A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
Actually it started when the Coalition government went for fiscal restraint rather than turning in the taps as Obama did. The NYT started publishing articles about how the U.K. was doomed, DOOMED!
Complete with comments from people on the streets of London. Using American idiom and references….
When my American relatives visited (New York Democrats since FDR), they would comment on the difference between the NYT and the reality.
In that case, the NYT had a point about George Osborne flatlining the economy.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
Russia is economically weak, but its willingness to use brute force, around the world , sometimes with skill - plus its great size, and wealth of natural resources - means it is the third most powerful country on earth, behind China and the USA
As we see right now. Russia is bullying the entire EU (which is economically ten times the size) with a degree of success
Russia is a tricky one. It’s got nukes and mad enough to use them. It’s huge but not huge population so much of the country is empty and potentially vulnerable to neighbours - only the nukes really stop the hordes.
It’s military we thought was big but it’s seemingly a bit crap so not as powerful as it was before.
It’s economy is weak and whilst it has huge natural resources then so does Saudi, Venezuela, Indonesia.
It has basically no soft cultural power so whilst for example France doesn’t have the size and natural resources France has nukes, a better trained and equipped military, huge soft power and a strong top global economy so would rank Russia below France in this example.
And whilst Russia is to an extent bullying the EU right now it’s a snapshot rather than likely projection over next few years and last few years.
4 additional HIMARS have arrived in🇺🇦. I’m grateful to @POTUS@SecDef Lloyd Austin III and 🇺🇸people for strengthening of #UAarmy We have proven to be smart operators of this weapon. The sound of the #HIMARS volley has become a top hit 🎶 of this summer at the front lines! https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1554076054435889152
More good news! Now get the production line for their rockets working overtime.
Our regular reminder that Betfair has two markets which, with only a month to go, should be more or less the same but right now Rishi is half a point bigger. Check both before you back or lay (and the books too, who may boost their prices).
Betfair next prime minister 1.11 Liz Truss 90% 10.5 Rishi Sunak 10%
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
I think we'd go to war for Vilnius, Talinn or Riga if needs must. London would be annihilated if it came to it but so would most of Russia's cities. The one I'm not sure about is Turkey, as they're always up to some mischief themselves in the region.
4 additional HIMARS have arrived in🇺🇦. I’m grateful to @POTUS@SecDef Lloyd Austin III and 🇺🇸people for strengthening of #UAarmy We have proven to be smart operators of this weapon. The sound of the #HIMARS volley has become a top hit 🎶 of this summer at the front lines! https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1554076054435889152
The shine often comes off 'wonder weapons' after a war. Witness Patriot missiles during the Gulf War?
It might be that HIMARS is not as effective as it appears at the moment; or that some of the kills credited to it are coming from other long-range systems. But it certainly looks like a brilliant system at the moment. I think this will be a market winner for LockMart...
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Perhaps the equalising effect of the internet is another factor.
When television was dominant, Americans could more easily ignore of the rest of the world, but now they're plunged into a global cultural medium where the largest group who can compete with them on equal terms are the British.
Not sure I wholly agree with that..... However the fact the NYT is so desperate to print something bad about Britain they turn to a notoriously unpleasant, contentious, untrustworthy, possibly anti-Semitic Irish Marxist to pen the article is quite striking
I can't see them going to such urgent lengths to diss France or Germany or Japan. Maybe China, but then China is America's mortal enemy and is supplanting America around the world, so negative press about China is to be expected
Something about Brexit Britain REALLY irks them
I was thinking of something like the TERF-wars. I've seen several American commentators become enraged that British feminists haven't deferred to their domestic political concerns but instead pursued the argument on its own terms. If they could flick a switch to disconnect the UK from their discourse they would happily do so.
There's a similar effect on the EU side too: "Why are you still here? You're supposed to be irrelevant now."
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
Russia is economically weak, but its willingness to use brute force, around the world , sometimes with skill - plus its great size, and wealth of natural resources - means it is the third most powerful country on earth, behind China and the USA
As we see right now. Russia is bullying the entire EU (which is economically ten times the size) with a degree of success
Russia is a tricky one. It’s got nukes and mad enough to use them. It’s huge but not huge population so much of the country is empty and potentially vulnerable to neighbours - only the nukes really stop the hordes.
It’s military we thought was big but it’s seemingly a bit crap so not as powerful as it was before.
It’s economy is weak and whilst it has huge natural resources then so does Saudi, Venezuela, Indonesia.
It has basically no soft cultural power so whilst for example France doesn’t have the size and natural resources France has nukes, a better trained and equipped military, huge soft power and a strong top global economy so would rank Russia below France in this example.
And whilst Russia is to an extent bullying the EU right now it’s a snapshot rather than likely projection over next few years and last few years.
That's a very Westocentric perspective
Russia has a lot of soft power in its "near abroad" - central Asia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan. Also in Serbia, Hungary, even Greece. More soft power than France or Britain, or perhaps even America
It is also much more influential than European actors in the Middle East - Syria, Iran, etc - because of its willingness to oppose the west and use its own military forces
And if Putin grinds out some kind of win in Ukraine (far from impossible) the perception of Russia as powerful will grow, with other benefits to Putin. Russia is literally expanding. It does not get much more blatantly powerful than that
Is this just a snapshot and Russia is actually doomed to swift decline? Maybe. I can see the arguments, Lack of real exports (outside raw materials). Terrible corruption. Bad demographics. And yet Russia also has all that territory, and natural resources, and its northerly location means it is likely to be a great beneficiary of global warming. Siberia could become intensely desirable and fertile
4 additional HIMARS have arrived in🇺🇦. I’m grateful to @POTUS@SecDef Lloyd Austin III and 🇺🇸people for strengthening of #UAarmy We have proven to be smart operators of this weapon. The sound of the #HIMARS volley has become a top hit 🎶 of this summer at the front lines! https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1554076054435889152
The shine often comes off 'wonder weapons' after a war. Witness Patriot missiles during the Gulf War?
It might be that HIMARS is not as effective as it appears at the moment; or that some of the kills credited to it are coming from other long-range systems. But it certainly looks like a brilliant system at the moment. I think this will be a market winner for LockMart...
It's fundamentally quite simple, though. The vehicle is a glorified truck - which means out can get places a to quicker than the earlier tracked vehicle (and will fit in something as small as a C130). The rockets are GPS/inertial navigation targeted (though they can also have terminal homing), so very difficult to jam, and perhaps most importantly, they outrange the bulk of Russian artillery. And it's easy and quick to reload.
Ukraine's tactical intelligence is greatly superior to that of the Russians, so they can hit stuff with precision, where for the most part Russia is just lobbing lots of warheads.
There's nothing magic about the system, and against a better equipped adversary it probably wouldn't be such a game changer.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
I think we'd go to war for Vilnius, Talinn or Riga if needs must. London would be annihilated if it came to it but so would most of Russia's cities. The one I'm not sure about is Turkey, as they're always up to some mischief themselves in the region.
You really think we'd sacrifice London for Riga? Can't see it
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
Actually it started when the Coalition government went for fiscal restraint rather than turning in the taps as Obama did. The NYT started publishing articles about how the U.K. was doomed, DOOMED!
Complete with comments from people on the streets of London. Using American idiom and references….
When my American relatives visited (New York Democrats since FDR), they would comment on the difference between the NYT and the reality.
In that case, the NYT had a point about George Osborne flatlining the economy.
Er no - they printed article after article claiming, essentially, that the U.K. was just about to enter a 1930s style depression. Next week. Always next week….
Now we can have a debate about relative economic performance. But we definitely haven’t had a depression in the U.K.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
OK, let’s resolve this once and for all. Could you set out what you think is the most pressing problem in the education system today and what evidence you have that the introduction of more grammar schools is the solution most likely to solve that problem.
The most pressing problem in education today is lack of opportunity in poor working class areas to get into a top Russell Group university and Oxbridge and a good career. More grammars would expand that opportunity.
Followed by the particularly poor results in terms of reading and maths and core GCSEs achieved by white working class boys in particular
No they wouldn't. The Grammar Schools would get filled with the children of middle class parents who move into the area, putting up house prices and who tutor their children.
In the large poorer village I lived in not a single child passed the 11 plus. In the posh areas loads did. Come A levels a whole bunch of us from the village transferred to the Grammar School. What do you think happened to us between 11 and 16 to suddenly make us brighter? The answer is nothing whatsoever.
No they wouldn't, not if we returned to grammar schools nationwide. Even today grammars also have entry at 16 as well as 11.
Well they were nationwide when I went to school and clearly they did. How do you explain what happened in my village and all the poorer areas around where I lived and everywhere come to that. There wasn't some event that made my village children brighter between 11 and 16. It was because the selection process is crap at 11. The Grammar schools was full of the middle classes and the Secondary moderns full of the poor. Then at 16 we all swapped over. Selection at 11 is cruel and damaging.
Rubbish, more from poorer working class areas got into top universities and became lawyers and doctors etc when we had more grammar schools than do today.
Evidence? I can't think of a single working class person at my Grammar School .
You do understand that because there were more Grammar schools then obviously more progressed don't you? You need to do ratios not absolute numbers. Just because of social mobility in general what you said just can't be true.
And what is it with this inferiority complex you have in looking up at doctors, lawyers, Oxbridge gentry, etc. I'm married to a doctor. She is perfectly normal you know.
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Sale High School: 15% on free school meals (FSM). Sale Grammar School: 3% FSM.
Now to be fair, the catchments aren't the same: Sale High draws many from Wythenshawe, while Sale Grammar gives priority to Trafford. But this shows that while you do get *some* working class pupils at Grammars, you don't, nowadays, get that many. You used to get a lot more, I think. Notable working class Grammar school pupils from the 80s include Ian Brown and John Squire of the Stone Roses, who both attended Altrincham Boys' Grammar - though I think both left at 16.
In my O level year at Grammar school of the 60 or so students ALL the council house kids (between 15 and 20) bar one did not enter the sixth form. One joined the National Westminster Bank, the rest either went straight into employment (generally on the tools GPO, RSRE Malvern, farming and the jam factory, or as clerks to Chapmans Stationary or the jam factory) or to Tech. There were probably 20 to 25 in the sixth form of which 15 plus went on to Uni or Poly. A pretty sad ratio really.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
I think we'd go to war for Vilnius, Talinn or Riga if needs must. London would be annihilated if it came to it but so would most of Russia's cities. The one I'm not sure about is Turkey, as they're always up to some mischief themselves in the region.
So would all their cities. If it came to that NATO has enough nukes to totally and utterly saturate Russia, and annihilate them.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
I think we'd go to war for Vilnius, Talinn or Riga if needs must. London would be annihilated if it came to it but so would most of Russia's cities. The one I'm not sure about is Turkey, as they're always up to some mischief themselves in the region.
You really think we'd sacrifice London for Riga? Can't see it
And how the feck is Putin gonna invade Riga?
It'll take his military years and years to recover from their defeat in Ukraine and Putin will be gone within five I reckon.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Perhaps the equalising effect of the internet is another factor.
When television was dominant, Americans could more easily ignore of the rest of the world, but now they're plunged into a global cultural medium where the largest group who can compete with them on equal terms are the British.
Not sure I wholly agree with that..... However the fact the NYT is so desperate to print something bad about Britain they turn to a notoriously unpleasant, contentious, untrustworthy, possibly anti-Semitic Irish Marxist to pen the article is quite striking
I can't see them going to such urgent lengths to diss France or Germany or Japan. Maybe China, but then China is America's mortal enemy and is supplanting America around the world, so negative press about China is to be expected
Something about Brexit Britain REALLY irks them
I was thinking of something like the TERF-wars. I've seen several American commentators become enraged that British feminists haven't deferred to their domestic political concerns but instead pursued the argument on its own terms. If they could flick a switch to disconnect the UK from their discourse they would happily do so.
There's a similar effect on the EU side too: "Why are you still here? You're supposed to be irrelevant now."
Ah, I see what you mean! For the first time American media is confronted by foreign media - traditional and social- which speaks English, which can influence American debate, and does so. In other words: America is occasionally seeing itself in a British mirror, and the world through a British prism, which is an alien experience to them, and not entirely welcome
Yes. That is true. I've noticed a touch of it in American discussion of sports, especially "soccer"
I did wonder if Russia had managed to take out any of the HIMARS trucks yet...
https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1554095299991375872 Russian Ministry of Defense claims it destroyed two of Ukraine's HIMARS rocket artillery systems, and posts video to prove it. Apparently, the two 16.2 ton, 7 m long, 3.2. m high, 2.4 m wide HIMARS vehicles were hidden in a room on the second floor of a building in Kharkiv.
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Factcheck (I was also one of 2 or 3 true working class in my grammar school in the 1960s). Every family got family allowance, though the book was usually held by the mother - and dad wasn't forever on strike because of unions, or any particular solidarity with them, but because of widespread intimidation by union extremists to go on strike whether the union supported the issue or not. This created a vicious circle of strikes without pay (meaning mum's wages and family allowance became essential) and a media obsession with depicting strikes as "wildcat" self-indulgences by workers too lazy to do their job.
So-called "wildcat" strikes did indeed, by cementing poorer families into greater poverty, create greater militancy - because higher wages were the only way for their generation to get out of the poverty trap. But they also discouraged the children of poorest from committing to school, because - in a world where jobs were abundant - the parents needed the extra wage as soon as possible.
The reason so few of my grammar school year were true working class was that the vast majority of my primary school year had no interest in passing their 11+. That absolutely wasn't because the primary teachers discouraged them or because the schools were particularly weak, but because parents taught them, from a very early age, that their future lay in doing more or less their parents' job.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
OK, let’s resolve this once and for all. Could you set out what you think is the most pressing problem in the education system today and what evidence you have that the introduction of more grammar schools is the solution most likely to solve that problem.
The most pressing problem in education today is lack of opportunity in poor working class areas to get into a top Russell Group university and Oxbridge and a good career. More grammars would expand that opportunity.
Followed by the particularly poor results in terms of reading and maths and core GCSEs achieved by white working class boys in particular
No they wouldn't. The Grammar Schools would get filled with the children of middle class parents who move into the area, putting up house prices and who tutor their children.
In the large poorer village I lived in not a single child passed the 11 plus. In the posh areas loads did. Come A levels a whole bunch of us from the village transferred to the Grammar School. What do you think happened to us between 11 and 16 to suddenly make us brighter? The answer is nothing whatsoever.
No they wouldn't, not if we returned to grammar schools nationwide. Even today grammars also have entry at 16 as well as 11.
Well they were nationwide when I went to school and clearly they did. How do you explain what happened in my village and all the poorer areas around where I lived and everywhere come to that. There wasn't some event that made my village children brighter between 11 and 16. It was because the selection process is crap at 11. The Grammar schools was full of the middle classes and the Secondary moderns full of the poor. Then at 16 we all swapped over. Selection at 11 is cruel and damaging.
Rubbish, more from poorer working class areas got into top universities and became lawyers and doctors etc when we had more grammar schools than do today.
Evidence? I can't think of a single working class person at my Grammar School .
You do understand that because there were more Grammar schools then obviously more progressed don't you? You need to do ratios not absolute numbers. Just because of social mobility in general what you said just can't be true.
And what is it with this inferiority complex you have in looking up at doctors, lawyers, Oxbridge gentry, etc. I'm married to a doctor. She is perfectly normal you know.
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Sale High School: 15% on free school meals (FSM). Sale Grammar School: 3% FSM.
Now to be fair, the catchments aren't the same: Sale High draws many from Wythenshawe, while Sale Grammar gives priority to Trafford. But this shows that while you do get *some* working class pupils at Grammars, you don't, nowadays, get that many. You used to get a lot more, I think. Notable working class Grammar school pupils from the 80s include Ian Brown and John Squire of the Stone Roses, who both attended Altrincham Boys' Grammar - though I think both left at 16.
In my O level year at Grammar school of the 60 or so students ALL the council house kids (between 15 and 20) bar one did not enter the sixth form. One joined the National Westminster Bank, the rest either went straight into employment (generally on the tools GPO, RSRE Malvern, farming and the jam factory, or as clerks to Chapmans Stationary or the jam factory) or to Tech. There were probably 20 to 25 in the sixth form of which 15 plus went on to Uni or Poly. A pretty sad ratio really.
At the time though you could leave school at 16 and work. Nowadays that isn't possible the choice is an incredibly poor apprenticeship or more education until you are 18.
The days of a child leaving school at 16 and earning enough to partly support the rest of the family disappeared in the 90s....
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Factcheck (I was also one of 2 or 3 true working class in my grammar school in the 1960s). Every family got family allowance, though the book was usually held by the mother - and dad wasn't forever on strike because of unions, or any particular solidarity with them, but because of widespread intimidation by union extremists to go on strike whether the union supported the issue or not. This created a vicious circle of strikes without pay (meaning mum's wages and family allowance became essential) and a media obsession with depicting strikes as "wildcat" self-indulgences by workers too lazy to do their job.
So-called "wildcat" strikes did indeed, by cementing poorer families into greater poverty, create greater militancy - because higher wages were the only way for their generation to get out of the poverty trap. But they also discouraged the children of poorest from committing to school, because - in a world where jobs were abundant - the parents needed the extra wage as soon as possible.
The reason so few of my grammar school year were true working class was that the vast majority of my primary school year had no interest in passing their 11+. That absolutely wasn't because the primary teachers discouraged them or because the schools were particularly weak, but because parents taught them, from a very early age, that their future lay in doing more or less their parents' job.
A poverty of ambition that was fine until the 80's onward destroyed any idea of a job for life..
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Factcheck (I was also one of 2 or 3 true working class in my grammar school in the 1960s). Every family got family allowance, though the book was usually held by the mother - and dad wasn't forever on strike because of unions, or any particular solidarity with them, but because of widespread intimidation by union extremists to go on strike whether the union supported the issue or not. This created a vicious circle of strikes without pay (meaning mum's wages and family allowance became essential) and a media obsession with depicting strikes as "wildcat" self-indulgences by workers too lazy to do their job.
So-called "wildcat" strikes did indeed, by cementing poorer families into greater poverty, create greater militancy - because higher wages were the only way for their generation to get out of the poverty trap. But they also discouraged the children of poorest from committing to school, because - in a world where jobs were abundant - the parents needed the extra wage as soon as possible.
The reason so few of my grammar school year were true working class was that the vast majority of my primary school year had no interest in passing their 11+. That absolutely wasn't because the primary teachers discouraged them or because the schools were particularly weak, but because parents taught them, from a very early age, that their future lay in doing more or less their parents' job.
Family allowance has always been universal hasn't it?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
OK, let’s resolve this once and for all. Could you set out what you think is the most pressing problem in the education system today and what evidence you have that the introduction of more grammar schools is the solution most likely to solve that problem.
The most pressing problem in education today is lack of opportunity in poor working class areas to get into a top Russell Group university and Oxbridge and a good career. More grammars would expand that opportunity.
Followed by the particularly poor results in terms of reading and maths and core GCSEs achieved by white working class boys in particular
No they wouldn't. The Grammar Schools would get filled with the children of middle class parents who move into the area, putting up house prices and who tutor their children.
In the large poorer village I lived in not a single child passed the 11 plus. In the posh areas loads did. Come A levels a whole bunch of us from the village transferred to the Grammar School. What do you think happened to us between 11 and 16 to suddenly make us brighter? The answer is nothing whatsoever.
No they wouldn't, not if we returned to grammar schools nationwide. Even today grammars also have entry at 16 as well as 11.
Well they were nationwide when I went to school and clearly they did. How do you explain what happened in my village and all the poorer areas around where I lived and everywhere come to that. There wasn't some event that made my village children brighter between 11 and 16. It was because the selection process is crap at 11. The Grammar schools was full of the middle classes and the Secondary moderns full of the poor. Then at 16 we all swapped over. Selection at 11 is cruel and damaging.
Rubbish, more from poorer working class areas got into top universities and became lawyers and doctors etc when we had more grammar schools than do today.
Evidence? I can't think of a single working class person at my Grammar School .
You do understand that because there were more Grammar schools then obviously more progressed don't you? You need to do ratios not absolute numbers. Just because of social mobility in general what you said just can't be true.
And what is it with this inferiority complex you have in looking up at doctors, lawyers, Oxbridge gentry, etc. I'm married to a doctor. She is perfectly normal you know.
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Sale High School: 15% on free school meals (FSM). Sale Grammar School: 3% FSM.
Now to be fair, the catchments aren't the same: Sale High draws many from Wythenshawe, while Sale Grammar gives priority to Trafford. But this shows that while you do get *some* working class pupils at Grammars, you don't, nowadays, get that many. You used to get a lot more, I think. Notable working class Grammar school pupils from the 80s include Ian Brown and John Squire of the Stone Roses, who both attended Altrincham Boys' Grammar - though I think both left at 16.
In my O level year at Grammar school of the 60 or so students ALL the council house kids (between 15 and 20) bar one did not enter the sixth form. One joined the National Westminster Bank, the rest either went straight into employment (generally on the tools GPO, RSRE Malvern, farming and the jam factory, or as clerks to Chapmans Stationary or the jam factory) or to Tech. There were probably 20 to 25 in the sixth form of which 15 plus went on to Uni or Poly. A pretty sad ratio really.
At the time though you could leave school at 16 and work. Nowadays that isn't possible the choice is an incredibly poor apprenticeship or more education until you are 18.
The days of a child leaving school at 16 and earning enough to partly support the rest of the family disappeared in the 90s....
So, is the interesting question why? Surely many of the same jobs still needed doing. Did the jobs continue, but they could no longer support a family because of, e.g., housing costs? Or did the jobs change?
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Perhaps the equalising effect of the internet is another factor.
When television was dominant, Americans could more easily ignore of the rest of the world, but now they're plunged into a global cultural medium where the largest group who can compete with them on equal terms are the British.
Not sure I wholly agree with that..... However the fact the NYT is so desperate to print something bad about Britain they turn to a notoriously unpleasant, contentious, untrustworthy, possibly anti-Semitic Irish Marxist to pen the article is quite striking
I can't see them going to such urgent lengths to diss France or Germany or Japan. Maybe China, but then China is America's mortal enemy and is supplanting America around the world, so negative press about China is to be expected
Something about Brexit Britain REALLY irks them
I was thinking of something like the TERF-wars. I've seen several American commentators become enraged that British feminists haven't deferred to their domestic political concerns but instead pursued the argument on its own terms. If they could flick a switch to disconnect the UK from their discourse they would happily do so.
There's a similar effect on the EU side too: "Why are you still here? You're supposed to be irrelevant now."
Ah, I see what you mean! For the first time American media is confronted by foreign media - traditional and social- which speaks English, which can influence American debate, and does so. In other words: America is occasionally seeing itself in a British mirror, and the world through a British prism, which is an alien experience to them, and not entirely welcome
Yes. That is true. I've noticed a touch of it in American discussion of sports, especially "soccer"
That's what we're here for, and renowned for: common sense.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
Fun, yes, but we should each do it in our own heads only rather than air it on here - because the fiction (if it is a fiction which I'm not saying it is) that legal NATO and 'real' NATO are one and the same is a necessary one for deterrence and Putin might be reading this.
Imagine if the war in Ukraine snowballs and Armageddon ensues because of loose talk below the line on PB.com. Could you live with that? Not sure I could.
I did wonder if Russia had managed to take out any of the HIMARS trucks yet...
https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1554095299991375872 Russian Ministry of Defense claims it destroyed two of Ukraine's HIMARS rocket artillery systems, and posts video to prove it. Apparently, the two 16.2 ton, 7 m long, 3.2. m high, 2.4 m wide HIMARS vehicles were hidden in a room on the second floor of a building in Kharkiv.
Yeah right, of course they’re hiding heavy trucks in city centre buildings, when every video we have seen of them them has the vehicles in rural areas.
Oh, and they won’t be hiding two of them together either, only the Russians do that with high-value targets.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
Fun, yes, but we should each do it in our own heads only rather than air it on here - because the fiction (if it is a fiction which I'm not saying it is) that legal NATO and 'real' NATO are one and the same is a necessary one for deterrence and Putin might be reading this.
Imagine if the war in Ukraine snowballs and Armageddon ensues because of loose talk below the line on PB.com. Could you live with that? Not sure I could.
That is rather the point of Armageddon, is it not ?
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Factcheck (I was also one of 2 or 3 true working class in my grammar school in the 1960s). Every family got family allowance, though the book was usually held by the mother - and dad wasn't forever on strike because of unions, or any particular solidarity with them, but because of widespread intimidation by union extremists to go on strike whether the union supported the issue or not. This created a vicious circle of strikes without pay (meaning mum's wages and family allowance became essential) and a media obsession with depicting strikes as "wildcat" self-indulgences by workers too lazy to do their job.
So-called "wildcat" strikes did indeed, by cementing poorer families into greater poverty, create greater militancy - because higher wages were the only way for their generation to get out of the poverty trap. But they also discouraged the children of poorest from committing to school, because - in a world where jobs were abundant - the parents needed the extra wage as soon as possible.
The reason so few of my grammar school year were true working class was that the vast majority of my primary school year had no interest in passing their 11+. That absolutely wasn't because the primary teachers discouraged them or because the schools were particularly weak, but because parents taught them, from a very early age, that their future lay in doing more or less their parents' job.
I don't disagree with most of what you say, apart from why use the word Factcheck? Wildcat strikes were quite common in the 70s. It doesn't really matter the reason to a 14 yr old why Dad was always out on strike. It wasn't anything the child could change. All he knew was Dad was at home instead, mum was more stressed because she had to pay the bills herself, children lost their pocket money for weeks on end, snide comments at Grammar school usually followed. I know every family with more than 1 child got family allowance, it was the only thing we had at times from tuesday to thursday.
Interesting and long thread on where things stand strategy-wise:
Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture Back in May, I examined Ukraine’s military strategy in a thread that I informally called ‘The Ukrainians are Masters of 21st Century War”. Today, an update on the Ukrainian approach - the "strategy of corrosion". 1/25
One thought I had reading this if Ukrainians are really Russians as Putin believes, how come they seem as a people to be that much more agile and adaptive than real Russians?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
I don't in principle have a problem with parents choosing between schools, but the choice shouldn't be too consequential.
At the present time, because school quality is uneven, and the effects too consequential, we have selection by house price, which results in a lot of social ghettoisation, even in a small city/large town like Exeter.
As far as I can tell there are lots of better education systems we could learn from, if we wanted to. I don't know how they manage to afford much smaller class sizes in Sweden or the Netherlands. Something about the Irish system seems to work pretty well, despite class sizes as large as Britain's.
Not sure whether there are other countries that have grammar schools.
Starmer making a complete arse of the strikes again today. Even Nandy running rings round him. He hasnt got a clue how to position himself and the party are largely ignoring him. Hes lucky the Tories are in full consume self mode
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
Fun, yes, but we should each do it in our own heads only rather than air it on here - because the fiction (if it is a fiction which I'm not saying it is) that legal NATO and 'real' NATO are one and the same is a necessary one for deterrence and Putin might be reading this.
Imagine if the war in Ukraine snowballs and Armageddon ensues because of loose talk below the line on PB.com. Could you live with that? Not sure I could.
That is rather the point of Armageddon, is it not ?
True. So, more accurately, I'd die feeling guilty.
But come to think of it that's quite likely anyway.
DaveyBoy1961 asked: "Just a question. Can you turn up at a polling station and vote instead of post the ballot paper in?" (In Washington state, which is a vote-by-mail state.)
Thanks for that, I didn't know you had vote-by-mail-only areas in the US. Stands to reason mind, lots of empty space, it would cost a fortune to staff polling stations like in the UK.
A view from the States: "Economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift, [the UK] is being cut down to size. The right’s Brexit fantasy — of a revitalized Britain, able once again to confidently assert itself — is finished." ~AA
Ah, the New York Times reverts to its histrionic Britain-bashing. It must please a segment of its liberal readership
A few months ago I worked out why they do this. It's because of the desperate state of American politics, with seemingly no way out of the nightmare. Add in racial conflict, mass shootings, foreign policy disasters, global retreat, surging crime, homelessness and drugs, and America's clear descent from top country status, and it is very depressing to be American right now. But they get some solace from pointing at Britain and saying "but look this place is fucked up too, and by rightwing populists who are just as bad as ours"
I have seen this effect in play at family weddings, but the NYT are really missing out on an important piece of the jigsaw. They need to discover how bad the governance of Ireland is as well. American visitors always need a crash course in the many past mistakes and misdemeanours of Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin.
For sure
And, to be fair, the UK press does exactly this as well. Whenever Britain feels a bit miserable, a lot of papers will print articles pointing out how newly crap everything is another country similar to ours (generally France, Germany, Italy, or the EU as a whole). And of course there is an entire school of journalists who spend careers writing America-is-terrible articles, they are particularly noticeable whenever there is a mass shooting
It is a sign of insecurity, and all countries suffer from it, sporadically. Some smaller, more insecure countries do it all the time (eg Ireland vis a vis the UK)
What's new here is AMERICAN insecurity. They have been top dog for a long while, but as that conviction of superiority fast speedily away, on multiple fronts, they are becoming more like other countries, with attendant neuroses
Indeed and in any case the threat to America is from China not us, we are only a middle ranking power now
I wouldn’t say we were “middle ranking”. I think better to numerically rank based on combos of size, economy, population, military power, soft power etc.
1st Rank US and China
2nd UK, France, Germany, Japan maybe India
3rd Italy, Russia,
I don’t know why I bothered to write that but there you go! Just mental diarrhoea.
In terms of economy, South Korea is arguably more influential than the UK. And Poland and Turkey may soon have superior conventional armed forces.
Tbh if you're in NATO it doesn't matter how strong your armed forces are, you have the guarantee of all other members.
This has never been properly tested. Let's hope that remains the case
Because I am unconvinced we would go to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, if Putin invaded the Baltics
I'm equally doubtful we would defend Romania or Bulgaria either. Turkey is tricky. Greece probably, Poland probably. Slovakia? Hmm
It would be fun to chart the mental map of REAL NATO, ie the NATO that contains the countries we would actually go to total war to defend. It is smaller than Theoretical Legal NATO
Fun, yes, but we should each do it in our own heads only rather than air it on here - because the fiction (if it is a fiction which I'm not saying it is) that legal NATO and 'real' NATO are one and the same is a necessary one for deterrence and Putin might be reading this.
Imagine if the war in Ukraine snowballs and Armageddon ensues because of loose talk below the line on PB.com. Could you live with that? Not sure I could.
I want Global Thermonuclear War now!
And not with those woke, vegan type nuclear weapons. Proper crowd pleasers. Dropped from big aircraft, with Texans on top of each one. The way God and Stanley Kubrick intended.
Here's a challenge for PBers: next time you go on a foreign trip, try doing it without taking any modern technology devices with you, ie. anything invented in the last 20 years.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
I was one of about 2 or 3 true working class in my Grammar school year (1970s). Mum and Dad both worked and were paid weekly in cash. Dad was in a manual occupation, Mum was a bookkeeper part time, (no accountancy quals). Dad was always out on strike (union man etc), Mum relied on Family allowance once a week, (She used to get it on a Tuesday from the GPO in town in her dinner hour). I was envious of my mates because they had money and nice houses. There were no Free School meals in our year. ( and no, we didn't live in a shoebox in't midlle o't't' road)
Factcheck (I was also one of 2 or 3 true working class in my grammar school in the 1960s). Every family got family allowance, though the book was usually held by the mother - and dad wasn't forever on strike because of unions, or any particular solidarity with them, but because of widespread intimidation by union extremists to go on strike whether the union supported the issue or not. This created a vicious circle of strikes without pay (meaning mum's wages and family allowance became essential) and a media obsession with depicting strikes as "wildcat" self-indulgences by workers too lazy to do their job.
So-called "wildcat" strikes did indeed, by cementing poorer families into greater poverty, create greater militancy - because higher wages were the only way for their generation to get out of the poverty trap. But they also discouraged the children of poorest from committing to school, because - in a world where jobs were abundant - the parents needed the extra wage as soon as possible.
The reason so few of my grammar school year were true working class was that the vast majority of my primary school year had no interest in passing their 11+. That absolutely wasn't because the primary teachers discouraged them or because the schools were particularly weak, but because parents taught them, from a very early age, that their future lay in doing more or less their parents' job.
Family allowance has always been universal hasn't it?
No, only for the 2nd and subsequent child in the earlier years, and I think it was post-war onwards.
Here's a challenge for PBers: next time you go on a foreign trip, try doing it without taking any modern technology devices with you, ie. anything invented in the last 20 years.
Here's a challenge for PBers: next time you go on a foreign trip, try doing it without taking any modern technology devices with you, ie. anything invented in the last 20 years.
But then how would we post our artful holiday snaps on here? Actually, aside from coming in here and sending cheery messages to friends and family all my travel is done with pre-smartphone technology. Paper tickets, paper maps. Spending on cards. I get flustered if anyone tried to force me to use an app.
Here's a challenge for PBers: next time you go on a foreign trip, try doing it without taking any modern technology devices with you, ie. anything invented in the last 20 years.
Modern technology to me is VHS and subsequent
Why do this to yourself when *abroad *? Translate, just in time hotel booking, satnav for cars, on-phone boarding cards, restaurants...
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
The petrol price comments got me thinking. According to this website https://tradingeconomics.com gas and fossil fuels are down a little today. Looking at the 12 month figures: crude oil is up 32% and natural gas 100%. Given that the cost of the raw materials is only a part of the cost to the consumer how are the twitter and news reports of people being quoted increases 4 or 5 times for their domestic energy renewals possible? If increases in petrol and domestic energy settle at no more than 50% over last year I suspect that the government can make that manageable by cutting tax and suspending green levies along with some covert threats to energy companies to not pass on future risk to consumers. Am I missing something?
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
I don't in principle have a problem with parents choosing between schools, but the choice shouldn't be too consequential.
At the present time, because school quality is uneven, and the effects too consequential, we have selection by house price, which results in a lot of social ghettoisation, even in a small city/large town like Exeter.
As far as I can tell there are lots of better education systems we could learn from, if we wanted to. I don't know how they manage to afford much smaller class sizes in Sweden or the Netherlands. Something about the Irish system seems to work pretty well, despite class sizes as large as Britain's.
Not sure whether there are other countries that have grammar schools.
Germany for starters plus a few equivalents in New York
4 additional HIMARS have arrived in🇺🇦. I’m grateful to @POTUS@SecDef Lloyd Austin III and 🇺🇸people for strengthening of #UAarmy We have proven to be smart operators of this weapon. The sound of the #HIMARS volley has become a top hit 🎶 of this summer at the front lines! https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1554076054435889152
The shine often comes off 'wonder weapons' after a war. Witness Patriot missiles during the Gulf War?
It might be that HIMARS is not as effective as it appears at the moment; or that some of the kills credited to it are coming from other long-range systems. But it certainly looks like a brilliant system at the moment. I think this will be a market winner for LockMart...
The accuracy of the rockets appears to be phenomenal, but I think the warheads are only 200lb, so there are definitely much more powerful weapons out there. For example a tomahawk cruise missile has a 1000lb warhead.
You can see this difference in terms of the damage done to the bridges recently. The HIMARS put lots of holes in the bridge, but weren't powerful enough to bring it down. There will be targets it's not suitable for.
Similarly, the Ukrainians have successfully targeted a lot of Russian tanks with 155mm artillery, using drones for targeting correction and acquisition, and using HIMARS on those sorts of targets would be overkill.
Im tempted to put some money on Starmer not leading Labour at the next election. His authority is very visibly ebbing away over pickets.
wishful thinking rather than evidence based I think.
Nandy at picket today and already two versions of whether Starmer 'authorised' it or Nandy just left a message with his office 'and wasnt told not to go'. Unions very critical, threatening funding pull. Plenty of evidence he's all over the shop
On this American v British media thing, and the NYT, and all that
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
Interesting and long thread on where things stand strategy-wise:
Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture Back in May, I examined Ukraine’s military strategy in a thread that I informally called ‘The Ukrainians are Masters of 21st Century War”. Today, an update on the Ukrainian approach - the "strategy of corrosion". 1/25
One thought I had reading this if Ukrainians are really Russians as Putin believes, how come they seem as a people to be that much more agile and adaptive than real Russians?
I listened to a Yale history podcast about the ancient Greeks and the learned professor made the argument that every newly free people have achieved stunning military successes - Thebes, Athens, France, US - and you might view the Ukrainians in the same vein.
Im tempted to put some money on Starmer not leading Labour at the next election. His authority is very visibly ebbing away over pickets.
You may be right. He has a 14% poll lead yet the MP he hoofed last week, who may well be deselected shortly, seems to be going out of his way to make trouble for him.
Interesting and long thread on where things stand strategy-wise:
Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture Back in May, I examined Ukraine’s military strategy in a thread that I informally called ‘The Ukrainians are Masters of 21st Century War”. Today, an update on the Ukrainian approach - the "strategy of corrosion". 1/25
One thought I had reading this if Ukrainians are really Russians as Putin believes, how come they seem as a people to be that much more agile and adaptive than real Russians?
Because in war, there's no better teacher than defeat. When Peter the Great captured Swedish generals at Poltava, he gave them a banquet afterwards, and toasted them as "My teachers." The Ukrainians took their defeat in 2014 to heart and learned from it.
On this American v British media thing, and the NYT, and all that
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
I am open to any alternative theories
I'd actually agree that the annual sneering about Eurovision was tiresome and would irritate any foreigner coming across it - it used to read like a relative constantly going on about the dress sense of his brother. It's telling that it stopped when we nearly won. Similarly, our sports coverage is really only interested in Brits doing well.
On this American v British media thing, and the NYT, and all that
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
I am open to any alternative theories
I'd actually agree that the annual sneering about Eurovision was tiresome and would irritate any foreigner coming across it - it used to read like a relative constantly going on about the dress sense of his brother. It's telling that it stopped when we nearly won. Similarly, our sports coverage is really only interested in Brits doing well.
But aren't most country's media like that?
Yes, as observed in the Monty Python ‘news for parrots’ sketch many years ago so its nothing new.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
It isn't irrelevant. Resource has an impact as well as pupil intake. More invested in underperforming areas will close the gap over time.
Also, another key strand in Optimum Education System, the affluent classes buy-out will be pretty much closed off. Private schools will be relieved of tax breaks and will not be allowed to charge more per pupil than the average state spend in their area.
See how this is taking shape now? We are inching towards our goal of a high quality egalitarian education system where the link between parental bank balance and the schooling outcomes and prospects of children is substantially weakened.
Fun slave trade fact of the day: Royal African Company slaves were routinely branded DOY for Duke of York. Given his unstellar performance as James II you would have expected them to retire the title in perpetuity rather than label the current incumbent with it. Though I suppose it gives him a colourable claim not to be the worst DOY evah.
Still getting anecdotal evidence of people going to Sunak's PR blitz and coming away convinced. I've no idea what proportion of voting members will attend, though.
On this American v British media thing, and the NYT, and all that
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
I am open to any alternative theories
I'd actually agree that the annual sneering about Eurovision was tiresome and would irritate any foreigner coming across it - it used to read like a relative constantly going on about the dress sense of his brother. It's telling that it stopped when we nearly won. Similarly, our sports coverage is really only interested in Brits doing well.
But aren't most country's media like that?
But this would only matter if you accessed British media a lot. Why would you bother if you're not British? I'm talking about Americans in America. Not Glaswegians "forced" to watch the BBC in Scotland
So I think @williamglenn might have a point. It's the potency of British media and opinions which is insufferable, otherwise they would be unheard, and ignored
And yes, media in all countries tends to be intensely parochial about sport
4 additional HIMARS have arrived in🇺🇦. I’m grateful to @POTUS@SecDef Lloyd Austin III and 🇺🇸people for strengthening of #UAarmy We have proven to be smart operators of this weapon. The sound of the #HIMARS volley has become a top hit 🎶 of this summer at the front lines! https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1554076054435889152
The shine often comes off 'wonder weapons' after a war. Witness Patriot missiles during the Gulf War?
It might be that HIMARS is not as effective as it appears at the moment; or that some of the kills credited to it are coming from other long-range systems. But it certainly looks like a brilliant system at the moment. I think this will be a market winner for LockMart...
It's fundamentally quite simple, though. The vehicle is a glorified truck - which means out can get places a to quicker than the earlier tracked vehicle (and will fit in something as small as a C130). The rockets are GPS/inertial navigation targeted (though they can also have terminal homing), so very difficult to jam, and perhaps most importantly, they outrange the bulk of Russian artillery. And it's easy and quick to reload.
Ukraine's tactical intelligence is greatly superior to that of the Russians, so they can hit stuff with precision, where for the most part Russia is just lobbing lots of warheads.
There's nothing magic about the system, and against a better equipped adversary it probably wouldn't be such a game changer.
If the Russians had been able to establish air superiority then assets like HIMARS wouldn't last long. But this is why a successful army needs to combine at least a dozen different different aspects into a whole.
Fun slave trade fact of the day: Royal African Company slaves were routinely branded DOY for Duke of York. Given his unstellar performance as James II you would have expected them to retire the title in perpetuity rather than label the current incumbent with it. Though I suppose it gives him a colourable claim not to be the worst DOY evah.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Perhaps the whole discussion of grammar vs comprehensive is inherently futile. No one seems to go back to a fresh sheet of paper here.
I would personally like to see the results of a trial where kids self select at 14. They can go either the academic route as per now leading to a levels and university or go to a more skills based route which teaches them plumbing, brick laying etc with industry certificates replacing gcse's also classes in basic book keeping and running a small business.
Our current system tends to assume all children are academically inclined and that is simply not true. Some that fail in the academic system would I have no doubt shine in a system which taught them valuable skills they could turn into a small business of their own
Here's the current status of vote by mail in the US:
"Eight states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington—allow all elections to be conducted by mail. Two states—Nebraska and North Dakota—permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail. Nine states—Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming—allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail. Four states—Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico—permit all-mail elections for certain small jurisdictions." source: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-table-18-states-with-all-mail-elections.aspx
(For the record: When I had a choice I voted in person, because I enjoyed the small ceremony, and seeing the nice ladies who ran the election in my precinct.
I prefer in-person voting in general because voting by mail undermines the secret ballot principle, allowing for intimidation and fraud. But I have to add, immediately, that I have seen no evidence that either fraud or intimidation have been significant problems since Washington state switched to all-mail voting.)
On this American v British media thing, and the NYT, and all that
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
I am open to any alternative theories
Someone should make them rewatch their Olympics coverage. One-eyed does not do it justice. You would have trouble knowing that other countries win gold medals apart from the US and that there are sports that exist where the US aren’t medalists in.
On Russian state TV, State Duma Defense Committee's head Andrey Kartapolov proposed taking Ukrainian children from occupied territories and shipping them off to military boarding schools in Russia. Not one word about asking for their parents' permission or even their own wishes. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1554122972935372804
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Perhaps the whole discussion of grammar vs comprehensive is inherently futile. No one seems to go back to a fresh sheet of paper here.
I would personally like to see the results of a trial where kids self select at 14. They can go either the academic route as per now leading to a levels and university or go to a more skills based route which teaches them plumbing, brick laying etc with industry certificates replacing gcse's also classes in basic book keeping and running a small business.
Our current system tends to assume all children are academically inclined and that is simply not true. Some that fail in the academic system would I have no doubt shine in a system which taught them valuable skills they could turn into a small business of their own
On this American v British media thing, and the NYT, and all that
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
I am open to any alternative theories
Someone should make them rewatch their Olympics coverage. One-eyed does not do it justice. You would have trouble knowing that other countries win gold medals apart from the US and that there are sports that exist where the US aren’t medalists in.
Yes, it's one form of "insufferable" triumphalism, exceptionalism and arrogance meeting another. USA v UK/England, and it is sharpened by a shared language and two very powerful media cultures
Comments
It’s military we thought was big but it’s seemingly a bit crap so not as powerful as it was before.
It’s economy is weak and whilst it has huge natural resources then so does Saudi, Venezuela, Indonesia.
It has basically no soft cultural power so whilst for example France doesn’t have the size and natural resources France has nukes, a better trained and equipped military, huge soft power and a strong top global economy so would rank Russia below France in this example.
And whilst Russia is to an extent bullying the EU right now it’s a snapshot rather than likely projection over next few years and last few years.
Betfair next prime minister
1.11 Liz Truss 90%
9.6 Rishi Sunak 10%
Next Conservative leader
1.11 Liz Truss 90%
9.8 Rishi Sunak 10%
The one I'm not sure about is Turkey, as they're always up to some mischief themselves in the region.
It might be that HIMARS is not as effective as it appears at the moment; or that some of the kills credited to it are coming from other long-range systems. But it certainly looks like a brilliant system at the moment. I think this will be a market winner for LockMart...
There's a similar effect on the EU side too: "Why are you still here? You're supposed to be irrelevant now."
Russia has a lot of soft power in its "near abroad" - central Asia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan. Also in Serbia, Hungary, even Greece. More soft power than France or Britain, or perhaps even America
It is also much more influential than European actors in the Middle East - Syria, Iran, etc - because of its willingness to oppose the west and use its own military forces
And if Putin grinds out some kind of win in Ukraine (far from impossible) the perception of Russia as powerful will grow, with other benefits to Putin. Russia is literally expanding. It does not get much more blatantly powerful than that
Is this just a snapshot and Russia is actually doomed to swift decline? Maybe. I can see the arguments, Lack of real exports (outside raw materials). Terrible corruption. Bad demographics. And yet Russia also has all that territory, and natural resources, and its northerly location means it is likely to be a great beneficiary of global warming. Siberia could become intensely desirable and fertile
Never write off Russia. History tells us that
The vehicle is a glorified truck - which means out can get places a to quicker than the earlier tracked vehicle (and will fit in something as small as a C130).
The rockets are GPS/inertial navigation targeted (though they can also have terminal homing), so very difficult to jam, and perhaps most importantly, they outrange the bulk of Russian artillery.
And it's easy and quick to reload.
Ukraine's tactical intelligence is greatly superior to that of the Russians, so they can hit stuff with precision, where for the most part Russia is just lobbing lots of warheads.
There's nothing magic about the system, and against a better equipped adversary it probably wouldn't be such a game changer.
Now we can have a debate about relative economic performance. But we definitely haven’t had a depression in the U.K.
Russia does not have enough the other way round.
It'll take his military years and years to recover from their defeat in Ukraine and Putin will be gone within five I reckon.
Yes. That is true. I've noticed a touch of it in American discussion of sports, especially "soccer"
https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1554095299991375872
Russian Ministry of Defense claims it destroyed two of Ukraine's HIMARS rocket artillery systems, and posts video to prove it. Apparently, the two 16.2 ton, 7 m long, 3.2. m high, 2.4 m wide HIMARS vehicles were hidden in a room on the second floor of a building in Kharkiv.
So-called "wildcat" strikes did indeed, by cementing poorer families into greater poverty, create greater militancy - because higher wages were the only way for their generation to get out of the poverty trap. But they also discouraged the children of poorest from committing to school, because - in a world where jobs were abundant - the parents needed the extra wage as soon as possible.
The reason so few of my grammar school year were true working class was that the vast majority of my primary school year had no interest in passing their 11+. That absolutely wasn't because the primary teachers discouraged them or because the schools were particularly weak, but because parents taught them, from a very early age, that their future lay in doing more or less their parents' job.
It changes monthly and closely tracks the oil price. $127 was the peak oil price, it was $105 a couple of days ago, and still falling.
In the UK there’s a more complex supply chain, so falls take a while to work through the system. Rises never seem to take long though!
The days of a child leaving school at 16 and earning enough to partly support the rest of the family disappeared in the 90s....
https://twitter.com/ThePrisonLawyer/status/1347626960529326080
Diesel, mind.
Imagine if the war in Ukraine snowballs and Armageddon ensues because of loose talk below the line on PB.com. Could you live with that? Not sure I could.
Reportedly works both ways for a lot of people.
Its bad how suddenly 180 seems "cheap" though compared to the 196.9 I filled up at recently. Hopefully it still has much further to fall yet.
Sainsbury's local probably has cheaper.
Oh, and they won’t be hiding two of them together either, only the Russians do that with high-value targets.
And there is also an app. 179 at 3 places within 5 miles of me in Devon
Weird fuckers
If you can get a Costco membership, unleaded is all yours for 168.7. Price diff will pay off the £35 membership in no time.
173.9 at BP Widnes 174.7 at Asda Westbrook
Mick Ryan, AM
@WarintheFuture
Back in May, I examined Ukraine’s military strategy in a thread that I informally called ‘The Ukrainians are Masters of 21st Century War”. Today, an update on the Ukrainian approach - the "strategy of corrosion". 1/25
https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1553973368809918464
===
One thought I had reading this if Ukrainians are really Russians as Putin believes, how come they seem as a people to be that much more agile and adaptive than real Russians?
At the present time, because school quality is uneven, and the effects too consequential, we have selection by house price, which results in a lot of social ghettoisation, even in a small city/large town like Exeter.
As far as I can tell there are lots of better education systems we could learn from, if we wanted to. I don't know how they manage to afford much smaller class sizes in Sweden or the Netherlands. Something about the Irish system seems to work pretty well, despite class sizes as large as Britain's.
Not sure whether there are other countries that have grammar schools.
But come to think of it that's quite likely anyway.
And not with those woke, vegan type nuclear weapons. Proper crowd pleasers. Dropped from big aircraft, with Texans on top of each one. The way God and Stanley Kubrick intended.
Even if I shut my eyes or look away. Green Needle
How odd
The supermarket I normally use is 6.2p a litre more than other supermarkets are. Might be time to change supermarkets!
Is SKS getting splinters up his arse by sitting on the fence?
If the Labour Party can’t stand up for working people, what is the bloody point of their existence!
Tried out the BP Pulse 150kW EV chargers at the weekend. Very fast but quite dear at £0.59 per kWh.
Not sure what exactly but it doesn't matter too much - something that isn't Piers Morgan.
Actually, aside from coming in here and sending cheery messages to friends and family all my travel is done with pre-smartphone technology. Paper tickets, paper maps. Spending on cards. I get flustered if anyone tried to force me to use an app.
Why do this to yourself when *abroad *? Translate, just in time hotel booking, satnav for cars, on-phone boarding cards, restaurants...
You can see this difference in terms of the damage done to the bridges recently. The HIMARS put lots of holes in the bridge, but weren't powerful enough to bring it down. There will be targets it's not suitable for.
Similarly, the Ukrainians have successfully targeted a lot of Russian tanks with 155mm artillery, using drones for targeting correction and acquisition, and using HIMARS on those sorts of targets would be overkill.
Plenty of evidence he's all over the shop
I was reading some American commentary on England's football win last night, and I came across the sentiment - more than once - that British (probably specifically English) attitudes to this are "insufferable". They mean the attitudes of the media rather than the people, I presume
One American voiced the opinion that the British/English are similarly insufferable about.... wait for it..... eurovision. Er, what??
Now, I can understand why Scots might find English media insufferable about the fitba. They've had 1966 rammed down their throats for 50 years, like it has something to do with Scotland and is a cause for all-British pride. But Americans? Why on earth should they care? And if they find our opinions or media insufferable, why not just... ignore it? It's not like they are forced to watch it on the BBC
Maybe @williamglenn's thesis is good. Americans are encountering a powerful English speaking media which is not their own, and they don't like it, because it is not America-centric, and in some ways considers itself superior to America. So: insufferable
I am open to any alternative theories
It could just work...
And there would be no actual downside...
Motivation makes a really big difference.
Strap in.
https://twitter.com/samtarry/status/1554056995904405504?s=21&t=EtMyg4AF60IBx577nrQocw
But aren't most country's media like that?
Also, another key strand in Optimum Education System, the affluent classes buy-out will be pretty much closed off. Private schools will be relieved of tax breaks and will not be allowed to charge more per pupil than the average state spend in their area.
See how this is taking shape now? We are inching towards our goal of a high quality egalitarian education system where the link between parental bank balance and the schooling outcomes and prospects of children is substantially weakened.
So I think @williamglenn might have a point. It's the potency of British media and opinions which is insufferable, otherwise they would be unheard, and ignored
And yes, media in all countries tends to be intensely parochial about sport
I would personally like to see the results of a trial where kids self select at 14. They can go either the academic route as per now leading to a levels and university or go to a more skills based route which teaches them plumbing, brick laying etc with industry certificates replacing gcse's also classes in basic book keeping and running a small business.
Our current system tends to assume all children are academically inclined and that is simply not true. Some that fail in the academic system would I have no doubt shine in a system which taught them valuable skills they could turn into a small business of their own
"Eight states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington—allow all elections to be conducted by mail.
Two states—Nebraska and North Dakota—permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail.
Nine states—Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming—allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail.
Four states—Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico—permit all-mail elections for certain small jurisdictions."
source: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-table-18-states-with-all-mail-elections.aspx
(For the record: When I had a choice I voted in person, because I enjoyed the small ceremony, and seeing the nice ladies who ran the election in my precinct.
I prefer in-person voting in general because voting by mail undermines the secret ballot principle, allowing for intimidation and fraud. But I have to add, immediately, that I have seen no evidence that either fraud or intimidation have been significant problems since Washington state switched to all-mail voting.)
Would probably find the Ukraine war ending very quickly as the Russians have to send what’s left out east.
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1554122972935372804