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Too many tweets, Part II – politicalbetting.com
Too many tweets, Part II – politicalbetting.com
?BREAKING: We just passed into law the biggest package of tax cuts in modern history, meaning 27 million people save more from January.Conservatives believe hard work should be rewarded. pic.twitter.com/1weWZvK5wN
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There’s got to be space for serious quizzes where knowledge is the prize and they don’t feel the need to be funny. What have we got at the moment?
Only Connect
Mastermind
University Challenge
I like OC but Victoria Coren-Mitchell’s opening & closing monologues are so unfunny it hurts. I can barely believe they make it past the editors
Any non Beeb serous quizzes?
https://x.com/simonrbriggs/status/1736669138792137045?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
(Labour ensured that there were enough hospital scandals killing off sick people to reduce the waiting lists)
ETA: The lack of lag is seriously impressive. Say what you like about the Tories, they effect change quickly.
I think she’s the finest Tony Lock impersonator to grace the charts.
https://twitter.com/colin_mayes1/status/1736671486633533692
Btw, I don't consider Mastermind a serious quiz; the general knowledge round is laughably easy and whoever lets some of the specialist subjects through ('Seasons 8 through 10 of Seinfeld") needs a slap.
Now whenever we go to London we drive 25 miles to Westbury rather than 5 miles to Gillingham, and get the GWR into Paddington. Cheaper, quicker, and generally more reliable.
https://x.com/MichelleMone/status/1736754263055815050?s=20
I had a friend who thought she was brilliant at general knowledge, despite all evidence to the contrary. She went on 15 to 1. First to be eliminated. Then she went on the weakest link. First to be eliminated. Then she went on 100%. Came last. Admirably, none of this put even the tiniest dent in her self-confidence.
But the rise since 2011 has been startling. Well done the Tories.
Countdown
1 They know its a lie but assume the public are too stupid to know
2 They are too stupid to know its a lie AND they think the public are stupid
They have been out claiming black is white for a while, and its probably now a knee-jerk muscle memory. Meanwhile the rest of us know what reality is because we live it. It isn't working any more.
We're back to how brilliant the film Don't Look Up was. Try to persuade people to disbelieve their own senses and basics of thinking because politically you want to manipulate them. It works for a while, but once everyone can see the big rock in the sky its hard to maintain the lie that it doesn't exist.
The Tory tax rise is the DLU asteroid. No matter how hard they try to insist that its a tax cut, we can all see it in the sky...
So that’s exactly what he’s going to do.
What could go wrong?
'In an earlier message on X, Michelle Mone also suggested that, if anyone was to blame for the government overspending on PPE, it was Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister during Covid and now levelling up secretary, and Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health.
"Michael Gove and Sir Chris Wormald approved the purchase of 5 years supply of PPE when the remit was to build up only 4 months. They oversaw huge waste in PPE contracts. They have both had questions to answer for a very long time."'
Is that 4 months as in normal pre-covid or 4 months of covid she means??
Not quite so dramatic maybe but pretty clear.
There was a really odd bloke at university, who had great general knowledge. I forget his real name but will always know him as "Roger's Friend" as that was his (one man) quiz team name. Anyway, I think he got to the grand final, and was clearly dangerous. But he got a relatively easy one wrong, people could see he was a bit flustered, and it was "nominate Roger's Friend", "nominate Roger's Friend", "nominate Roger's Friend" until he collapsed.
I also know a bloke who we to this day mock because he used to regularly go on birdwatching holidays, then got to the final three of 15-1, and the decisive question was, "What is the national bird of New Zealand?" Turns out the answer isn't "emu", funnily enough.
But @Scott_xP is posting it, and it’s showing up Cameron, Osborne & Co. Don’t tell me he’s turned on them now
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/18/michelle-mone-hits-out-rishi-sunak-ppe-deals
He can't stand on Starmer is Scary, because he isn't, and neither is his front bench. They might not be up to the job, because the job is impossible.
They can't stand on the brilliance of the government's record, because they've not been up to the job either.
So what can the Conservatives go with? "Don't give Labour too big a majority"? Probably has the benefit of being true and it acknowledges where the battleground is, but it's a rubbish message, with echoes of the Conservative campaign in 2005.
https://twitter.com/Parody_PM/status/1736779292246225288
A quiz I couldn't stand, for reasons I can't quite explain, was Eggheads. Just found it really boring and there was a time in the early 2010s when it seemed like it was on whenever you turned on the telly.
But it says many other very interesting things about him. I heartily recommend the whole article. On a topical note,
"He was a long-standing supporter of the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. He joked that if, on an episode of Fifteen to One, too few contestants survived the first round to continue the game, he would give a speech on the Marbles to fill the time. This happened in a 2001 episode, where he gave a lengthy presentation stating the case to return them, for which the channel was criticised."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Stewart
Immigration is the achilles heel of the Tories and yet he wants to make it his mission to highlight how bad it is. He is doing nothing about the migration he can control and then to make it worse, is highlighting how his party can't handle illegal migration either.
It is honestly baffling - but just shows him to be a bit thick.
N.B. Neither do I!
Not saying this doesn't show a problem; just that it's the sort of thing that always pops into my mind when I see any chart.
I wouldn't have thought those birds were big enough, but perhaps there has been an advance in breeding, or even genetic enegineering. (For some passengers, such an "organic" engine would be an attraction, I suspect.)
The principle needs a name, like Cookie's Law. Rishi's Razor?
I'm struggling in a quick search to find pre-2010 data for A&E waiting times, so I wonder where that FT graph got its data from. Was that target measured before 2003?
There's no reason why the two graphs should have the same x-axis limits of course, they work independently.
If, as I hope, Labour do use any of these they really need to make sure they're watertight though
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/18/joe-biden-signals-he-has-no-interest-in-signing-us-uk-trade-agreement
Vanishingly likely never to happen, since the US wants to impose crap agri standards and monopolistic copyright rules on the UK, and has no interest in a services deal where the UK had a comparative advantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_87Oci0FcY
Capital budgets were slashed to the bone, which is why the beds:patient and CT scanner:patient ratios are pretty much third-world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWAOuI4NAug
Something Kafkaesque about this process, even if I am hardly a natural supporter of the loonbag Ms Cates.
Is this what we have to expect from the Tories in the GE24 campaign, the "let's put SKS in Number 10" campaign?
Fear. Thatcher.
Respect. Brown.
Horror. Truss.
Pity. Sunak
As a politician, to be pitied is worse than any other emotion...
Which is why it must remain unspoken. Like the Python killing joke.
Both of which can also be attached to Rishi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_African_general_election#Opinion_polls
Among the many reasons why we MUST get rid of the government is that they have no interest in reality and spend all day gaslighting everyone.
Labour, even if they are administratively no more competent, don’t have the burden of defending the indefensible.
Constitutional theory is about 100 years behind the reality and we could really do with a modern-day Bagehot to point out that actually, yes, the people are sovereign.
1. The principle that parliament should be elected by and is accountable to the (adult) population of the country is unchallenged, bar fringe cases.
2. Parliament may exercise sovereignty on behalf of the people but this is not the same as actually being sovereign in its own right. Legal sovereignty is not the same as the enduring political reality that underpins constitutional practice.
3. The principle that first-order political questions should be settled by the people themselves through referendums - in other words, that parliament doesn't have the authority or legitimacy to decide those questions for itself - is now a constitutional convention. (This is not the same as saying that all referendums involve first-order political questions).
4. The nature of the Parliament Act, Salisbury Convention and 'mandates' in general point to the people being the fundamental source of sovereignty.
Really?
A man who set the dogs of Hell on any rivals, and for years fought for the PMship, then when he got it, had f-all idea what to do with it? A man who fought hos rivals within Labour more strongly then he did his enemies outside?
Nasty. That is the word that should be associated with Brown. Nasty.
Then he suggests using the word "fanny" instead
Or, as he puts it, "diet ****"
I am not posting much due to my on going health issues but I would just say that as poor as England's NHS stats are, Wales are worse and this is the responsibility of Wales Labour government
9 weeks ago today at this time I was sent directly into A & E by my GP as a medical emergency. I was triaged at 5.30pm, had blood at 6.30pm and then my wife and I waited with 114 other patients overnight, being asked back at 3.00am for more bloods as they had made an error with those at 6.30pm
It was 7.00am, (over 13 hours later) I first saw the A & E doctor who immediately admitted me to hospital and arranged an emergency ultrasound which confirmed a massive left thigh DVT and other issues
I continue under the care of the hospital and three consultants, but the point I would make is that it not just an English issues, but also a Welsh and as I understand it from our family, a Scottish one which covers the political divide of Conservative, Labour and SNP
I do not know the answer and certainly Streeting will have his work cut out to come a anywhere near a resolution for England, and as for Wales I see little prospect of improvement in the short term
Westminster VI (17 Dec):
Labour 42% (-1)
Conservative 24% (-1)
Liberal Democrat 11% (-2)
Reform UK 10% (-1)
Green 6% (+1)
SNP 4% (+2)
Other 2% (+1)
Changes +/- 10 Dec
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus
In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.
At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.
Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year...
..By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”
A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.
Having said that, I expect them to get worse before they get better: as the Tories did with IDS, or Labour with Corbyn.
IMV, short of unexpected events (of which we have had none recently...) we are looking at three terms for Labour.
Rt Hon. Colonel Bob Stewart (Con*)
Mr Andrew Bridgen (Con*)
Ms Virginia Crosbie (Con)
Rt Hon. Dame Eleanor Laing (Con)
Mr Marco Longhi (Con)
Mr David Duguid (Con)
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Con)
Ms Miriam Cates (Con)
Is there a pattern I wonder?
(*Elected as Con, now disowned by them - too late.)
https://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/standards-and-financial-interests/parliamentary-commissioner-for-standards/complaints-and-investigations/allegations-currently-under-investigation-by-the-commissioner/