrough."
That is Good News for blighty. We don't want to be glad-handed with some namby-pamby European agreement. We want our OWN agreement with the US to make our steel 10% cheaper than the Europeans. That way by the time we add on the cost of customs to ship our part-made steel to the EU and back again (having shut UK finishing plants for various things we need) it will be the same price. Huzzah!
How do you make it cheaper than zero tariff?
You think the cost of filling in endless paperwork is only in the tariff? I'm lucky enough to have zero tariff zero VAT products. Declaring all of that is a bastard - and get any detail wrong and its not coming in zero tariff or not.
Anyway, Brexit is really now highlighting the short-termism of our economic policies of the post industrial era. Yes globalisation, yes we can make a profit by selling something off, but we're now absolutely reliant on foreign owners and foreign production. "Save British Steel" some people are saying but we don't own it and we don't have the capability to make what we need.
Other countries seem to have managed through this era without making the same mistakes. Look at Germany - still owns stuff, still produces stuff, still invests for the long term. This isn't party political as we've had Tory Labour and Coalition governments in the 1980 - 2016 era - all doing the same stupiud.
Nope - I know that the paperwork is the real killer here.
But our MPs are thick and my local MP thinks that all paperwork can be automated away. Which is not surprising as he's a lawyer and I'm just the person who earns £100k + year creating those automated systems.
So if you know that is the case why post "how do you make it cheaper than zero tariff"? Even if we had agreed a zero tariff zero quota arrangement for literally every product category, if we are insisting that we have different standards requiring compliance checks then that means reams of paperwork and inspections and all that bullshit.
I know that some people think sovrinty is worth more than red tape (having spent 30 years campaigning to cut red tape) but you and I know they are idiots. Don't give them succour by trying to make this only about tariffs.
It was a genuine question on JK Rowling to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to it.
The issue seems to stem from whether there are multiple genders, from what I have read on Reddit
If you managed to spend the last year on the internet without coming into contact with this particular controversy then just carry on doing what you've been doing, your social media streams are perfectly calibrated.
Why are you shouting me down for asking a legitimate question? This has only come up because of the Harry Potter documentary that was just on. I wasn't aware that JK Rowling had been "cancelled"
The problem is that it's highly contentious for the reasons @edmundintokyo talked about - mainly because both parties talk at cross purposes and never seem to understand that
1) both sides do actually have valid points but 2) what they are asking for is impossible because their desired fix creates the problem the other side is worried about (and is a problem that the other side just doesn't seem able to grasp or see) 3) and no compromise is possible because it's very much a binary result that the other side cannot accept.
We've covered the same issue here multiple times when talking about rapists ending up in Scottish Women's prisons because self identifying as a women is their "right". As it never ends well it's best to try and avoid the topic.
I am LGBTQIwhatever and my 20 year-old non-binary offspring has had a couple of trans boyfriends. So I do care about trans issues. But you can't override every other issue with trans rights - be sensitive to their rights and also the rights of women.
The problem with Ms Rowling is that she took a clear and previously uncontroversial stance in favour of protecting women's rights in their ongoing struggle against real misogyny. Fatal error. "YOU'RE TRANSPHOBIC" they howl even though she had made it clear she isn't.
People like my whatever-the-gender-neutral-alternative-to-son's ex BFs and my old mate who is trans male to female and *genuine* should be absolutely supported. That is not the same as dodgy Dave the deviant suddenly self-identifying as female demanding access to a women's refuge.
That people on both sides of the debate cannot understand the difference is baffling to me. So I largely stay out of it.
The problem comes down to self identification.
For pro trans people its a magic fix that solves all problems For womens rights it creates a whole new set of issues that the pro trans people just don't seem to understand.
As I said the problem just isn't fixable so I try and keep as far away from it as possible.
The other issue is that you simply can't put a complete argument in 280 characters so anything you post on this topic on twitter will result in 1 tweet being taken out of context and used against you for every more.
At least on here you can post something long enough that it's impossible to use part of your argument completely out of context
I'm not sure anyone claimed it was a "magic fix", which is perhaps your interpretation ?
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
Sounds way too expensive.
Pay someone to observe how the prison works and identify the weak points.
Then send your single man in for a few weeks so they can pick the correct moment.
Bit more effort but far cheaper and far less likely to go wrong.
Well the Maxwell verdict has taken the heat off Bojo for 24 hours, but his Covid plans are in disarray (just like his hair, his finances, and his relations with Princess Nut Nut.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
We stop this middle class obsession of doing a LFT every day and start doing the level of testing other western countries do.
It is government policy rather than a middle-class obsession that we take an LFT test before going out or having friends round, or twice a week if we have no friends, and daily if we are isolating after a close contact with a plague carrier.
Its a government policy which has spawned a middle class obsession.
But the government policy does seem something from the 'track and trace' era of controlling covid rather than accepting its here and living with it.
And also a government policy which wanted to make use of the vast number of LFTs they had bought - that they're now desperately buying up ever more LFTs to feed the middle class obsession that has resulted is amusing in a collective madness sort of way.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
If that was done, one day we (or those that follow us) will know. People rarely keep quiet for ever.
Good news - my LFTs have arrived. No Royal Mail emails, so a pleasant surprise.
Not so good news - I realised that I forgot to put the bin out last night, and now I've missed the collection. Funny how what was the highlight of my week during shielding is now something that slips my mind.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
If that was done, one day we (or those that follow us) will know. People rarely keep quiet for ever.
If what you are keeping quiet about is the murder of someone capable of giving inconvenient evidence, that is going to colour your thinking about going public.
Here's a bloke who murdered Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, but prudently kept it to himself till his deathbed, this year
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
Gay people used to face this same kind of "moral panic" cr*p. Giving trans people rights does not take rights away from women any more than taking giving gay people rights took them away from straight people.
It does if you let them compete in women's sport
That is a matter for the doctors in the relevant sporting bodies to deal with.I suspect they have more expertise on the matter than PB posters or Ms Rowling
Good news - my LFTs have arrived. No Royal Mail emails, so a pleasant surprise.
Not so good news - I realised that I forgot to put the bin out last night, and now I've missed the collection. Funny how what was the highlight of my week during shielding is now something that slips my mind.
Have you double checked that you haven't been rescheduled to mid January anyway? No collections here this week
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
If this was an attempt to troll by throwing out a casual reference to an issue that excites two rival tribes of the angriest people on the internet and doing an innocent face then please do it somewhere else. If you're going to do that kind of trolling here, the only permitted subject is AV.
I am thinking about doing one of Sunday's pieces on the Tory leadership election rules and the fact the Tories use a form of quasi-AV to elect their leader.
Multiple rounds of voting, the candidate with the least votes get eliminated, and we only have a winner when someone gets 50% plus of the votes.
You call it "AV". I call it "Keep Another IDS off the Ballot".
I'm not sure what Labour would call it, but whatever it is, they want it - to Keep Another Corbyn off the Ballot....
IDS won the Tory leadership under the party's AV system once Portillo and Davis and Ancram were knocked out and he was the only alternative left to Ken Clarke
How was a party that chose IDS over Ken Clarke ever let back into Downing Street?
They sorted themselves out, we chose Cameron over David Davis, and the other lot let Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Then you f*cked up royally by letting the current clown in, just sayin.
They f*cked up royally by letting Theresa May in which led to even Jeremy Corbyn polling 10% poll leads.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
The trouble with Boris is that when he's good he's very, very good and when he's bad he's terrible, and there's precious little in between. For my money, he has done a great job in implementing the result of the 2016 referendum, which destroyed his last two predecessors and paralysed politics for three years, in the stunning triumph of our vaccine programme, in seeing off Jeremy Corbyn and in avoiding the worst barbarities of continental or Chinese lockdowns during this epidemic.
But the extended crises of the last five years could be coming to a close. And, as is well known, the mundane, routine stuff of every day economic and social policy with its tradeoffs and need to consider dozens of factors and come to usually fudged decisions is too detailed and tedious for his toddler-length attention span. He is intellectually lazy, so will always go with the big government, high spending solution. And his only defence, entirely true, is that Starmer would be even worse.
Also, is being PM really compatible with having a couple of babies in the house?
I rather think it's the third baby in the house that is the problem.
Carrie may not be everybody's idea of an ideal wife, but that's a bit harsh!
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
Where would you get a hitman in a prison? Just asking......
And then Kellie-Jay Keen calls a person who transitioned to being a woman, a man. I get sort of the idea of what she's saying but this just seems to encourage being nasty against somebody for no reason?
Mrs C, 'expertise' is not required, just a basic level of fundamental biology.
Men have approximately twice the muscle and half the fat of women, on average. We know men outcompete women at elite level because practically every single record held by men is better than the female equivalent, and it's why sexually segregated sporting competitions are fully justified and entirely normal.
Someone being trans does not rewrite their genetic code or undo decades of performance-enhancing testosterone flowing through their system.
This is a straightforward conflict between ideology and reality.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
Sounds way too expensive.
Pay someone to observe how the prison works and identify the weak points.
Then send your single man in for a few weeks so they can pick the correct moment.
Bit more effort but far cheaper and far less likely to go wrong.
"Weak points" is a bit of an Ocean's 11 rather than real life point, isn't it? There is one way in, you need a security pass to get in via that way, you don't have a security pass. End of, in real life, whereas if you suborn someone with an existing pass, no problemo.
And then Kellie-Jay Keen calls a person who transitioned to being a woman, a man. I get sort of the idea of what she's saying but this just seems to encourage being nasty against somebody for no reason?
At the heart of the issue is whether, as some argue, “gender trumps biological sex” and what flows from that. Notably she is a lot more civil and polite than some of her critics, and has not yet doxed or threatened to murder any of them.
Exactly. We stopped using the word "sex" because fnarr fnarr so substituted gender. Which us something completely different. My insert-neutral-substitute-here offspring is biologically male and gender neutral. Their last two ex-boyfriends were biologically female and male gendered.
Its not difficult. Promote the rights of people to identify in whatever gender they want, protect the rights of people of one biological sex from being threatened and raped by the other.
What is going on with JK Rowling? This issue seems to have totally passed me by.
She says chicks with dicks aren't chicks.
That's what it boils down to.
Did she actually say that? I have zero interest in TERF wars, but my impression was that she said that trans rights couldn’t be at the expense of women’s rights
Yes she did but that is not an acceptable position in the new Scotland. As one of the last serious taxpayers left in the country this is unfortunate.
Gay people used to face this same kind of "moral panic" cr*p. Giving trans people rights does not take rights away from women any more than taking giving gay people rights took them away from straight people.
It does if you let them compete in women's sport
That is a matter for the doctors in the relevant sporting bodies to deal with.I suspect they have more expertise on the matter than PB posters or Ms Rowling
Hahahahahahahahaha
No it isn't, it is a matter of pure self identification for a huge number of sporting bodies. You haven't the first idea what you are on about.
Looks like the sentencing hearing will be at a later date, presumably so that she and her lawyer can work out how many names she needs to give to authorities, in order to see her get out in a handful of years.
She’s going to know an awful lot of names, at least two living Presidents were associates of Epstein.
She'll need to give a lot more than names. They will want evidence.
Far be it for me to spread conspiracy :-)
But I find it hard to believe she will be allowed to bring down two American political dynasties and the British Royal Family.
Presumably she has made arrangements so that upon her unfortunate sudden demise, her story would still be aired. But you would have thought Epstein would have done the same and apparently not.
It’s going to be quite fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maxwell is 60 years old, she won’t fancy living out the rest of her life behind bars, and clearly has a lot of records of people who were involved with Epstein.
There have been loads of conspiracy theories over the years about high-society pedophile rings - and while this isn’t quite that, it’s clear that many of the young ladies involved with Epstein and Maxwell were a little too young, and a lot of the people at the parties were in the top echelons of American (and British) society.
The question is, therefore, will release of the contents of her little black book be a mitigating factor or an aggravating factor, when it comes to sentencing. Or will she get “suicided” like Epstein, so that it can never be released.
Is there really any credibility in the suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide? Genuine question.
I have not followed it that closely but I assumed the idea that he was bumped off to save embarassment was just a QAnon level conspiracy theory.
Why would you assume that?
Occam's razor.
How many people would need to be involved in a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and ensure it was covered up?
Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb, and involving lots of people in a murder and cover up is easy when you have virtually infinite money and virtually infinite power, as Epstein's "friends" undoubtedly did, between them.
That’s exactly what fuels the conspiracies, it wouldn’t have taken a massive amount of money or resources to arrange for him to be killed, and there were an awful lot of people with money and connections, with motive to have him dead. Paying off half a dozen prison guards and a hit man isn’t particularly expensive, in the grand scheme of things.
If that was done, one day we (or those that follow us) will know. People rarely keep quiet for ever.
If what you are keeping quiet about is the murder of someone capable of giving inconvenient evidence, that is going to colour your thinking about going public.
Here's a bloke who murdered Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, but prudently kept it to himself till his deathbed, this year
Comments
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending17december2021
Week-ending: five-year average, COVID deaths, non-COVID deaths, excess non-COVID deaths
24-Sep-21, 9,264, 888, 9,796, 532
01-Oct-21, 9,377, 783, 9,727, 350
08-Oct-21, 9,555, 666, 10,141, 586
15-Oct-21, 9,811, 713, 10,464, 653
22-Oct-21, 9,865, 792, 10,516, 651
29-Oct-21, 9,759, 859, 10,128, 369
05-Nov-21, 9,891, 995, 10,555, 664
12-Nov-21, 10,331, 1,020, 11,030, 699
19-Nov-21, 10,350, 952, 11,151, 801
26-Nov-21, 10,380, 817, 10,650, 270
03-Dec-21, 10,357, 792, 10,867, 510
10-Dec-21, 10,695, 764, 11,166, 471
17-Dec-21, 10,750, 755, 11,645, 895
They owe us.
With 200,000 omicron cases per day, and household members, and workers in key jobs, supposed to be doing daily lateral flow tests, we need several million lateral flow kits every day, and these are simply not going to be available any time soon. PCR tests are also not available in the numbers required, so the whole testing system is in a total state of collapse.
Where we go from here is anyone's guess.
Imagine if the ECB split the Test and one-day stuff in the TV contract. I reckon the Tests would sell for more.
My comment is really about the hypocrisy of people who launch into the UK for a reasonable administrative procedure and find excuses when an EU country does something that is equally in breach of the treaty.
But they “have a good reason” which makes it all ok…
Tbf, given the transport costs involved, it's a puzzle to me why steel is exported between the EU/US/UK at all.
I mean, I appreciate not all of those entities has a long tradition of making steel themselves. Oh, wait...
And yet other countries, notably Australia, India, Pakistan and New Zealand seem perfectly capable of producing players, including batsmen, with the requisite skills to play five-day cricket.
The problem with Ms Rowling is that she took a clear and previously uncontroversial stance in favour of protecting women's rights in their ongoing struggle against real misogyny. Fatal error. "YOU'RE TRANSPHOBIC" they howl even though she had made it clear she isn't.
People like my whatever-the-gender-neutral-alternative-to-son's ex BFs and my old mate who is trans male to female and *genuine* should be absolutely supported. That is not the same as dodgy Dave the deviant suddenly self-identifying as female demanding access to a women's refuge.
That people on both sides of the debate cannot understand the difference is baffling to me. So I largely stay out of it.
The only horse that doesn't kick is a dead horse.
All the best.
I listen to TMS, look at the scorecards on cricinfo, and Test cricket receives not a penny from me.
But its America. Best to let them get on with it - it's their country.
Again, this isn't much good for test cricket, where its the ability to bowl fast, accurate and let the ball swing and seam, with the idea you don't give bad balls away. Anderson isn't trying to bowl 6 different balls an over at 6 different paces.
"The current clown" took the Tories from 10% behind Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to win an eighty seat majority, got a revised Trade Deal that abolished the backstop and was so good it is now being iterated into an even better deal; then got the vaccines first in the world.
If that's clowning about, then Send in the Clowns!
But he already f**ked you at the last election. 😲
The issues are:
1) non parents being allowed to be involved
2) the way everything in America is becoming politics first...
Friends of inlaws decided against spending Christmas at their place in France this year. They were concerned that if there were restrictions on coming back they would risk missing their flight for their holiday in America.
How do these people cope?
One of the beauties of the multi-day matches is that you can follow a game without necessarily watching every single ball. You can dip in for half an hour, catch an update a bit later, etc. Somehow they need to sell that aspect of an unfolding story, and monetize it.
People keeling over a few months after a bout of covid due to weakened circulatory and pulmonary systems ?
For pro trans people its a magic fix that solves all problems
For womens rights it creates a whole new set of issues that the pro trans people just don't seem to understand.
As I said the problem just isn't fixable so I try and keep as far away from it as possible.
The other issue is that you simply can't put a complete argument in 280 characters so anything you post on this topic on twitter will result in 1 tweet being taken out of context and used against you for every more.
At least on here you can post something long enough that it's impossible to use part of your argument completely out of context
Anyway, Brexit is really now highlighting the short-termism of our economic policies of the post industrial era. Yes globalisation, yes we can make a profit by selling something off, but we're now absolutely reliant on foreign owners and foreign production. "Save British Steel" some people are saying but we don't own it and we don't have the capability to make what we need.
Other countries seem to have managed through this era without making the same mistakes. Look at Germany - still owns stuff, still produces stuff, still invests for the long term. This isn't party political as we've had Tory Labour and Coalition governments in the 1980 - 2016 era - all doing the same stupiud.
Yesterday in SA they did 34,753 tests some of which had to be paid for by the person taking the test.
In the UK we did 1,476,216 tests all of which were free.
And our testing system is a "shambles"
She explains it herself:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1476194103528407046?s=21
At the heart of the issue is whether, as some argue, “gender trumps biological sex” and what flows from that. Notably she is a lot more civil and polite than some of her critics, and has not yet doxed or threatened to murder any of them.
But the extended crises of the last five years could be coming to a close. And, as is well known, the mundane, routine stuff of every day economic and social policy with its tradeoffs and need to consider dozens of factors and come to usually fudged decisions is too detailed and tedious for his toddler-length attention span. He is intellectually lazy, so will always go with the big government, high spending solution. And his only defence, entirely true, is that Starmer would be even worse.
Also, is being PM really compatible with having a couple of babies in the house?
What is really weird is his preferred brand of nail comes from Colombia. Perhaps they are particularly good at shipping relatively small parcels internationally.
But our MPs are thick and my local MP thinks that all paperwork can be automated away. Which is not surprising as he's a lawyer and I'm just the person who earns £100k + year creating those automated systems.
The RSPB should put them on posters.
But - and its a very bit but - it is an established principle that countries have the absolute right in an emergency to change processes even if written into treaty. This was the point being made last March "THEY CAN'T CLOSE THEIR BORDERS COS SCHENGEN" and yet they did close their borders and we didn't.
How a nation chooses to draw up its pandemic emergency powers is up to that nation. Some of our red list country bans have made no sense at all, yet here we are shouting at the French for doing the same. Instead of an arbitrary red list they have done an arbitrary EU list. We aren't EU, we demanded not to be EU and be tret like ROW and now we're Outraged that we're seen as not EU and as ROW.
What the frack is wrong with some people? This is what you wanted!
A lot of women need safe women only / man free spaces because of past issues / trauma they have experienced.
We need to survive this surge and then we can think about reducing testing rates as Covid burns itself out
.
There were likely millions of negative tests taken and not reported.
I think what we're seeing right now is that countries that have tended to be more coercive in dealing with the virus are now getting a bigger counter-reaction. It's obviously hard to separate cause and effect here but for instance Japan's response to covid was almost entirely voluntary, and the resistance has largely fizzled, despite traditionally having quite a strong antivaxx undercurrent.
Be careful what you wish for, it may become true.
Surely every single story about being granted x wishes should tell you things never end up the way you want.
I know that some people think sovrinty is worth more than red tape (having spent 30 years campaigning to cut red tape) but you and I know they are idiots. Don't give them succour by trying to make this only about tariffs.
Alastair had a typically civilised stab at the issue on his blog:
https://alastair-meeks.medium.com/a-fool-rushes-in-a-suggested-way-of-approaching-trans-rights-ccae2554fe31
Pay someone to observe how the prison works and identify the weak points.
Then send your single man in for a few weeks so they can pick the correct moment.
Bit more effort but far cheaper and far less likely to go wrong.
But the government policy does seem something from the 'track and trace' era of controlling covid rather than accepting its here and living with it.
And also a government policy which wanted to make use of the vast number of LFTs they had bought - that they're now desperately buying up ever more LFTs to feed the middle class obsession that has resulted is amusing in a collective madness sort of way.
Not so good news - I realised that I forgot to put the bin out last night, and now I've missed the collection. Funny how what was the highlight of my week during shielding is now something that slips my mind.
Here's a bloke who murdered Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, but prudently kept it to himself till his deathbed, this year
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/nyregion/jimmy-hoffa-fbi-investigation.html
Campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen and James Max clash over the issue of 'sex-based rights' and JK Rowling's 'trans-row'.
James: "I am slightly staggered by your views."
Campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen: "What? That biological sex exists."
@thejamesmax
"Women can't commit rape" - erh, what? As in legally they can't?
If you've transitioned to being a woman, this person would like you to not use female toilets - but where are they supposed to go then? Outside?
Men have approximately twice the muscle and half the fat of women, on average. We know men outcompete women at elite level because practically every single record held by men is better than the female equivalent, and it's why sexually segregated sporting competitions are fully justified and entirely normal.
Someone being trans does not rewrite their genetic code or undo decades of performance-enhancing testosterone flowing through their system.
This is a straightforward conflict between ideology and reality.
Its not difficult. Promote the rights of people to identify in whatever gender they want, protect the rights of people of one biological sex from being threatened and raped by the other.
No it isn't, it is a matter of pure self identification for a huge number of sporting bodies. You haven't the first idea what you are on about.