How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
In the brief snippet of the Superbowl I caught he seemed to be in a right old tizzy and body slamming his own coach. I fear he may have anger issues.
isn't there a conspiracy theory that Travis Kelce is just a beard, ie a pretend boyfriend, with a celeb angle, to hide the fact Taylor Swift is actually a lesbian?
I like this theory mainly because it gives me a chance to imagine Taylor Swift being a lesbian, and doing lesbiany things, perhaps with a young Scarlet Johansson
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
If that was true then Russia would have won in 2022.
Inaccurate artillery bombardments might look impressive but its precision what matters.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
What is obsolete is the old style of artillery as a semi permanent emplacement, complete with tea tent.
What works in Ukraine is shoot-and-scoot.
- A pre planned fire mission. - The vehicle rocks up at a randomly chosen location at the appointed time. - fire a bunch of rounds, in concert with other systems. But the other systems aren’t at the same location. - leave, if you can, before the last round hits the target.
Systems like Archer, where the ammunition is pre loader into an auto loader, the crew don’t get out of the cab, and they can stop, shoot and leave in times measured in tens of seconds are what works in that environment.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
Yermakov played for the ART Giants youth team in Dusseldorf. The night before an upcoming match, on Feb. 10, he and his teammate Artem Kozachenko were reportedly attacked with knives on the street.
Yermakov died in the hospital of injuries sustained in the attack. Kozachenko remains in intensive care.
The entire ART Giants youth team reportedly spent the night in the hospital with Yermakov and Kozachenko following the attack.
According to the FBK, the young men's attackers may have been motivated by hatred against Ukraine. The players "were attacked with knives in the street simply because they were Ukrainians," the FBK said in their announcement...
What a horrific story
Who the F would attack Ukrainians in Germany, for being Ukrainian? Are there gangs of drunken, violent Russian emigres with knives roaming Dusseldorf?
Doesn't add up
Apparently they've arrested someone, so we'll see.
There have been several examples of both anti-Ukrainian and anti-Russian violence in Germany since the war started; there are quite large numbers of both Russain and Ukrainians living there, of course.
Victoria Atkins (a Cambridge-educated lawyer btw). As an aside, I think her performance the other day was also yet another exemplar of the lack of intellectual curiosity that leads to ignorance. She is not an idiot but she is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury so should by now understand debt and gdp just as a Northern Ireland Secretary should know that Republican and Loyalist communities vote for different parties, a Trade Secretary should know which ports carry goods between here and France, a Culture Secretary should understand online encryption, and a Transport Secretary should know ferry companies need big boats called ferries.
There has been comment recently on the SNP mafia currently "governing" Scotland. Several ministers, including Yousless himself, have almost no experience outside supporting and working for the party.
The question here is it is worse to have no Real World experience, and be rubbish at your political job, or to have had a real job of some kind, and still be rubbish at your political job?
Problem for SNP is that most of its talented people are now on backbenches (Sturgeon, Swinney, Forbes, Ewing, even Matheson).The second eleven now in charge, buttressed by the comically incompetent two Green ministers, hardly know which end of the bat to hold. And we have more than two more years of this.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Yermakov played for the ART Giants youth team in Dusseldorf. The night before an upcoming match, on Feb. 10, he and his teammate Artem Kozachenko were reportedly attacked with knives on the street.
Yermakov died in the hospital of injuries sustained in the attack. Kozachenko remains in intensive care.
The entire ART Giants youth team reportedly spent the night in the hospital with Yermakov and Kozachenko following the attack.
According to the FBK, the young men's attackers may have been motivated by hatred against Ukraine. The players "were attacked with knives in the street simply because they were Ukrainians," the FBK said in their announcement...
What a horrific story
Who the F would attack Ukrainians in Germany, for being Ukrainian? Are there gangs of drunken, violent Russian emigres with knives roaming Dusseldorf?
Doesn't add up
Apparently they've arrested someone, so we'll see.
There have been several examples of both anti-Ukrainian and anti-Russian violence in Germany since the war started; there are quite large numbers of both Russain and Ukrainians living there, of course.
Actually, now you mention it, I do recall videos of pro-Russian groups in Germany, early in the war, parading that sinister letter Z on flags, so you are right
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Again - apparently she was much more to the left than Barack, and wanted him to fight for things (I remember her being on the side of a public option, for example). And I think she does have the charisma for it - it's just whether she feels if her lack of elected experience (as only the spouse of a POTUS) is an issue.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
If you wanted to ensure all the above with relative ease that would need a big increase in welfare spending funded by higher taxes, food banks fill the gap and provide extra food that fills the gaps in welfare funding and also ease the burden on those on minimum wage and low incomes
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
In the brief snippet of the Superbowl I caught he seemed to be in a right old tizzy and body slamming his own coach. I fear he may have anger issues.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
I think that drones might be a substitute for artillery if they had better range, higher payloads, and were being produced in much greater numbers. So, they might be soon, but even if they were today, we're still not producing enough of them.
Things have come to a pretty pass when we can't even agree amongst ourselves on PB about what is the right strategy for Ukraine to win this war.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
It's not the "modest living" that is objectionable, it's the financial insecurity that comes with not having money left over to normally spend on luxuries, that can be diverted to deal with events, whatever those might be.
I don't have expensive tastes, and I take pleasure in the simple, free, things in life, but keeping within a modest budget, and worrying whether the fridge will need replacing, is mentally very wearing.
I'll choose a less modest living in order to live without those worries, thankyouverymuch.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
Lets assume that - as some reports have it - she has been preparing a potential run since 2022. The DNC finally accept that Sleepy Joe is asleep and break the news to him that its in everyone's best interests if he steps off the ticket.
Michelle Obama becomes the unity candidate. Qualification for the job? She isn't Donald Trump, and she used to live at the White House.
Michelle Obama becoming President is just more proof that American democracy is broken. We've had daddy and son Presidents. We nearly had husband and wife Presidents. What next - Chelsea Clinton vs Donald Trump Junior?
Or maybe just restore the King as their head of state if it is going to be a hereditary and family position anyway?
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Also, do we have any concrete evidence that Michelle Obama has any significant political skill, or even if she is particularly clever or cunning or anything?
This is not meant as a provocation, she is just a nullity in my mind, I don't know anything about her. I guess she wrote that book which did very well? - but I never read it, and it could have been ghosted
I am happy to be schooled if there is plenty of evidence that she is in fact a political and intellectual titan
‘No downsides, only considerable upsides’, part 94:
’Things have come to a pretty pass when the most authoritative government response to new figures testifying to the negative economic impact of Brexit is to insist that everything could have been so very much worse. Thus Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, cited doom-laden forecasts of “inevitable decline”, which, she said, “have been proved false”.
And, yes, thank goodness, the economic meltdown predicted by some did not happen – quite, with a very near miss, and a political crisis, in relation to Northern Ireland. But the lack of a complete meltdown, either in the weeks immediately after the UK’s departure from the EU took effect, or in the four years since, can be only limited consolation in the light of the latest assessment.
The report, compiled by John Springford, an associate of the Centre for European Reform, concludes that Brexit has opened a hole of almost £100bn in annual UK exports, which is making the country worse off than if it had remained in the European Union. The estimates show that missed growth in goods and services exports means that trade is running at 30 per cent below what it could have been without Brexit…
‘Now, the Centre for European Reform is a pro-EU think tank. But Springford’s economic credentials are not in doubt, and his conclusions chime with those of other recent surveys – which have, if anything, been even more negative about the extent to which the UK’s economy has been held back by Brexit. Among the most pessimistic findings have come from Cambridge Econometrics, which found that Brexit has already cost the UK economy £140bn in lost growth...
‘There have been knock-on effects on the standard of living, with Bloomberg estimating that GDP is 4 per cent lower than it might have been, with others citing lost investment, and a nearly £500 annual hit to UK workers’ pay – compared with what might otherwise have been expected...
‘Nor is it credible to explain the losses away as being caused entirely by external factors: the Covid pandemic, for instance, or the war in Ukraine. To be sure, these “black swan” events took a heavy toll on the UK economy. But they took a toll on many economies. Germany, for instance, upended the basic premises of its whole energy sector after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The difference is that others have, for the most part, bounced back more quickly or been able to cushion individuals and families more effectively against the shocks than have the successive post-Brexit governments in the UK.
Those who forecast that by leaving the EU, the UK was committing an enormous act of entirely avoidable self-harm are vindicated…
‘A full four years after Brexit came into effect, the balance sheet is not looking good, whether it is for trade, investment, or standards of living...’
The UK has full employment and no shortage of immigrants.
Perhaps they think the public sector would have become magically more productive if the UK was in the EU compared with what it was when the UK was in the EU.
Trade is a significant driver of productivity, it is well documented both in the macro data and at the firm level. By making it harder to trade, especially for smaller, fast growing firms, Brexit has harmed our growth prospects materially. Sad.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Again - apparently she was much more to the left than Barack, and wanted him to fight for things (I remember her being on the side of a public option, for example). And I think she does have the charisma for it - it's just whether she feels if her lack of elected experience (as only the spouse of a POTUS) is an issue.
So the Democratic establishment won't let her run, then ?
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Also, do we have any concrete evidence that Michelle Obama has any significant political skill, or even if she is particularly clever or cunning or anything?
This is not meant as a provocation, she is just a nullity in my mind, I don't know anything about her. I guess she wrote that book which did very well? - but I never read it, and it could have been ghosted
I am happy to be schooled if there is plenty of evidence that she is in fact a political and intellectual titan
As to intellect - no idea.
She has some experience in government - but in the appointed political positions that are common in the US. Not elective politics.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
If you want there to be no state, and you don't want people to be forced to work, wouldn't you be dependent on private charity?
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Also, do we have any concrete evidence that Michelle Obama has any significant political skill, or even if she is particularly clever or cunning or anything?
This is not meant as a provocation, she is just a nullity in my mind, I don't know anything about her. I guess she wrote that book which did very well? - but I never read it, and it could have been ghosted
I am happy to be schooled if there is plenty of evidence that she is in fact a political and intellectual titan
She is pretty charismatic - she was always good at the meet and greet part of the job of a politician. Getting votes and choosing policy fights - who knows.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
Not that I’m wanting to be PB Minister for farming, it’s all over the news why they are protesting in their own words, but my view of the political disenchantment would be the Tory’s have spent a lot of time on their Brexit/Global Britain project, so farming might be feeling a bit like a neglected woman. If that makes sense? They are in the shed playing with Brexit all the time, and they don’t bring flowers anymore, and you wonder if they really care anymore.
Or to be a bit more specific, the farming industry works on a world of interlinked chains just like any other kind of industry “cars” “steel” “techno widget” and when links in the chain can’t carry on, or needs to up prices or diversify, it hits on the smooth running of lots of other things. I guess it’s a bit like the problem when factory shut that was supplying by product to what they were doing, so it impacted keeping things fresh, and like when beer was threatened because a particular gas wasn’t flowing into UK.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Also, do we have any concrete evidence that Michelle Obama has any significant political skill, or even if she is particularly clever or cunning or anything?
This is not meant as a provocation, she is just a nullity in my mind, I don't know anything about her. I guess she wrote that book which did very well? - but I never read it, and it could have been ghosted
I am happy to be schooled if there is plenty of evidence that she is in fact a political and intellectual titan
As to intellect - no idea.
She has some experience in government - but in the appointed political positions that are common in the US. Not elective politics.
OK I am schooling myself
Quite an extraordinary racial ancestry, from slavery to Native American roots, and she does have an impressive educational CV - Princeton, postgrad, etc
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
It's not the "modest living" that is objectionable, it's the financial insecurity that comes with not having money left over to normally spend on luxuries, that can be diverted to deal with events, whatever those might be.
I don't have expensive tastes, and I take pleasure in the simple, free, things in life, but keeping within a modest budget, and worrying whether the fridge will need replacing, is mentally very wearing.
I'll choose a less modest living in order to live without those worries, thankyouverymuch.
Even if "they" manage to get Biden to step aside, which is impossible without a 25th, there is no credible route for MO to be the Democratic candidate.
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
A quick google reveals that she has admitted that she suffered (suffers?) from low level depression.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
Also, do we have any concrete evidence that Michelle Obama has any significant political skill, or even if she is particularly clever or cunning or anything?
This is not meant as a provocation, she is just a nullity in my mind, I don't know anything about her. I guess she wrote that book which did very well? - but I never read it, and it could have been ghosted
I am happy to be schooled if there is plenty of evidence that she is in fact a political and intellectual titan
She is pretty charismatic - she was always good at the meet and greet part of the job of a politician. Getting votes and choosing policy fights - who knows.
Which goes some way to explain her relative popularity.
But like the 'generic Democrat', who also usually outpolls real world candidates, that would probably change dramatically if her (highly unlikely) candidacy became a reality.
Even if "they" manage to get Biden to step aside, which is impossible without a 25th, there is no credible route for MO to be the Democratic candidate.
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
Even if "they" manage to get Biden to step aside, which is impossible without a 25th, there is no credible route for MO to be the Democratic candidate.
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
Don't think Pres and VP can be from the same state.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
There is a conspiracy theory on the likes of InfoWars that Obama has always been the President behind the scenes. So they boomed Michelle Obama as the obvious next puppet after Biden and (ironically) Trump. A watered-down version feeds through to the US right media and money goes on Michelle Obama.
The problems.
1) No sign that Michelle Obama wants the job. 2) No sign the Democrat poobahs could get her the nomination. 3) It would be quite a canny political move and the Democrats may be known for many things but...
Betting post. Hills have 'Next PM after GE', Rishi at 5/1.
And they have 'Total Tory Seats lost at next GE, 1-50', at 66/1.
It seems to me that Rishi is only going to be PM after the next GE (5/1) if the Tories lose only between 1-50 seats (66/1).
Neither of these outcomes is likely. But I wonder, if Labour carry on with their Rochdale fiasco for a bit, and add a few more (this is a Labour speciality) that the 66/1 'losing 1-50 seats' is value.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
Meanwhile, Leon wonders why so many interesting posters have left pb.com...
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
Not a failure of the people to buy food before anything else. Everyone on UC got a free £300 last Friday. Why not just spend that on food?
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
Meanwhile, Leon wonders why so many interesting posters have left pb.com...
I specifically said that my remarks should NOT be seen as in any way personally "critical"
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
The implication of this article is that it is Labour who are going to topple these cabinet ministers, great to the delight of our very own resident XMP. I am not so sure.
To take the case of Central Devon, where Mel Stride is the sitting MP, the Tories won 16 district council seats last year, the Lib Dems 19 and the Labour Party not a single one. Just nine months ago.
If Labour were indeed on the point of taking such Westminster seats, one might have expected them to win even one seat. But no. The anti-Tory vote is coalescing around the Lib Dems.
This story was published in the Times..... Who owns the Times??? And what is his objective?
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
Meanwhile, Leon wonders why so many interesting posters have left pb.com...
I specifically said that my remarks should NOT be seen as in any way personally "critical"
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
If you want there to be no state, and you don't want people to be forced to work, wouldn't you be dependent on private charity?
No - because private charity wouldn't exist. In anarcho syndicalism there is the community, that is essentially the decision making entity. Mutual aid, for example, is not the same as private charity (which is itself often funded by capital to use as a tax write off, as well as make rich people feel better). Mutual aid is about people taking power away from external institutions and place it back within the people inside the community themselves. Again - I have no desire to have to explain why anarchism is not "anarchy" as is understood by the layman or to outline the myriad interactions between people under anarchism when I have given the underpinning of my political philosophy - if you're actually interested I would suggest starting with Bookchin, Makhno and Kropotkin, and modern intellectuals like Graeber and Ocalan.
Anarchism is not "people do whatever they want" - it's closer to community organising via meetings and direct democracy. Like, sure, anarchists under capitalism do go out against state power and fascism and fight the system. But when we're organising ourselves it's lots of meetings and votes. It's just the idea that there should be no illegitimate unjust hierarchies, and the only legitimate hierarchies can be formed via direct democracy.
Even if "they" manage to get Biden to step aside, which is impossible without a 25th, there is no credible route for MO to be the Democratic candidate.
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
Don't think Pres and VP can be from the same state.
They can't.
And would Newsom accept in any event ?
Seems unlikely to me, as if she won, he'd be effectively sidelined, and if she were to lose, he'd go down with the ship. Governor is arguably a better position to run from than VP - and certainly better than defeated VP candidate.
Even if "they" manage to get Biden to step aside, which is impossible without a 25th, there is no credible route for MO to be the Democratic candidate.
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
Don't think Pres and VP can be from the same state.
They can, it just makes it very slightly harder to win the election in the electoral college.
There is a conspiracy theory on the likes of InfoWars that Obama has always been the President behind the scenes. So they boomed Michelle Obama as the obvious next puppet after Biden and (ironically) Trump. A watered-down version feeds through to the US right media and money goes on Michelle Obama.
The problems.
1) No sign that Michelle Obama wants the job. 2) No sign the Democrat poobahs could get her the nomination. 3) It would be quite a canny political move and the Democrats may be known for many things but...
I have an acquaintance who has fallen down this rabbit hole. From total sanity to believing that the Obamas secretly run the world
It is honestly a tragic spectacle. It's all social media, it's like a fungus that gets in the brain
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
If you want there to be no state, and you don't want people to be forced to work, wouldn't you be dependent on private charity?
No - because private charity wouldn't exist. In anarcho syndicalism there is the community, that is essentially the decision making entity. Mutual aid, for example, is not the same as private charity (which is itself often funded by capital to use as a tax write off, as well as make rich people feel better). Mutual aid is about people taking power away from external institutions and place it back within the people inside the community themselves. Again - I have no desire to have to explain why anarchism is not "anarchy" as is understood by the layman or to outline the myriad interactions between people under anarchism when I have given the underpinning of my political philosophy - if you're actually interested I would suggest starting with Bookchin, Makhno and Kropotkin, and modern intellectuals like Graeber and Ocalan.
Anarchism is not "people do whatever they want" - it's closer to community organising via meetings and direct democracy. Like, sure, anarchists under capitalism do go out against state power and fascism and fight the system. But when we're organising ourselves it's lots of meetings and votes. It's just the idea that there should be no illegitimate unjust hierarchies, and the only legitimate hierarchies can be formed via direct democracy.
What if you find yourself in a community where you're ostracised and bullied? Would that not happen for some reason?
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
Lets assume that - as some reports have it - she has been preparing a potential run since 2022. The DNC finally accept that Sleepy Joe is asleep and break the news to him that its in everyone's best interests if he steps off the ticket.
Michelle Obama becomes the unity candidate. Qualification for the job? She isn't Donald Trump, and she used to live at the White House.
Michelle Obama becoming President is just more proof that American democracy is broken. We've had daddy and son Presidents. We nearly had husband and wife Presidents. What next - Chelsea Clinton vs Donald Trump Junior?
That's true. She'd be a galaxies better President than Donald Trump but this is about as close to a universal human characteristic as you can get.
It's not an easy one to price though. Eg remember Cameron coming back as FS? That took everyone by surprise. He'd have been a big price in a 'Next FS' market if he was even included. However unbeknown to anybody outside a small circle there'd been conversations where he'd been sounded out and said "yes ok, I'll do it". That was a key obstacle and it'd been cleared.
With MOB, all her public statements indicate in no uncertain terms she's not interested. The equivalent (to the info we didn't have re the DC return) would be if she's changed her mind. There's no particular reason to think she has. However IF she has, and if it becomes clear Biden can't do the campaign and she's the best placed to head off the catastrophe of Trump2, we'd probably be looking at a short price favourite as soon as it breaks.
Jelling all of this (plus several other factors) into a fair price now? As I say, not easy. You can only do a fat range. Fwiw I make it plenty higher than 10 but plenty lower than 100.
There is a conspiracy theory on the likes of InfoWars that Obama has always been the President behind the scenes. So they boomed Michelle Obama as the obvious next puppet after Biden and (ironically) Trump. A watered-down version feeds through to the US right media and money goes on Michelle Obama.
The problems.
1) No sign that Michelle Obama wants the job. 2) No sign the Democrat poobahs could get her the nomination. 3) It would be quite a canny political move and the Democrats may be known for many things but...
I have an acquaintance who has fallen down this rabbit hole. From total sanity to believing that the Obamas secretly run the world
It is honestly a tragic spectacle. It's all social media, it's like a fungus that gets in the brain
Yes, everyone knows it's the Clintons - who hate the Obamas.
‘No downsides, only considerable upsides’, part 94:
’Things have come to a pretty pass when the most authoritative government response to new figures testifying to the negative economic impact of Brexit is to insist that everything could have been so very much worse. Thus Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, cited doom-laden forecasts of “inevitable decline”, which, she said, “have been proved false”.
And, yes, thank goodness, the economic meltdown predicted by some did not happen – quite, with a very near miss, and a political crisis, in relation to Northern Ireland. But the lack of a complete meltdown, either in the weeks immediately after the UK’s departure from the EU took effect, or in the four years since, can be only limited consolation in the light of the latest assessment.
The report, compiled by John Springford, an associate of the Centre for European Reform, concludes that Brexit has opened a hole of almost £100bn in annual UK exports, which is making the country worse off than if it had remained in the European Union. The estimates show that missed growth in goods and services exports means that trade is running at 30 per cent below what it could have been without Brexit…
‘Now, the Centre for European Reform is a pro-EU think tank. But Springford’s economic credentials are not in doubt, and his conclusions chime with those of other recent surveys – which have, if anything, been even more negative about the extent to which the UK’s economy has been held back by Brexit. Among the most pessimistic findings have come from Cambridge Econometrics, which found that Brexit has already cost the UK economy £140bn in lost growth...
‘There have been knock-on effects on the standard of living, with Bloomberg estimating that GDP is 4 per cent lower than it might have been, with others citing lost investment, and a nearly £500 annual hit to UK workers’ pay – compared with what might otherwise have been expected...
‘Nor is it credible to explain the losses away as being caused entirely by external factors: the Covid pandemic, for instance, or the war in Ukraine. To be sure, these “black swan” events took a heavy toll on the UK economy. But they took a toll on many economies. Germany, for instance, upended the basic premises of its whole energy sector after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The difference is that others have, for the most part, bounced back more quickly or been able to cushion individuals and families more effectively against the shocks than have the successive post-Brexit governments in the UK.
Those who forecast that by leaving the EU, the UK was committing an enormous act of entirely avoidable self-harm are vindicated…
‘A full four years after Brexit came into effect, the balance sheet is not looking good, whether it is for trade, investment, or standards of living...’
The UK has full employment and no shortage of immigrants.
Perhaps they think the public sector would have become magically more productive if the UK was in the EU compared with what it was when the UK was in the EU.
Trade is a significant driver of productivity, it is well documented both in the macro data and at the firm level. By making it harder to trade, especially for smaller, fast growing firms, Brexit has harmed our growth prospects materially. Sad.
Although difficult to adjust for the covid disruptions.
And the idea that some theoretical extra exports from small business would have increased GDP by 4% really doesn't come close to adding up.
Higher productivity boosts both domestic production and production for export. I doubt that this channel accounts for the majority of the lost output to date but it will likely account for a growing share from here as I would guess it will be the main driver of ongoing dynamic economic losses as a result of Brexit.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should not exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
Not a failure of the people to buy food before anything else. Everyone on UC got a free £300 last Friday. Why not just spend that on food?
Because shit is expensive and people have limited time resources and so it's easier to buy somewhat cheap (although relatively expensive for the cost of the ingredients) but quick food rather than time intensive cheaper ingredients that can be made into cheap and healthy meals. Again, the vast majority of people who use food banks are in work - these are people in precarity, working long hours for little pay, and then also have to eat. That they work long hours for little pay is already a failure, but it is an additional failure that the state then fails them by not a) increasing the minimum wage and enforcing workers' rights and strong labour unions and b) by not at least topping up their pay to a sustainable level (until they can force their employers to do so via their wages).
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
Everyone can be a journalist now via social media and the internet and blogs, indeed much of the commentary on here is better than some journalism now
Systems like Archer, where the ammunition is pre loader into an auto loader, the crew don’t get out of the cab, and they can stop, shoot and leave in times measured in tens of seconds are what works in that environment.
With a coffee break that would be "eats, shoots and leaves"
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I have never claimed to earn a modest living and have no opinion on precisely where that line should be drawn. I would say that my parents earned a modest living and were broadly happy with it, although the arithmetic of that is very different in a world of much higher house prices.
Even if "they" manage to get Biden to step aside, which is impossible without a 25th, there is no credible route for MO to be the Democratic candidate.
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
That is not true. Whilst Kamala would be POTUS, the next Democratic nominee would be decided on the floor of the DNC conference - with delegates free to vote for whoever they wanted. If Biden died after the conference but before the vote, I think then his VP would automatically be the candidate for POTUS and they could choose a new running mate (although, again, the delegates in theory could vote for anyone and the Dems could argue that Biden's delegates should vote for whoever they agree should be the POTUS - which they wouldn't have to... that could become very tricky)
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
If that was true then Russia would have won in 2022.
Inaccurate artillery bombardments might look impressive but its precision what matters.
[According to various podcasts, I personally know nothing]
Ukraine can survive a deficit of artillery, especially with better precision, but only by so much (say 2:1 or 3:1), and the bigger the deficit the more people they lose. When they were running short in 2022 they got pushed back and lost Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. This year they seem to be down to something like 5:1 or 6:1 and if that keeps dropping then they're going to get pushed back further and more of them killed in the process.
The drone footage looks impressive but you only get to see the videos where the drone actually survived and managed to hit something, and generally it ends with a boom as they drop a grenade on a tank which may or may not actually seriously damage the tank. Also a lot of the tank kills you see are of tanks that have already been abandoned by the Russians because the Ukrainians were blowing the fuck out of everything in the vicinity with artillery.
Systems like Archer, where the ammunition is pre loader into an auto loader, the crew don’t get out of the cab, and they can stop, shoot and leave in times measured in tens of seconds are what works in that environment.
Systems like Archer, where the ammunition is pre loader into an auto loader, the crew don’t get out of the cab, and they can stop, shoot and leave in times measured in tens of seconds are what works in that environment.
With a coffee break that would be "eats, shoots and leaves"
For the British Army, obviously there is a Boiling Water vessel in the cab. So they can brew tea and drink it while the automated system empties the autoloader at the enemy.
I suppose in these bleak times we must gather good news stories where we can.
I'd need to check the science behind the story. However we all have resistance to cancer. Lots of ways the body deals with cells that go wrong. Cancers usually need a chain of cellular mutations and pre-existing genotypes to become as issue.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
This isn't very bright by you is it? A little bit of analysis shows that @IanB2 posts only a fraction of the posts you do. Myself, I hardly post at all. I can go several days without posting sometimes and when I do post it is only a handful of posts. Yesterday you must have made hundreds of posts, driving us all mad with drivel, and taking over the site. So commonsense should tell one that I am pretty forgettable, but you definitely are not (and that is not a compliment) simply because of the number of posts. So of course I am aware of you and you are probably not very aware of me. It isn't some syndrome as you call it, it is just stats and commonsense.
My post this morning was a mild joke at your expense. I'm surprised you took it so personally. It was a joke because it fitted your style. I mean the irony is you made an almost identical conspiracy type joke afterwards re Swift being a Lesbian. I neither believe you believe that conspiracy nor the one I jokingly accused you of.
A bit tetchy this morning (evening, assuming you are where you say you are and not in a basement in Dartford like some here think)
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
Everyone can be a journalist now via social media and the internet and blogs, indeed much of the commentary on here is better than some journalism now
For commentary, yes.
But actually finding things out, especially things that others don't want found out... There's still nothing to beat actual journalism. And that needs people to be paid to do it.
Anyone who pushes the loopy conspiracy theory Israel leaders allowed the attack on them so they could have a war, is unfit to be a British MP. Simples. Labour should expel the man from their party, and not have a candidate in the by election - hardly a difficult decision really with a GE coming. No one should vote for such a person under any mitigating circumstances.
The fact Labour haven’t expelled him, are standing by him, is a pathetic political decision - it’s no brainer decision to expel him, to sit this election out.
When rallying to the flag at war, things can’t be looked into for home truths, but they will be when the war closes, and I’d be surprised if the intelligence services don’t get the main blame for their failure, and the security forces for their failure.
The political situation regarding Netanyahu governments will be closely looked at and might find some weird things, possible even covert funding of Hamas by the Israeli government - but it’s the opposite kind of conspiracy if they were giving them money, in that they trusted things like that meant they wouldn’t do an attack.
There, I’ve said it; Netanyahu governments mistake is likely to have been too trusting of Hamas, and was too friendly with them.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
I would be in the 2% Topping, trundling along with my pittance
Likewise, @malcolmg I am more than content with my salary
Not least because, I enjoy my job so much I would do it for nothing. Yet I am well paid for it. That is immensely satisfying, and also extremely fortunate. I give thanks for my luck, daily
When I was a kid at school I figured out that people divide into two groups in terms of work, ie in later life some kids end up getting paid to do what they do during official schooltime - maths, physics, economics, Latin - and then there are kids who end up geting paid to do what they do during playtime - kick a football, tell stories, sing a song, carve a flint
In life, try and be in the latter group
So I get to play in a science lab (not as much as I would like, but enough) making new molecules and using state of the art analytical kit. Thats playtime for me.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
3) It would be quite a canny political move and the Democrats may be known for many things but...
Would it really be a canny move? Running the wife of a popular former president who starts out with good polling numbers is something they've tried before. Here's what happened the last time:
Systems like Archer, where the ammunition is pre loader into an auto loader, the crew don’t get out of the cab, and they can stop, shoot and leave in times measured in tens of seconds are what works in that environment.
With a coffee break that would be "eats, shoots and leaves"
For the British Army, obviously there is a Boiling Water vessel in the cab. So they can brew tea and drink it while the automated system empties the autoloader at the enemy.
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
It's "political correctness gone mad" all over again - plus ça change.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I've definitely had covid once, and probably two or three times. It wasn't particularly worse than the flu (I caught it post vax) and had me bed rest ill for maybe a couple of days, testing positive (But asymptomatic) for 10 or so. I'd be astonished if it's knocked 18 years off my life.
I'm guessing this table is for those who had a severe illness r continuing effects from Covid - because the amount of people who haven't caught covid once must be very low by now.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
Germany did not realise that that the conquest of Western Europe, at a cost of 50,000 dead, was a fluke. The casualties in the USSR were the norm.
Up to a point but remember that initially the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union went remarkably well. Perhaps an alternative history might have Hitler offering Stalin terms rather than assume capturing Moscow would lead to capitulation rather than Soviet industry and government simply relocating and fighting on.
The German army had a maximum operational range of 350 to 500 miles at best. After that it was impossible to supply (and Germany had terrible supply problems). Germany was not a highly automotive society in the 30's and 40's. The British were the first to have a fully motorized/mechanized army. The Russian railway was a different gauge to the German system and they destroyed bridges etc on the retreat.
Hitler could not offer terms to the Russians - it was a Race War, a war of annihilation. What terms can you give for that? And as for going well - the Germans lost 750,000 casualties (out of around 3 million). These were the cream of the Wehrmacht and the start of its decline.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Yebbut all computers stick together, don't they, so they would have been useless in the Post Office scandal. It would have been yes all good those lying thieving sub-post masters string 'em up, jail's too good for them, now, wouldn't it.
I suppose in these bleak times we must gather good news stories where we can.
I'd need to check the science behind the story. However we all have resistance to cancer. Lots of ways the body deals with cells that go wrong. Cancers usually need a chain of cellular mutations and pre-existing genotypes to become as issue.
Over the years there have been many, many stories of “animal x doesn’t get cancer”, “animal y resistant to cancer”
How many have actual led to actual, usable treatments?
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
I think that drones might be a substitute for artillery if they had better range, higher payloads, and were being produced in much greater numbers. So, they might be soon, but even if they were today, we're still not producing enough of them.
Things have come to a pretty pass when we can't even agree amongst ourselves on PB about what is the right strategy for Ukraine to win this war.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
What would have been said about the Western Front in WW1 right up to March 1918?
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
It's "political correctness gone mad" all over again - plus ça change.
It’s the actuality underlying the frothing.
So you have the Met Police spending a fortune on giving themselves awards on racial awareness. While strip searching black teenagers. Illegaly.
The worthy aim becomes the morons latest power point deck.
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
If you want there to be no state, and you don't want people to be forced to work, wouldn't you be dependent on private charity?
No - because private charity wouldn't exist. In anarcho syndicalism there is the community, that is essentially the decision making entity. Mutual aid, for example, is not the same as private charity (which is itself often funded by capital to use as a tax write off, as well as make rich people feel better). Mutual aid is about people taking power away from external institutions and place it back within the people inside the community themselves. Again - I have no desire to have to explain why anarchism is not "anarchy" as is understood by the layman or to outline the myriad interactions between people under anarchism when I have given the underpinning of my political philosophy - if you're actually interested I would suggest starting with Bookchin, Makhno and Kropotkin, and modern intellectuals like Graeber and Ocalan.
Anarchism is not "people do whatever they want" - it's closer to community organising via meetings and direct democracy. Like, sure, anarchists under capitalism do go out against state power and fascism and fight the system. But when we're organising ourselves it's lots of meetings and votes. It's just the idea that there should be no illegitimate unjust hierarchies, and the only legitimate hierarchies can be formed via direct democracy.
What if you find yourself in a community where you're ostracised and bullied? Would that not happen for some reason?
Even Ursula Le Guin's "perfect" anarchist societies were in reality, horribly conformist and oppressive.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Yebbut all computers stick together, don't they, so they would have been useless in the Post Office scandal. It would have been yes all good those lying thieving sub-post masters string 'em up, jail's too good for them, now, wouldn't it.
Indeed. Am I saying this is a good thing? Absolutely not
I remember growing up, my parents used to buy The Hereford Times, for local news. Then the West Briton, when Dad moved down to Cornwall
The Hereford Times probably sold 15-20k copies? Enough to support quite a few journalists, who ONLY covered news in Hereford and Herefordshire? Incredible - and wonderful. They uncovered local corruption, they did local events proud, the journalist from the Hereford Times was, locally, an important figure
All gone, and I don't know how it can be replaced, unless AI makes us all so rich society can subsidise these jobs as a worthy and good thing in themselves (and they probably are)
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
It's "political correctness gone mad" all over again - plus ça change.
It’s the actuality underlying the frothing.
So you have the Met Police spending a fortune on giving themselves awards on racial awareness. While strip searching black teenagers. Illegaly.
The worthy aim becomes the morons latest power point deck.
This is why the term "virtue signalling" in the mouths of some is so ironic. They complain that such awards are just "virtue signalling" but will also defend the racism - because their issue is addressing the racism at all, not that an award that says "we're the least racist racist government sanctioned mob" is laughable in the face of their racist actions.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
This isn't very bright by you is it? A little bit of analysis shows that @IanB2 posts only a fraction of the posts you do. Myself, I hardly post at all. I can go several days without posting sometimes and when I do post it is only a handful of posts. Yesterday you must have made hundreds of posts, driving us all mad with drivel, and taking over the site. So commonsense should tell one that I am pretty forgettable, but you definitely are not (and that is not a compliment) simply because of the number of posts. So of course I am aware of you and you are probably not very aware of me. It isn't some syndrome as you call it, it is just stats and commonsense.
My post this morning was a mild joke at your expense. I'm surprised you took it so personally. It was a joke because it fitted your style. I mean the irony is you made an almost identical conspiracy type joke afterwards re Swift being a Lesbian. I neither believe you believe that conspiracy nor the one I jokingly accused you of.
A bit tetchy this morning (evening, assuming you are where you say you are and not in a basement in Dartford like some here think)
If I "drive you mad with my drivel" (really? This is a peculiar remark in itself) you can simply scroll, no one forces anyone to engage with anything. So: simply scroll, and STFU
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
"the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old."
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
In this case, the context seems to be an ongoing fight between the brass and Shapps over the current army recruitment crisis.
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
I think that drones might be a substitute for artillery if they had better range, higher payloads, and were being produced in much greater numbers. So, they might be soon, but even if they were today, we're still not producing enough of them.
Things have come to a pretty pass when we can't even agree amongst ourselves on PB about what is the right strategy for Ukraine to win this war.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
What would have been said about the Western Front in WW1 right up to March 1918?
Ukraine's going to need substantially more equipment to achieve such a result.
Alastair Campbell: Spoke recently to a soldier friend who said “you’ve no idea how hard it is being in the military when you’re ashamed of your own government.”
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
I think that drones might be a substitute for artillery if they had better range, higher payloads, and were being produced in much greater numbers. So, they might be soon, but even if they were today, we're still not producing enough of them.
Things have come to a pretty pass when we can't even agree amongst ourselves on PB about what is the right strategy for Ukraine to win this war.
Judging by the snail's pace at which battles over modest towns, suburbs and villages- Adviika (In progress), Bakhmut for the Russians, Krinky, Staromaiorske for Ukraine seem to have gone after the initial attack by Russia and counter by Ukraine there's going to be fighting in the Donbas for the next hundred years.
What would have been said about the Western Front in WW1 right up to March 1918?
Ukraine's going to need substantially more equipment to achieve such a result.
The story of 1918 is actually the last gasp of the German army trying to win before the US army arrived big time on the Western Front. The series of attacks by the Germans set the scene for the '100 days', and arguably hastened the end (by venturing out, rather than just endlessly strengthening the Hindenberg line. That said, it was the allied blockade that won the war as Germany was running out of everything (just as happened a generation later).
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Alternatively, AI is the last best chance to salvage something from the smoking ruins.
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
We make a similar point about local journalism, however, i don't understand your last argument. It was a better news environment when local news was covered properly by dedicated people (being paid). Why shouldn't we want that world to return?
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
Please don't make me ask each PB contributor what, in their estimation, constitutes a "modest living".
I wouldn't put a number on it - but I mean the ability to pay bills, have a roof over your head, pay for food and other necessities, and support a family sounds like me a minimum for "modest living". Food banks, for example, should not exist.
Food banks shouldn't exist? So in your anarchist utopia there would be no mechanism to redistribute surplus food to those in need?
I mean, there are a lot of assumptions in that starting with the idea of surplus food - this food isn't surplus, it would have been bought if the people could just afford it. As I've said many times before; my axiom for resource distribution would be each according to their need.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
If you want there to be no state, and you don't want people to be forced to work, wouldn't you be dependent on private charity?
No - because private charity wouldn't exist. In anarcho syndicalism there is the community, that is essentially the decision making entity. Mutual aid, for example, is not the same as private charity (which is itself often funded by capital to use as a tax write off, as well as make rich people feel better). Mutual aid is about people taking power away from external institutions and place it back within the people inside the community themselves. Again - I have no desire to have to explain why anarchism is not "anarchy" as is understood by the layman or to outline the myriad interactions between people under anarchism when I have given the underpinning of my political philosophy - if you're actually interested I would suggest starting with Bookchin, Makhno and Kropotkin, and modern intellectuals like Graeber and Ocalan.
Anarchism is not "people do whatever they want" - it's closer to community organising via meetings and direct democracy. Like, sure, anarchists under capitalism do go out against state power and fascism and fight the system. But when we're organising ourselves it's lots of meetings and votes. It's just the idea that there should be no illegitimate unjust hierarchies, and the only legitimate hierarchies can be formed via direct democracy.
What if you find yourself in a community where you're ostracised and bullied? Would that not happen for some reason?
I mean the underpinning of anarchist thought is based in the inherent equality of all people, so it kind of depends. As I have pointed to many times, take Rojava. Due to the cultural and historic issues at play in that area, it was clear that many men did not want their wives involved in direct democracy, and that tensions along ethnic lines could lead to difficulties. So it was made part of how to make sure the anarcho syndicalism worked was to ensure women could participate and to ensure that ethnic minorities always represented. Much of anarchism works on the idea of consensus (and there are a few models of consensus). For example, one model is simply you need 100% of people to agree to a thing for that to be the thing people do going forward. Another model is to instead have a system where proposals are made and then people state if they have any issues with that proposal - if no one has a reason to object then that proposal will go through. In Rojava my (limited) understanding allows for the second type where, if a specific ethnic group object to a proposal for cultural reasons, that those objections must be met as long as they don't clash with the underlying principles of anarchism (such as female participation in politics).
So - why would an individual be "ostracised and bullied"? Arguably the only legitimate reason would be actions that undermine the inherent equality of all people; which is what we deem crime. How crime is dealt with under anarchism also depends on your specific interests - for some people a form of trial that involves the entire community makes sense, for others a mediation process between the parties involved is enough, etc etc. The thing is it isn't taken out of the context of the people who know them, are affected by the actions, and imposed top down. Now you may argue this will just lead to mob rule, and I would argue that the legal system as we have developed it is just putting mob rule in a silly wig to give it respectability. Oh, and defining the mob doing the ruling as a very specific set of rich people whose interests are not the same as most peoples.
Off topic completely, but I saw this study doing the rounds that (to me as a 30 something still experiencing Long Covid) seems pretty scary. The general idea is that those who suffered Covid are more likely to have more deterioration in their DNA and that their biological age becomes wildly out of sync with their actual age - and that this is more prominent the younger you are:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
I don't think you can infer shortening of life expectancy from this. Notable they think effect reversible in some people. I'm sure we will learn more over time.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
You've just got some weird obsession with me, like @IanB2
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
The list of things that never enter your head is however a long one.
This is a comment by you, hours ago - when I was not here, and hadn't been here for some time
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
This isn't very bright by you is it? A little bit of analysis shows that @IanB2 posts only a fraction of the posts you do. Myself, I hardly post at all. I can go several days without posting sometimes and when I do post it is only a handful of posts. Yesterday you must have made hundreds of posts, driving us all mad with drivel, and taking over the site. So commonsense should tell one that I am pretty forgettable, but you definitely are not (and that is not a compliment) simply because of the number of posts. So of course I am aware of you and you are probably not very aware of me. It isn't some syndrome as you call it, it is just stats and commonsense.
My post this morning was a mild joke at your expense. I'm surprised you took it so personally. It was a joke because it fitted your style. I mean the irony is you made an almost identical conspiracy type joke afterwards re Swift being a Lesbian. I neither believe you believe that conspiracy nor the one I jokingly accused you of.
A bit tetchy this morning (evening, assuming you are where you say you are and not in a basement in Dartford like some here think)
If I "drive you mad with my drivel" (really? This is a peculiar remark in itself) you can simply scroll, no one forces anyone to engage with anything. So: simply scroll, and STFU
Weird considering I hardly do engage with you compared to others and when I do it is sometimes positive, like asking a question. I have commented the last couple of days a bit more because the number of posts from you has just taken over the site. Yes one can scroll past, but when 50% of the posts are from you it just destroys the fun of the site. You must see you are doing this surely. Less is more.
This morning was just a little joke at your expense (well actually the main joke wasn't even at your expense and plenty then made follow up comments). I don't know why you have taken it so personally. I would have left it at the first line of my comment if I had known you were going to be so sensitive.
Alastair Campbell: Spoke recently to a soldier friend who said “you’ve no idea how hard it is being in the military when you’re ashamed of your own government.”
I think Campbell has simply blanked out Iraq in its entirety, it didn't happen, it's not a thing, that is the only way he can cope with his tragic role in it
He has made other telling remarks which imply that is his mindset
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
Yebbut all computers stick together, don't they, so they would have been useless in the Post Office scandal. It would have been yes all good those lying thieving sub-post masters string 'em up, jail's too good for them, now, wouldn't it.
Indeed. Am I saying this is a good thing? Absolutely not
I remember growing up, my parents used to buy The Hereford Times, for local news. Then the West Briton, when Dad moved down to Cornwall
The Hereford Times probably sold 15-20k copies? Enough to support quite a few journalists, who ONLY covered news in Hereford and Herefordshire? Incredible - and wonderful. They uncovered local corruption, they did local events proud, the journalist from the Hereford Times was, locally, an important figure
All gone, and I don't know how it can be replaced, unless AI makes us all so rich society can subsidise these jobs as a worthy and good thing in themselves (and they probably are)
Arguably the problem isn't so much AI, it's a lack of people willing to pay to take an interest in their local area. It's hard to believe that actual paid-for local newspapers existed, but they did, in great numbers. I click often on links to stories in the Manchester Evening News, but I can't imagine many people pay for it any more. And that's Manchester, where quite a lot goes on! Hard to imagine there was ever a market for a Hereford local newspaper. And yet, almost everyone is at most only one or two steps removed from a facebook group for their local area. Perhaps the interest hasn't gone away; perhaps it is just that people are no longer willing to part with fifty pence for a newspaper when so much content exists for free.
Rather sad, I think. The death of local newspapers and the removal of national newspapers from the news-space makes it incredibly difficult to find out what is going on, or measuring trends (and hence changes) over time.
It is really really sad. I also fear it is all true, journalism is largely finished. AI will take over 80-90% of it
It seems to me that daily journalism of the newspaper sort has simply been taken over by the digital spaces (of which PB is one) that, every second, 24 hours a day, link and comment to each other. Because newspapers, even before the digital takeover, started substituting quantity for quality, press releases for reporting, and third rate comment for proper journalism, life for most people is too short to bother, except for their part in the 'links' world.
Two things have taken their place. Weekly journalism, (The Economist has 1,158,000 subscribers) and specialist sources. For example western media more or less ignore Africa altogether apart from disaster stuff and the first week of a war, but it can be had elsewhere. Eg, the west has no interest in the Sudan war but
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
I know a bit about this, as it's adjacent to some of the things I do for work.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
In fact, this story is such a load of nonsense that it's almost making me wonder if other "woke" stories have also been cynically invented to distract from real, actual government failings.
Various “woke” ideas have been latched onto by the incompetent, to explain away organisational paralysis.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
In this case, the context seems to be an ongoing fight between the brass and Shapps over the current army recruitment crisis.
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
Indeed.
Both sides in this are talking bollocks.
Society has moved on a bit. This means that the terms and conditions for the military aren’t a slam dunk. That and Crapita in the recruitment process.
Comments
Inaccurate artillery bombardments might look impressive but its precision what matters.
What works in Ukraine is shoot-and-scoot.
- A pre planned fire mission.
- The vehicle rocks up at a randomly chosen location at the appointed time.
- fire a bunch of rounds, in concert with other systems. But the other systems aren’t at the same location.
- leave, if you can, before the last round hits the target.
Systems like Archer, where the ammunition is pre loader into an auto loader, the crew don’t get out of the cab, and they can stop, shoot and leave in times measured in tens of seconds are what works in that environment.
Not sure how that would affect the price of eggs but might be a contributory factor to any decision.
I think she would be excellent and certainly no worse than current candidates.
I mean, I don't come on here at 8am and announce apropos of nothing, "Hey guess what I bet @kjh will be along in an hour to tell us about facial hair in Myanmar" - the idea of you, as a concept, never enters my head
There have been several examples of both anti-Ukrainian and anti-Russian violence in Germany since the war started; there are quite large numbers of both Russain and Ukrainians living there, of course.
ministers, hardly know which end of the bat to hold. And we have more than two more years of this.
A grim development
The Labour Party has changed from a party that looked inwards to a party that meets the public gaze.
From a party of dogma to a party of patriotism.
With my leadership there will zero tolerance of antisemitism, of racism, of discrimination of any kind.
https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1625887628141764610?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Along with creating new meme fodder.
https://twitter.com/vikhyatk/status/1756931179222302939
I don't have expensive tastes, and I take pleasure in the simple, free, things in life, but keeping within a modest budget, and worrying whether the fridge will need replacing, is mentally very wearing.
I'll choose a less modest living in order to live without those worries, thankyouverymuch.
This is not meant as a provocation, she is just a nullity in my mind, I don't know anything about her. I guess she wrote that book which did very well? - but I never read it, and it could have been ghosted
I am happy to be schooled if there is plenty of evidence that she is in fact a political and intellectual titan
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/exports
Although difficult to adjust for the covid disruptions.
And the idea that some theoretical extra exports from small business would have increased GDP by 4% really doesn't come close to adding up.
Food banks should exist because it shows, under the current system we have, that wages and government assistance are not enough for working people to afford food staples. Most people who use food banks are the working poor. That private charity needs to be organised to help huge numbers of working people eat is a clear failure of the system we live in.
She has some experience in government - but in the appointed political positions that are common in the US. Not elective politics.
Obviously, I can't give specific details... but if you were to think about some of the checks you might run on someone before granting them a security clearance, one of them might be something like a credit check.
Nice and simple in the UK - sign contracts with the credit reference agencies, hire a team of software developers, and in a few months you'll have an automated system that will get you the required information in less than a second.
Not so simple for an overseas recruit, especially if they're somewhere like Nepal where there might not even be a credit reference agency to talk to.
So you're going to have to check the applicant's financial history manually, and then you'll want to verify that information with his bank or community in Nepal. Rather than a few seconds, this might take many months.
Meanwhile, you've got this applicant who wants to start his job. But he can't because you're hanging on waiting for a Nepalese money-lender to confirm that they did indeed repay that 1000 Rupee loan they had five years ago.
In that case, you might well decide to let the applicant start at risk, making sure he doesn't go beyond basic training without the full clearance coming through.
Not woke, just a very simple operational decision that allows the pipeline of overseas recruits to be unclogged.
Or to be a bit more specific, the farming industry works on a world of interlinked chains just like any other kind of industry “cars” “steel” “techno widget” and when links in the chain can’t carry on, or needs to up prices or diversify, it hits on the smooth running of lots of other things. I guess it’s a bit like the problem when factory shut that was supplying by product to what they were doing, so it impacted keeping things fresh, and like when beer was threatened because a particular gas wasn’t flowing into UK.
Quite an extraordinary racial ancestry, from slavery to Native American roots, and she does have an impressive educational CV - Princeton, postgrad, etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Obama
Less impressive professonally, but perhaps she sacrificed her career to aid her husband? Who did quite well, TBF
Her wiki entry doesn't scream "i want to be POTUS" tho
Probably not 😀
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event
If he drops dead, which is not impossible, it'll be Harris with Newsom as VP.
https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov
Which goes some way to explain her relative popularity.
But like the 'generic Democrat', who also usually outpolls real world candidates, that would probably change dramatically if her (highly unlikely) candidacy became a reality.
"Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?)"
That's me, isn't it? You are referring to me? Or Boris Johnson, but I reckon it's me
You can't help yourself
i imagine you have a framed photo of me in your bedroom, which you feverishly wank over, and then, after you've climaxed, you angrily hit the photo with your tiny fists, and encourage the dog to come out of your bed and join in, then you wank over the photo, all over again
This is not a criticism
The problems.
1) No sign that Michelle Obama wants the job.
2) No sign the Democrat poobahs could get her the nomination.
3) It would be quite a canny political move and the Democrats may be known for many things but...
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/bills/inflation-rise-4-1-2899317
If it does stick and not fall much till later in the year, interest rates won’t be cut very quickly.
Also tax cuts and budget giveaways could encourage it upwards.
I’ll add all this to the May 2nd argument.
And they have 'Total Tory Seats lost at next GE, 1-50', at 66/1.
It seems to me that Rishi is only going to be PM after the next GE (5/1) if the Tories lose only between 1-50 seats (66/1).
Neither of these outcomes is likely. But I wonder, if Labour carry on with their Rochdale fiasco for a bit, and add a few more (this is a Labour speciality) that the 66/1 'losing 1-50 seats' is value.
DYOR.
So what is your point?
To take the case of Central Devon, where Mel Stride is the sitting MP, the Tories won 16 district council seats last year, the Lib Dems 19 and the Labour Party not a single one. Just nine months ago.
If Labour were indeed on the point of taking such Westminster seats, one might have expected them to win even one seat. But no. The anti-Tory vote is coalescing around the Lib Dems.
This story was published in the Times..... Who owns the Times??? And what is his objective?
Anarchism is not "people do whatever they want" - it's closer to community organising via meetings and direct democracy. Like, sure, anarchists under capitalism do go out against state power and fascism and fight the system. But when we're organising ourselves it's lots of meetings and votes. It's just the idea that there should be no illegitimate unjust hierarchies, and the only legitimate hierarchies can be formed via direct democracy.
And would Newsom accept in any event ?
Seems unlikely to me, as if she won, he'd be effectively sidelined, and if she were to lose, he'd go down with the ship. Governor is arguably a better position to run from than VP - and certainly better than defeated VP candidate.
Newsom could do a "Chaney" anyway.
It is honestly a tragic spectacle. It's all social media, it's like a fungus that gets in the brain
"I'll believe it when it happens"...
It's not an easy one to price though. Eg remember Cameron coming back as FS? That took everyone by surprise. He'd have been a big price in a 'Next FS' market if he was even included. However unbeknown to anybody outside a small circle there'd been conversations where he'd been sounded out and said "yes ok, I'll do it". That was a key obstacle and it'd been cleared.
With MOB, all her public statements indicate in no uncertain terms she's not interested. The equivalent (to the info we didn't have re the DC return) would be if she's changed her mind. There's no particular reason to think she has. However IF she has, and if it becomes clear Biden can't do the campaign and she's the best placed to head off the catastrophe of Trump2, we'd probably be looking at a short price favourite as soon as it breaks.
Jelling all of this (plus several other factors) into a fair price now? As I say, not easy. You can only do a fat range. Fwiw I make it plenty higher than 10 but plenty lower than 100.
Just as “‘Elf and Safety” was used by bullshit merchants to deny progress on anything. Actual H&S was usually ignored by these morons.
So now you have legions of clowns using racism, sexism, ableism etc as their excuse.
Aside from the organisation not doing anything, the actual racism, sexism etc goes unchecked. And Dave from accounting still can’t get his wheelchair through the door. Because it is too fucking narrow.
Ukraine can survive a deficit of artillery, especially with better precision, but only by so much (say 2:1 or 3:1), and the bigger the deficit the more people they lose. When they were running short in 2022 they got pushed back and lost Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. This year they seem to be down to something like 5:1 or 6:1 and if that keeps dropping then they're going to get pushed back further and more of them killed in the process.
The drone footage looks impressive but you only get to see the videos where the drone actually survived and managed to hit something, and generally it ends with a boom as they drop a grenade on a tank which may or may not actually seriously damage the tank. Also a lot of the tank kills you see are of tanks that have already been abandoned by the Russians because the Ukrainians were blowing the fuck out of everything in the vicinity with artillery.
Which is in desperately short supply.
My post this morning was a mild joke at your expense. I'm surprised you took it so personally. It was a joke because it fitted your style. I mean the irony is you made an almost identical conspiracy type joke afterwards re Swift being a Lesbian. I neither believe you believe that conspiracy nor the one I jokingly accused you of.
A bit tetchy this morning (evening, assuming you are where you say you are and not in a basement in Dartford like some here think)
But actually finding things out, especially things that others don't want found out... There's still nothing to beat actual journalism. And that needs people to be paid to do it.
The fact Labour haven’t expelled him, are standing by him, is a pathetic political decision - it’s no brainer decision to expel him, to sit this election out.
When rallying to the flag at war, things can’t be looked into for home truths, but they will be when the war closes, and I’d be surprised if the intelligence services don’t get the main blame for their failure, and the security forces for their failure.
The political situation regarding Netanyahu governments will be closely looked at and might find some weird things, possible even covert funding of Hamas by the Israeli government - but it’s the opposite kind of conspiracy if they were giving them money, in that they trusted things like that meant they wouldn’t do an attack.
There, I’ve said it; Netanyahu governments mistake is likely to have been too trusting of Hamas, and was too friendly with them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29801-8
The key table here:
This could mean a general shortening of life expectancy, as well as more illnesses associated with aging in younger people; with Long Covid essentially being part of that as your body goes from having the DNA strength of a 20-30 year old to having the equivalent strength of a 40-50 year old. I am not a medic, so any doctors or scientists here who know better than me I would be extremely grateful if you can tell me if this all sounds like bullcrap - but if it isn't will we not have to change a lot of policy priors (such as people being capable of working well into their 60s and 70s) after generation Covid?
Its Sunak's fault - he makes the laws. He forced this guy onto the ballot paper. Boooooooo.
I'm guessing this table is for those who had a severe illness r continuing effects from Covid - because the amount of people who haven't caught covid once must be very low by now.
Hitler could not offer terms to the Russians - it was a Race War, a war of annihilation. What terms can you give for that? And as for going well - the Germans lost 750,000 casualties (out of around 3 million). These were the cream of the Wehrmacht and the start of its decline.
How many have actual led to actual, usable treatments?
So you have the Met Police spending a fortune on giving themselves awards on racial awareness. While strip searching black teenagers. Illegaly.
The worthy aim becomes the morons latest power point deck.
I remember growing up, my parents used to buy The Hereford Times, for local news. Then the West Briton, when Dad moved down to Cornwall
The Hereford Times probably sold 15-20k copies? Enough to support quite a few journalists, who ONLY covered news in Hereford and Herefordshire? Incredible - and wonderful. They uncovered local corruption, they did local events proud, the journalist from the Hereford Times was, locally, an important figure
All gone, and I don't know how it can be replaced, unless AI makes us all so rich society can subsidise these jobs as a worthy and good thing in themselves (and they probably are)
Local papers, local radio, they seem to need a monopoly for the finances to stack up. If you're the only place the local car dealership has to go to get an advert out to everyone, that brings in enough money to fund the journalism. Once that market atomised, the money wasn't there any more.
Back in the 80's a town like Gosport (population 80,000) could support a daily edition of the Portsmouth News, with 3 or 4 dedicated hacks based in a High Street office. Sales fell, so the product got worse, so sales fell even more and it's all gone now.
Overall, we probably don't want to go back to that world, but some important things have been lost.
I am not aware of a metric called the DNA strength - that's probably the bull crap part of this. I am sorry to hear of your long covid - are you willing to share your symptoms? One thing to note - long term response to infection is not a new thing, and not unique to Covid. I think there is an issue with some people who have been affected by infection with covid (and this paper is interesting - I will read in full later) but there area also people suffering in other ways that may not be related to a physical process. Some reports of people with long covid (and by no means all) sound very similar to FND (functional neuronal disorders - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-All-Your-Head-Psychosomatic/dp/0099597853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F11M757UHFI1&keywords=fnd+suzanne+o'sullivan&qid=1707737980&sprefix=fnd+suzanneo'sullivan,aps,291&sr=8-1).
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/labour-candidate-fell-for-online-conspiracy-theory-about-hamas-attacks-shadow-minister-says/ar-BB1i8WkC?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=75b40c8b460447a385ede8d801445173&ei=5
The Labour front bench are saying that he 'fell for an online conspiracy theory'. I thought this was red-on-red infighting, but it appears to be the Labour line for his defence. Hardly a ringing defence, is it?
Absurd statements from both sides... Brass - "we might need conscription!", Shapps - "woke!". What it likely actually needs is more money, an acceptance of reduced capacity, or a willingness to think about meeting requirements in other ways.
I'm actually quite disappointed in Shapps for leaning into the woke nonsense, I had genuinely thought he was better than that. The situation he's trying to distract from must be truly desperate.
https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1756943519858458939
Alastair Campbell: Spoke recently to a soldier friend who said “you’ve no idea how hard it is being in the military when you’re ashamed of your own government.”
How we do that, is a different question. But properly reported local news is a good thing, no?
So - why would an individual be "ostracised and bullied"? Arguably the only legitimate reason would be actions that undermine the inherent equality of all people; which is what we deem crime. How crime is dealt with under anarchism also depends on your specific interests - for some people a form of trial that involves the entire community makes sense, for others a mediation process between the parties involved is enough, etc etc. The thing is it isn't taken out of the context of the people who know them, are affected by the actions, and imposed top down. Now you may argue this will just lead to mob rule, and I would argue that the legal system as we have developed it is just putting mob rule in a silly wig to give it respectability. Oh, and defining the mob doing the ruling as a very specific set of rich people whose interests are not the same as most peoples.
I couldn't actually find the table in the paper, sorry if I'm being dumb.
This morning was just a little joke at your expense (well actually the main joke wasn't even at your expense and plenty then made follow up comments). I don't know why you have taken it so personally. I would have left it at the first line of my comment if I had known you were going to be so sensitive.
He has made other telling remarks which imply that is his mindset
And yet, almost everyone is at most only one or two steps removed from a facebook group for their local area. Perhaps the interest hasn't gone away; perhaps it is just that people are no longer willing to part with fifty pence for a newspaper when so much content exists for free.
Two things have taken their place. Weekly journalism, (The Economist has 1,158,000 subscribers) and specialist sources. For example western media more or less ignore Africa altogether apart from disaster stuff and the first week of a war, but it can be had elsewhere.
Eg, the west has no interest in the Sudan war but
https://sudantribune.com/
does.
Both sides in this are talking bollocks.
Society has moved on a bit. This means that the terms and conditions for the military aren’t a slam dunk. That and Crapita in the recruitment process.