Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
.@Bren4Bassetlaw gave a forthright answer the binary, central question facing him + other Tory MPs today: are you content to back a law breaker in office?
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
That's exactly what laws should be built around, surely. Fred West and Jimmy Savile were pretty unusual people.
I have never encountered anyone who was genuinely anti-trans. Perhaps some US Christians are because it's a perversion of God's handiwork? What we usually get is right on numpties who leap on any suggestion that safeguards are needed for fakers and edge cases with cries of "he said Jehovah! He said jehovah!"
I have encountered people who are genuinely anti-trans. They were working with people who were trans.
Awks.
But that's probably because most people rarely meet a trans person (or realise they've met one...) for such feelings to out.
"Safeguards are needed."
Gay men have raped other men in toilets. Where are the safeguard for that? None are needed, because a) it would trample on the rights of the massive majority of gay men who do not behave in such an awful manner, b) it is thankfully rare, and c) because it is unenforceable.
A truly and utterly imbecilic point. Do you think banning alcohol sales to under 18s is pointless and ineffective because adults drink irresponsibly too? Or we shouldn't restrict gun sales because knives and hammers are available as murder weapons? We should have no criminal records checks on wannabe scoutmasters because the massive majority of them are entirely praiseworthy individuals? Or that a ban on people with dicks in ladies loos is in some way unenforceable?
How do you 'enforce' people with dicks not going into ladies' loos?
The truly imbecilic part is reducing this debate to a dangly body part (which almost certainly doesn't function sexually because of the hormones).
And so little discussion of those transitioning the other way.
It's pathetic. Utterly pathetic. And imbecilic. Utterly imbecilic. And nasty. Utterly nasty.
I despair at the sheer ignorance and the hatred is ALL spawned from that ignorance.
Edit. Not you JJ I hope. Just my general despair at the stupidity of this debate.
Live and let live. There are FAR FAR FAR more important things to concern the human race right now.
(Forgot City Airport which is past its glory days of basically throwing the bags down to you from the hold, but still the best located for business, fun, life.)
And I think the Privileges Committee can only recommend that the house has a vote. Which Johnson will win because majority. Then time to draw a line and move on.
Eighteen dead children. At a fucking primary school.
And this will just be another one of the fucking list, another memory, before long.
It makes me so angry.
Fuck. King. Hell.
Just saw the news. Horrific and as you say not going to move the needle on much at all in terms of stopping future events.
Anytime I idly think to myself, “America might be a good place to live”, this happens. And you decide nahhhh. The (non) response in America belies a sickness in society when compared with the outcome of both Dunblane and Port Arthur.
It occurs to me that the 2nd Amendment is America’s equivalent of the NHS
An anachronistic national institution, which is bizarrely worshipped by many, meaning it can never seriously be reformed, even though it kills thousands of people every year. And this despite the fact that all equivalent countries do that thing - gun law, healthcare - so much better, and without the slaughter, or cringeworthy worship
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
That's exactly what laws should be built around, surely. Fred West and Jimmy Savile were pretty unusual people.
I have never encountered anyone who was genuinely anti-trans. Perhaps some US Christians are because it's a perversion of God's handiwork? What we usually get is right on numpties who leap on any suggestion that safeguards are needed for fakers and edge cases with cries of "he said Jehovah! He said jehovah!"
I have encountered people who are genuinely anti-trans. They were working with people who were trans.
Awks.
But that's probably because most people rarely meet a trans person (or realise they've met one...) for such feelings to out.
"Safeguards are needed."
Gay men have raped other men in toilets. Where are the safeguard for that? None are needed, because a) it would trample on the rights of the massive majority of gay men who do not behave in such an awful manner, b) it is thankfully rare, and c) because it is unenforceable.
A truly and utterly imbecilic point. Do you think banning alcohol sales to under 18s is pointless and ineffective because adults drink irresponsibly too? Or we shouldn't restrict gun sales because knives and hammers are available as murder weapons? We should have no criminal records checks on wannabe scoutmasters because the massive majority of them are entirely praiseworthy individuals? Or that a ban on people with dicks in ladies loos is in some way unenforceable?
And people transitioning need to live as their new 'gender' for two years.
Under current legislation. Scotland is planning to reduce it to 3 months with no medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
That's exactly what laws should be built around, surely. Fred West and Jimmy Savile were pretty unusual people.
I have never encountered anyone who was genuinely anti-trans. Perhaps some US Christians are because it's a perversion of God's handiwork? What we usually get is right on numpties who leap on any suggestion that safeguards are needed for fakers and edge cases with cries of "he said Jehovah! He said jehovah!"
Gay men have raped other men in toilets.
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.
I think we’ll agree that on average men are physically stronger than women and the overwhelming proportion of sexual assaults are carried out by men upon women.
Hence the concern over natal males having access to traditionally female only spaces. And shutting down any debate on the topic by describing such concerns as “not valid” (Sturgeon).
How much should a perceived or real danger to others, however tiny, be allowed to restrict people from doing something that is a biological necessity, like going to the loo? Men are raped in toilets. It is rare, but it happens. The rape is probably done by gay or bi men. Yet fortunately despite this vanishingly small risk, we allow gay men to use men's toilets.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
When they finish the railway so it goes all the way to the airport, Luton will be a serious player
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
It is only a reasonable point if you ignore the mass of evidence from nearly all other countries that fewer guns = better and safer defence from criminals.
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
It is only a reasonable point if you ignore the mass of evidence from nearly all other countries that fewer guns = better and safer defence from criminals.
Even within America that is obvious. States or cities with higher gun ownership rates are not safer places to be.
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
I wouldn’t argue with any of that. America would be a much nicer, safer, kinder, calmer place if you could magically make ALL the guns disappear tomorrow
The trouble is, to get there, you have to overcome basic human psychology. A lot of criminals in America (a rather criminal country) carry guns. Law-abiding Americans know this. They won’t give up their guns because they wouldn’t feel safe being disarmed when the bad guys are still armed. No logic or statistic is going to persuade them otherwise. School shootings will continue
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
That's exactly what laws should be built around, surely. Fred West and Jimmy Savile were pretty unusual people.
I have never encountered anyone who was genuinely anti-trans. Perhaps some US Christians are because it's a perversion of God's handiwork? What we usually get is right on numpties who leap on any suggestion that safeguards are needed for fakers and edge cases with cries of "he said Jehovah! He said jehovah!"
I have encountered people who are genuinely anti-trans. They were working with people who were trans.
Awks.
But that's probably because most people rarely meet a trans person (or realise they've met one...) for such feelings to out.
"Safeguards are needed."
Gay men have raped other men in toilets. Where are the safeguard for that? None are needed, because a) it would trample on the rights of the massive majority of gay men who do not behave in such an awful manner, b) it is thankfully rare, and c) because it is unenforceable.
A truly and utterly imbecilic point. Do you think banning alcohol sales to under 18s is pointless and ineffective because adults drink irresponsibly too? Or we shouldn't restrict gun sales because knives and hammers are available as murder weapons? We should have no criminal records checks on wannabe scoutmasters because the massive majority of them are entirely praiseworthy individuals? Or that a ban on people with dicks in ladies loos is in some way unenforceable?
And people transitioning need to live as their new 'gender' for two years.
Under current legislation. Scotland is planning to reduce it to 3 months with no medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
I'm not sure I agree with that. It's a big decision for someone to make, and IMO a year or two makes sense.
And Americans vote time and time and time again to protect the gun rights of lunatics over the rights of children my daughter's age not to be shot to death in their classroom.
America is a third world country on a whole stack of measures, and the voters are only just getting started making it into Gilead.
We had one mass school shooting. We reacted in horror and passed laws so strict that chances of a repeat are very very small. America suffers them on a regular basis, smears the parents who then campaign for sanity, and suggests that primary school teachers arm themselves to defend their classroom. At least those are the politicians they vote for. And you get what you vote for.
So whilst I can barely comprehend what the parents are going through, there is a simple solution for Americans who don't want to suffer their kids being murdered at school or their horrendous metrics on various health and education metrics: leave. Move to civilisation and leave the savages to it.
Cabinet head Case rumoured to be packing his suitcase to save Big Dog after report into case involving a suitcase of wine. Unclear whether Big Dog will follow suit to see the case closed.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
When they finish the railway so it goes all the way to the airport, Luton will be a serious player
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
I think it's on top of a hill/plateau. Much of Luton is 150-200 foot lower.
So we could fill Luton with landfill and extend the airport on top. Which would probably improve Luton ... .;)
It occurs to me that the 2nd Amendment is America’s equivalent of the NHS
An anachronistic national institution, which is bizarrely worshipped by many, meaning it can never seriously be reformed, even though it kills thousands of people every year. And this despite the fact that all equivalent countries do that thing - gun law, healthcare - so much better, and without the slaughter, or cringeworthy worship
They both have a vicious cycle, too.
The more guns in general circulation, the more likely your ordinary citizen feels the need to have one. Same goes for the power of the weapon - you now see ordinary cops walking around with assault rifles.
The NHS has a phenomenon where the proportion of government expenditure is increasing even faster than our demographic profile would suggest. Better health care and longer lives = more expenditure.
There is no political appetite to break the cycle in either case.
As a bare minimum, Russia has now lost 4,035 pieces of military kit in its 3 months in Ukraine, 699 of them tanks. (Oryx) The real total is probably well north of 5000.
This is an unrelated installation of 700 dots. It gives a chance to see a visual representation of every tank that crossed the border from Russia to Ukraine - but will not be making the return journey (scroll down half way).
The scale of destruction of everything - manpower, kit, cities, innocent Ukrainians - is barely imaginable without being brought up short by such visualisations.
Here is the O2 Arena. It holds 20,000. You could put a dead Russian soldier in every seat, and still have corpses spilling out to the car park:
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
I wouldn’t argue with any of that. America would be a much nicer, safer, kinder, calmer place if you could magically make ALL the guns disappear tomorrow
The trouble is, to get there, you have to overcome basic human psychology. A lot of criminals in America (a rather criminal country) carry guns. Law-abiding Americans know this. They won’t give up their guns because they wouldn’t feel safe being disarmed when the bad guys are still armed. No logic or statistic is going to persuade them otherwise. School shootings will continue
Perhaps it is about time they valued education more.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
When they finish the railway so it goes all the way to the airport, Luton will be a serious player
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
Luton Airport takes about 90 min for me, but it really is a shocker for road access and parking. Departures is very crowded too. It needs a fair bit spending on it.
Birmingham is not just closer but a far better travelling experience, and until the recent problems Manchester was great. I dont travel from Heathrow or Gatwick unless I have no choice. Getting there adds massively to the hassle of flying.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
When they finish the railway so it goes all the way to the airport, Luton will be a serious player
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
I think it's on top of a hill/plateau. Much of Luton is 150-200 foot lower.
So we could fill Luton with landfill and extend the airport on top. Which would probably improve Luton ... .;)
Yes
Compared to the incredible expense and controversy of expanding LHR, or building Boris Island (which is in entirely the wrong place) demolishing the rest of Luton is a small price to pay. Barely a price at all. Ahem
Luton is also perfectly positioned for the rest of the UK. Near the M25 and right on the M1. Just Bloody Do It. Demolish Luton Town!
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
Some very dodgy logic there. The crucial comparator is not shootings in self defence, it's total crime against gun owner defeated, including by the deterrent effect. And suicide wise, their overall stats are 13 per 100k vs 11 per 100k for us. In other words they would just do it differently if they had to. And it's not obvious to me that interference with the right to an elective death is justified anyway.
And Americans vote time and time and time again to protect the gun rights of lunatics over the rights of children my daughter's age not to be shot to death in their classroom.
America is a third world country on a whole stack of measures, and the voters are only just getting started making it into Gilead.
We had one mass school shooting. We reacted in horror and passed laws so strict that chances of a repeat are very very small. America suffers them on a regular basis, smears the parents who then campaign for sanity, and suggests that primary school teachers arm themselves to defend their classroom. At least those are the politicians they vote for. And you get what you vote for.
So whilst I can barely comprehend what the parents are going through, there is a simple solution for Americans who don't want to suffer their kids being murdered at school or their horrendous metrics on various health and education metrics: leave. Move to civilisation and leave the savages to it.
Sky have just announced that the children killed were between 7 and 10, the same ages as two of our grandchildren who go to the same school
I felt a tear run down my face, and just cannot comprehend the horror for the parents who may well have lost more than one sibling
The US should be utterly ashamed of itself and those Republicans still claiming gun rights this morning have the blood of innocent children on their hands
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense.
And factually wrong. The Changi waterfall isn’t actually in the airport but in the Jewell shopping mall next to it. DXB is a mess. Doha and Istanbul are impressive. Heathrow is severely space constrained and they’ve done a good job with the space they have. For decades people have sniped at UK airport retail (a former BAA CEO said his counterparts complained that the British built shopping centres and attached runways to them).
Cabinet head Case rumoured to be packing his suitcase to save Big Dog after report into case involving a suitcase of wine. Unclear whether Big Dog will follow suit to see the case closed.
is that Simon Case?, the investigation case or the wine suitcase?
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
Some very dodgy logic there. The crucial comparator is not shootings in self defence, it's total crime against gun owner defeated, including by the deterrent effect. And suicide wise, their overall stats are 13 per 100k vs 11 per 100k for us. In other words they would just do it differently if they had to. And it's not obvious to me that interference with the right to an elective death is justified anyway.
There isn't much evidence that gun ownership deters property crime or assault such as rape either, indeed the opposite in the article that I linked to. Indeed a fair amount of American burglaries are to steal guns...
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
I wouldn’t argue with any of that. America would be a much nicer, safer, kinder, calmer place if you could magically make ALL the guns disappear tomorrow
The trouble is, to get there, you have to overcome basic human psychology. A lot of criminals in America (a rather criminal country) carry guns. Law-abiding Americans know this. They won’t give up their guns because they wouldn’t feel safe being disarmed when the bad guys are still armed. No logic or statistic is going to persuade them otherwise. School shootings will continue
This is why even if your end state was to have gun laws similar to Britain, you wouldn't go there in one go. You'd get there in stages. Start by requiring all guns to be registered. Then, possession of an unregistered gun is a crime, and the police can start reducing the number of guns that are out there. Require background checks before selling guns, and make it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to purchase a gun. Then you could require a licence for having a gun - perhaps some mandatory training in gun safety at a gun club. You make certain classes of guns illegal, because they're only good for mass shootings, etc.
In an optimistic scenario you might find that at some stage you manage to get to the Swiss state of their being lots of guns, but not a huge amount of gun violence, and America could be quite happy with a regulated right to bear arms.
There are some simple steps of regulation that don't on themselves threaten the right to bear arms, but should, in time, make it harder for criminals to access weapons.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense.
And factually wrong. The Changi waterfall isn’t actually in the airport but in the Jewell shopping mall next to it. DXB is a mess. Doha and Istanbul are impressive. Heathrow is severely space constrained and they’ve done a good job with the space they have. For decades people have sniped at UK airport retail (a former BAA CEO said his counterparts complained that the British built shopping centres and attached runways to them).
I don’t understand the adoration of the Mid East airports either. They’re quite nice. Good connections, for sure. But hard to get a drink in. They are also attached to tedious, soulless cities built in sterile deserts. Ho hum, who cares
I was in the new Istanbul airport two weeks ago, Huge and impressive (and also quite hard to get a drink in; thought I suspect this will change soon)
But airports are all beginning to resemble each other. The brand new ones all look like Istanbul which looks like all the rest.
Heathrow is very old as airports go, and does a good job of dealing with multiple issues which arise from historical mistakes and necessary limitations
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
I like the comparison between the NHS and 2nd Amendment. If you’ve not experienced it, you don’t understand it, but for many people it’s their religion. And yes, the EU.
Can't we find a better way of funding our retirement than leeching off people's gas bills? Is that really beyond us?
Some facts. The standard UC after rent for single under 25's is £ 265.31 per calendar month. For over 25's is £ 334.91. The average energy bill from October is predicted to be £233.33 per calendar month. This is not sustainable. Regardless of any fucker's pension fund.
And before anyone says small flat, don't use any energy. The standing charge percentage of that is huge. You could literally never turn it on and still be paying a whopping proportion.
Really? I just Googled British Gas.
Standing charge of 45p for electricity and 27p for gas. 70p per day * 30 days = £21 pcm.
So less than 10% of the predicted bill from October
That's a tripling of my standing charge. And I'm with British Gas.
I rather suspect the reason it is going up so much is to get round the fact that it's uneconomic to provide the fuel itself under the price cap.
I agree with the fact that it’s climbed a lot (and includes a lot of policy stuff). Just questioning @dixiedean ’s preemptive rebuttal that it’s a “whopping proportion” of energy bills
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
You need to start travelling again
The Elizabeth Line will be cheaper than the Heathrow Express, as you say, but also a damn sight more convenient because Paddington is a PITA to get to in the first place; also a lot cheaper and far quicker than a black cab.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense.
And factually wrong. The Changi waterfall isn’t actually in the airport but in the Jewell shopping mall next to it. DXB is a mess. Doha and Istanbul are impressive. Heathrow is severely space constrained and they’ve done a good job with the space they have. For decades people have sniped at UK airport retail (a former BAA CEO said his counterparts complained that the British built shopping centres and attached runways to them).
I don’t understand the adoration of the Mid East airports either. They’re quite nice. Good connections, for sure. But hard to get a drink in. They are also attached to tedious, soulless cities built in sterile deserts. Ho hum, who cares
I was in the new Istanbul airport two weeks ago, Huge and impressive (and also quite hard to get a drink in; thought I suspect this will change soon)
But airports are all beginning to resemble each other. The brand new ones all look like Istanbul which looks like all the rest.
Heathrow is very old as airports go, and does a good job of dealing with multiple issues which arise from historical mistakes and necessary limitations
You must really have got your skates on travelling wherever your flint-knapping takes you.
I have been on a plane three times over the past two years and a train (Eurostar) once.
I genuinely can't remember anything about anywhere. It's all a blur. Save for LHR where as you walk towards customs you are in a quantum state of not knowing whether you will turn the corner to find queues winding back hundreds of yards or three people lining up meekly at the biometric passport gates.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
You need to start travelling again
The Elizabeth Line will be cheaper than the Heathrow Express, as you say, but also a damn sight more convenient because Paddington is a PITA to get to in the first place; also a lot cheaper and far quicker than a black cab.
The Liz Line will surely kill off the last taxi services between LHR and central London, except for a few Americans who don’t understand public transport
I wonder if it will kill off the Heathrow Express? The HEX is super pricey, but boy is it fast. 15 minutes is quite something. On a quiet day my flat is just 10 minutes by cab from Paddington so it’s also cool for me, but then I am also only 10 minutes in a cab from Tott Ct Rd or Bond Street, where I will be able to get the Liz Line. And the Liz Line will be way cheaper
The Heathrow Express is endangered. They will have to halve their fares to survive, if it survives at all
IIRC the number of gun killings each year in the USA is over 20k with the number of deaths in mass shootings being under 1k.
Which is perhaps why mass shootings don't have more of an effect.
I fail to see the point of your numbers.
How many die annually in mass shootings in the UK?
I believe that hospitals in the UK are overloaded with people who have been knifed. "Knives, knives, knives."
Massive exaggeration, mostly a handful in london
Plus, it's not like the UK hasn't struggled with various attempted solutions to knife crimes. In response to knife attacks, politicians don't just shrug their shoulders, blame their political opponents and trouser money from the National Knife Association.
Knives are difficult, because there are legitimate reasons to have them. Many Americans would argue the same regarding guns, I'm sure. The difference is, I can't just go walk about with my kitchen knife. I need a lawful reason to do so.
I wish the US would be as proactive on guns as the UK is on knives.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
You need to start travelling again
The Elizabeth Line will be cheaper than the Heathrow Express, as you say, but also a damn sight more convenient because Paddington is a PITA to get to in the first place; also a lot cheaper and far quicker than a black cab.
People who get black cabs in from LHR are like those who eat in Angus Steakhouses. Genuinely unfathomable.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
Some very dodgy logic there. The crucial comparator is not shootings in self defence, it's total crime against gun owner defeated, including by the deterrent effect. And suicide wise, their overall stats are 13 per 100k vs 11 per 100k for us. In other words they would just do it differently if they had to. And it's not obvious to me that interference with the right to an elective death is justified anyway.
There isn't much evidence that gun ownership deters property crime or assault such as rape either, indeed the opposite in the article that I linked to. Indeed a fair amount of American burglaries are to steal guns...
No, again with the fallacies (why am I not surprised to find politically inspired bollocks in the Scientific American?) I don't disagree with the conclusion Guns is Bad, but the causation could be either way (people in more rapey neighbourhoods are more heavily armed) and there's a prisoners dilemma thing going on: total gunlessness is best all round but my best personal policy is still to have one in case anyone else does
Can't we find a better way of funding our retirement than leeching off people's gas bills? Is that really beyond us?
Some facts. The standard UC after rent for single under 25's is £ 265.31 per calendar month. For over 25's is £ 334.91. The average energy bill from October is predicted to be £233.33 per calendar month. This is not sustainable. Regardless of any fucker's pension fund.
And before anyone says small flat, don't use any energy. The standing charge percentage of that is huge. You could literally never turn it on and still be paying a whopping proportion.
Really? I just Googled British Gas.
Standing charge of 45p for electricity and 27p for gas. 70p per day * 30 days = £21 pcm.
So less than 10% of the predicted bill from October
That's a tripling of my standing charge. And I'm with British Gas.
I rather suspect the reason it is going up so much is to get round the fact that it's uneconomic to provide the fuel itself under the price cap.
I agree with the fact that it’s climbed a lot (and includes a lot of policy stuff). Just questioning @dixiedean ’s preemptive rebuttal that it’s a “whopping proportion” of energy bills
My standing charge is ≈ 35p a day for both leccy and gas. On my last bill that was ≈ 10% but is a smaller proportion in winter months.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
That's exactly what laws should be built around, surely. Fred West and Jimmy Savile were pretty unusual people.
I have never encountered anyone who was genuinely anti-trans. Perhaps some US Christians are because it's a perversion of God's handiwork? What we usually get is right on numpties who leap on any suggestion that safeguards are needed for fakers and edge cases with cries of "he said Jehovah! He said jehovah!"
I have encountered people who are genuinely anti-trans. They were working with people who were trans.
Awks.
But that's probably because most people rarely meet a trans person (or realise they've met one...) for such feelings to out.
"Safeguards are needed."
Gay men have raped other men in toilets. Where are the safeguard for that? None are needed, because a) it would trample on the rights of the massive majority of gay men who do not behave in such an awful manner, b) it is thankfully rare, and c) because it is unenforceable.
A truly and utterly imbecilic point. Do you think banning alcohol sales to under 18s is pointless and ineffective because adults drink irresponsibly too? Or we shouldn't restrict gun sales because knives and hammers are available as murder weapons? We should have no criminal records checks on wannabe scoutmasters because the massive majority of them are entirely praiseworthy individuals? Or that a ban on people with dicks in ladies loos is in some way unenforceable?
It really isn't imbecilic.
Let's take your last line. How do you 'enforce' people with dicks not going into ladies' loos? How do you check? Does someone stand outside checking people when they go in? Does Mrs J have to 'prove' she's a woman before she enters the hallowed sanctum?
How do you enforce it?
If someone commits abuse, prosecute them. Have an environment where victims can come forward and their claims will be investigated (we often fall at this fence).
And people transitioning need to live as their new 'gender' for two years. If you're MtoF, that involves dressing and living as a woman for two years. And yes, using women's loos.
My friend Lauren - who is as you say dressing and living as a woman - is pro-trans rights as you can imagine. But before transitioning was also pro-feminism. So isn't insisting her rights as a "new woman" as Ricky Gervais put it" override the rights of everyone else. Because she isn't a tosser.
This is what neither extreme end of the trans vs womens rights spectrum can comprehend. You can stand up for each others rights and be respectful and they don't clash. Its only if you are NO TRANS or NO WOMEN'S SPACES that we have a problem. So stop shouting at each other and let this happen naturally and tell the mouth foamers at both end to do one.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense.
And factually wrong. The Changi waterfall isn’t actually in the airport but in the Jewell shopping mall next to it. DXB is a mess. Doha and Istanbul are impressive. Heathrow is severely space constrained and they’ve done a good job with the space they have. For decades people have sniped at UK airport retail (a former BAA CEO said his counterparts complained that the British built shopping centres and attached runways to them).
I don’t understand the adoration of the Mid East airports either. They’re quite nice. Good connections, for sure. But hard to get a drink in. They are also attached to tedious, soulless cities built in sterile deserts. Ho hum, who cares
I was in the new Istanbul airport two weeks ago, Huge and impressive (and also quite hard to get a drink in; thought I suspect this will change soon)
But airports are all beginning to resemble each other. The brand new ones all look like Istanbul which looks like all the rest.
Heathrow is very old as airports go, and does a good job of dealing with multiple issues which arise from historical mistakes and necessary limitations
You must really have got your skates on travelling wherever your flint-knapping takes you.
I have been on a plane three times over the past two years and a train (Eurostar) once.
I genuinely can't remember anything about anywhere. It's all a blur. Save for LHR where as you walk towards customs you are in a quantum state of not knowing whether you will turn the corner to find queues winding back hundreds of yards or three people lining up meekly at the biometric passport gates.
I have managed to squeeze in a lot of travel. During Covid the Gazette (and other assignments) have sent me to
Greece in 2020 Spain in 2021 Greece again, 2021 Portugal, 2021 Sri Lanka, 2022 Turkey, 2022 The USA, 2022 Turkey again, 2022 Greece yet again (all over), 2022 (I also flew to Inverness, Scotland, in 2021)
I can happily report that travel has gotten increasingly easier from about mid 2021 onwards, pretty much everywhere. You still hit glitches but they are diminishing. I just read that even Thailand (driven insane by Covid) is finally abandoning masking. At the moment everyone still wears them all the time even OUTDOORS despite Covid basically disappearing. At last they are going
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
I wouldn’t argue with any of that. America would be a much nicer, safer, kinder, calmer place if you could magically make ALL the guns disappear tomorrow
The trouble is, to get there, you have to overcome basic human psychology. A lot of criminals in America (a rather criminal country) carry guns. Law-abiding Americans know this. They won’t give up their guns because they wouldn’t feel safe being disarmed when the bad guys are still armed. No logic or statistic is going to persuade them otherwise. School shootings will continue
This is why even if your end state was to have gun laws similar to Britain, you wouldn't go there in one go. You'd get there in stages. Start by requiring all guns to be registered. Then, possession of an unregistered gun is a crime, and the police can start reducing the number of guns that are out there. Require background checks before selling guns, and make it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to purchase a gun. Then you could require a licence for having a gun - perhaps some mandatory training in gun safety at a gun club. You make certain classes of guns illegal, because they're only good for mass shootings, etc.
In an optimistic scenario you might find that at some stage you manage to get to the Swiss state of their being lots of guns, but not a huge amount of gun violence, and America could be quite happy with a regulated right to bear arms.
There are some simple steps of regulation that don't on themselves threaten the right to bear arms, but should, in time, make it harder for criminals to access weapons.
Agreed. Also, there's a proposal from conservative Republicans on one of the blogs that I follow to spread "red flag" laws, allowing confiscation of weapons from people whose behaviour suggests they are a threat to others. At present, these laws aren't applied in any Republican state except Florida:
That's hardly a surprise. The article notes that it's mostly owned by foreign investment funds, who are interested in spending the least amount of money to generate the maximum return. Which is why the place isn't a gleaming jewel to welcome travellers because the owners already have airports like that in their own countries.
As for the cost of getting there and the fact that you are practically assaulted by luxury shops tripping you up trying to get around etc etc etc - but at least they don't as yet have 4 hour delays for security like Manchester. Which has the opposite problem that its council owners don't have the cash to upgrade it and there appears to be no staff available to work there despite excellent transport links to the high pockets of unemployment on its doorstep...
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
"Or are we still in the period when self-delusion reigns, even if the honeymoon is over? – a “very vain, wicked foolish place full of all sorts of humbug, falseness and pretension …. not a moral place certainly nor a merry one, although very noisy – a world where everyone is striving for what is not worth having“?
When will this play be played out?"
If Vanity Fair and Pilgrim's Progress are about right the answer is Never. So PB can carry on.
I recall a guy I met in Louisiana last month. Middle aged, white, sane, articulate, Trump voter. Yes, sane Trump voters exist. He admitted Trump is a dangerous loon but he said “the Democrats are worse”, he then reeled off a list of recent crimes in New Orleans, some of them facilitated by crazy Democrat posturing on race and crime. I later googled his claims, he was not particularly exaggerating
Then we got onto guns. He bemoaned the terrible gun crimes in Louisiana, and I replied, “Well, America will have this problem, until you make it much much harder for anyone to have guns”
He looked at me like I was lunatic. “Then how would we defend ourselves against the criminals?”
It was a reasonable point. You can’t disinvent the gun and even if you stopped all gun sales tomorrow America is flooded with guns and they’re not going to disappear
It’s a tragic state of affairs and these horrible atrocities probably won’t end until technology saves America from herself, by making guns somehow unusable
After Dunblane, we banned guns even though criminals might not have handed theirs in. Presumably new guns are harder to find now, so gangs stab each other instead.
According to President Biden in this 2-minute speech yesterday, during the ban on sales of assault rifles, mass killings dropped, and after the ban ended, mass shootings tripled. Maybe assault weapons would be a good place to start. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Hand guns exist only to kill people, but this is the long term trend for a ban on sales. Despite all the school killings, America has chosen its path. They prefer guns to children.
You have to put yourself in the mind of an American citizen.
Say a hard left Democrat president comes to power, and tries to ban guns and get all Americans to yield their guns to the authorities
America is flooded with guns, so the criminals have plenty of them. The only people that will give up their guns are the law abiding citizens, who will then be effectively disarmed in the face of highly-armed villains, and a pretty trigger-happy police force. As an American, I would not vote for that, I would probably want to keep my gun, just in case
As I say, the problem is much deeper and more intractable that “sorting the gun laws”. It requires a cultural or technological revolution. The latter is more likely
It is one of the great American myths that having a gun at home makes a person safer. The evidence is very much the opposite. For every shooting in self defence there are 4 accidental domestic shootings (often children), 7 criminal homicides and 11 suicides.
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
I wouldn’t argue with any of that. America would be a much nicer, safer, kinder, calmer place if you could magically make ALL the guns disappear tomorrow
The trouble is, to get there, you have to overcome basic human psychology. A lot of criminals in America (a rather criminal country) carry guns. Law-abiding Americans know this. They won’t give up their guns because they wouldn’t feel safe being disarmed when the bad guys are still armed. No logic or statistic is going to persuade them otherwise. School shootings will continue
This is why even if your end state was to have gun laws similar to Britain, you wouldn't go there in one go. You'd get there in stages. Start by requiring all guns to be registered. Then, possession of an unregistered gun is a crime, and the police can start reducing the number of guns that are out there. Require background checks before selling guns, and make it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to purchase a gun. Then you could require a licence for having a gun - perhaps some mandatory training in gun safety at a gun club. You make certain classes of guns illegal, because they're only good for mass shootings, etc.
In an optimistic scenario you might find that at some stage you manage to get to the Swiss state of their being lots of guns, but not a huge amount of gun violence, and America could be quite happy with a regulated right to bear arms.
There are some simple steps of regulation that don't on themselves threaten the right to bear arms, but should, in time, make it harder for criminals to access weapons.
Clever ploy: arbitrarily change all existing calibres and chamber sizes, so you can get a .435 magnum but not a .44, and a .242 rifle not a .243 and so on. Make the old calibres illegal (they also obsolesce as ammunition runs out) and police the fuck out of the sale of new style weapons and ammunition.
Not particularly funny (like much of Gervais' stuff). The sort of sad stuff some comedians were doing in the 1970s and 1980s against gay people, pre-Internet.
Find a group who are small and cannot answer back. Poke fun at them and say they're a danger.
Gervais has never been very funny. I'm 100% sure people will be massively overreacting though.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
You need to start travelling again
The Elizabeth Line will be cheaper than the Heathrow Express, as you say, but also a damn sight more convenient because Paddington is a PITA to get to in the first place; also a lot cheaper and far quicker than a black cab.
The Liz Line will surely kill off the last taxi services between LHR and central London, except for a few Americans who don’t understand public transport
I wonder if it will kill off the Heathrow Express? The HEX is super pricey, but boy is it fast. 15 minutes is quite something. On a quiet day my flat is just 10 minutes by cab from Paddington so it’s also cool for me, but then I am also only 10 minutes in a cab from Tott Ct Rd or Bond Street, where I will be able to get the Liz Line. And the Liz Line will be way cheaper
The Heathrow Express is endangered. They will have to halve their fares to survive, if it survives at all
For millions more people in the South East of England, the real difference will be the train from Reading to Heathrow.
The M3 and M4 corridors used to be full of airport taxis, because to get there by train either involved a bus from Reading or Woking, or going into Waterloo or Paddington and back out again to the airport.
One of the big challenges of fundamental NHS reform is that it would take so long to bring about meaningful, noticeable change - especially given recruitment and retention issues. I am not sure the same applies to gun laws in the US. Stopping 18 year-olds from legally buying assault rifles could be done very quickly.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
When they finish the railway so it goes all the way to the airport, Luton will be a serious player
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
Luton has its problems - the bullpen that is departures is not good when its busy. But they are expanding that and adding more airside shops and restaurants.
Remember who they serve though - budget airlines with high speed turnarounds. So there is no need to spend forever in the bullpen. The bus link from the station works and the pods will be better when they open soon. Inside its 5-10 minutes through security at any time of day. And the gates are no more than 5 minutes walk from the bullpen.
What's not to like? I detest the whole flying experience - especially having to wait around in stupid airports for hours. Luton is a London airport you can practically speaking just walk through barely needing to stop. Works for me.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
Indeed.
Except all those YES Saltires are neatly folded up in the loft, unlikely to get another outing for a generation or more.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
Indeed.
That’s like me saying that countless Orange marches are an official arm of the propaganda op known as the UK.
"This episode is inflicting serious damage not only on the Tory party but also on the country’s institutions, from the police to the Civil Service and Parliament itself. Conservative backbenchers, even Cabinet ministers, need to decide soon how long they can let it go on."
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
That's exactly what laws should be built around, surely. Fred West and Jimmy Savile were pretty unusual people.
I have never encountered anyone who was genuinely anti-trans. Perhaps some US Christians are because it's a perversion of God's handiwork? What we usually get is right on numpties who leap on any suggestion that safeguards are needed for fakers and edge cases with cries of "he said Jehovah! He said jehovah!"
I have encountered people who are genuinely anti-trans. They were working with people who were trans.
Awks.
But that's probably because most people rarely meet a trans person (or realise they've met one...) for such feelings to out.
"Safeguards are needed."
Gay men have raped other men in toilets. Where are the safeguard for that? None are needed, because a) it would trample on the rights of the massive majority of gay men who do not behave in such an awful manner, b) it is thankfully rare, and c) because it is unenforceable.
A truly and utterly imbecilic point. Do you think banning alcohol sales to under 18s is pointless and ineffective because adults drink irresponsibly too? Or we shouldn't restrict gun sales because knives and hammers are available as murder weapons? We should have no criminal records checks on wannabe scoutmasters because the massive majority of them are entirely praiseworthy individuals? Or that a ban on people with dicks in ladies loos is in some way unenforceable?
It really isn't imbecilic.
Let's take your last line. How do you 'enforce' people with dicks not going into ladies' loos? How do you check? Does someone stand outside checking people when they go in? Does Mrs J have to 'prove' she's a woman before she enters the hallowed sanctum?
How do you enforce it?
If someone commits abuse, prosecute them. Have an environment where victims can come forward and their claims will be investigated (we often fall at this fence).
And people transitioning need to live as their new 'gender' for two years. If you're MtoF, that involves dressing and living as a woman for two years. And yes, using women's loos.
My friend Lauren - who is as you say dressing and living as a woman - is pro-trans rights as you can imagine. But before transitioning was also pro-feminism. So isn't insisting her rights as a "new woman" as Ricky Gervais put it" override the rights of everyone else. Because she isn't a tosser.
This is what neither extreme end of the trans vs womens rights spectrum can comprehend. You can stand up for each others rights and be respectful and they don't clash. Its only if you are NO TRANS or NO WOMEN'S SPACES that we have a problem. So stop shouting at each other and let this happen naturally and tell the mouth foamers at both end to do one.
Even compared to most debates the extreme end tossers get all the attention on this one. Up to and including influence on policy in some places for some reason.
There's middle ground to aim for as with anything, but at present they don't make the most noise.
And Americans vote time and time and time again to protect the gun rights of lunatics over the rights of children my daughter's age not to be shot to death in their classroom.
America is a third world country on a whole stack of measures, and the voters are only just getting started making it into Gilead.
We had one mass school shooting. We reacted in horror and passed laws so strict that chances of a repeat are very very small. America suffers them on a regular basis, smears the parents who then campaign for sanity, and suggests that primary school teachers arm themselves to defend their classroom. At least those are the politicians they vote for. And you get what you vote for.
So whilst I can barely comprehend what the parents are going through, there is a simple solution for Americans who don't want to suffer their kids being murdered at school or their horrendous metrics on various health and education metrics: leave. Move to civilisation and leave the savages to it.
Sky have just announced that the children killed were between 7 and 10, the same ages as two of our grandchildren who go to the same school
I felt a tear run down my face, and just cannot comprehend the horror for the parents who may well have lost more than one sibling
The US should be utterly ashamed of itself and those Republicans still claiming gun rights this morning have the blood of innocent children on their hands
Mrs RP has left for her school. To supervise primary age special educational needs kids. Risk of her getting shot and killed at work is practically zero. My 10 year old daughter is about to walk to her school. Risk of her getting shot and killed in class is practically zero.
I am a very VERY unhappy man this morning. I can't comprehend what those poor people are going through. But again, this is the society they all participate in. And what a society it is!
I'm not sure America can be saved. But if we're not talking about the shitkickers who want to arm Mrs RP or the healthcare companies and their vassals or the people who vote to defund education or the propagandists who tell people how America is the greatest country in the world despite its ever worsening outcomes in health and education and crime, if you look past those bastards there are wonderful people.
So as their country can't be saved there is only one safe route - leave. Think how enriched this country would be if the families of the poor murdered kids had emigrated here. Hard working, industrious decent people.
There is soooo much wrong with this country and yet we have the basics right. We should be offering migration packages to people to flee to civlilisation. Save sane Americans and leave the rest of it for Gilead.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
Indeed.
That’s like me saying that countless Orange marches are an official arm of the propaganda op known as the UK.
If you insist.
Also, very snowflakey to get all sarky about folk walking through with their self-funded Saltires briefly , but at the same time hypersensitive about any comment on regimented arrays of UJs suspended for miles of London roads at our taxes' expense.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
Indeed.
Hardly a comparison, but what you would expect from Tory Toom Tabard.
@rcs1000 you could argue that political risk of changes in the taxation landscape is part of doing business. If investment is dependent on past (lesser taxed) profits then clearly it’s not that good of an investment.m
That said I am in favour of recurring taxes not one-off windfalls. How can you plan government expenditure on windfalls?
Vanishingly rare examples and laws should not be built around aberrations or those who abuse the system.
The culture wars on this topic are revolting.
The vast majority of trans people, whether that's male to female, female to male, or varieties of non-binary are peaceful.
Live and let live. And the rest of us get on with our lives.
There's an old saying that as people get older, they get more small-c conservative. I don't think I am. As I get older, I'm getting more let-everyone-live-life-as-they-want-as-long-as-they-dont-hurt-others.
There's enough in life to be concerned about without getting het up about the way a person dresses, what a person does to another consenting adult, or how they identify.
I don't like the pronouns rubbish - much of it seems like pathetic virtue signalling. But if someone asks to be called by a different name or pronoun, I'll try to do so - even if I think it's silly.
Yes, I'm pretty much where you both are on that. Society has got a bit like some of the churches - apparently obsessed with sexual and gender issues. I'm in favour of protecting anyone vulnerable, as far as we can, and against abuse of anyone. Apart from that, really there are other things to worry about.
One of the big challenges of fundamental NHS reform is that it would take so long to bring about meaningful, noticeable change - especially given recruitment and retention issues. I am not sure the same applies to gun laws in the US. Stopping 18 year-olds from legally buying assault rifles could be done very quickly.
I travel a LOT more than you, as we have established - thanks to your irritation at my photos - and Heathrow is an excellent airport, given the difficult job it has to do. Not as good as Changi - but nowhere is as good as Changi, but better than its main competition in terms of actual world cities - ie JFK or CDG
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
You need to start travelling again
The Elizabeth Line will be cheaper than the Heathrow Express, as you say, but also a damn sight more convenient because Paddington is a PITA to get to in the first place; also a lot cheaper and far quicker than a black cab.
The Liz Line will surely kill off the last taxi services between LHR and central London, except for a few Americans who don’t understand public transport
I wonder if it will kill off the Heathrow Express? The HEX is super pricey, but boy is it fast. 15 minutes is quite something. On a quiet day my flat is just 10 minutes by cab from Paddington so it’s also cool for me, but then I am also only 10 minutes in a cab from Tott Ct Rd or Bond Street, where I will be able to get the Liz Line. And the Liz Line will be way cheaper
The Heathrow Express is endangered. They will have to halve their fares to survive, if it survives at all
Remember that Heathrow own the tunnels under the airport and charge a premium for use of them. The reason why special fares to Heathrow apply even on Liz Line trains is because the Qatari investment fund people want to profiteer.
So the problem isn't HEX being expensive, its profiteering. Easy to steal money from clueless tourists, less easy when a way cheaper and not much slower once you connect at Paddington service now exists. So give it time and I can see them dropping the silly charges and then HEX may be a small premium.
At least its not Gatwick Express. Double the fare. To save 3 minutes. On the same trains.
Without commenting on the article except that it's low-end copy appended to clickbait, I've used Gatwick and Heathrow in the T5 era, and both have been fine as gateways to the metropolis, but Heathrow is better for anywhere not London or points south-east, which is a lot of the country.
When they finish the railway so it goes all the way to the airport, Luton will be a serious player
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
Luton has its problems - the bullpen that is departures is not good when its busy. But they are expanding that and adding more airside shops and restaurants.
Remember who they serve though - budget airlines with high speed turnarounds. So there is no need to spend forever in the bullpen. The bus link from the station works and the pods will be better when they open soon. Inside its 5-10 minutes through security at any time of day. And the gates are no more than 5 minutes walk from the bullpen.
What's not to like? I detest the whole flying experience - especially having to wait around in stupid airports for hours. Luton is a London airport you can practically speaking just walk through barely needing to stop. Works for me.
Yep, I really like Luton. So convenient and quick, and then 25-30 minutes to King's X St Pancras, and a 5 minute cab ride to my flat. A gem
Perhaps it is better that it remains unsung, so it doesn't get crowded
I quite like City, but it is a pain to get to (and the Lizzie Line won't help much), I dislike Gatwick (crowded, wrong side of The Smoke) and I have a quite irrational hatred of Stansted, which is not convenient for me, but does not justify the way I LOATHE it.
I will go to great lengths to avoid flying in and out of Stansted. Something about it depresses me
Not particularly funny (like much of Gervais' stuff). The sort of sad stuff some comedians were doing in the 1970s and 1980s against gay people, pre-Internet.
Find a group who are small and cannot answer back. Poke fun at them and say they're a danger.
Gervais has never been very funny. I'm 100% sure people will be massively overreacting though.
A million times better than Cordon though who for some reason is worshipped in England. He is the unfunniest man in the world apart from that absolute balloon Jimmy Carr who gives him a run for his money.
Killing bulls for fun in Spain and parts of France is pretty bizarre, to say the least, and pretty unbannable.
Catalonia, the Balearics, and the Canaries have all moved against bullfighting in recent decades and I believe killing the bull is banned in all three.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
Most devotions normally have their equal and opposite force. In the case of the EU devotees, their polar opposites are the deranged Brexiteers who have been obsessed with something that has (as many of us predicted) turned out to be utterly pointless and self harming.
That said, I agree on your analysis of the peculiar British obsession with the NHS. There are people who genuinely believe it is "the envy of the world". It is the same silly parochial and exceptionalist mindset that is exhibited by those who believe in "the benefits of Brexit" lol.
We're fortunate to live in an almost gun-free country in terms of crime. So far this year there haven't been any gun deaths in London, a city of 9 million people.
I wonder if other countries have institutions that mirror gun law in the USA and the NHS in the UK. Things that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved, even though many in their hearts know that they are pernicious, stupid, deformed, silly, and which make outsiders say WTF - yet which also seem insusceptible to significant reform due to the worship thing
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
The EU isn’t a country of course.
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
Indeed.
That’s like me saying that countless Orange marches are an official arm of the propaganda op known as the UK.
If you insist.
Also, very snowflakey to get all sarky about folk walking through with their self-funded Saltires briefly , but at the same time hypersensitive about any comment on regimented arrays of UJs suspended for miles of London roads at our taxes' expense.
Both comments seemed pretty snowflakey to me. I mean, sure, the context was different in the two examples but it was still two posters getting worked up about flags (though I'm sure the getting worked up part will be strenuously denied). On the spectrum of snowflakeness they might not be on the exact same point but not that far apart either.
Ken Paxton* 232,257 66.0% George P. Bush 119,470 34.0% Total reported 351,727
So far Bush is carrying just one county: Travis (Austin)
Like Joe Kennedy IIIrd in Massachussets Senate primary in 2020 it seems the left in the Democrats and the Trumpite right in the GOP are not keen on dynasties at present. However in time the Kennedys and Bushes will be back.
The tragic shooting in Texas last night might however boost Beto O'Rourke in November given Governor Abbott passed an open carry firearms Bill
Comments
PM planning HoC statement, presser & address to ‘22 - a triumvirate of apologies to Parly, public, his MPs - as braces for difficult report/pics
Lots MPs promised verdict on PM/Partygate post Gray. But now picking up from some decision day shifting to privileges cttee probe
https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1529351076352253952
Several of his points are simply nonsense. Yes, Heathrow Express is expensive, as his American notes, but it gets you into the middle of London in FIFTEEN MINUTES. It is a premium service. The American probably prefers a car, being American, but that will take four times as long and still cost twice as much, because London is big
And all the other terminals are rubbish compared to T5? Also nonsense. T3 has been completely revamped and now gleams as much as T5
Moreover, the Elizabeth Line will now whisk you direct from Heathrow right across London, to Paddington, Tott Ct Road, the City and Canary Wharf in the East (the last in an astonishing 44 minutes). And it will be a lot cheaper than HEX.
You need to start travelling again
It's either "I am" or "I am not".
He went for "I certainly am". Many others will say "I uncertainly am", but effect is same.
https://twitter.com/cathynewman/status/1529208023452983299
Just saw the news. Horrific and as you say not going to move the needle on much at all in terms of stopping future events.
And so little discussion of those transitioning the other way.
It's pathetic. Utterly pathetic. And imbecilic. Utterly imbecilic. And nasty. Utterly nasty.
I despair at the sheer ignorance and the hatred is ALL spawned from that ignorance.
Edit. Not you JJ I hope. Just my general despair at the stupidity of this debate.
Live and let live. There are FAR FAR FAR more important things to concern the human race right now.
And I think the Privileges Committee can only recommend that the house has a vote. Which Johnson will win because majority. Then time to draw a line and move on.
An anachronistic national institution, which is bizarrely worshipped by many, meaning it can never seriously be reformed, even though it kills thousands of people every year. And this despite the fact that all equivalent countries do that thing - gun law, healthcare - so much better, and without the slaughter, or cringeworthy worship
https://twitter.com/warriors/status/1529246789290934272?s=21&t=Y220yRKPGEwZBY-1nRfbrQ
Tory MPS will continue to endure the BoZo shitshow
That’s before the Sue Gray report has been published or seen in full by No 10. https://twitter.com/annaisaac/status/1529225414006259712
Because not doing so would be monstrous.
No, I’m not joking. It’s highly convenient. Multiple rail lines pass through it, and you can get there in 30 minutes from St Pancras, which of course links to the Eurostar. You can also go direct to Farringdon, which now links to the Lizzie Line
I’ve often wondered why Luton has not been considered for massive expansion, given its advantages - and no one will mind if they knock down half of Luton. Apparently one issue is nearby hills? So level the hills then. Do it
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/
The NRA opposes and defunds public health research into gun deaths because of these sorts of findings.
The reason being that there are not good and bad people, but rather people with good and bad in the same person. People who leave loaded guns for their kids to find, people who get angry or drunk and kill during arguments, people who become depressed and shoot themselves etc. Most American gun deaths are suicides, almost all with self bought guns.
The trouble is, to get there, you have to overcome basic human psychology. A lot of criminals in America (a rather criminal country) carry guns. Law-abiding Americans know this. They won’t give up their guns because they wouldn’t feel safe being disarmed when the bad guys are still armed. No logic or statistic is going to persuade them otherwise. School shootings will continue
Although it looks as though it's six months: three months plus three months 'reflection period' ?
https://www.gov.scot/news/gender-recognition-reform-bill/
But there's still a period where the person has to live as their new gender.
But, as I always say, you get what you vote for.
And Americans vote time and time and time again to protect the gun rights of lunatics over the rights of children my daughter's age not to be shot to death in their classroom.
America is a third world country on a whole stack of measures, and the voters are only just getting started making it into Gilead.
We had one mass school shooting. We reacted in horror and passed laws so strict that chances of a repeat are very very small. America suffers them on a regular basis, smears the parents who then campaign for sanity, and suggests that primary school teachers arm themselves to defend their classroom. At least those are the politicians they vote for. And you get what you vote for.
So whilst I can barely comprehend what the parents are going through, there is a simple solution for Americans who don't want to suffer their kids being murdered at school or their horrendous metrics on various health and education metrics: leave. Move to civilisation and leave the savages to it.
So we could fill Luton with landfill and extend the airport on top. Which would probably improve Luton ... .;)
The more guns in general circulation, the more likely your ordinary citizen feels the need to have one. Same goes for the power of the weapon - you now see ordinary cops walking around with assault rifles.
The NHS has a phenomenon where the proportion of government expenditure is increasing even faster than our demographic profile would suggest. Better health care and longer lives = more expenditure.
There is no political appetite to break the cycle in either case.
This is an unrelated installation of 700 dots. It gives a chance to see a visual representation of every tank that crossed the border from Russia to Ukraine - but will not be making the return journey (scroll down half way).
https://ocula.com/magazine/features/a-stitch-in-time-hand-made-textile-contemplation-i/
Nor will many of their crews.
The scale of destruction of everything - manpower, kit, cities, innocent Ukrainians - is barely imaginable without being brought up short by such visualisations.
Here is the O2 Arena. It holds 20,000. You could put a dead Russian soldier in every seat, and still have corpses spilling out to the car park:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_O2#/media/File:O2_arena.jpg
You could likely fill it over again with injured Russians.
Was it worth it, Vlad?
Boulder: AR-15
Orlando: AR-15
Parkland: AR-15
Las Vegas: AR-15
Aurora, CO: AR-15
Sandy Hook: AR-15
Waffle House: AR-15
San Bernardino: AR-15
Midland/Odessa: AR-15
Poway synagogue: AR-15
Sutherland Springs: AR-15
Tree of Life Synagogue: AR-15
From @adamcbest
Birmingham is not just closer but a far better travelling experience, and until the recent problems Manchester was great. I dont travel from Heathrow or Gatwick unless I have no choice. Getting there adds massively to the hassle of flying.
Compared to the incredible expense and controversy of expanding LHR, or building Boris Island (which is in entirely the wrong place) demolishing the rest of Luton is a small price to pay. Barely a price at all. Ahem
Luton is also perfectly positioned for the rest of the UK. Near the M25 and right on the M1. Just Bloody Do It. Demolish Luton Town!
I felt a tear run down my face, and just cannot comprehend the horror for the parents who may well have lost more than one sibling
The US should be utterly ashamed of itself and those Republicans still claiming gun rights this morning have the blood of innocent children on their hands
In the EU I suggest it is, er, the EU
In an optimistic scenario you might find that at some stage you manage to get to the Swiss state of their being lots of guns, but not a huge amount of gun violence, and America could be quite happy with a regulated right to bear arms.
There are some simple steps of regulation that don't on themselves threaten the right to bear arms, but should, in time, make it harder for criminals to access weapons.
I was in the new Istanbul airport two weeks ago, Huge and impressive (and also quite hard to get a drink in; thought I suspect this will change soon)
But airports are all beginning to resemble each other. The brand new ones all look like Istanbul which looks like all the rest.
Heathrow is very old as airports go, and does a good job of dealing with multiple issues which arise from historical mistakes and necessary limitations
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45572691
How long will his party allow him to bend everything to himself?
I have been on a plane three times over the past two years and a train (Eurostar) once.
I genuinely can't remember anything about anywhere. It's all a blur. Save for LHR where as you walk towards customs you are in a quantum state of not knowing whether you will turn the corner to find queues winding back hundreds of yards or three people lining up meekly at the biometric passport gates.
I wonder if it will kill off the Heathrow Express? The HEX is super pricey, but boy is it fast. 15 minutes is quite something. On a quiet day my flat is just 10 minutes by cab from Paddington so it’s also cool for me, but then I am also only 10 minutes in a cab from Tott Ct Rd or Bond Street, where I will be able to get the Liz Line. And the Liz Line will be way cheaper
The Heathrow Express is endangered. They will have to halve their fares to survive, if it survives at all
Knives are difficult, because there are legitimate reasons to have them. Many Americans would argue the same regarding guns, I'm sure. The difference is, I can't just go walk about with my kitchen knife. I need a lawful reason to do so.
I wish the US would be as proactive on guns as the UK is on knives.
Bradley is the only terminal that comes close
Countries can have more than one thing that are bizarrely worshipped and preserved.
This is what neither extreme end of the trans vs womens rights spectrum can comprehend. You can stand up for each others rights and be respectful and they don't clash. Its only if you are NO TRANS or NO WOMEN'S SPACES that we have a problem. So stop shouting at each other and let this happen naturally and tell the mouth foamers at both end to do one.
Greece in 2020
Spain in 2021
Greece again, 2021
Portugal, 2021
Sri Lanka, 2022
Turkey, 2022
The USA, 2022
Turkey again, 2022
Greece yet again (all over), 2022
(I also flew to Inverness, Scotland, in 2021)
I can happily report that travel has gotten increasingly easier from about mid 2021 onwards, pretty much everywhere. You still hit glitches but they are diminishing. I just read that even Thailand (driven insane by Covid) is finally abandoning masking. At the moment everyone still wears them all the time even OUTDOORS despite Covid basically disappearing. At last they are going
Huzzah
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/pass-and-enforce-red-flag-laws-now?utm_source=email&s=r
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQPress/status/1529177369445007360
As for the cost of getting there and the fact that you are practically assaulted by luxury shops tripping you up trying to get around etc etc etc - but at least they don't as yet have 4 hour delays for security like Manchester. Which has the opposite problem that its council owners don't have the cash to upgrade it and there appears to be no staff available to work there despite excellent transport links to the high pockets of unemployment on its doorstep...
Leave. Civilised countries do exist outside their borders.
When will this play be played out?"
If Vanity Fair and Pilgrim's Progress are about right the answer is Never. So PB can carry on.
The M3 and M4 corridors used to be full of airport taxis, because to get there by train either involved a bus from Reading or Woking, or going into Waterloo or Paddington and back out again to the airport.
Remember who they serve though - budget airlines with high speed turnarounds. So there is no need to spend forever in the bullpen. The bus link from the station works and the pods will be better when they open soon. Inside its 5-10 minutes through security at any time of day. And the gates are no more than 5 minutes walk from the bullpen.
What's not to like? I detest the whole flying experience - especially having to wait around in stupid airports for hours. Luton is a London airport you can practically speaking just walk through barely needing to stop. Works for me.
F1: rain possible on Sunday, although BBC forecasts seem quite pants so worth keeping an eye on (with a pinch of salt).
If you insist.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/24/attending-party-wont-topple-boris-misleading-parliament-still2/
There's middle ground to aim for as with anything, but at present they don't make the most noise.
I am a very VERY unhappy man this morning. I can't comprehend what those poor people are going through. But again, this is the society they all participate in. And what a society it is!
I'm not sure America can be saved. But if we're not talking about the shitkickers who want to arm Mrs RP or the healthcare companies and their vassals or the people who vote to defund education or the propagandists who tell people how America is the greatest country in the world despite its ever worsening outcomes in health and education and crime, if you look past those bastards there are wonderful people.
So as their country can't be saved there is only one safe route - leave. Think how enriched this country would be if the families of the poor murdered kids had emigrated here. Hard working, industrious decent people.
There is soooo much wrong with this country and yet we have the basics right. We should be offering migration packages to people to flee to civlilisation. Save sane Americans and leave the rest of it for Gilead.
That said I am in favour of recurring taxes not one-off windfalls. How can you plan government expenditure on windfalls?
But I'd question them being inherently low tax anyway.
So the problem isn't HEX being expensive, its profiteering. Easy to steal money from clueless tourists, less easy when a way cheaper and not much slower once you connect at Paddington service now exists. So give it time and I can see them dropping the silly charges and then HEX may be a small premium.
At least its not Gatwick Express. Double the fare. To save 3 minutes. On the same trains.
Perhaps it is better that it remains unsung, so it doesn't get crowded
I quite like City, but it is a pain to get to (and the Lizzie Line won't help much), I dislike Gatwick (crowded, wrong side of The Smoke) and I have a quite irrational hatred of Stansted, which is not convenient for me, but does not justify the way I LOATHE it.
I will go to great lengths to avoid flying in and out of Stansted. Something about it depresses me
https://twitter.com/scotlandinunion/status/1529363820002562048?s=20&t=kK4RfHSnCq6WROPDuOb5TA
That said, I agree on your analysis of the peculiar British obsession with the NHS. There are people who genuinely believe it is "the envy of the world". It is the same silly parochial and exceptionalist mindset that is exhibited by those who believe in "the benefits of Brexit" lol.
NEW: Even some in government admit the new UK border approach could be a breach of WTO rules. But ministers have gamed that it's worth the risk.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-outsource-border-check-eu-brexit/
The tragic shooting in Texas last night might however boost Beto O'Rourke in November given Governor Abbott passed an open carry firearms Bill
https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1529202610649108480?s=20&t=kK4RfHSnCq6WROPDuOb5TA