Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
The Vale of Glamorgan has a rep for thinking itself to be special, so it will be immensely pleased to see you've put it in the South 😀
Essex and Oxfordshire now in the Midlands apparently
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Outside of Oxbridge the oldest British universities still operating, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow ie pre 19th century are all Scottish
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
I rather fear that no politician, civil servant, academic, journalist or even local councillor has begun to grasp, never mind think about the solutions to, the scale of our problems.
Because the solution is higher taxes on the better off, who tend to vote..
Not necessarily.
Feeding the system more money may keep it filing a bit longer. But that isn’t the solution by itself.
It’s about choices. If railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren’t not going to have railways. Same goes for schools, hospitals etc.
But when any actual attempt is made to reduce these costs, all those who are interested in the current system raise a cry.
I’m doing a loft conversion. The bumf for which runs to hundreds of pages. Many of which were auto generated by software. The actually content is less than a word per page.
The actual real plans for everything are 6 pages of PDF - nice clear diagrams.
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Any table that ranks Aston above Birmingham has to be bollocks.
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Outside of Oxbridge the oldest British universities still operating, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow ie pre 19th century are all Scottish
Aberdeen is also an ancient university - older than Edinburgh in fact.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
Truss is a function of the damage Boris Johnson did to his party, the parliament, and the country at large. How can a blithering idiot like Truss even get to become the PM in the first place? Simply by surviving in the vacuum created by Boris.
This is why I still maintain that Boris is the worst PM we've ever had. Truss was a symptom, not the disease.
He was certainly the worst of my lifetime (I start with Atlee) and not just for the reason you give.
I suspect that there will be some loyal Conservatives who say, or think, 'Ah well, that is in the past and things are different now.' It's an argument which can have validity but Boris brought in a lot of his placemen.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
Don't know whether they were, but we were. As were the French.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
I rather fear that no politician, civil servant, academic, journalist or even local councillor has begun to grasp, never mind think about the solutions to, the scale of our problems.
Because the solution is higher taxes on the better off, who tend to vote..
I tend to go off a bit here on a Kermodian rant, so forgive me if you've heard this before. All our current politicians were bought up and learned their trade in the neoliberalism period, which started in the 70s ish and ended in the 10s ish. This period was marked by considerable global trade underwritten by the US armed forces, expanding Govt expenditure and Government income derived from debt, believing tax to be bad and unworkable due to free movement.
But those situations do not now pertain. Trade is more difficult and unreliable: getting stuff from China will be more difficult, we made trade with the EU more difficult ourselves. Due to demographic changes we cannot service the debt (old people consume, not produce) and we cannot raise tax (due to Government learned helplessness). We are too highly leveraged and things are going wrong.
The government is trying to square the circle by importing 500,000 to 1,000,000 people per annum. This may work in producing growth and expanding tax but it will transform the country into a population herded into smaller and smaller boxes owned by foreign funds. To maintain the economy (an abstract noun) it will sacrifice the poor (a concrete noun) and is to my mind immoral, as the state should serve its people not itself.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
The Vale of Glamorgan has a rep for thinking itself to be special, so it will be immensely pleased to see you've put it in the South 😀
And it makes the case for a revival of what might be called Greater Northumbria.
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Any table that ranks Aston above Birmingham has to be bollocks.
It is certainly different to all the other rankings, so yeah a whiff of bullshit
But what happened to Goldsmiths, down at 111, and Brunel, second from bottom at 121?!
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
I'm not amongst the 7% by any means. But isn't the argument of a lot of them that Truss tried to break from the tired Treasury consensus that had led to stagnation in the UK, with a bold tax-cutting agenda... and she'd have made it too but for backstabbers and dismal pessimists in the financial markets, the civil service blob, and even her own party? So she failed, but did so trying to break a rotten system, whereas other recent PMs have survived longer only because they haven't even bothered trying.
Before you pick holes in that, yes a know the argument is full of holes. I don't support it... just saying that's the argument.
The downside with that argument is that Truss and Kwarteng ended up reinforcing the consensus. Even if their ideas were right, their choice not to set out their workings meant that nobody trusted them. One of the reasons Sunak and Hunt are being as dismal as they are is that they are having to overcompensate.
There was a fair bit of foreboding about the flakiness of Truss and Trussonomics before she got the job... Did anyone think she would do quite as badly as she did?
Not 'setting out her workings' refers to the decision not to base Kwarteng's budget on the forecasts of the OBR, who it now turns out couldn't forecast their way out of a paper bag. The ONS has also proven itself to be a piece of shit. Truss and Kwarteng deserve full blame for the timing and presentation of their reforms, but their skepticism of the official forecasting bodies was hardly unwarranted.
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Outside of Oxbridge the oldest British universities still operating, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow ie pre 19th century are all Scottish
Aberdeen is also an ancient university - older than Edinburgh in fact.
When I was at UCL we were told that WE were the oldest uni in the country, due to our links with teaching at St Barts Hospital which dates from 1123. It is surely bollocks, however
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
Shall I? Or is it a tad unfair?
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
"Such is life!"
She came within a matter of hours of causing the entire UK pension system to collapse. The City is still shaken by how close the UK came to absolute meltdown.
But she took on the consensus, so it's ok because her motives were pure. Even if that consensus is not to have pensions collapse.
Yes we could "respect her truth" or decide that reckless, charmless incompetence is not merely a different truth but a load of catastrophic bullshit... even the Tories balked at the abyss they were looking into. Not that they deserve any credit for that, since they were the ones that brought the UK to the absolute brink.
That would be the 'absolute brink' of bond yields being at half what they are now would it?
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
The Vale of Glamorgan has a rep for thinking itself to be special, so it will be immensely pleased to see you've put it in the South 😀
Essex and Oxfordshire now in the Midlands apparently
At least 1/3 of the population lives south of Essex, so in that sense, yes.
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
Shall I? Or is it a tad unfair?
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
Don't know whether they were, but we were. As were the French.
Cavalry were still a useful arm of battle in the East, from 1939-45, due to the climate, terrain, and poor roads. The massed charge (and it was only Nazi propaganda that showed Polish horsemen charging tanks) was gone, but for scouting, raiding, and use as mounted infantry, horsemen were important.
Neither the German nor Soviet armies were close to mechanisation in 1939.
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
I think the Truss-haters are worried it might work because they are in hysterics, making ridiculous comparisons like Venezuela.
I'm unsure of how you think this is a 'gotcha', given that the measures in the minibudget (apart from the cancellation of the NI increase, for which we should all be grateful) were never implemented.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
The Vale of Glamorgan has a rep for thinking itself to be special, so it will be immensely pleased to see you've put it in the South 😀
We are special. However Monmouthshire, Newport, Cardiff and Bridgend also feature, and they are not.
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
Shall I? Or is it a tad unfair?
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
Your obession with me, to the point of taking and hoarding screenshots, is a little unsettling. I sense you have some weird "Leon shrine" in your home, where you carefully file away my comments, alphabetically, in large ring binders, kept on a shelf next to a photo of me taken with a telephoto lens
Contract the state to cope with the fact that for the next 20 years the state will be one massive care home. Expand the tax base to focus on wealth (which is static), not income /currency (which is portable). Every time something crosses a border, tax it. Every time a person crosses a border, charge them. You want 1 million people immigrating per year? Fine, licence them and sell the licences on the open market (no bulk buying). You want foreign pension funds owning a tower block? Fine, licence them and sell the licences on the open market.
This approach will hopefully rebalance the state so income=expenditure and we can pay the debt off, putting the state on a solid financial footing.
Naughty of me but in this case it serves as a useful reminder to us all not to be swept up in the New Leader euphoria.
There was once a time when Sunak was similarly lauded and then, I think it was Mike Smithson himself, began to point out some of his weaknesses which have now been made all too apparent.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
The Vale of Glamorgan has a rep for thinking itself to be special, so it will be immensely pleased to see you've put it in the South 😀
Essex and Oxfordshire now in the Midlands apparently
At least 1/3 of the population lives south of Essex, so in that sense, yes.
Split into three countries: Greater Northumbria, Greater Wessex and Mercia. Devolve the foreign country (top bit) to Norway. West of Offa's Dyke to join with a united Ireland.
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
Shall I? Or is it a tad unfair?
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
Leon is a fucking idiot
You're the same. Absolutely obsessed with me. What is it all about? I have no such urgent, tumescent feelings about you (either way), barely notice you are here, but you are full of this weird quivering bile
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Glad that's all clear.
No, it's really quite creepy
Coming from you Mr S. T. that's most amusing.
I haven't bothered keeping anyone else's as no one else is such a shit.
p.s. has it struck you that some of us women wandering around the streets and houses might have once been one of your (multiple) sexual conquests ...?
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
Shall I? Or is it a tad unfair?
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Glad that's all clear.
No, it's really quite creepy
Coming from you Mr S. T. that's most amusing.
I haven't bothered keeping anyone else's as no one else is such a shit.
p.s. has it struck you that some of us women wandering around the streets and houses might have once been one of your (multiple) sexual conquests ...?
Have a nice evening
Er, what??
Are you now tacitly implying you are an ex sexual partner of mine?
This just gets WEIRDER
Did I give one to @Farooq as well? I must have been VERY stoned
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Glad that's all clear.
No, it's really quite creepy
Coming from you Mr S. T. that's most amusing.
I haven't bothered keeping anyone else's as no one else is such a shit.
p.s. has it struck you that some of us women wandering around the streets and houses might have once been one of your (multiple) sexual conquests ...?
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Glad that's all clear.
No, it's really quite creepy
I’d imagine the only worse thing would be someone following you around the world posting on twitter with photos almost exactly the same as yours.
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Any table that ranks Aston above Birmingham has to be bollocks.
Student satisfaction with Birmingham teaching and the university overall is dire (57% satisfied on the overall measure). Aston marginally better. In general universities should be a lot more concerned about student dissatisfaction than they appear to be.
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
Only someone who is given a mauling by the said person.
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Glad that's all clear.
No, it's really quite creepy
I’d imagine the only worse thing would be someone following you around the world posting on twitter with photos almost exactly the same as yours.
lol
OK I am off for a walk on Primrose Hill mainly because my flat, which I cleverly left sealed, with the blinds open, exposing the floor to ceiling windows facing due south. is so damnably hot it is potentially lethal
Heathener is a Leon creation; he is arguing with himself - I suggest everybody leaves him to it.
You're quite wrong. Sadly - because I wish I had created such a baroquely strange persona as @Heathener, who simultaneously travels the world - but boils water and keeps it in thermos flasks to "save money", and now, it seems, has a catalogue of all my comments carefully screenshotted and kept in a wooden chest next to a framed portrait of me, ritually smeared with cat poo
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
They did - on this day 84 years ago. However there’s a school of thought that the lancers charging tanks thing was propagandising by the Germans to belittle the Polish defence of their country.
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
I think the Truss-haters are worried it might work because they are in hysterics, making ridiculous comparisons like Venezuela.
And more in this vein. Out of interest how do you search for these old comments on vanilla? Not that I necessarily want to, but curious.
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Any table that ranks Aston above Birmingham has to be bollocks.
It is certainly different to all the other rankings, so yeah a whiff of bullshit
But what happened to Goldsmiths, down at 111, and Brunel, second from bottom at 121?!
When I were but a lad, Brunel was quite reputable
I seem to recall that the Guardian rankings are quite heavily weighted on “feels” - from my career in finance the only rankings that mattered in my industry were the QS World rankings which were less about whether you had a jolly time and didn’t get terrified at university but how good the university actually was at churning out research and top students.
The Mail strangely has jumped into the rankings game with an article today with their own rankings and put Imperial top over Oxford/Cambridge. Haven’t bothered to work out what they are basing their rankings on but maybe an algorithm based on VERY busty displays by students and how much alumni’s houses are worth.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
I rather fear that no politician, civil servant, academic, journalist or even local councillor has begun to grasp, never mind think about the solutions to, the scale of our problems.
Because the solution is higher taxes on the better off, who tend to vote..
[Deleted due to violation of "Just a Minute" protocol]
That said I still think England might be VALUE at 16/1 to win the trophy. Their draw is so easy - relatively. If they qualify they can easily make the semis and then it’s just two games
And they have historically outperformed at World Cups
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
As it's a slow politics and betting day perhaps there is space to note the Guardian's 2024 University Guide which appears to be newly out. I have no idea how useful its data is. However:
Top is St Andrew's. Of the top 16 no fewer than 5 are Scottish. This seems worth noting as the Scottish population is less than 10% of the UK. can any of this be true?
Any table that ranks Aston above Birmingham has to be bollocks.
It is certainly different to all the other rankings, so yeah a whiff of bullshit
But what happened to Goldsmiths, down at 111, and Brunel, second from bottom at 121?!
When I were but a lad, Brunel was quite reputable
I seem to recall that the Guardian rankings are quite heavily weighted on “feels” - from my career in finance the only rankings that mattered in my industry were the QS World rankings which were less about whether you had a jolly time and didn’t get terrified at university but how good the university actually was at churning out research and top students.
The Mail strangely has jumped into the rankings game with an article today with their own rankings and put Imperial top over Oxford/Cambridge. Haven’t bothered to work out what they are basing their rankings on but maybe an algorithm based on VERY busty displays by students and how much alumni’s houses are worth.
Yes they lay great emphasis on student satisfaction. St Andrews is number 1 for that. Lots of rich kids having a nice time
QS or THES are the gold standard if you want pure academic prowess (tho that is controversial in different ways)
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
Don't know whether they were, but we were. As were the French.
We were just phasing out cavalry as mounted infantry - horses provided mobility, but the soldiers got off and fought as infantry. The BEF was the first completely motorised army in the world.
Same with the Poles and the French. The whole “lancers charging tanks thing” was bullshit.
The Germans never completely motorised in WWII. The vaunted Panzer divisions contained thousands of horses….
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
I have a Copydexed scrapbook of all your posts.
Ii have a large pin board with many photographs all tied together with red thread, complete with notations saying "Aliens?", "Gobekli Tepe????" and "Micropenis????" in green highlighter. It all makes sense.
The hype around UAPs might well be ludicrous and unfounded (tho then you have to explain why it is happening at all) but that’s a mad article from the “Washington Spectator” which sounds as loopy as any flying saucer spotter
Sample paragraph:
“Such Deep State victim claims, no matter how improbable, serve two related goals: a) they help advance far-right, paranoid, anti-government conspiracy beliefs that can potentially be harnessed by aspiring GOP authoritarians and b) fuel the notion among UFO acolytes that if the whistleblowers are in such danger, then their alien tales must be true.”
So, er, the whole UAP flap is being conjured up by secret Nazis in the Republican Party so incoming “authoritarians” can blah blah blah WTAF
Looking good. I have some in my back garden too and they’re about 3 weeks ahead of the vineyard but a couple of Pinot bunches are starting to shrivel because I don’t spray the same toxic chemicals (organic, mind) as I do on the real thing.
What variety? Looks like a disease-resistant hybrid, possibly a North American variety like Concord?
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
Anyone giving an incorrect name for macaroni cheese should be taken out and shot.
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
I would force feed them egg and chips and post the pictures on all the pompous foodie blogs, as befits someone who eats a raincoat.
Egg and chips might be the most perfect food. That or a cheese and tomato sandwich.
No, cheese and tomato is just about the worst sandwich filling. The cheese acts as an impermeable membrane that becomes slimy from the tomato, which also makes the bread soggy. Tomato does not belong in a sandwich.
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
Anyone giving an incorrect name for macaroni cheese should be taken out and shot.
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
I would force feed them egg and chips and post the pictures on all the pompous foodie blogs, as befits someone who eats a raincoat.
Egg and chips might be the most perfect food. That or a cheese and tomato sandwich.
No, cheese and tomato is just about the worst sandwich filling. The cheese acts as an impermeable membrane that becomes slimy from the tomato, which also makes the bread soggy. Tomato does not belong in a sandwich.
You’re using the wrong tomato maybe. And possibly the wrong cheese. And bread
Gotchas about posts from the past are a bit of a case of there but for the grace of God.
I’ve made lots of incorrect predictions in my time. Sometimes confidently. (I’ve also made some terrifyingly accurate weather predictions like last year’s 40C). Today I’m on the hook for £50 to my favourite charity if BJO proves right about Corbyn in the Mayoral. He may well win. The Lib Dems have charitable status, does that count?
Gotchas are worthwhile in one sense though: if someone sounds a big too sure about the latest opinion (Dan Hannan I’m looking at you) but have been consistently wrong in the past then it’s worth the odd reminder.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
The Russians were :-).
I recall a POW escape story entitled "He rode with the Cossacks", inherited with a cache of 1950s books from an aunt who died before I was born.
One feature I recall was what was called the fluidity of the front line, and the routine nature of being cut off behind the enemy forces.
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
Anyone giving an incorrect name for macaroni cheese should be taken out and shot.
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
I would force feed them egg and chips and post the pictures on all the pompous foodie blogs, as befits someone who eats a raincoat.
Egg and chips might be the most perfect food. That or a cheese and tomato sandwich.
No, cheese and tomato is just about the worst sandwich filling. The cheese acts as an impermeable membrane that becomes slimy from the tomato, which also makes the bread soggy. Tomato does not belong in a sandwich.
Maybe not a “sandwich” as such but good beef tomatoes with salami and black pepper in a croissant is one of life’s surprisingly amazing combos. Very simple but the mix of the sweet croissant, the solid but juicy tomato, spicy garlicky salami and punch of pepper is great.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
The Russians were :-).
I recall a POW escape story entitled "He rode with the Cossacks", inherited with a cache of 1950s books from an aunt who died before I was born.
One feature I recall was what was called the fluidity of the front line, and the routine nature of being cut off behind the enemy forces.
The Germans ran cavalry units too on the Eastern front, though generally fighting as mobile infantry.
Though completely motorised in 1939, Britain did revert to mules in the Eastern battles around Burma, with quite extensive muleteer units in supply roles.
All three of the Truss fans comment on PB.com. I have fond memories from a year ago of one of them calling me a "Truss hater" for suspecting she might not be a huge success.
Shall I? Or is it a tad unfair?
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
The hype around UAPs might well be ludicrous and unfounded (tho then you have to explain why it is happening at all) but that’s a mad article from the “Washington Spectator” which sounds as loopy as any flying saucer spotter
Sample paragraph:
“Such Deep State victim claims, no matter how improbable, serve two related goals: a) they help advance far-right, paranoid, anti-government conspiracy beliefs that can potentially be harnessed by aspiring GOP authoritarians and b) fuel the notion among UFO acolytes that if the whistleblowers are in such danger, then their alien tales must be true.”
So, er, the whole UAP flap is being conjured up by secret Nazis in the Republican Party so incoming “authoritarians” can blah blah blah WTAF
Ignore
Why is it happening at all? Same as always, follow the money. There is cash to be made telling yarns.
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
Anyone giving an incorrect name for macaroni cheese should be taken out and shot.
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
I would force feed them egg and chips and post the pictures on all the pompous foodie blogs, as befits someone who eats a raincoat.
Egg and chips might be the most perfect food. That or a cheese and tomato sandwich.
No, cheese and tomato is just about the worst sandwich filling. The cheese acts as an impermeable membrane that becomes slimy from the tomato, which also makes the bread soggy. Tomato does not belong in a sandwich.
If your tomato is making the bread soggy you're not using enough butter (or substitute).
Heathener is a Leon creation; he is arguing with himself - I suggest everybody leaves him to it.
You're quite wrong. Sadly - because I wish I had created such a baroquely strange persona as @Heathener, who simultaneously travels the world - but boils water and keeps it in thermos flasks to "save money", and now, it seems, has a catalogue of all my comments carefully screenshotted and kept in a wooden chest next to a framed portrait of me, ritually smeared with cat poo
Genius
I don't care enough to bother but perhaps others will enjoy screenshotting and reposting past predictions (together with totally uncaveated betting advice) by Heathener in future when they turn out to be wide of the mark.
Gotchas about posts from the past are a bit of a case of there but for the grace of God.
I’ve made lots of incorrect predictions in my time. Sometimes confidently. (I’ve also made some terrifyingly accurate weather predictions like last year’s 40C). Today I’m on the hook for £50 to my favourite charity if BJO proves right about Corbyn in the Mayoral. He may well win. The Lib Dems have charitable status, does that count?
Gotchas are worthwhile in one sense though: if someone sounds a big too sure about the latest opinion (Dan Hannan I’m looking at you) but have been consistently wrong in the past then it’s worth the odd reminder.
It's a sign of an unserious punter.
Anyone remotely successful and respected at it exhibits a degree of humility.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
The Russians were :-).
I recall a POW escape story entitled "He rode with the Cossacks", inherited with a cache of 1950s books from an aunt who died before I was born.
One feature I recall was what was called the fluidity of the front line, and the routine nature of being cut off behind the enemy forces.
The Germans ran cavalry units too on the Eastern front, though generally fighting as mobile infantry.
Though completely motorised in 1939, Britain did revert to mules in the Eastern battles around Burma, with quite extensive muleteer units in supply roles.
We even specially adapted transport gliders to transport mules and horses into combat in the second Chindit expedition.
Just spotted a hot air balloon. Must be the perfect weather for it.
We’ve got loads round here - the Longleat Sky Safari is on…
That sounds like a really bad idea today.
We've had severe thunderstorms all afternoon.
You _do not_ want to be caught in an updraught in a balloon.
They were given the all clear. No thunderstorms this far south today, Might be an issue for the morning lift.
Fair enough. I presume they have a professional involved for such an event.
The forecast had a line from the Wash to the Welsh Valleys south of which thunderstorms were less likely, but I'm not sure I'd have trusted it completely.
We went from clear blue sky to a massive towering cloud with thunder in no more than 20 minutes.
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
Anyone giving an incorrect name for macaroni cheese should be taken out and shot.
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
I would force feed them egg and chips and post the pictures on all the pompous foodie blogs, as befits someone who eats a raincoat.
Egg and chips might be the most perfect food. That or a cheese and tomato sandwich.
No, cheese and tomato is just about the worst sandwich filling. The cheese acts as an impermeable membrane that becomes slimy from the tomato, which also makes the bread soggy. Tomato does not belong in a sandwich.
You’re using the wrong tomato maybe. And possibly the wrong cheese. And bread
They are a delicious combination
This is correct. But the tomato, the cheese and most of all the bread have to be right, as does any additional chutney etc. Sandwiches can be a food of the gods.
As it's still a slow Political betting day, I shall point out that according to the Guardian University Guide 2024, out today, Roehampton has the second best classics department in the country, beating Cambridge, St Andrew's and Durham. Make of this what you will. But Caveat emptor.
A British parliamentary researcher has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China in what is alleged to be one of the most damaging breaches of security involving a hostile state at Westminster.
The male suspect, who is in his late twenties, is understood to be linked to a number of senior Tory MPs, including several who are privy to classified or highly sensitive information.
They include Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and Alicia Kearns, the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee.
A senior Whitehall source claimed: “This is a major escalation by China. We have never seen anything like this before.”
Counterterrorism police swooped on the researcher and another man in his thirties on suspicion of espionage-related offences in March.
The researcher is a Briton who held a parliamentary pass and has worked with MPs on international policy, including relations with Beijing, for several years.
He previously spent time living and working in China, where security officials fear he may have been recruited as a sleeper agent and sent back to Britain with the intention of infiltrating political networks critical of the Beijing regime.
The researcher was arrested in Edinburgh and his London flat is thought to have been searched by police. The second suspect was arrested in Oxfordshire.
Scotland Yard said in a statement last night: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police arrested two men on March 13 on suspicion of offences under section one of the Official Secrets Act 1911.
I feel like this article popped up in my recommendations due to visiting PB. How truffle ruined absolutely everything
If I shut my eyes, I can remember a time when I’d order a plain pasta pomodoro and mac and cheese came just as it was. My chips were sprinkled only with a dash of flaky sea salt. A much simpler time.
A time before truffle.
Then, truffle took over, sending the London food scene into a state of mushroom-induced delirium. Now, seemingly every morsel on every menu is swimming in a thick pungent oil or is scattered with shavings of the crusty, nobbly little creatures. My TikTok For You Page is an explosion of sweaty cheese wheels and twirling forkfuls of truffley pastas. ‘You’ve got to try this new spot in Soho,’ an influencer’s voice proclaims. ‘We had the truffle fries, the truffle pasta and this incredible truffle cocktail with a truffle emulsion.’
Anyone giving an incorrect name for macaroni cheese should be taken out and shot.
Anyone using the phrase "food scene" should also be taken out and shot.
Not that I have anything against the author.
I would force feed them egg and chips and post the pictures on all the pompous foodie blogs, as befits someone who eats a raincoat.
Egg and chips might be the most perfect food. That or a cheese and tomato sandwich.
No, cheese and tomato is just about the worst sandwich filling. The cheese acts as an impermeable membrane that becomes slimy from the tomato, which also makes the bread soggy. Tomato does not belong in a sandwich.
You’re using the wrong tomato maybe. And possibly the wrong cheese. And bread
They are a delicious combination
This is correct. But the tomato, the cheese and most of all the bread have to be right, as does any additional chutney etc. Sandwiches can be a food of the gods.
As it's still a slow Political betting day, I shall point out that according to the Guardian University Guide 2024, out today, Roehampton has the second best classics department in the country, beating Cambridge, St Andrew's and Durham. Make of this what you will. But Caveat emptor.
Good job Spain aren’t in the rugby World Cup - the choir singing their national anthem would be buggered as it has no lyrics. Maybe however silence would be better.
Who catalogues screenshots of someone’s posts? It’s kind of creepy.
I have a Copydexed scrapbook of all your posts.
Ii have a large pin board with many photographs all tied together with red thread, complete with notations saying "Aliens?", "Gobekli Tepe????" and "Micropenis????" in green highlighter. It all makes sense.
Heathener is a Leon creation; he is arguing with himself - I suggest everybody leaves him to it.
You're quite wrong. Sadly - because I wish I had created such a baroquely strange persona as @Heathener, who simultaneously travels the world - but boils water and keeps it in thermos flasks to "save money", and now, it seems, has a catalogue of all my comments carefully screenshotted and kept in a wooden chest next to a framed portrait of me, ritually smeared with cat poo
Genius
The screenshot is especially telling.
She's not in love so don't forget it. It's just a silly phase she's going through.
The hype around UAPs might well be ludicrous and unfounded (tho then you have to explain why it is happening at all) but that’s a mad article from the “Washington Spectator” which sounds as loopy as any flying saucer spotter
Sample paragraph:
“Such Deep State victim claims, no matter how improbable, serve two related goals: a) they help advance far-right, paranoid, anti-government conspiracy beliefs that can potentially be harnessed by aspiring GOP authoritarians and b) fuel the notion among UFO acolytes that if the whistleblowers are in such danger, then their alien tales must be true.”
So, er, the whole UAP flap is being conjured up by secret Nazis in the Republican Party so incoming “authoritarians” can blah blah blah WTAF
Ignore
Why is it happening at all? Same as always, follow the money. There is cash to be made telling yarns.
Obama? Christopher Mellon? Senator Marco Rubio? Lots of other senators? Various ex CIA, Navy, NASA bigwigs? Pilots? Astronauts?
A British parliamentary researcher has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China in what is alleged to be one of the most damaging breaches of security involving a hostile state at Westminster.
The male suspect, who is in his late twenties, is understood to be linked to a number of senior Tory MPs, including several who are privy to classified or highly sensitive information.
They include Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and Alicia Kearns, the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee.
A senior Whitehall source claimed: “This is a major escalation by China. We have never seen anything like this before.”
Counterterrorism police swooped on the researcher and another man in his thirties on suspicion of espionage-related offences in March.
The researcher is a Briton who held a parliamentary pass and has worked with MPs on international policy, including relations with Beijing, for several years.
He previously spent time living and working in China, where security officials fear he may have been recruited as a sleeper agent and sent back to Britain with the intention of infiltrating political networks critical of the Beijing regime.
The researcher was arrested in Edinburgh and his London flat is thought to have been searched by police. The second suspect was arrested in Oxfordshire.
Scotland Yard said in a statement last night: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police arrested two men on March 13 on suspicion of offences under section one of the Official Secrets Act 1911.
Frankly I'm slightly surprised it's even 7%. Isn't that a bit more than the number who claim to have been decapitated?
What I think she correctly recognised is that if you are going to challenge the consensus you really need to do it straight away when your democratic mandate is at its strongest. The fact she failed utterly demonstrates how difficult this is.
No - it demonstrates how hopeless she is.
I have some sympathy with Truss: she diagnosed the problem and initiated a course of action which in past years may have worked. But the consequent crash in sterling and endangerment of the pension funds could not be tolerated by 2020s politics dominated by pensioners.
Commingled with that were her poor social skills and inability to argue her case, leading to difficulty in forming alliances.
So when things went bang few came to her aid and she left no "school of Truss" followers to succeed her
A reheated version of so-called Thatcherite policies (so-called because poorly understood by those who who believed in the myth rather than the reality) was not the solution for the problems of today, some of them a long-term consequence of those Thatcherite policies.
That's why she crashed and burned. The sooner the Tories stop thinking that Thatcherism is the answer the quicker they might actually start the hard work of thinking about the solutions to today's problems.
Indeed. Every church buries its God. By turning the living woman Margaret Hilda Thatcher into an icon and her words into holy writ, the Conservative Party missed the point that her policies required significant political skill to enact and would not work today.
Incidentally, there are parallels in warfare. Every army goes into battle trained and ready to fight the last war, and if it's not won quickly there is a period about 6-24 months in when each side realises that oops they don't know how to do this, and have to come up with something else fast. You can see the Ukrainians and Russians adapting in real time.
But that's warfare. There's no immediately pressing need for the Conservatives to evolve, so they wont. If they are defeated in 24 they will, but until then no.
Weren’t the Poles still using cavalry in 1939? Or is that a myth designed to evoke even more sympathy for our allies?
The Russians were :-).
I recall a POW escape story entitled "He rode with the Cossacks", inherited with a cache of 1950s books from an aunt who died before I was born.
One feature I recall was what was called the fluidity of the front line, and the routine nature of being cut off behind the enemy forces.
The Germans ran cavalry units too on the Eastern front, though generally fighting as mobile infantry.
Though completely motorised in 1939, Britain did revert to mules in the Eastern battles around Burma, with quite extensive muleteer units in supply roles.
The Germans had a lot of cavalry units. Both the Wermacht and the SS had a considerable number of Cavalry units up to divisional level. And they used them extensively on the Eastern Front where conditions made them preferable to mechanised units in many situations.
There was a full cavalry battle between the Poles and the Germans at Krasnobród in 1939.
The hype around UAPs might well be ludicrous and unfounded (tho then you have to explain why it is happening at all) but that’s a mad article from the “Washington Spectator” which sounds as loopy as any flying saucer spotter
Sample paragraph:
“Such Deep State victim claims, no matter how improbable, serve two related goals: a) they help advance far-right, paranoid, anti-government conspiracy beliefs that can potentially be harnessed by aspiring GOP authoritarians and b) fuel the notion among UFO acolytes that if the whistleblowers are in such danger, then their alien tales must be true.”
So, er, the whole UAP flap is being conjured up by secret Nazis in the Republican Party so incoming “authoritarians” can blah blah blah WTAF
Ignore
Why is it happening at all? Same as always, follow the money. There is cash to be made telling yarns.
Obama? Christopher Mellon? Senator Marco Rubio? Lots of other senators? Various ex CIA, Navy, NASA bigwigs? Pilots? Astronauts?
They’re all in it for the money?
There is no evidence of anything. What is it that Obama said? What has Rubio actually seen?
Nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s all bullshit stories. Some may be misidentified things for sure, just as people think they see ghosts.
I think there is a similarity to the the Carl Beech/Tom Watson affair. Warsons parliamentary status helped give credence to Beech’s lies. We see similar in the US with UAPs.
Comments
Feeding the system more money may keep it filing a bit longer. But that isn’t the solution by itself.
It’s about choices. If railways cost a billion pounds a mile, then we aren’t not going to have railways. Same goes for schools, hospitals etc.
But when any actual attempt is made to reduce these costs, all those who are interested in the current system raise a cry.
I’m doing a loft conversion. The bumf for which runs to hundreds of pages. Many of which were auto generated by software. The actually content is less than a word per page.
The actual real plans for everything are 6 pages of PDF - nice clear diagrams.
I suspect that there will be some loyal Conservatives who say, or think, 'Ah well, that is in the past and things are different now.' It's an argument which can have validity but Boris brought in a lot of his placemen.
I want them all out.
But those situations do not now pertain. Trade is more difficult and unreliable: getting stuff from China will be more difficult, we made trade with the EU more difficult ourselves. Due to demographic changes we cannot service the debt (old people consume, not produce) and we cannot raise tax (due to Government learned helplessness). We are too highly leveraged and things are going wrong.
The government is trying to square the circle by importing 500,000 to 1,000,000 people per annum. This may work in producing growth and expanding tax but it will transform the country into a population herded into smaller and smaller boxes owned by foreign funds. To maintain the economy (an abstract noun) it will sacrifice the poor (a concrete noun) and is to my mind immoral, as the state should serve its people not itself.
My solution is... (Cont on next rant)
But what happened to Goldsmiths, down at 111, and Brunel, second from bottom at 121?!
When I were but a lad, Brunel was quite reputable
It won't last of course but it has been a trifle hot this week.
Well since he continues to plaster pointless travel photos all over this place I will then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Poland#Misconceptions
Neither the German nor Soviet armies were close to mechanisation in 1939.
Edit. And RCT????
...my solution is "do less with more".
Contract the state to cope with the fact that for the next 20 years the state will be one massive care home. Expand the tax base to focus on wealth (which is static), not income /currency (which is portable). Every time something crosses a border, tax it. Every time a person crosses a border, charge them. You want 1 million people immigrating per year? Fine, licence them and sell the licences on the open market (no bulk buying). You want foreign pension funds owning a tower block? Fine, licence them and sell the licences on the open market.
This approach will hopefully rebalance the state so income=expenditure and we can pay the debt off, putting the state on a solid financial footing.
There was once a time when Sunak was similarly lauded and then, I think it was Mike Smithson himself, began to point out some of his weaknesses which have now been made all too apparent.
I guess in a way it's flattering? So, thanks
Leon can be a total shit, especially when he's been at the bottle. So I decided to keep the better moments of bullshit about Liz Truss. Especially useful when he later attempted some glorious revisionism.
Glad that's all clear.
I haven't bothered keeping anyone else's as no one else is such a shit.
p.s. has it struck you that some of us women wandering around the streets and houses might have once been one of your (multiple) sexual conquests ...?
Have a nice evening
Are you now tacitly implying you are an ex sexual partner of mine?
This just gets WEIRDER
Did I give one to @Farooq as well? I must have been VERY stoned
Just spotted a hot air balloon. Must be the perfect weather for it.
OK I am off for a walk on Primrose Hill mainly because my flat, which I cleverly left sealed, with the blinds open, exposing the floor to ceiling windows facing due south. is so damnably hot it is potentially lethal
Genius
However there’s a school of thought that the lancers charging tanks thing was propagandising by the Germans to belittle the Polish defence of their country.
We've had severe thunderstorms all afternoon.
You _do not_ want to be caught in an updraught in a balloon.
The Mail strangely has jumped into the rankings game with an article today with their own rankings and put Imperial top over Oxford/Cambridge. Haven’t bothered to work out what they are basing their rankings on but maybe an algorithm based on VERY busty displays by students and how much alumni’s houses are worth.
England to lose to Argentina. We are so poor
19-16
That said I still think England might be VALUE at 16/1 to win the trophy. Their draw is so easy - relatively. If they qualify they can easily make the semis and then it’s just two games
And they have historically outperformed at World Cups
QS or THES are the gold standard if you want pure academic prowess (tho that is controversial in different ways)
https://washingtonspectator.org/ufo-tales-falling-apart-after-hearings/
As I said all along.
Same with the Poles and the French. The whole “lancers charging tanks thing” was bullshit.
The Germans never completely motorised in WWII. The vaunted Panzer divisions contained thousands of horses….
Sample paragraph:
“Such Deep State victim claims, no matter how improbable, serve two related goals: a) they help advance far-right, paranoid, anti-government conspiracy beliefs that can potentially be harnessed by aspiring GOP authoritarians and b) fuel the notion among UFO acolytes that if the whistleblowers are in such danger, then their alien tales must be true.”
So, er, the whole UAP flap is being conjured up by secret Nazis in the Republican Party so incoming “authoritarians” can blah blah blah WTAF
Ignore
What variety? Looks like a disease-resistant hybrid, possibly a North American variety like Concord?
They are a delicious combination
I’ve made lots of incorrect predictions in my time. Sometimes confidently. (I’ve also made some terrifyingly accurate weather predictions like last year’s 40C). Today I’m on the hook for £50 to my favourite charity if BJO proves right about Corbyn in the Mayoral. He may well win. The Lib Dems have charitable status, does that count?
Gotchas are worthwhile in one sense though: if someone sounds a big too sure about the latest opinion (Dan Hannan I’m looking at you) but have been consistently wrong in the past then it’s worth the odd reminder.
I recall a POW escape story entitled "He rode with the Cossacks", inherited with a cache of 1950s books from an aunt who died before I was born.
One feature I recall was what was called the fluidity of the front line, and the routine nature of being cut off behind the enemy forces.
Though completely motorised in 1939, Britain did revert to mules in the Eastern battles around Burma, with quite extensive muleteer units in supply roles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0UqLicdV0A
Let's see if they can sell it before the hand-egg kicks off (or however rugby matches start).
Ireland and Italy as predicted.
Australia Georgia much closer - as predicted.
Now for Argentina England. My prediction Arg 21 Eng 15
https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/inland/politik-inland/beschlossen-sahra-wagenknecht-gruendet-eigene-partei-85351472.html
Anyone remotely successful and respected at it exhibits a degree of humility.
https://www.ww2gp.org/burma/mules.php#:~:text=During their earlier excursion into,from Indian army artillery units.
The forecast had a line from the Wash to the Welsh Valleys south of which thunderstorms were less likely, but I'm not sure I'd have trusted it completely.
We went from clear blue sky to a massive towering cloud with thunder in no more than 20 minutes.
As it's still a slow Political betting day, I shall point out that according to the Guardian University Guide 2024, out today, Roehampton has the second best classics department in the country, beating Cambridge, St Andrew's and Durham. Make of this what you will. But Caveat emptor.
What is it about French stadia?
You predicted Wales would win the group and England wouldn't get out of the group.
The male suspect, who is in his late twenties, is understood to be linked to a number of senior Tory MPs, including several who are privy to classified or highly sensitive information.
They include Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and Alicia Kearns, the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee.
A senior Whitehall source claimed: “This is a major escalation by China. We have never seen anything like this before.”
Counterterrorism police swooped on the researcher and another man in his thirties on suspicion of espionage-related offences in March.
The researcher is a Briton who held a parliamentary pass and has worked with MPs on international policy, including relations with Beijing, for several years.
He previously spent time living and working in China, where security officials fear he may have been recruited as a sleeper agent and sent back to Britain with the intention of infiltrating political networks critical of the Beijing regime.
The researcher was arrested in Edinburgh and his London flat is thought to have been searched by police. The second suspect was arrested in Oxfordshire.
Scotland Yard said in a statement last night: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police arrested two men on March 13 on suspicion of offences under section one of the Official Secrets Act 1911.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-arrested-suspicion-china-spy-parliamentary-researcher-xrtbrw86m
https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/
She's not in love so don't forget it. It's just a silly phase she's going through.
Rubio? Lots of other senators? Various ex CIA, Navy, NASA bigwigs? Pilots? Astronauts?
They’re all in it for the money?
Fool.
There was a full cavalry battle between the Poles and the Germans at Krasnobród in 1939.
Nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s all bullshit stories. Some may be misidentified things for sure, just as people think they see ghosts.
I think there is a similarity to the the Carl Beech/Tom Watson affair. Warsons parliamentary status helped give credence to Beech’s lies. We see similar in the US with UAPs.