Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
If there’s anything on the menu that you’ve never eaten before, that’s what I would try.
It’s very good advice. And yet I am nearly full and I KNOW the fried pork belly is AMAZEBOMBEROONI
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Voting hours are a lot longer in the UK than in - for example - the US.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Voting hours are a lot longer in the UK than in - for example - the US.
Lets not try and compare ourselves to that exemplary bastion of democracy.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
If you need "encouragement" when the polls are open for 15 hours on election day and postal voting on demand is available, why should weekend voting help?
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
I admit to being skeptical weekend voting would really make that much difference. There's postal voting and the polling stations are open for 15 hours. Maybe it would be a bit of difference, but I cannot get worked up about it as some great injustice.
Whilst it would take away some of the drama, perhaps 2 days for voting as is not unhead of woudl be the way to go. Or even just 0700-2200 one day and 0700-1200 the next, followed by the count.
rcs1000 and Leon - Your arguments support the conclusion I reached years ago: that Obamacare was the wrong solution to US health problems. A little history: In the early 1980s, crack hit the black community very hard, reducing life expectancy, especially among black men. Before then, life expectancy had been rising for all groups, and faster for blacks than whites.
One can criticize the response of the governments to the crack epidemic, but the actions did result in a decrease in crack use, and, soon, a return to the increases in life expectancy among all groups.
What might be the right solutions? There is a hint in what is usually called the "Hispanic Paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox "The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world.[2] The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites.[3][4][5][6][7][8] According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites. . . . Other hypotheses around the Hispanic paradox maintain that the phenomenon is real, and is caused by sociocultural factors which characterize the Hispanic population. Many of these factors can be described under the more broad categories of cultural values, interpersonal context, and community context.[10] Some health researchers attribute the Hispanic paradox to different eating habits, especially the relatively high intake of legumes such as beans and lentils."
Here's a simple way to understand how strong the effects of the "paradox" are: The six largest demographic groups in the US are white women, white men, Hispanic women, Hispanic men, black women, and black men. Before COVID hit, I looked at the life expectancy of the groups, as calculated by the CDC. Here is what I found, putting the groups in order of increasing life expectancy: black men, white men, black women, white women and Hispanic men, and Hispanic women.
I have never met anyone in the US who knows that -- and I doubt that it is common knowledge in Britain, either.
(In my opinion, stronger families and stronger communities are the principal explanation for the paradox. And that would help explain why groups like Japanese-Americans live longer.)
-dissolution of the monarchy -end of FPTP -re-entering the EU -unification of Ireland -federalisation
All in the lifetime of HYUFD.
You are most generous in wishing him so long a life. Or an excessive optimist.
I wish him only the best. Fifty more years could tick the majority off!.
(And I do believe federalisation is closer than most PBers think.)
When you say federalisation, do you mean the EU or the UK?
The most likely of the five is the end of FPTP, as it would shift power from the voters to politicians.
Surely multimember STV would do the opposite, as it would allow voters to choose which of the various Conservative/Labour/Independent/etc candidates on the ballot would get their first choice.
To what extent is the tardiness of Germany’s supply of weapons to Ukraine related to manufacturing constraints, and limited existing stocks ? (They’ve certainly provided substantial financial aid, for example.)
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1571110300484792321 The German government has approved Ukraine's request for more RCH-155 howitzers. However, the manufacturer will be able to produce them for Ukraine no earlier than the first half of 2025, reports Welt am Sonntag citing @MelnykAndrij and documents received from the manufacturer…
It’s clearly not an insignificant problem in general. Poland, for example, just ordered several billion dollars worth of a S Korean F16 derivative light fighter (with inferior performance), because they aren’t prepared to wait years for deliveries of new F16s from the US, and the Korean jet (the FA-50) is available very quickly.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
From an NYTimes article at the start of the year:
There is a shortage of everything from protective vests to thermal underwear. Radio equipment is 30 years out of date. Only one in three warships is ready to deploy — so few that the navy worries it cannot meet all its international commitments.
Even in Rukla, the flagship German NATO mission which has relatively few complaints when it comes to resources, the general scarcity has been felt.
Some of the armored vehicles are five decades old. During international exercises in Lithuania, their equipment routinely made the German units “the weakest link in the chain,” soldiers reported to the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces on their return from tours in Rukla.
Indeed. But while they’re perhaps an extreme example, very similar comments could be made for most of Europe up until this year’s invasion. At least some of the reluctance to supply Ukraine with the more modern and potent weapons is that our own militaries are quite nervous about the effect on their own capabilities.
Which is why Turkish and S Korean defence manufacturers are making out like bandits.
Indeed, I remember @Dura_Ace saying that our spare self propelled artillery is in such a poor state that it is undeployable.
It wasn't me. It was light bulb shaped head defence expert Frances Tusa on Twitter.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
If there’s anything on the menu that you’ve never eaten before, that’s what I would try.
It’s very good advice. And yet I am nearly full and I KNOW the fried pork belly is AMAZEBOMBEROONI
If you’re nearly full, what about something refreshing from the starter menu? The cherry gazpacho?
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
History won't be very kind to Merkel.
Merkel was pretty mediocre, all things considered. A German Baldwin.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
To what extent is the tardiness of Germany’s supply of weapons to Ukraine related to manufacturing constraints, and limited existing stocks ? (They’ve certainly provided substantial financial aid, for example.)
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1571110300484792321 The German government has approved Ukraine's request for more RCH-155 howitzers. However, the manufacturer will be able to produce them for Ukraine no earlier than the first half of 2025, reports Welt am Sonntag citing @MelnykAndrij and documents received from the manufacturer…
It’s clearly not an insignificant problem in general. Poland, for example, just ordered several billion dollars worth of a S Korean F16 derivative light fighter (with inferior performance), because they aren’t prepared to wait years for deliveries of new F16s from the US, and the Korean jet (the FA-50) is available very quickly.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
From an NYTimes article at the start of the year:
There is a shortage of everything from protective vests to thermal underwear. Radio equipment is 30 years out of date. Only one in three warships is ready to deploy — so few that the navy worries it cannot meet all its international commitments.
Even in Rukla, the flagship German NATO mission which has relatively few complaints when it comes to resources, the general scarcity has been felt.
Some of the armored vehicles are five decades old. During international exercises in Lithuania, their equipment routinely made the German units “the weakest link in the chain,” soldiers reported to the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces on their return from tours in Rukla.
One of the few things about which Donald Trump was right. The larger nations of Europe need to up their game in defence, especially as the US focus moves away from NATO and towards China. The less said about the German attitude to arming Ukraine, the better.
Surely the lesson of the SMO is that the Russians are fucking crap and, as they are the only conventional threat in Europe, we can spend less.
False logic. There should be no Tory voters by now and yet… Peoples views change with age and place in society. Unless you are Jeremy Corbyn.
Well a couple of points. Tories are less popular with the young than ever its the disproportionate support of the old even compared with 10 years ago that is keeping them in power Back in the 80s and 90s there were plenty of old labour voters..not so much now
So the Tories have pushed things as far as they can now. The more they appease their old core vote the more disgust the young feel with them and the sharper the backlash
I've heard it all before. Conservative voters will be outbred by the young and/or ethnic minorities, and it never happens.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Although it seems that encouragement to vote by post is aimed primarily at the elderly.
Any political institution in the world would kill every kitten in the catteries of Kilburn to get these figures of support
I thought the young weren’t meant to care about this old crone yet 63% of them report being at least a little upset
in the age range 25-49 53% support the monarchy and only 27% oppose - so that’s 2 to 1. And the figures get, of course, much higher as you go up the ages
Unless Charles actually stabs his own children with one of those leaky pens we are decades from the monarchy being remotely imperilled
The monarchy can never afford to be complacent. But it is often implied (or outright stated) that 'the end is near' based off what is at worst lukewarm feelings from the young, or ethnic minorities.
The monarchy can handle things getting lukewarm. It's people being strongly against that would be an issue.
That's why its if there is a clash between crown and Tory government that problems would come.
Indeed
And these figures must be seen in context. One of the Late Queen’s sons, Prince Andrew, has been exposed as (allegedly?) a horrible pedophile, a predatory monster who has to pay off his victims. He is such a scandal he has to be hidden away until it is unavoidable that he is seen, then he is hidden away again
He narrowly avoided a rape trial in New York
Meanwhile a beautiful black woman who married into the family is claiming they are all racist
It’s about as bad as it gets. It is hard to envisage a worse context for the Royal Family, within the realms of the Likely. I guess Prince William could join the Wagner group and be seen shooting Ukrainian ballet dancers? Apart from that any deeper scandal strikes me as highly improbable
And still the monarchy has rock solid support. Two to one or more. It isn’t going anywhere
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
Are you going to Jerez?
Sadly, no, I fly back tonight
But Seville is my new FAVE CITY ON EARTH
It’s got everything. Esp the food & wine but certainly not just the food & wine. The happiness quotient here is phenomenal
BTW I did some research, I’m not imagining this transformation. The city council has apparently spent 10-15 years doing up the place, pedestrianising the centre, cleaning all the buildings, installing trams and bicycles, the works. Now kids play football in beautiful squares which used to be filthy car parks
It is genius urbanism. It is also not hard if you have the basic bones of good architecture. Not every city has the cathedrals palaces and sunshine of Seville but most places in Europe can manage some period buildings, Get rid of the fucking cars!
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Although it seems that encouragement to vote by post is aimed primarily at the elderly.
Based on what? There’s no age requirement for accessing it, and the ability to get one is advertised through things like twitter. It’s not as if postal voting is only advertised at the WI or something.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Occurs to me the great counter example to all the Abolitions is the greatest monarchy of all: Rome
From Republic to Empire, and it was as an Empire that it reached its remarkable zenith
The Roman monarchy was a peculiar affair. They spent three hundred years (until the time of Diocletian) denying that it actually was a monarchy. And, they never really worked out a theory of succession. Sometimes the monarch would inherit from his father. Other times, the monarch would just emerge, from the ranks of the Senate or civil service. Other times, he'd seize power by force.
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
I’ve seen a few documentaries on the tube of you about the impact of fentanyl. Looks horrendous the impact it’s having in some parts of the US
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
I don't think the circumstances really support that, though we need the conclusions of the investigation.
There is a lot of material strangely not mentioned by the people trying to portray the incident of the Chris Kaba shooting as a 'police killing of an innocent unarmed man', prominent amongst them a couple of MPs (this latter seems spectacularly misjudged in the midst of a continuing investigation) :
* Not his own car, and it is one which is associated with a previous firearms offence a few days prior. * Kaba is a member of a rap collective known as 67, which ran or runs county lines drugs distribution. In 2019 21 of the people in/associated with the 67 collective, including 2 named individuals in the core (like Kaba) were sentenced to a total of 64 years in prison for drugs offences. * Kaba himself has a history of being charged for firearms offences. * Kaba did not stop and drove away from police. When cornered he continued to ram the police cars with his car, when ordered to leave his vehicle.
In this context the police action seem quite logical / reasonable. And the claims by the campaign may well be a diversionary tactic, or the MPs may have been gulled. I don't know.
Whether the police action is considered justified will ultimately depend on detail around whether a police assessment around lives at risk was reasonable, which we do not have yet.
To what extent is the tardiness of Germany’s supply of weapons to Ukraine related to manufacturing constraints, and limited existing stocks ? (They’ve certainly provided substantial financial aid, for example.)
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1571110300484792321 The German government has approved Ukraine's request for more RCH-155 howitzers. However, the manufacturer will be able to produce them for Ukraine no earlier than the first half of 2025, reports Welt am Sonntag citing @MelnykAndrij and documents received from the manufacturer…
It’s clearly not an insignificant problem in general. Poland, for example, just ordered several billion dollars worth of a S Korean F16 derivative light fighter (with inferior performance), because they aren’t prepared to wait years for deliveries of new F16s from the US, and the Korean jet (the FA-50) is available very quickly.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
From an NYTimes article at the start of the year:
There is a shortage of everything from protective vests to thermal underwear. Radio equipment is 30 years out of date. Only one in three warships is ready to deploy — so few that the navy worries it cannot meet all its international commitments.
Even in Rukla, the flagship German NATO mission which has relatively few complaints when it comes to resources, the general scarcity has been felt.
Some of the armored vehicles are five decades old. During international exercises in Lithuania, their equipment routinely made the German units “the weakest link in the chain,” soldiers reported to the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces on their return from tours in Rukla.
One of the few things about which Donald Trump was right. The larger nations of Europe need to up their game in defence, especially as the US focus moves away from NATO and towards China. The less said about the German attitude to arming Ukraine, the better.
Surely the lesson of the SMO is that the Russians are fucking crap and, as they are the only conventional threat in Europe, we can spend less.
Not really, since we Europeans seem to be struggling a bit just to supply someone else. We should probably be better prepared, in a more chaotic world.
Though if we could spend better presumably we could spend less.
I am so impressed by the Don Bolduc, the Republican Senatorial candidate in New Hampshire.
Just a few weeks ago, in the Primary debate he said:
"I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Trump won the election, and, damnit, I stand by my letter"
Yesterday he said:
"I’ve spent the past couple weeks talking to Granite Staters all over the state from every party, and I have come to the conclusion—and I want to be definitive on this—the election was not stolen"
Do reverse ferrets like this mean that the likes of Don B. would not endorse Don T. or would they find reasons to be flexible yet again?
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. The gap in participation unsurpisingly increased with the relaxation of restrictions bon postal voting.
Changes that would make things go the other way are blocked.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Although it seems that encouragement to vote by post is aimed primarily at the elderly.
Based on what? There’s no age requirement for accessing it, and the ability to get one is advertised through things like twitter. It’s not as if postal voting is only advertised at the WI or something.
Yes, I don't get this argument at all. Even if postal voting was brought in because it was considered the elderly would use it most, anyone can do it. So it enables those who are working to vote and doesn't discriminate.
I've not yet seen the argument that it would actually make a difference to switch to the weekend. Given the options already open to people (proxy voting as well), I cannot see it.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. The gap in participation unsurpisingly increased with the relaxation of restrictions being relaxed.
Changes that would make things go the other way are blocked.
So they are universally available, but used primarily by one age group. What does that tell you about the motivation to vote of the other?
Low turnout is not due to their inability to vote, it’s primarily due to motivation. The polling @Andy_JS mentioned reflects this lack of motivation.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
To what extent is the tardiness of Germany’s supply of weapons to Ukraine related to manufacturing constraints, and limited existing stocks ? (They’ve certainly provided substantial financial aid, for example.)
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1571110300484792321 The German government has approved Ukraine's request for more RCH-155 howitzers. However, the manufacturer will be able to produce them for Ukraine no earlier than the first half of 2025, reports Welt am Sonntag citing @MelnykAndrij and documents received from the manufacturer…
It’s clearly not an insignificant problem in general. Poland, for example, just ordered several billion dollars worth of a S Korean F16 derivative light fighter (with inferior performance), because they aren’t prepared to wait years for deliveries of new F16s from the US, and the Korean jet (the FA-50) is available very quickly.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
From an NYTimes article at the start of the year:
There is a shortage of everything from protective vests to thermal underwear. Radio equipment is 30 years out of date. Only one in three warships is ready to deploy — so few that the navy worries it cannot meet all its international commitments.
Even in Rukla, the flagship German NATO mission which has relatively few complaints when it comes to resources, the general scarcity has been felt.
Some of the armored vehicles are five decades old. During international exercises in Lithuania, their equipment routinely made the German units “the weakest link in the chain,” soldiers reported to the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces on their return from tours in Rukla.
One of the few things about which Donald Trump was right. The larger nations of Europe need to up their game in defence, especially as the US focus moves away from NATO and towards China. The less said about the German attitude to arming Ukraine, the better.
Surely the lesson of the SMO is that the Russians are fucking crap and, as they are the only conventional threat in Europe, we can spend less.
Certainly we should think carefully as to what has been effective and what hasn't, while not forgetting that a fight with a military peer is unlikely. More likely we will be fighting small wars far away, and against peasants with IEDs and AK47s rather than heavy artillery.
Re; the header, those figures also have some relationship with this - which is why the royal family need to work to hard to resolve what has unfortunately turned into something of a totemic culrural conflict :
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Also look at the school system - not just the segregation into private and state, but how property prices go up near the "better" state schools because no-one who's got any money wants their brats mixing with riffraff and filth. It's not like that in say Scandinavia.
If there were really such a thing as hereditary difference in ability (which there isn't), they wouldn't need segregated schools or for that matter the personal inheritance of wealth either. They'd get to the top because of how clever they were. The British ruling class know deep down that it's they who are dirt, dishonest thicko thieving dirt. That's why they "think" everyone else is, and recognise each other as "proper" by means of such a shared belief.
Even on here, you get some of them doing things like boasting how much they've spent on meals. I mean, seriously, how much more common as muck can you get than telling everyone how much you've paid for something?
It is highly useful info, especially when it is usually look how *little* this meal costs.
It's the footwear where it becomes wearisome; loose talk about £6,000 a pair polo boots and so on. repulsive.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
What do the number matrices signify? ("1-2-3-4" and all that.)
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
People don't start with Fentanyl.
They don’t? I think they do?
The dealers spike the “milder” drugs with Fentanyl as I understand, and Fentanyl is stronger, cheaper and Satanically addictive. And so the poor junkie is hooked
But I am not an expert drug addict any more, thank God. Perhaps I am wrong
The Albanians here who run a lot of the 'dial a deal' services have been increasingly cutting the products with fentanyl. Which has given quite a few people an unexpected evening...
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
You're lucky if you can eat and drink without putting on weight.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
The problem with postal voting is that you have to send your vote off early, so miss the end of the campaign. On two occasions I can remember, I have made my mind up on the way to the polling station.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
I’ve seen a few documentaries on the tube of you about the impact of fentanyl. Looks horrendous the impact it’s having in some parts of the US
The ”side effects” of Fentanyl withdrawal, and, pretty shortly, Fentanty itself (in a regular user), closely mimic schizophrenia
it is a grotesquely nasty drug
There is a theory floating around GOP circles that it was invented, or improved from an original US recipe, by the Chinese, who knew it would destroy American society. And they knew they could pump it over the Mex/US border via the drug cartels. Bingo: US Life Expectancy drops to 76, lower than Panama
Bonkers? I don’t know any more. Not after Covid leaked from the lab
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
I don't think the circumstances really support that, though we need the conclusions of the investigation.
There is a lot of material strangely not mentioned by the people trying to portray the incident of the Chris Kaba shooting as a 'police killing of an innocent unarmed man', prominent amongst them a couple of MPs (this latter seems spectacularly misjudged in the midst of a continuing investigation) :
* Not his own car, and it is one which is associated with a previous firearms offence a few days prior. * Kaba is a member of a rap collective known as 67, which ran or runs county lines drugs distribution. In 2019 21 of the people in/associated with the 67 collective, including 2 named individuals in the core (like Kaba) were sentenced to a total of 64 years in prison for drugs offences. * Kaba himself has a history of being charged for firearms offences. * Kaba did not stop and drove away from police. When cornered he continued to ram the police cars with his car, when ordered to leave his vehicle.
In this context the police action seem quite logical / reasonable. And the claims by the campaign may well be a diversionary tactic, or the MPs may have been gulled. I don't know.
Whether the police action is considered justified will ultimately depend on detail around whether a police assessment around lives at risk was reasonable, which we do not have yet.
And then they didn't shoot that man with the knife, who stabbed two coppers, when they surely should have done (maybe they were unarmed though)
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
Because it won’t do anything to solve the problem you are describing. The ability to vote is not the issue, it’s the motivation to do so. It’s already as easy as going to the post box down the road. Having the polling place open an additional day will not improve access in any meaningful way.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
Because it won’t do anything to solve the problem you are describing. The ability to vote is not the issue, it’s the motivation to do so. It’s already as easy as going to the post box down the road. Having the polling place open an additional day will not improve access in any meaningful way.
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Also look at the school system - not just the segregation into private and state, but how property prices go up near the "better" state schools because no-one who's got any money wants their brats mixing with riffraff and filth. It's not like that in say Scandinavia.
If there were really such a thing as hereditary difference in ability (which there isn't), they wouldn't need segregated schools or for that matter the personal inheritance of wealth either. They'd get to the top because of how clever they were. The British ruling class know deep down that it's they who are dirt, dishonest thicko thieving dirt. That's why they "think" everyone else is, and recognise each other as "proper" by means of such a shared belief.
Even on here, you get some of them doing things like boasting how much they've spent on meals. I mean, seriously, how much more common as muck can you get than telling everyone how much you've paid for something?
It is highly useful info, especially when it is usually look how *little* this meal costs.
It's the footwear where it becomes wearisome; loose talk about £6,000 a pair polo boots and so on. repulsive.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
You're lucky if you can eat and drink without putting on weight.
I like the Simpsons description of Tapas - endless appetizers for a meal that never comes...
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
You're lucky if you can eat and drink without putting on weight.
The genius of Seville.
Tapas gives you all the art and taste in tiny portions and the walking helps you exercise it off again.
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
I’ve seen a few documentaries on the tube of you about the impact of fentanyl. Looks horrendous the impact it’s having in some parts of the US
I think crystal meth is worse.
Fentanyl only kills you. Crystal meth is a powerful neuro toxin that drives you mad. It leaves you utterly incapable of changing your mind.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
If there’s anything on the menu that you’ve never eaten before, that’s what I would try.
@Leon look for a dish that has tomatoes in it. In Spain the joyous tomato adds so much to a dish.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
What do the number matrices signify? ("1-2-3-4" and all that.)
Good question
My guess is some code for allergies and dietary preferences: vegan, pescatarian, gluten free, dairy free, and so on
Happily I will eat literally anything, like the Chinaman of legend
In a lifetime of travel I have never refused a dish on the grounds of personal revulsion. And I’ve eaten some awful things. The bulging thorax of a tarantula springs to mind
Occurs to me the great counter example to all the Abolitions is the greatest monarchy of all: Rome
From Republic to Empire, and it was as an Empire that it reached its remarkable zenith
The Roman monarchy was a peculiar affair. They spent three hundred years (until the time of Diocletian) denying that it actually was a monarchy. And, they never really worked out a theory of succession. Sometimes the monarch would inherit from his father. Other times, the monarch would just emerge, from the ranks of the Senate or civil service. Other times, he'd seize power by force.
Whereas, at least if you follow Bagehot, we have spent a couple of hundred years denying that our country is a republic.
Kept Haarland to one goal: tick Kept de Bruyne to 2 assists: tick. Did not concede more than City's average goals: tick. Had the odd, admittedly speculative, shot themselves: tick.
A good afternoon's work really. Losing 0-3 at home not a bad result at all.
To what extent is the tardiness of Germany’s supply of weapons to Ukraine related to manufacturing constraints, and limited existing stocks ? (They’ve certainly provided substantial financial aid, for example.)
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1571110300484792321 The German government has approved Ukraine's request for more RCH-155 howitzers. However, the manufacturer will be able to produce them for Ukraine no earlier than the first half of 2025, reports Welt am Sonntag citing @MelnykAndrij and documents received from the manufacturer…
It’s clearly not an insignificant problem in general. Poland, for example, just ordered several billion dollars worth of a S Korean F16 derivative light fighter (with inferior performance), because they aren’t prepared to wait years for deliveries of new F16s from the US, and the Korean jet (the FA-50) is available very quickly.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
From an NYTimes article at the start of the year:
There is a shortage of everything from protective vests to thermal underwear. Radio equipment is 30 years out of date. Only one in three warships is ready to deploy — so few that the navy worries it cannot meet all its international commitments.
Even in Rukla, the flagship German NATO mission which has relatively few complaints when it comes to resources, the general scarcity has been felt.
Some of the armored vehicles are five decades old. During international exercises in Lithuania, their equipment routinely made the German units “the weakest link in the chain,” soldiers reported to the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces on their return from tours in Rukla.
One of the few things about which Donald Trump was right. The larger nations of Europe need to up their game in defence, especially as the US focus moves away from NATO and towards China. The less said about the German attitude to arming Ukraine, the better.
Surely the lesson of the SMO is that the Russians are fucking crap and, as they are the only conventional threat in Europe, we can spend less.
Certainly we should think carefully as to what has been effective and what hasn't, while not forgetting that a fight with a military peer is unlikely. More likely we will be fighting small wars far away, and against peasants with IEDs and AK47s rather than heavy artillery.
Or maybe don't bother fighting small wars far away. No good comes of it; for the UK or the countries lucky enough to host the small wars.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
What do the number matrices signify? ("1-2-3-4" and all that.)
I would guess they signify the presence of dairy, gluten, etc, and that there is a key on the reverse.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
Because it won’t do anything to solve the problem you are describing. The ability to vote is not the issue, it’s the motivation to do so. It’s already as easy as going to the post box down the road. Having the polling place open an additional day will not improve access in any meaningful way.
Lets do some trials and see who is right then.
I guarantee you that the youth turnout would still be significantly lower than that of the elderly. An extra day (or different day) when they aren’t motivated to vote in the first place won’t make any difference.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
You're lucky if you can eat and drink without putting on weight.
If i ate like this every day I’d be 129 stone
It’s my last day and I have deliberately anticipated a mega lunch by not eating this morning and barely eating yesterday. I’ve earned this. And Lo, it was worth it
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
Are you going to Jerez?
Sadly, no, I fly back tonight
But Seville is my new FAVE CITY ON EARTH
It’s got everything. Esp the food & wine but certainly not just the food & wine. The happiness quotient here is phenomenal
BTW I did some research, I’m not imagining this transformation. The city council has apparently spent 10-15 years doing up the place, pedestrianising the centre, cleaning all the buildings, installing trams and bicycles, the works. Now kids play football in beautiful squares which used to be filthy car parks
It is genius urbanism. It is also not hard if you have the basic bones of good architecture. Not every city has the cathedrals palaces and sunshine of Seville but most places in Europe can manage some period buildings, Get rid of the fucking cars!
I was slightly underimpressed, it doesn't have the Moorish architecture of Granada or Cordoba (or even Malaga) but it does have the best craft beer in Andalusia. The unexpected highlight of my trip last year was propping up a sherry bar in Jerez, watching flamenco and drinking sherry from the cask. Malaga old town was unexpectedly nice, the Alhambra as good as I expected, the Mesquita even better, Cadiz small and a bit boring. And Gib is weird.
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
I’ve seen a few documentaries on the tube of you about the impact of fentanyl. Looks horrendous the impact it’s having in some parts of the US
The ”side effects” of Fentanyl withdrawal, and, pretty shortly, Fentanty itself (in a regular user), closely mimic schizophrenia
it is a grotesquely nasty drug
There is a theory floating around GOP circles that it was invented, or improved from an original US recipe, by the Chinese, who knew it would destroy American society. And they knew they could pump it over the Mex/US border via the drug cartels. Bingo: US Life Expectancy drops to 76, lower than Panama
Bonkers? I don’t know any more. Not after Covid leaked from the lab
That life expectancy stat is surprising and who knows how it ended up on the streets but it is there and some people are making a lot of cash on peoples misery.
Mind you we e heard similar stories about Spice in the U.K. and Krokodil in Russia.
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
People don't start with Fentanyl.
They don’t? I think they do?
The dealers spike the “milder” drugs with Fentanyl as I understand, and Fentanyl is stronger, cheaper and Satanically addictive. And so the poor junkie is hooked
But I am not an expert drug addict any more, thank God. Perhaps I am wrong
The Albanians here who run a lot of the 'dial a deal' services have been increasingly cutting the products with fentanyl. Which has given quite a few people an unexpected evening...
Not for the first time, I'd like to challenge the prevailing assertion that the old invariably vote in their own self-interest.
I'm knocking on a bit, retired, and am comfortable financially - though far from rich. Like most of us retired folk, I have children (in their 30s) and, now, grandchildren. When I vote, I reckon I give more weight to what is in their interests than what is in my own interest. And yes, I vote, when given the choice, to be taxed a bit more to provide better public services and a better deal all round for my children and grandchildren.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
Because it won’t do anything to solve the problem you are describing. The ability to vote is not the issue, it’s the motivation to do so. It’s already as easy as going to the post box down the road. Having the polling place open an additional day will not improve access in any meaningful way.
Lets do some trials and see who is right then.
I guarantee you that the youth turnout would still be significantly lower than that of the elderly. An extra day (or different day) when they aren’t motivated to vote in the first place won’t make any difference.
Of course youth turnout would still be significantly lower. The gap would close a bit though.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
The problem with postal voting is that you have to send your vote off early, so miss the end of the campaign. On two occasions I can remember, I have made my mind up on the way to the polling station.
Postal voting at scale distorts elections in this way. The campaign is the totality of it, up to polling day.
You could make the argument that does democracy even work properly when a large group of people many who have been out of the workforce for 20 to 30 years consistently swing elections
Was democracy supposed to only represent the workforce? If not, then it is certainly frustrating how the elderly vote is so influential, but it is certainly not undemocratic. As to whether that works even if it is democratic, well, that's just a general argument about whether democracy works, which applies to matters other than old people getting more influence.
Well we have never had democracies with such large elderly populations. Now a wise and informed elderly population is one thing but in the absence of that people vote their self interest. And as you become increasingly disconnected from the working world that becomes a problem
It’s not the fault of elderly voters if they are more motivated to vote than younger people.
So can we have weekend voting to encourage more workers to vote? No? Quelle surprise.
Isn’t postal voting universally available these days?
Indeed. It was brought in to encourage and facilitate voting by the elderly......
But it’s universal. So anyone can get one if they are unable to vote during the normal voting hours. Again it points to motivation, not ease of access.
Why are the establishment more interested in providing access to vote that suits the elderly rather than the young? It is fairly obviously in their self interest.
Postal votes can be used by voters of any age.
Yes but they are used proportionately more by older voters. .
But that's voluntary choice at work - if younger, working people do not take up that option that is not the fault of the postal voting system, since they are perfectly able to use it. I have, once, due to being requested to do so around Covid restrictions.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
No, I want to encourage as many people to vote as possible, of all ages. So postal votes are great for lots of people especially those with mobility issues. Weekend voting would be great for workers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation.
What better way for someone with low control over hours worked and low access to flexible transportation to vote than a postal vote? Which they already have access to.
Why such resistance to encouraging wider voting? In the big scheme of things having voting run from Friday to Saturday instead of just Thursdays would cost trivially little.
Because it won’t do anything to solve the problem you are describing. The ability to vote is not the issue, it’s the motivation to do so. It’s already as easy as going to the post box down the road. Having the polling place open an additional day will not improve access in any meaningful way.
Lets do some trials and see who is right then.
I guarantee you that the youth turnout would still be significantly lower than that of the elderly. An extra day (or different day) when they aren’t motivated to vote in the first place won’t make any difference.
Of course youth turnout would still be significantly lower. The gap would close a bit though.
I don’t think so. The burden of voting is so low with postal voting that there isn’t much room for improvement. Efforts should be focused at actually engaging groups them to make them more motivated to vote. Simply saying that voting is now on a Saturday won’t make much difference.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
I don't think the circumstances really support that, though we need the conclusions of the investigation.
There is a lot of material strangely not mentioned by the people trying to portray the incident of the Chris Kaba shooting as a 'police killing of an innocent unarmed man', prominent amongst them a couple of MPs (this latter seems spectacularly misjudged in the midst of a continuing investigation) :
* Not his own car, and it is one which is associated with a previous firearms offence a few days prior. * Kaba is a member of a rap collective known as 67, which ran or runs county lines drugs distribution. In 2019 21 of the people in/associated with the 67 collective, including 2 named individuals in the core (like Kaba) were sentenced to a total of 64 years in prison for drugs offences. * Kaba himself has a history of being charged for firearms offences. * Kaba did not stop and drove away from police. When cornered he continued to ram the police cars with his car, when ordered to leave his vehicle.
In this context the police action seem quite logical / reasonable. And the claims by the campaign may well be a diversionary tactic, or the MPs may have been gulled. I don't know.
Whether the police action is considered justified will ultimately depend on detail around whether a police assessment around lives at risk was reasonable, which we do not have yet.
The death of this young man seems to be becoming a bit of a rallying call. There are numerous demos planned for tomorrow up and down the country.
The police are in an invidious position here as are IPSO. Whatever result IPSO deliver will seriously annoy a vocal contingent in this debate.
Sitting at the marble counter top of a brilliant tapas bar in Seville eating yet another superb lunch while guzzling cold Spanish white and arguing nonsense with PB is one of my new fave things ever, so thanks, guys. Sincerely
What should I eat next?
Are you going to Jerez?
Sadly, no, I fly back tonight
But Seville is my new FAVE CITY ON EARTH
It’s got everything. Esp the food & wine but certainly not just the food & wine. The happiness quotient here is phenomenal
BTW I did some research, I’m not imagining this transformation. The city council has apparently spent 10-15 years doing up the place, pedestrianising the centre, cleaning all the buildings, installing trams and bicycles, the works. Now kids play football in beautiful squares which used to be filthy car parks
It is genius urbanism. It is also not hard if you have the basic bones of good architecture. Not every city has the cathedrals palaces and sunshine of Seville but most places in Europe can manage some period buildings, Get rid of the fucking cars!
I was slightly underimpressed, it doesn't have the Moorish architecture of Granada or Cordoba (or even Malaga) but it does have the best craft beer in Andalusia. The unexpected highlight of my trip last year was propping up a sherry bar in Jerez, watching flamenco and drinking sherry from the cask. Malaga old town was unexpectedly nice, the Alhambra as good as I expected, the Mesquita even better, Cadiz small and a bit boring. And Gib is weird.
Yes Gib is weird. Bleak in places, so brutally military, but it can also be fun
I won’t hear a word against Seville, I’m drunk in Seville
Seville has glorious Moorish architecture, it’s just not as well known as the Alhambra
Malaga is indeed a surprising pleasure. People think of it as an airport but it is so much more. Cadiz is oddly claustrophobic
I want to go to Huelva. I hear it is ugly and industrial but it is the true, burning heart’s core of the Early Spanish Empire. Where Columbus sailed and prayed. Sanlucar! La Radiba! More sherry!
Columbus was a dude. The Woke Americans who have cancelled him are idiots
NigelB said: "Since the Presidential elections are the biggest political betting events, I don't think there are all that many PB regulars unaware of the political battles over Obama's expansion of Medicaid, etc."
Well, then, why don't you correct the mistaken comments I see so often here? (I didn't name individuals who were making those mistakes, because I think that -- usually -- hinders rational discussion.)
And here, I suspect, are three things you didn't know about "ObamaCare", as it is often called: 1. It included a tax on "Cadillac" plans, private plans that were too generous. 2. It resulted in the closing of rural hospitals. (If you want more details, look for an article by Anemona Hartocollis in the NYT some years ago. 3. After it had been in effect for some years, life expectancy in the United States fell, beginning in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Life_expectancy
Nor is it likely that you know that George W. Bush proposed a substantial expansion of Medicare benefits, Part D, which passed. (Incidentally, that has probably had positive effects outside the United States. By increasing the expenditure for drugs here, it probably incentivized American drug companies to spend more on research.)
I think you are really quite mad if you think that the decline in life expectancy seen in the US post 2014 is due to Obamacare. (You would also need to explain why Massachusetts did not see a similar trend shifted forward a decade, given they were first with an Obamacare type system.)
it’s the drugs. I have written about it
After Covid : “the second greatest contributor to the decline in life expectancy is accidental injury, driven primarily by drug overdoses, which killed over 100,000 U.S. residents last year.” (CDC Report, 2022)
US Life Expectancy is now 76. Which is mind boggling. It is now lower than Panama, Iran or Sri Lanka
Yes: Perdue Pharma (and others) have a lot to answer for.
It’s not OxyContin any more tho, it is the evil Fentanyl
I’ve seen a few documentaries on the tube of you about the impact of fentanyl. Looks horrendous the impact it’s having in some parts of the US
The ”side effects” of Fentanyl withdrawal, and, pretty shortly, Fentanty itself (in a regular user), closely mimic schizophrenia
it is a grotesquely nasty drug
There is a theory floating around GOP circles that it was invented, or improved from an original US recipe, by the Chinese, who knew it would destroy American society. And they knew they could pump it over the Mex/US border via the drug cartels. Bingo: US Life Expectancy drops to 76, lower than Panama
Bonkers? I don’t know any more. Not after Covid leaked from the lab
That life expectancy stat is surprising and who knows how it ended up on the streets but it is there and some people are making a lot of cash on peoples misery.
Mind you we e heard similar stories about Spice in the U.K. and Krokodil in Russia.
Fentanyl is definitely made in large quantities in both China and North Korea.
Our dog was prescribed it when she was sent home to die. (She survived!)
Postal voting is a bit like watching The Queue on TV. It's not the same as being there. For me, going to the polling station to cast my vote is an important part of the democratic process. Not quite sure why, it just is.
To what extent is the tardiness of Germany’s supply of weapons to Ukraine related to manufacturing constraints, and limited existing stocks ? (They’ve certainly provided substantial financial aid, for example.)
https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1571110300484792321 The German government has approved Ukraine's request for more RCH-155 howitzers. However, the manufacturer will be able to produce them for Ukraine no earlier than the first half of 2025, reports Welt am Sonntag citing @MelnykAndrij and documents received from the manufacturer…
It’s clearly not an insignificant problem in general. Poland, for example, just ordered several billion dollars worth of a S Korean F16 derivative light fighter (with inferior performance), because they aren’t prepared to wait years for deliveries of new F16s from the US, and the Korean jet (the FA-50) is available very quickly.
Germany's armed forces were/are in a shockingly poor state. When the German government was shopping around for things to cut in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis, Merkel saw military spending and thought it was an easy place to make reductions.
From an NYTimes article at the start of the year:
There is a shortage of everything from protective vests to thermal underwear. Radio equipment is 30 years out of date. Only one in three warships is ready to deploy — so few that the navy worries it cannot meet all its international commitments.
Even in Rukla, the flagship German NATO mission which has relatively few complaints when it comes to resources, the general scarcity has been felt.
Some of the armored vehicles are five decades old. During international exercises in Lithuania, their equipment routinely made the German units “the weakest link in the chain,” soldiers reported to the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces on their return from tours in Rukla.
There also aspects around slowness to mobilise commitments once made, I think.
This is quite an interesting interview with Brigadier General Dr. Christian Freuding, head of the Ukraine special staff at the Defense Ministry in Germany. As opposed to the top army bosses who seem to want to get themselves defenestrated.
Even amongst the Love Island gawker generation Monarchy wins 40 29. Republicanism is dead for at least 50 years. Not until the end of the reign of George VII, if at all
On the topic of the stats in the header, I'm slightly surprised that over a quarter of people have seen the Queen in person. I would have guessed lower, maybe 10 or 15%...
Postal voting is a bit like watching The Queue on TV. It's not the same as being there. For me, going to the polling station to cast my vote is an important part of the democratic process. Not quite sure why, it just is.
Agreed. Id stop voting if it became 100% postal or online. Doing my civic duty tick Posting my civic duty nah
On the topic of the stats in the header, I'm slightly surprised that over a quarter of people have seen the Queen in person. I would have guessed lower, maybe 10 or 15%...
38% of 2019 Tory voters having seen the Queen in person seems extraordinary. I suspect some think that a postage stamp counts as 'in person'.
Any political institution in the world would kill every kitten in the catteries of Kilburn to get these figures of support
I thought the young weren’t meant to care about this old crone yet 63% of them report being at least a little upset
in the age range 25-49 53% support the monarchy and only 27% oppose - so that’s 2 to 1. And the figures get, of course, much higher as you go up the ages
Unless Charles actually stabs his own children with one of those leaky pens we are decades from the monarchy being remotely imperilled
The monarchy can never afford to be complacent. But it is often implied (or outright stated) that 'the end is near' based off what is at worst lukewarm feelings from the young, or ethnic minorities.
The monarchy can handle things getting lukewarm. It's people being strongly against that would be an issue.
That's why its if there is a clash between crown and Tory government that problems would come.
Indeed
And these figures must be seen in context. One of the Late Queen’s sons, Prince Andrew, has been exposed as (allegedly?) a horrible pedophile, a predatory monster who has to pay off his victims. He is such a scandal he has to be hidden away until it is unavoidable that he is seen, then he is hidden away again
He narrowly avoided a rape trial in New York
Meanwhile a beautiful black woman who married into the family is claiming they are all racist
It’s about as bad as it gets. It is hard to envisage a worse context for the Royal Family, within the realms of the Likely. I guess Prince William could join the Wagner group and be seen shooting Ukrainian ballet dancers? Apart from that any deeper scandal strikes me as highly improbable
And still the monarchy has rock solid support. Two to one or more. It isn’t going anywhere
Can you be exposed as an alleged pedophile?
If Andrew dropped his trousers, he would be exposed and an alleged paedophile.
A hereditary monarchy is obviously not consistent with a vibrant democracy. The question is what do you replace it with?
Our democracy is pretty vibrant. Betwn Jan 1 2010 and Dec 31 2019 we had 5 democratically elected governments.
Someone on here was whining on last evening about how they would fight for the Monarchy.
Would I? If Britain were invaded by a hostile foreign power(s) and I had the means to resist, I would.
I would fight to defend democracy so I'd have been a Roundhead last time round. Given it's not a very likely scenario, the notion of a future Monarch seeking to impose authoritarian rule on Britain is the sort of thing which would have me opposing the Monarchy.
On the topic of the stats in the header, I'm slightly surprised that over a quarter of people have seen the Queen in person. I would have guessed lower, maybe 10 or 15%...
38% of 2019 Tory voters having seen the Queen in person seems extraordinary. I suspect some think that a postage stamp counts as 'in person'.
Old farts. So more chances. Esp. if keen. Hell, I've seen her Maj three times that I can think of offhand (school; dad got a garden party invite with the rations; and work, which got me a handshake from her consort, who as I have noted here before had an argument with my colleague).
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Also look at the school system - not just the segregation into private and state, but how property prices go up near the "better" state schools because no-one who's got any money wants their brats mixing with riffraff and filth. It's not like that in say Scandinavia.
If there were really such a thing as hereditary difference in ability (which there isn't), they wouldn't need segregated schools or for that matter the personal inheritance of wealth either. They'd get to the top because of how clever they were. The British ruling class know deep down that it's they who are dirt, dishonest thicko thieving dirt. That's why they "think" everyone else is, and recognise each other as "proper" by means of such a shared belief.
Even on here, you get some of them doing things like boasting how much they've spent on meals. I mean, seriously, how much more common as muck can you get than telling everyone how much you've paid for something?
It is highly useful info, especially when it is usually look how *little* this meal costs.
It's the footwear where it becomes wearisome; loose talk about £6,000 a pair polo boots and so on. repulsive.
Getting them for £50? on ebay is good tho'
Being sincere for once.
Coup of a lifetime.
Only really a bargain if you have some polo ponies already.
A hereditary monarchy is obviously not consistent with a vibrant democracy. The question is what do you replace it with?
Our democracy is pretty vibrant. Betwn Jan 1 2010 and Dec 31 2019 we had 5 democratically elected governments.
Someone on here was whining on last evening about how they would fight for the Monarchy.
Would I? If Britain were invaded by a hostile foreign power(s) and I had the means to resist, I would.
I would fight to defend democracy so I'd have been a Roundhead last time round. Given it's not a very likely scenario, the notion of a future Monarch seeking to impose authoritarian rule on Britain is the sort of thing which would have me opposing the Monarchy.
The Ukrainians haven't had even a theoretical monarch since August 1917. They don't seem to be lacking in the will to resist.
A hereditary monarchy is obviously not consistent with a vibrant democracy. The question is what do you replace it with?
Our democracy is pretty vibrant. Betwn Jan 1 2010 and Dec 31 2019 we had 5 democratically elected governments.
Someone on here was whining on last evening about how they would fight for the Monarchy.
Would I? If Britain were invaded by a hostile foreign power(s) and I had the means to resist, I would.
I would fight to defend democracy so I'd have been a Roundhead last time round. Given it's not a very likely scenario, the notion of a future Monarch seeking to impose authoritarian rule on Britain is the sort of thing which would have me opposing the Monarchy.
In fact the constitutional monarchy exists, in theory and officially, to defend democracy. So on the occasions when some people have not been allowed to hold up blank pieces of paper in protest, which more recently it encouragingly seems they are, then the constitutional monarchy has not been working.
A hereditary monarchy is obviously not consistent with a vibrant democracy. The question is what do you replace it with?
Our democracy is pretty vibrant. Betwn Jan 1 2010 and Dec 31 2019 we had 5 democratically elected governments.
Someone on here was whining on last evening about how they would fight for the Monarchy.
Would I? If Britain were invaded by a hostile foreign power(s) and I had the means to resist, I would.
I would fight to defend democracy so I'd have been a Roundhead last time round. Given it's not a very likely scenario, the notion of a future Monarch seeking to impose authoritarian rule on Britain is the sort of thing which would have me opposing the Monarchy.
Any political institution in the world would kill every kitten in the catteries of Kilburn to get these figures of support
I thought the young weren’t meant to care about this old crone yet 63% of them report being at least a little upset
in the age range 25-49 53% support the monarchy and only 27% oppose - so that’s 2 to 1. And the figures get, of course, much higher as you go up the ages
Unless Charles actually stabs his own children with one of those leaky pens we are decades from the monarchy being remotely imperilled
The monarchy can never afford to be complacent. But it is often implied (or outright stated) that 'the end is near' based off what is at worst lukewarm feelings from the young, or ethnic minorities.
The monarchy can handle things getting lukewarm. It's people being strongly against that would be an issue.
That's why its if there is a clash between crown and Tory government that problems would come.
Indeed
And these figures must be seen in context. One of the Late Queen’s sons, Prince Andrew, has been exposed as (allegedly?) a horrible pedophile, a predatory monster who has to pay off his victims. He is such a scandal he has to be hidden away until it is unavoidable that he is seen, then he is hidden away again
He narrowly avoided a rape trial in New York
Meanwhile a beautiful black woman who married into the family is claiming they are all racist
It’s about as bad as it gets. It is hard to envisage a worse context for the Royal Family, within the realms of the Likely. I guess Prince William could join the Wagner group and be seen shooting Ukrainian ballet dancers? Apart from that any deeper scandal strikes me as highly improbable
And still the monarchy has rock solid support. Two to one or more. It isn’t going anywhere
Can you be exposed as an alleged pedophile?
If Andrew dropped his trousers, he would be exposed and an alleged paedophile.
Would that cover it?
Or rather, uncover it?
Has he been accused of paedophilia? As I understand it, the ladies in question have all been legal, under UK law.
On the topic of the stats in the header, I'm slightly surprised that over a quarter of people have seen the Queen in person. I would have guessed lower, maybe 10 or 15%...
38% of 2019 Tory voters having seen the Queen in person seems extraordinary. I suspect some think that a postage stamp counts as 'in person'.
Old farts. So more chances. Esp. if keen. Hell, I've seen her Maj three times that I can think of offhand (school; dad got a garden party invite with the rations; and work, which got me a handshake from her consort, who as I have noted here before had an argument with my colleague).
I mean i've 'seen' her in that she was driven past during the silver jubilee and i waved. I'm more excited by the slebs in my 'randomly got pissed with' collection, and im not that excited by them, more by the being pissed
Comments
The most likely of the five is the end of FPTP, as it would shift power from the voters to politicians.
Whilst it would take away some of the drama, perhaps 2 days for voting as is not unhead of woudl be the way to go. Or even just 0700-2200 one day and 0700-1200 the next, followed by the count.
One can criticize the response of the governments to the crack epidemic, but the actions did result in a decrease in crack use, and, soon, a return to the increases in life expectancy among all groups.
What might be the right solutions? There is a hint in what is usually called the "Hispanic Paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
"The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world.[2] The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites.[3][4][5][6][7][8] According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites.
. . .
Other hypotheses around the Hispanic paradox maintain that the phenomenon is real, and is caused by sociocultural factors which characterize the Hispanic population. Many of these factors can be described under the more broad categories of cultural values, interpersonal context, and community context.[10] Some health researchers attribute the Hispanic paradox to different eating habits, especially the relatively high intake of legumes such as beans and lentils."
Here's a simple way to understand how strong the effects of the "paradox" are: The six largest demographic groups in the US are white women, white men, Hispanic women, Hispanic men, black women, and black men. Before COVID hit, I looked at the life expectancy of the groups, as calculated by the CDC. Here is what I found, putting the groups in order of increasing life expectancy: black men, white men, black women, white women and Hispanic men, and Hispanic women.
I have never met anyone in the US who knows that -- and I doubt that it is common knowledge in Britain, either.
(In my opinion, stronger families and stronger communities are the principal explanation for the paradox. And that would help explain why groups like Japanese-Americans live longer.)
Sadly, no, I fly back tonight
But Seville is my new FAVE CITY ON EARTH
It’s got everything. Esp the food & wine but certainly not just the food & wine. The happiness quotient here is phenomenal
BTW I did some research, I’m not imagining this transformation. The city council has apparently spent 10-15 years doing up the place, pedestrianising the centre, cleaning all the buildings, installing trams and bicycles, the works. Now kids play football in beautiful squares which used to be filthy car parks
It is genius urbanism. It is also not hard if you have the basic bones of good architecture. Not every city has the cathedrals palaces and sunshine of Seville but most places in Europe can manage some period buildings, Get rid of the fucking cars!
There is a lot of material strangely not mentioned by the people trying to portray the incident of the Chris Kaba shooting as a 'police killing of an innocent unarmed man', prominent amongst them a couple of MPs (this latter seems spectacularly misjudged in the midst of a continuing investigation) :
* Not his own car, and it is one which is associated with a previous firearms offence a few days prior.
* Kaba is a member of a rap collective known as 67, which ran or runs county lines drugs distribution. In 2019 21 of the people in/associated with the 67 collective, including 2 named individuals in the core (like Kaba) were sentenced to a total of 64 years in prison for drugs offences.
* Kaba himself has a history of being charged for firearms offences.
* Kaba did not stop and drove away from police. When cornered he continued to ram the police cars with his car, when ordered to leave his vehicle.
In this context the police action seem quite logical / reasonable. And the claims by the campaign may well be a diversionary tactic, or the MPs may have been gulled. I don't know.
Whether the police action is considered justified will ultimately depend on detail around whether a police assessment around lives at risk was reasonable, which we do not have yet.
And it was a whole minute when City didn't look like scoring which is another bonus.
Actually fried eggs with fat soller king prawns and thinly sautéed potatoes with a rich bisque crab shell sauce
Though if we could spend better presumably we could spend less.
Changes that would make things go the other way are blocked.
I've not yet seen the argument that it would actually make a difference to switch to the weekend. Given the options already open to people (proxy voting as well), I cannot see it.
Low turnout is not due to their inability to vote, it’s primarily due to motivation. The polling @Andy_JS mentioned reflects this lack of motivation.
You seem to be saying that because older people tend to use it more postal voting is unfair. When in fact it actively makes it less unfair by offering an option for those who simply cannot find the time on the day of the vote.
https://news.sky.com/story/support-for-sussexes-or-royal-family-split-along-age-lines-survey-finds-12240799
Being sincere for once.
it is a grotesquely nasty drug
There is a theory floating around GOP circles that it was invented, or improved from an original US recipe, by the Chinese, who knew it would destroy American society. And they knew they could pump it over the Mex/US border via the drug cartels. Bingo: US Life Expectancy drops to 76, lower than Panama
Bonkers? I don’t know any more. Not after Covid leaked from the lab
Tapas gives you all the art and taste in tiny portions and the walking helps you exercise it off again.
Fentanyl only kills you. Crystal meth is a powerful neuro toxin that drives you mad. It leaves you utterly incapable of changing your mind.
I sometimes wonder and its prevalence in Epping.
My guess is some code for allergies and dietary preferences: vegan, pescatarian, gluten free, dairy free, and so on
Happily I will eat literally anything, like the Chinaman of legend
In a lifetime of travel I have never refused a dish on the grounds of personal revulsion. And I’ve eaten some awful things. The bulging thorax of a tarantula springs to mind
Kept Haarland to one goal: tick
Kept de Bruyne to 2 assists: tick.
Did not concede more than City's average goals: tick.
Had the odd, admittedly speculative, shot themselves: tick.
A good afternoon's work really. Losing 0-3 at home not a bad result at all.
Not sure this is good for the league though.
It’s my last day and I have deliberately anticipated a mega lunch by not eating this morning and barely eating yesterday. I’ve earned this. And Lo, it was worth it
Mind you we e heard similar stories about Spice in the U.K. and Krokodil in Russia.
I'm knocking on a bit, retired, and am comfortable financially - though far from rich. Like most of us retired folk, I have children (in their 30s) and, now, grandchildren. When I vote, I reckon I give more weight to what is in their interests than what is in my own interest. And yes, I vote, when given the choice, to be taxed a bit more to provide better public services and a better deal all round for my children and grandchildren.
I don't think I'm alone.
The police are in an invidious position here as are IPSO. Whatever result IPSO deliver will seriously annoy a vocal contingent in this debate.
I won’t hear a word against Seville, I’m drunk in Seville
Seville has glorious Moorish architecture, it’s just not as well known as the Alhambra
Malaga is indeed a surprising pleasure. People think of it as an airport but it is so much more. Cadiz is oddly claustrophobic
I want to go to Huelva. I hear it is ugly and industrial but it is the true, burning heart’s core of the Early Spanish Empire. Where Columbus sailed and prayed. Sanlucar! La Radiba! More sherry!
Columbus was a dude. The Woke Americans who have cancelled him are idiots
Our dog was prescribed it when she was sent home to die. (She survived!)
This is quite an interesting interview with Brigadier General Dr. Christian Freuding, head of the Ukraine special staff at the Defense Ministry in Germany. As opposed to the top army bosses who seem to want to get themselves defenestrated.
This is in German, but change the settings and it will auto-translate into English substitles/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPSh-g-wdT0
Doing my civic duty tick
Posting my civic duty nah
Would that cover it?
Or rather, uncover it?
Would I? If Britain were invaded by a hostile foreign power(s) and I had the means to resist, I would.
I would fight to defend democracy so I'd have been a Roundhead last time round. Given it's not a very likely scenario, the notion of a future Monarch seeking to impose authoritarian rule on Britain is the sort of thing which would have me opposing the Monarchy.
If this would keep up for a month it would help enormously.
Shame it won't.
I'm more excited by the slebs in my 'randomly got pissed with' collection, and im not that excited by them, more by the being pissed