He is not perfectly adequate. He’s a bed-blocker for someone who actually believes in London and is willing to use the admittedly-limited powers available to advance its cause.
That he is better than Hall is no recommendation.
In my darker moments, I fear that Starmer could be a kind of national Khan.
So who would you like to be Mayor?
Personally I would have voted for Rory Stewart.
Livingstone (First Term) and Johnson (First Term) were pretty good.
You want someone with a bit of urban passion who is willing to use the bully pulpit to influence broader stakeholders.
Not sure Rory’s got that either, to be honest.
Andy Birmingham and Andy Manchester both seems to do that pretty well. Who is there who is able (and, more importantly, willing) to do the same for London? Sadiq and Susan are meh-to-awful, but there's no obvious good alternatives that they have blocked.
(Part of Khan's problem is that he's had eight years, he's basically done what he set out to do in ULEZ, but there isn't a plausible successor who could let him retire, even if he wanted to.)
These were all initiated and largely implemented by others. I’ll give him ULEZ.
But ULEZ, as much as I support it, is rather paltry fare for one of the greatest cities on Earth.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. They were clinched and delivered on his watch, while he was mayor. Ergo, he quite reasonably claims them just as anyone else would.
This William Wragg story looks like it’s going to explode !!
I'm just baffled why anyone would do what is alleged. Giving out private details of friends and acquaintances to a unknown third party because you think the third party can compromise you - wtf?
He had already announced himself as a stand-down at the next Election, BTW.
And sending naked photos of himself to someone, as an elected politician with risks that are obvious. Where do the parties get these people from?
Remember the post I've made many times
No one sane wants to be an MP, there are easier ways to make more money and easier ways to make the changes you wish to make...
Work for a lobbyist. Get a grant of the govt to then lobby the govt for the policy you want. You get the change you want with no accountability and you get well paid for it.
That is the next scandal. Or rather it's already happening. But we aren't paying enough attention. Yet. Unaccountable lobbyists are the overmighty union barons or over-indulged City of our time.
Utility companies wave hello.
How's this for a funny one? I'm suing A Certain Company because they repeatedly attempted to swindle me. They've just applied to dismiss the case. The only reason they give is that they do not consider it to have merit. The real reason (and I am not making this up) is as they made clear when asking me for yet another extension for their reply is they have lost the paperwork...
I hope you are taping your calls with them.
It's all been by email.
But yes, future calls will be taped.
Afaik if you intend that your recording might have some future utility you have to inform the other party that the conversation is being taped?
Probably, but I've no qualms about doing that.
They record calls anyway so in a sense the point is moot.
Careful.
A couple of years ago i was interviewed under caution and it was of course recorded. Later, I asked for a copy and got a supposed transcript. It was highly selective and seriously misleading.
Make your own recording.
Interesting. A friend, when reporting a crime (vote theft) had to get his “statement” re-written to reflect what he actually said.
The first version (he showed me a copy) was simply weird.
Oh, some years back I received a friendly visit from a Community Police Officer. He was very nice, and we had a agreeable discussion in which we agreed about the main points he was interested in.
A year or so later i was shown a statement he had allegedly written about the meeting. It was a work of fiction.
Bear in mind that this is Gloucestershire Police we are talking about here. My own view is that the CPO was not the author of the inaccurate statement, but draw your own conclusions.
I had fun with Gloucestershire police several years ago where a police sergeant obviously took a fancy to my ex who was living there, took her story without question or bothering to take any actual evidence from her which would have closed things down straight away, made me travel there from somewhere else I was visiting in the UK to meet him at 11pm after his shift started and tried to give me a caution.
About a year later I received an email from him saying I had a warrant out for my arrest as I didn’t attend court on the matter I had been charged with (wasn’t told I was being charged).
Eventually after a load of correspondence with the CPS where I sent them downloads of my phone etc showing messages to and from my ex I had the warrant and the charges dropped. I also demonstrated that the Sergeant was lying about trying to contact me and letting me know I was being charged as could prove absolutely no attempt to contact me by phone or email and yet mysteriously he had successfully contacted me to tell me there was a warrant for my arrest.
It could have been an absolute nightmare if I had unwittingly travelled to the UK in that period as I would have been arrested on landing which would have been very embarrassing and cause a massive issue.
A few years later my ex contacted me and we made friends and when we discussed it all she said that she had withdrawn her accusation but the Sergeant refused to let it go, said it was out of her hands, and he kept offering to visit her to check up in her (a very beautiful French woman) which I guess he did for all complainants.
Whenever I see a headline about a police officer from Gloucestershire in trouble I check if it was him as he is the sort of thick misguided twat the police desperately need to root out.
This resonates.
The dishonesty is less striking than the utter incompetence which will come as no surprise to anyone who has had dealings with them.
In fairness I should add that they have recently been taken out of special measures. They can now no longer be regarded as one of the worst six forces in the country - a lo bar, but at least they have cleared it.
Btw, would you like to share the name of the officer in question? PM me if you like.
I think you are being much, much too hard on yourself. I don't think Corbynism was a cult. We have a wide range of beliefs here and all you did was be in that spectrum and changed your views to now appear elsewhere in that spectrum of views and are embarrassed by your previous views
That is not cult stuff. Cult stuff is believing in lizard rulers, contrails full of chemicals, etc. Although I think Trumpism is a cult, so where you draw the line is difficult, but people like Corbyn and Johnson for instance are just not the same as Trump..
That's kind but I really do think it was a cult. The things that I said and saw, for example that mural I defended it despite it being obviously anti-Semitic.
I do not think all Corbynites were cultists - but I think Corbynism was a cult and I was in a cult.
Whatever you want to call it, I am glad to have got out and returned to having views that I can sincerely hold and argue without shame. For me that is enough.
How do you know you are not down a rabbit hole now.
Well, I can never know that for sure. I don't think you can either.
But I don't feel like I am. I'm quite aware of Starmer's flaws for example and I am quite prepared to vote Conservative if Labour ends up screwing up the country.
It’s time to retire the word “racist”. It’s lost whatever original meaning it once had and is now freely applied, often as a straightforward attempt to “cancel” or delegitimise someone or something.
I now prefer the word “prejudiced”. One can be prejudiced against black people, white people, Muslims, Scotsmen, accordion-players, Tory MPs, and Cheshire-based PB posters.
We are all, in fact, somewhat prejudiced. It is a human failing against which we must constantly check ourselves. Being “prejudiced” therefore is a hopefully temporary state of sin, capable of correction, whereas “racist” is used now to significantly a permanent state of moral perdition.
When I lived in NZ 3 decades ago there was a great euphemism in use. If someone made a racist comment etc they would be asked "don't you think that is a bit culturally insensitive?".
Far less confrontational than calling someone racist, and it did require people to examine their attitudes.
I think "culturally insensitive" is a very useful phrase still.
What about - “Don’t be a wanker” ?
Or is that culturally insensitive?
Depends if you think wanking is "impure"?
I can’t remember - depends which kind of religious bigot I am today. I try to rotate - Opus Dei on Sundays, Wee Free on Tuesdays….
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
Well with all due respect, as one example, after the killing of the aid workers you said it was deliberate and that they'd not apologised.
Despite the fact they immediately apologised and said it immediately was a tragic mistake.
They've now not just apologised and promised an investigation, but sacked those behind the mistake.
Do you accept it was a tragic mistake, or do you still insist it was deliberate? We have made mistakes in wars in the past, in the fog of war everyone does.
How is any of this anti-Semitic?
It depends.
If you're consistent and would do the same with Britain and Russia and America and everyone else then it's not.
If you're holding them to separate standards because they're Jews and Jews can do no right, then it is.
I'm not saying you personally are. But I do think, with all due respect, you flirt with the edge and it's fuelled in part by innocently swallowing the propaganda of those who outright are.
I think in part, you swallow the propaganda of the Israeli Government. In some of the things you say, you come across utterly uncaring about any fellow human beings. Some of the language you use I find beyond the pale myself.
I don't hold Israel to higher standards than any other country. I am simply calling them out for what they have done, which is to kill many innocent people trying to provide aid to other innocent people. I believe they targeted these people on purpose, to try and starve the Gazan people to death. That is my opinion.
Now if we want to hold other states to the same standard, what Russia is doing is equally as appalling as what Hamas have done to Israel. What the UK did in Iraq was appalling. What the US does with the death penalty, with its actions abroad, Guantanamo Bay etc. is appalling.
Every country does appalling things. But the point is that I was talking about what Israel has just done - and they keep doing it. Why?
It is a pisspoor attempt to look like a man of the people.
Only David Tennant is allowed to wear trainers with suits.
Maybe he's just having some foot pain from some problem and prefers trainers.
You can buy some decent shoes that are as comfortable as trainers.
Honestly some of the Louis Vuitton loafers are like having your feet being massaged by angels.
Serious question: I get some metatarsalgia (ball of foot hurts). What would you recommend that's stylish and affordable?
Mephisto are good, if you have sensitive feet. Depends on your definition of stylish, though.
Ecco are good too. Some of their work shoes are as comfortable as trainers.
With any foot problem (I have an arthritic toe from an old injury) the exact fit is crucial, so I always wear new shoes around the house for a few days before going outside or removing the labels. That way can legitimately return them and try a different pair.
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
Not at all - it's a real issue. Extraordinary look. How did it happen?
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
How do you know you are not down a rabbit hole now.
Well, I can never know that for sure. I don't think you can either.
But I don't feel like I am. I'm quite aware of Starmer's flaws for example and I am quite prepared to vote Conservative if Labour ends up screwing up the country.
Traitor!
Then so be it. Frankly and people may find this hard to believe, I do not give the "scum" label to Boris Johnson. I think he's a coward, a liar and totally unfit to lead the country and is probably the worst PM to ever lead the country but his actions seem to mostly have come from his laziness and character failings as opposed to actually being genuinely nasty which I have to conclude in much of what Corbyn did (for example), he was. The way he and others treated Luciana Berger for example, I think is vile.
I don't think the Tories are scum, I don't believe the Tory Party is scum. I think if they got back to the centre ground and appealed to me I would vote for them. I don't see that myself as a bad thing.
Anyway, I will urge myself to get off the scum thing as I can see it's not a helpful title.
...I think that if the 1944 plot to kill Hitler in the Wolf's Lair had succeeded, the Allies would have still insisted on Unconditional Surrender and Allied Occupation...
Weren't some of the Germans and Italians who signed and organised the surrender of Caserta treated more leniently because they did that (fairly useless) surrender?
Italians only, and I think you mean Cassabile (8th Sep 1943).
Four or five days before the end of the war in Europe. The argument *against* being that the protracted 'negotiation' for the surrender was unnecessary; a much simpler and quicker surrender could have been negotiated which would have saved many lives. Instead, the Germans and Italians involved were more interested in saving their own necks. Karl Wolf being one such example.
Didn't do Anton Dostler any good - he was tried for War Crimes, and executed nearby.
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
Not at all - it's a real issue. Extraordinary look. How did it happen?
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
How is that? I’m not a particular fan of the Royal Family, I just pity them rather than be consumed by jealousy
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
Not at all - it's a real issue. Extraordinary look. How did it happen?
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
How is that? I’m not a particular fan of the Royal Family, I just pity them rather than be consumed by jealousy
Accepted: apols.
It's still an odd image, and without the photoshop nonsense.
How do you know you are not down a rabbit hole now.
Well, I can never know that for sure. I don't think you can either.
But I don't feel like I am. I'm quite aware of Starmer's flaws for example and I am quite prepared to vote Conservative if Labour ends up screwing up the country.
Traitor!
Then so be it. Frankly and people may find this hard to believe, I do not give the "scum" label to Boris Johnson. I think he's a coward, a liar and totally unfit to lead the country and is probably the worst PM to ever lead the country but his actions seem to mostly have come from his laziness and character failings as opposed to actually being genuinely nasty which I have to conclude in much of what Corbyn did (for example), he was. The way he and others treated Luciana Berger for example, I think is vile.
I don't think the Tories are scum, I don't believe the Tory Party is scum. I think if they got back to the centre ground and appealed to me I would vote for them. I don't see that myself as a bad thing.
Anyway, I will urge myself to get off the scum thing as I can see it's not a helpful title.
"This Bounty Hunter Tory is MY kind of scum: fearless and inventive!"
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
1) modern camera lens stuffing up perspective as a result of depth of field 2) no dog for scale
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
Yep. It was the lying. Just as it wasn't the "parties". It was the lying. The guy just lied as easily as breathing. Got away with it for ages due to his charm and charisma (plus a chunk of luck and class deference) but eventually he didn't.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
Still seems like a bunch of nothing much to me
I think if it had been the first incident, it would have been a lot of nothing. But the fact was that he'd kept doing it. Over and over and over and over. And the MPs decided enough was enough.
For what it is worth, I do think they'd be doing better if he was the leader. But they'd still be on course to lose handsomely.
“I'm pretty sure that we've built the first recoverable weapon, which is pretty cool,” Brose said. “It fundamentally changes how operators can think about shot doctrine in the air defense fight.”
Road Runner was born from a napkin sketch about two years ago. Its explosive warhead could be replaced with an intelligence sensor that could take pictures of fast-moving enemy aircraft, ships, or even spot nascent wildfires before they spread. Luckey sees the Road Runner being used in a host of roles, from defending military bases to protecting critical infrastructure.
A company video shows the half-drone, half-missile launching from a white box that resembles an oversized refrigerator or deep freezer. The so-called “nest” is climate-controlled and monitors the health of the Road Runner, Luckey said.
“It's doing the job that typically would have required a team of aircraft maintainers in a hangar to do: keeping a jet aircraft ready to get off the ground very quickly,” he said. “It does that totally autonomously, for months at a time.”
Road Runner is powered by company-made jet engines, which are being used “in five different products,” Luckey said. When landing, the drone looks like a cape-wearing superhero slowly floating to the ground.
The company is building the drones on a production line here and aims to make hundreds or more per year.
“There's no reason that you can't have 100,000 Road Runners just sitting around all over the world ready to do their thing with a very small number of people managing all of them,” Luckey said.
So how did the company settle on the name Road Runner?
“One of the competitors is the Coyote block two,” Luckey said referring to the RTX-made counter-drone system. “We're all competitors. We're just having a little fun with each other.”..
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
Not at all - it's a real issue. Extraordinary look. How did it happen?
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
How is that? I’m not a particular fan of the Royal Family, I just pity them rather than be consumed by jealousy
Accepted: apols.
It's still an odd image, and without the photoshop nonsense.
It's just a photographer using a wide angle lens indoors to get the shot. Always looks a bit odd.
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
Not at all - it's a real issue. Extraordinary look. How did it happen?
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
How is that? I’m not a particular fan of the Royal Family, I just pity them rather than be consumed by jealousy
Accepted: apols.
It's still an odd image, and without the photoshop nonsense.
It's just a photographer using a wide angle lens indoors to get the shot. Always looks a bit odd.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
Which, lest we forget, was what actually brought him down over Partygate. Not that the parties happened, but that Boris came out with implausible denials about his knowlege of them.
Could he have survived fessing up from the start? I don't know, but the route he tried was a) what he has always done when cornered and b) doomed because you just can't lie at the despatch box.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
Which, lest we forget, was what actually brought him down over Partygate. Not that the parties happened, but that Boris came out with implausible denials about his knowlege of them.
Could he have survived fessing up from the start? I don't know, but the route he tried was a) what he has always done when cornered and b) doomed because you just can't lie at the despatch box.
He got away with lying at the dispatch box for quite some time?
How do you know you are not down a rabbit hole now.
Well, I can never know that for sure. I don't think you can either.
But I don't feel like I am. I'm quite aware of Starmer's flaws for example and I am quite prepared to vote Conservative if Labour ends up screwing up the country.
Traitor!
Then so be it. Frankly and people may find this hard to believe, I do not give the "scum" label to Boris Johnson. I think he's a coward, a liar and totally unfit to lead the country and is probably the worst PM to ever lead the country but his actions seem to mostly have come from his laziness and character failings as opposed to actually being genuinely nasty which I have to conclude in much of what Corbyn did (for example), he was. The way he and others treated Luciana Berger for example, I think is vile.
I don't think the Tories are scum, I don't believe the Tory Party is scum. I think if they got back to the centre ground and appealed to me I would vote for them. I don't see that myself as a bad thing.
Anyway, I will urge myself to get off the scum thing as I can see it's not a helpful title.
The "scum" label that has dogged Rayner is, I suspect, in down at heel Mancunian circles probably less offensive than genteel PB Tories understood it to be. It's like Mogg calling you and me a trogladite or a plebian. We workers don't know what he means so take no offence.
This William Wragg story looks like it’s going to explode !!
I'm just baffled why anyone would do what is alleged. Giving out private details of friends and acquaintances to a unknown third party because you think the third party can compromise you - wtf?
He had already announced himself as a stand-down at the next Election, BTW.
And sending naked photos of himself to someone, as an elected politician with risks that are obvious. Where do the parties get these people from?
Remember the post I've made many times
No one sane wants to be an MP, there are easier ways to make more money and easier ways to make the changes you wish to make...
Work for a lobbyist. Get a grant of the govt to then lobby the govt for the policy you want. You get the change you want with no accountability and you get well paid for it.
That is the next scandal. Or rather it's already happening. But we aren't paying enough attention. Yet. Unaccountable lobbyists are the overmighty union barons or over-indulged City of our time.
Utility companies wave hello.
How's this for a funny one? I'm suing A Certain Company because they repeatedly attempted to swindle me. They've just applied to dismiss the case. The only reason they give is that they do not consider it to have merit. The real reason (and I am not making this up) is as they made clear when asking me for yet another extension for their reply is they have lost the paperwork...
I hope you are taping your calls with them.
It's all been by email.
But yes, future calls will be taped.
Afaik if you intend that your recording might have some future utility you have to inform the other party that the conversation is being taped?
Probably, but I've no qualms about doing that.
They record calls anyway so in a sense the point is moot.
Careful.
A couple of years ago i was interviewed under caution and it was of course recorded. Later, I asked for a copy and got a supposed transcript. It was highly selective and seriously misleading.
Make your own recording.
Interesting. A friend, when reporting a crime (vote theft) had to get his “statement” re-written to reflect what he actually said.
The first version (he showed me a copy) was simply weird.
Oh, some years back I received a friendly visit from a Community Police Officer. He was very nice, and we had a agreeable discussion in which we agreed about the main points he was interested in.
A year or so later i was shown a statement he had allegedly written about the meeting. It was a work of fiction.
Bear in mind that this is Gloucestershire Police we are talking about here. My own view is that the CPO was not the author of the inaccurate statement, but draw your own conclusions.
I had fun with Gloucestershire police several years ago where a police sergeant obviously took a fancy to my ex who was living there, took her story without question or bothering to take any actual evidence from her which would have closed things down straight away, made me travel there from somewhere else I was visiting in the UK to meet him at 11pm after his shift started and tried to give me a caution.
About a year later I received an email from him saying I had a warrant out for my arrest as I didn’t attend court on the matter I had been charged with (wasn’t told I was being charged).
Eventually after a load of correspondence with the CPS where I sent them downloads of my phone etc showing messages to and from my ex I had the warrant and the charges dropped. I also demonstrated that the Sergeant was lying about trying to contact me and letting me know I was being charged as could prove absolutely no attempt to contact me by phone or email and yet mysteriously he had successfully contacted me to tell me there was a warrant for my arrest.
It could have been an absolute nightmare if I had unwittingly travelled to the UK in that period as I would have been arrested on landing which would have been very embarrassing and cause a massive issue.
A few years later my ex contacted me and we made friends and when we discussed it all she said that she had withdrawn her accusation but the Sergeant refused to let it go, said it was out of her hands, and he kept offering to visit her to check up in her (a very beautiful French woman) which I guess he did for all complainants.
Whenever I see a headline about a police officer from Gloucestershire in trouble I check if it was him as he is the sort of thick misguided twat the police desperately need to root out.
This resonates.
The dishonesty is less striking than the utter incompetence which will come as no surprise to anyone who has had dealings with them.
In fairness I should add that they have recently been taken out of special measures. They can now no longer be regarded as one of the worst six forces in the country - a lo bar, but at least they have cleared it.
Btw, would you like to share the name of the officer in question? PM me if you like.
I will dig it out - all correspondence is in one of my old gmails I haven’t used for a few years. I still travel with one of my original two copies of letters from the CPS confirming everything is dropped if I’m going to or via the UK just in case some system error sends the police to get me off the plane. No apology however.
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Duncan is alleging that Senior politicians in the Lords and Commons are bidding for an overseas Government. I don't believe he is remotely anti-Semitic but he calls into question domestic corruption.
I agree with this. His comments are criticising the Nethanyahu regime and our govts closeness to it which is fair comment. There may be other stuff he has said that was not quoted but from what I have seen I think this issue is artificial offence.
Of course we have the Israeli ultras here who think any criticism of Israel and its govt is also anti semitic.
Criticism of the Israeli government is entirely legitimate.
Holding them to standards you wouldn't hold any other nation is not.
I don't think anyone here is doing that. Do you?
You very openly have described your rabbit hole and cult susceptibility.
Criticism of Israel is entirely legitimate (if it is genuine criticism of Israel; it is not always) but if you also look at some of your comments on the Israeli actions and government you will see that you use hugely emotive language and terms that suggest an extreme of emotion over rationality.
Corby wasn't scum. AFAICS he was a run of the mill lefty, redistributive, anti-semite of which there are zillions around, even on well-respected internet chat rooms. Likewise, the Israeli government are not scum. They are fighting a war. Is Netanyahu scum? I don't follow it that closely to know what he has or hasn't done but I doubt it. I loathe BoJo but I wouldn't call him scum.
Well at least I am open to my failings. If you think I’m in a cult then you can say so. But I do not think I am.
Emotive language does not mean I am in a cult. I accept you may perceive it that way but the actions of the Israelis in recent days I do think are utterly appalling.
I do think Corbyn was scum yes.
I think you take issue more with the way I write, which is fair enough as it goes but I don't really have much more to say to you as I sense we are not going to agree.
I don't take issue with the way you do anything. You are a great contributor to this site and are one of the posters we know we get feelings straight onto the page with. Plenty of posters have to run by themselves what they post to ensure it either doesn't betray who they really are, or that it projects the wrong image to others.
Not you - you tell it like you see it.
My point was just that some of the language you have been using to describe the Israelis seems to be out of a cult's lexicon.
Something which the remain side got very wrong (and me too), was that they should have voted through Theresa May's deal. Rory Stewart has convinced me.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
Still seems like a bunch of nothing much to me
And to the likes of Nadine. He can do no wrong for his uberfans. And no right for his "haters" of course.
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP.
The Conservative former minister Alan Duncan
Your original quote was about the differing attitudes towards antisemitism between Labour and Tory MPs.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP, in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s friends in years past, who were very much Labour MPs at the time, and many of them still are.
Those Labour MPs are scum, clearly.
But the way anti-Semitism is reported in the Tories vs Labour is different. Actually forget anti-Semitism, just racism in general, for example Islamophobia.
So where is the Tory MP who has a problem with antisemitism?
Well I sincerely believed Alan Duncan was still a Tory MP but I was wrong. Former MP then. For what it's worth, I am not saying Duncan is anti-Semitic, I don't think he is. More that his comments are given a fair hearing compared to MPs from other parties.
But the Tories clearly have problems with racism of their own, which is as bad in my view, as the anti-Semitism in Labour.
I know of Duncan from his days working for Marc Rich in the '80s. I didn't know him personally but from what I saw and by all accounts he was a decent enough guy. Quite a flamboyant gay, but not a hint of racial prejudice.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
Yep. It was the lying. Just as it wasn't the "parties". It was the lying. The guy just lied as easily as breathing. Got away with it for ages due to his charm and charisma (plus a chunk of luck and class deference) but eventually he didn't.
Slightly more complicated than that, even. Boris has been sacked and dumped multiple times for his dishonesty. The remarkable thing is that he managed to fail upwards so many times. So he never really learned the lesson that dishonesty is a bad thing. Even the running away is just his standard MO.
The difference this time was that there wasn't really an upwards to fail to.
“I'm pretty sure that we've built the first recoverable weapon, which is pretty cool,” Brose said. “It fundamentally changes how operators can think about shot doctrine in the air defense fight.”
Road Runner was born from a napkin sketch about two years ago. Its explosive warhead could be replaced with an intelligence sensor that could take pictures of fast-moving enemy aircraft, ships, or even spot nascent wildfires before they spread. Luckey sees the Road Runner being used in a host of roles, from defending military bases to protecting critical infrastructure.
A company video shows the half-drone, half-missile launching from a white box that resembles an oversized refrigerator or deep freezer. The so-called “nest” is climate-controlled and monitors the health of the Road Runner, Luckey said.
“It's doing the job that typically would have required a team of aircraft maintainers in a hangar to do: keeping a jet aircraft ready to get off the ground very quickly,” he said. “It does that totally autonomously, for months at a time.”
Road Runner is powered by company-made jet engines, which are being used “in five different products,” Luckey said. When landing, the drone looks like a cape-wearing superhero slowly floating to the ground.
The company is building the drones on a production line here and aims to make hundreds or more per year.
“There's no reason that you can't have 100,000 Road Runners just sitting around all over the world ready to do their thing with a very small number of people managing all of them,” Luckey said.
So how did the company settle on the name Road Runner?
“One of the competitors is the Coyote block two,” Luckey said referring to the RTX-made counter-drone system. “We're all competitors. We're just having a little fun with each other.”..
Strong XFY-1 vibes crossed with X-13
It’s not the first recoverable weapon - plenty of drones have been used as “hit something or bring it back”
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
Well with all due respect, as one example, after the killing of the aid workers you said it was deliberate and that they'd not apologised.
Despite the fact they immediately apologised and said it immediately was a tragic mistake.
They've now not just apologised and promised an investigation, but sacked those behind the mistake.
Do you accept it was a tragic mistake, or do you still insist it was deliberate? We have made mistakes in wars in the past, in the fog of war everyone does.
How is any of this anti-Semitic?
It depends.
If you're consistent and would do the same with Britain and Russia and America and everyone else then it's not.
If you're holding them to separate standards because they're Jews and Jews can do no right, then it is.
I'm not saying you personally are. But I do think, with all due respect, you flirt with the edge and it's fuelled in part by innocently swallowing the propaganda of those who outright are.
I think in part, you swallow the propaganda of the Israeli Government. In some of the things you say, you come across utterly uncaring about any fellow human beings. Some of the language you use I find beyond the pale myself.
I don't hold Israel to higher standards than any other country. I am simply calling them out for what they have done, which is to kill many innocent people trying to provide aid to other innocent people. I believe they targeted these people on purpose, to try and starve the Gazan people to death. That is my opinion.
Now if we want to hold other states to the same standard, what Russia is doing is equally as appalling as what Hamas have done to Israel. What the UK did in Iraq was appalling. What the US does with the death penalty, with its actions abroad, Guantanamo Bay etc. is appalling.
Every country does appalling things. But the point is that I was talking about what Israel has just done - and they keep doing it. Why?
Because they are at war, Horse. And war is shit.
Some are "just" (usually because we won them) and some less so (usually because we disagree with the premise of the aggressor if we are not the aggressor in which case it would be a Just War).
But it is a war. Now, you can say, a rag tag mob of militants blamming off a few rounds at their much more powerful neighbour and then the neighbour responds with the methods at its disposal, well that's just not fair (still less just). But you have to put yourself into the boots (or Adidas Spezials) of the person doing the responding or indeed initially the aggressing.
Hamas and the Gazans believe that Israel is occupying its historic lands. You then have to ask whether being given some of those lands "back" (they never had them to start with but still) and continuing to harass their supposed aggressor to the point of crossing the border and killing over a thousand of them is the right way to go about it but that is their right to do.
Likewise, it is Israel's right to respond. Which is what we're seeing right now.
Which, lest we forget, was what actually brought him down over Partygate. Not that the parties happened, but that Boris came out with implausible denials about his knowlege of them.
Could he have survived fessing up from the start? I don't know, but the route he tried was a) what he has always done when cornered and b) doomed because you just can't lie at the despatch box.
He got away with lying at the dispatch box for quite some time?
He's been lying in lots of places, all his life.
Including quite a lot of beds that are not his own.
“I'm pretty sure that we've built the first recoverable weapon, which is pretty cool,” Brose said. “It fundamentally changes how operators can think about shot doctrine in the air defense fight.”
Road Runner was born from a napkin sketch about two years ago. Its explosive warhead could be replaced with an intelligence sensor that could take pictures of fast-moving enemy aircraft, ships, or even spot nascent wildfires before they spread. Luckey sees the Road Runner being used in a host of roles, from defending military bases to protecting critical infrastructure.
A company video shows the half-drone, half-missile launching from a white box that resembles an oversized refrigerator or deep freezer. The so-called “nest” is climate-controlled and monitors the health of the Road Runner, Luckey said.
“It's doing the job that typically would have required a team of aircraft maintainers in a hangar to do: keeping a jet aircraft ready to get off the ground very quickly,” he said. “It does that totally autonomously, for months at a time.”
Road Runner is powered by company-made jet engines, which are being used “in five different products,” Luckey said. When landing, the drone looks like a cape-wearing superhero slowly floating to the ground.
The company is building the drones on a production line here and aims to make hundreds or more per year.
“There's no reason that you can't have 100,000 Road Runners just sitting around all over the world ready to do their thing with a very small number of people managing all of them,” Luckey said.
So how did the company settle on the name Road Runner?
“One of the competitors is the Coyote block two,” Luckey said referring to the RTX-made counter-drone system. “We're all competitors. We're just having a little fun with each other.”..
Strong XFY-1 vibes crossed with X-13
It’s not the first recoverable weapon - plenty of drones have been used as “hit something or bring it back”
Mini jet engines are getting cheap these days.
First jet powered one, I think. It's more akin to a recoverable missile than a drone.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
You are talking the scorpion and the frog here. Every politician wants to be PM, or at least be in as powerful a position as possible. Therefore every politician's DNA is to advance themselves as far as possible to further that aim. Deposing Boris wasn't some grand plan coming together, it was a tactical decision made by people who thought they would gain political position from it.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
It is also lacking in credibility to assume Boris could have kept his coalition together either. He promised mutually opposite things to people who sincerely believed him. That just doesn't pass the test of time for a leader in a democracy.
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP.
The Conservative former minister Alan Duncan
Your original quote was about the differing attitudes towards antisemitism between Labour and Tory MPs.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP, in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s friends in years past, who were very much Labour MPs at the time, and many of them still are.
Those Labour MPs are scum, clearly.
But the way anti-Semitism is reported in the Tories vs Labour is different. Actually forget anti-Semitism, just racism in general, for example Islamophobia.
So where is the Tory MP who has a problem with antisemitism?
Well I sincerely believed Alan Duncan was still a Tory MP but I was wrong. Former MP then. For what it's worth, I am not saying Duncan is anti-Semitic, I don't think he is. More that his comments are given a fair hearing compared to MPs from other parties.
But the Tories clearly have problems with racism of their own, which is as bad in my view, as the anti-Semitism in Labour.
I know of Duncan from his days working for Marc Rich in the '80s. I didn't know him personally but from what I saw and by all accounts he was a decent enough guy. Quite a flamboyant gay, but not a hint of racial prejudice.
Did you work for Marc Rich too?
No, but I worked with someone who was associated with Marc Rich. I went to their offices on Wigmore Street a few times but never saw Marc or Pinci.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
I think you proceed from a false assumption or two.
1) The people who ousted him were long term Boris Johnson fans (the likes of Priti Patel, JRM, Zahawi, and even Jonathan Gullis) realised that they won down to Boris Johnson in 2019 but his behaviour on Pincher was unforgivable and would see the Tories lose the next election.
I knew a few people who worked at Downing Street/CCHQ for Boris Johnson, one of them put it in very stark terms, it was like me turning on Dave, even Boris knew if he was losing the likes of them it was over.
2) As Richard Nabavi pointed out the day after Boris Johnson became PM, the destruction was inevitable under Boris
"The party is no longer recognisable as the pragmatic, business-friendly, economically-sound, reality-based party of government which I have supported for decades. It will justifiably get the electoral blame for the consequences of the disastrous course it has chosen, and will probably never be forgiven by younger voters."
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
You raise an interesting point. Did the people that brought him down do it for the right reasons (i.e. they won't contemplate supporting liars) and they wanted somebody more decent? But then I would question why they elected him in the first place, as they knew full well what he was like.
In that case, if we are to conclude they did it for self-interest, they must have concluded that somebody else had a better chance of winning. Johnson was behind in the polls when he left (albeit less than now). Was there anyone else that could win, I do not think any polling showed that.
So I only conclude 14 years of government has picked a lot of brains and good judgment has gone out of the window completely. Much the same happened during the end of New Labour, when it was quite obvious removing Brown was the right thing to do but nobody did.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
I don't think that borne out by the polling. The decline in Tory polling began in summer 2021 and has been pretty much linear since, apart from a squiggle for the Trussocalypse, to present time. If you didn't know the point in time that Johnson resigned you couldn't pick it out on the graph.
There's something really odd about the perspectives in that photo. Everything (the flag, the furniture, the windows, the PM) is slightly but clearly the wrong size.
This has the sniff of Republicans and their analysis of Princess Catherine’s pics!
Not at all - it's a real issue. Extraordinary look. How did it happen?
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
How is that? I’m not a particular fan of the Royal Family, I just pity them rather than be consumed by jealousy
That's exactly my view too. Life in the goldfish bowl. An inhumane institution.
Interesting 15 year study from the Netherlands which finds that gender discontentedness is common in early adolescence but in very large part disappears with age (the cohort who have been followed since 11 are now 26).
The discontent seems to be closely linked to concepts of self worth and mental health generally with a slightly increased propensity amongst those who are not heterosexual. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38413534/
What it appears to me that this piece of substantial research indicates, once again, is that giving adolescents who have such anxieties puberty blockers and hormone treatment is neither necessary nor desirable. My view, rather than that of the authors, is that such interventions are far more likely to do harm than good for problems that have a very high propensity to resolve over time without them. It concerns me greatly that in Scotland there is still rigorous denial of this reality and a desire to use such troubled children as pawns in a game which seems designed to show that trans is more prevalent than it actually is.
The heartbreak we are witnessing in Gaza is an unmitigated disaster and Israel needs to reflect that incidents like killing innocent aid workers by accident or design is turning opinion against the continuation of this conflict and it is time for everyone to call on Netanyahu and Hamas to agree a ceasefire, release all hostages on both sides and seek a resolution but goodness knows what that will look like after the devastation in Gaza
Maybe this is unrealistic but the wise leaders will be those who get round the table with all sides and prosecute peace
I am not posting as much as quite a lot of discussions are polarised and at times rather unpleasant and I do not have the bandwidth to be involved
It was interesting that in Scotland 70% want change of leaderships and governing parties but that Starmer and labour have not convinced many that they are the answer. If true the SNP may perform above expectations at the GE
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP.
The Conservative former minister Alan Duncan
Your original quote was about the differing attitudes towards antisemitism between Labour and Tory MPs.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP, in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s friends in years past, who were very much Labour MPs at the time, and many of them still are.
Those Labour MPs are scum, clearly.
But the way anti-Semitism is reported in the Tories vs Labour is different. Actually forget anti-Semitism, just racism in general, for example Islamophobia.
So where is the Tory MP who has a problem with antisemitism?
Well I sincerely believed Alan Duncan was still a Tory MP but I was wrong. Former MP then. For what it's worth, I am not saying Duncan is anti-Semitic, I don't think he is. More that his comments are given a fair hearing compared to MPs from other parties.
But the Tories clearly have problems with racism of their own, which is as bad in my view, as the anti-Semitism in Labour.
I know of Duncan from his days working for Marc Rich in the '80s. I didn't know him personally but from what I saw and by all accounts he was a decent enough guy. Quite a flamboyant gay, but not a hint of racial prejudice.
Did you work for Marc Rich too?
The Marc Rich charged with tax evasion, wire fraud, sanctions busting and various other offences, who fled to Switzerland, donated money to the Democratic Party and was pardoned by Clinton when he left office?
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
I don't think that borne out by the polling. The decline in Tory polling began in summer 2021 and has been pretty much linear since, apart from a squiggle for the Trussocalypse, to present time. If you didn't know the point in time that Johnson resigned you couldn't pick it out on the graph.
I think you’re quite wrong to assume it would be linear if Boris had remained. Even if it had, he has infinitely more scope to woo voters back into the fold than any other Tory leader. For all the hate they attract, serial womanisers whose spouses give them umpteen chances are generally pretty good at talking their way into being given another crack at it
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
I think you proceed from a false assumption or two.
1) The people who ousted him were long term Boris Johnson fans (the likes of Priti Patel, JRM, Zahawi, and even Jonathan Gullis realised that they won down to Boris Johnson in 2019 but his behaviour on Pincher was unforgivable and would see the Tories lose the next election.
I knew a few people who worked at Downing Street/CCHQ for Boris Johnson, one of them put it in very stark terms, it was like me turning on Dave, even Boris knew if he was losing the likes of them it was over.
2) As Richard Nabavi pointed out the day after Boris Johnson became PM, the destruction was inevitable under Boris
"The party is no longer recognisable as the pragmatic, business-friendly, economically-sound, reality-based party of government which I have supported for decades. It will justifiably get the electoral blame for the consequences of the disastrous course it has chosen, and will probably never be forgiven by younger voters."
has turned out to be prescient.
And the party, understandably, had cut Boris a lot of slack already. But everyone has their personal limit.
It's the standard dilemma any employer has. If you have a star performer who is also a terrible human being, do you keep them or chuck them? There comes a point where you have to chuck them, or you end up with the sort of talent scandals that the BBC had.
“I'm pretty sure that we've built the first recoverable weapon, which is pretty cool,” Brose said. “It fundamentally changes how operators can think about shot doctrine in the air defense fight.”
Road Runner was born from a napkin sketch about two years ago. Its explosive warhead could be replaced with an intelligence sensor that could take pictures of fast-moving enemy aircraft, ships, or even spot nascent wildfires before they spread. Luckey sees the Road Runner being used in a host of roles, from defending military bases to protecting critical infrastructure.
A company video shows the half-drone, half-missile launching from a white box that resembles an oversized refrigerator or deep freezer. The so-called “nest” is climate-controlled and monitors the health of the Road Runner, Luckey said.
“It's doing the job that typically would have required a team of aircraft maintainers in a hangar to do: keeping a jet aircraft ready to get off the ground very quickly,” he said. “It does that totally autonomously, for months at a time.”
Road Runner is powered by company-made jet engines, which are being used “in five different products,” Luckey said. When landing, the drone looks like a cape-wearing superhero slowly floating to the ground.
The company is building the drones on a production line here and aims to make hundreds or more per year.
“There's no reason that you can't have 100,000 Road Runners just sitting around all over the world ready to do their thing with a very small number of people managing all of them,” Luckey said.
So how did the company settle on the name Road Runner?
“One of the competitors is the Coyote block two,” Luckey said referring to the RTX-made counter-drone system. “We're all competitors. We're just having a little fun with each other.”..
Strong XFY-1 vibes crossed with X-13
It’s not the first recoverable weapon - plenty of drones have been used as “hit something or bring it back”
Mini jet engines are getting cheap these days.
First jet powered one, I think. It's more akin to a recoverable missile than a drone.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
I think you proceed from a false assumption or two.
1) The people who ousted him were long term Boris Johnson fans (the likes of Priti Patel, JRM, Zahawi, and even Jonathan Gullis) realised that they won down to Boris Johnson in 2019 but his behaviour on Pincher was unforgivable and would see the Tories lose the next election.
I knew a few people who worked at Downing Street/CCHQ for Boris Johnson, one of them put it in very stark terms, it was like me turning on Dave, even Boris knew if he was losing the likes of them it was over.
2) As Richard Nabavi pointed out the day after Boris Johnson became PM, the destruction was inevitable under Boris
"The party is no longer recognisable as the pragmatic, business-friendly, economically-sound, reality-based party of government which I have supported for decades. It will justifiably get the electoral blame for the consequences of the disastrous course it has chosen, and will probably never be forgiven by younger voters."
has turned out to be prescient.
What Richard said maybe true, but what I said was only Boris could have held the new coalition together, and I think that is also true. Where Sunak has gone wrong is trying to convince that 2019 coalition that Boris wasn’t needed. He should have gone back the Cameronism that Richard craved, it’s the only way they can win in the future in my opinion.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
They were fairly clearly wrong to think they could win without him (although TBC). But we'll never know if they could have won THIS election with him.
2022 Johnson was not 2019 Johnson in the public's mind. The joke wasn't funny enough to enough people any more, the bright sunlit uplands the booster-in-chief had promised were nowhere to be seen, he'd proved chaotic and unable to maintain the trust of those working with him, and the idea of a man partying while gran died and ignoring the rules he set for others was hard to shake. He'd had a succession of by-election drubbings, was in deep trouble for lying to Parliament, and significant trouble for lying to colleagues.
He was and is a charismatic figure. He'd won a stonking election victory and the 2020s should have belonged to him. But he'd f***ed it all up through his own deep character flaws, within 20 months.
You can comfort yourself with the idea that he'd have changed and that the REAL Johnson would've shone through in the remainder of the Parliament and beyond, turning it all around. Maybe, but it doesn't sound at all realistic to me - sounds like hogwash and fantasy.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
I think you proceed from a false assumption or two.
1) The people who ousted him were long term Boris Johnson fans (the likes of Priti Patel, JRM, Zahawi, and even Jonathan Gullis) realised that they won down to Boris Johnson in 2019 but his behaviour on Pincher was unforgivable and would see the Tories lose the next election.
I knew a few people who worked at Downing Street/CCHQ for Boris Johnson, one of them put it in very stark terms, it was like me turning on Dave, even Boris knew if he was losing the likes of them it was over.
2) As Richard Nabavi pointed out the day after Boris Johnson became PM, the destruction was inevitable under Boris
"The party is no longer recognisable as the pragmatic, business-friendly, economically-sound, reality-based party of government which I have supported for decades. It will justifiably get the electoral blame for the consequences of the disastrous course it has chosen, and will probably never be forgiven by younger voters."
has turned out to be prescient.
What Richard said maybe true, but what I said was only Boris could have held the new coalition together, and I think that is also true. Where Sunak has gone wrong is trying to convince that 2019 coalition that Boris wasn’t needed. He should have gone back the Cameronism that Richard craved, it’s the only way they can win in the future in my opinion.
I have said before that the Tories can only win again when they revert to the pro-EU party that they were for the half century to 2016.
It will probably take them over a decade to realise it of course.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I think you misrepresent or at least misunderstand the Pincher story.
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
Still seems like a bunch of nothing much to me
The relationship between MPs and the PM is quite a personal one.
It's probably not dissimilar to that between a football manager and the players. They think he has their back, and whatever he might say to the press, he will tell them the truth.
When a manager lies to the players' faces, it destroys trust.
And that's what happened. The MPs no longer felt they could trust Boris.
I wonder whether Rishi & co, the people who knifed Boris, staged some kind of intervention with him at any point. Whether they say him down and said ‘Look you just can’t behave like this as PM, and it’s got to stop. We realise you’re the only one that can win for us but we will take you down if you dont buck up’ or whether they really believed there was a pathway to success without him , so just got rid
They did, half the cabinet told him pretty much that the weekend he told them he hadn't known about Chris Pincher being a sexual predator.
I think ‘sexual predator’ makes it sound worse than it was, but in any case, so we know that Theresa May didn’t know when she appointed him too?
I believe so, remember she fired her friend from university Damian Green for being a bit handsy with a journalist. so if she could sack him she would have fired Pincher if she had known it was a pattern.
All this considered, it still seems to me to be incredible that the people that brought Boris down genuinely thought they could win without him. Had he never been PM they could have, but not once he’d changed their voter coalition
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
They were fairly clearly wrong to think they could win without him (although TBC). But we'll never know if they could have won THIS election with him.
2022 Johnson was not 2019 Johnson in the public's mind. The joke wasn't funny enough to enough people any more, the bright sunlit uplands the booster-in-chief had promised were nowhere to be seen, he'd proved chaotic and unable to maintain the trust of those working with him, and the idea of a man partying while gran died and ignoring the rules he set for others was hard to shake. He'd had a succession of by-election drubbings, was in deep trouble for lying to Parliament, and significant trouble for lying to colleagues.
He was and is a charismatic figure. He'd won a stonking election victory and the 2020s should have belonged to him. But he'd f***ed it all up through his own deep character flaws, within 20 months.
You can comfort yourself with the idea that he'd have changed and that the REAL Johnson would've shone through in the remainder of the Parliament and beyond, turning it all around. Maybe, but it doesn't sound at all realistic to me - sounds like hogwash and fantasy.
He could’ve blamed it all on the pandemic and restarted; people would have bought it - he’s still the most popular choice as leader with 2019 Cons.
As for the people who sought to replace him, they’d have been better off waiting until he lost the next GE, if they thought it was so certain to happen. Then they could have started over as a new broom, where’s now they’re doomed, DOOMED I TELL YE
Interesting 15 year study from the Netherlands which finds that gender discontentedness is common in early adolescence but in very large part disappears with age (the cohort who have been followed since 11 are now 26).
The discontent seems to be closely linked to concepts of self worth and mental health generally with a slightly increased propensity amongst those who are not heterosexual. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38413534/
What it appears to me that this piece of substantial research indicates, once again, is that giving adolescents who have such anxieties puberty blockers and hormone treatment is neither necessary nor desirable. My view, rather than that of the authors, is that such interventions are far more likely to do harm than good for problems that have a very high propensity to resolve over time without them. It concerns me greatly that in Scotland there is still rigorous denial of this reality and a desire to use such troubled children as pawns in a game which seems designed to show that trans is more prevalent than it actually is.
Interesting. There are some other studies with similar findings.
The main limitation I see (from a quick skim - and they don't seem to discuss it) is that they don't appear to have any data on treatment for gender dysphoria, so they don't know whether gender dysphoria is resolving by itself or in response to treatment (psychological, puberty blockers, x-sex hormones). Worth noting that we also can't do that with any certainty in the UK (well, England at least - not certain for other nations) using already-collected data as the GIDS and adult clinics data are not readily available for research and there are legal barriers to linkage if someone has gained a gender recognition certificate.
ETA: On the main message, it certainly seems like there is a group that experiences temporary gender dysphoria that does resolve (it may in those cases be a mask for other, different, underlying issues - not fitting in, mental health and gender seeming like the problem and solution). But then there is another group with persistent (or 'real', if you like) gender dysphoria and that group seems to benefit from the interventions. The trouble is that ideally you need to correctly discriminate those groups before puberty, to put the second group on the blockers and then the x-sex hormones (and likely, eventually, surgery) and to put the first group, if needed, on appropriate treatments for the real problem (and not blockers or x-sex hormones). But how do you tell which troubled young people are in which group?
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP.
The Conservative former minister Alan Duncan
Your original quote was about the differing attitudes towards antisemitism between Labour and Tory MPs.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP, in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s friends in years past, who were very much Labour MPs at the time, and many of them still are.
Those Labour MPs are scum, clearly.
But the way anti-Semitism is reported in the Tories vs Labour is different. Actually forget anti-Semitism, just racism in general, for example Islamophobia.
So where is the Tory MP who has a problem with antisemitism?
Well I sincerely believed Alan Duncan was still a Tory MP but I was wrong. Former MP then. For what it's worth, I am not saying Duncan is anti-Semitic, I don't think he is. More that his comments are given a fair hearing compared to MPs from other parties.
But the Tories clearly have problems with racism of their own, which is as bad in my view, as the anti-Semitism in Labour.
I know of Duncan from his days working for Marc Rich in the '80s. I didn't know him personally but from what I saw and by all accounts he was a decent enough guy. Quite a flamboyant gay, but not a hint of racial prejudice.
Did you work for Marc Rich too?
No, but I worked with someone who was associated with Marc Rich. I went to their offices on Wigmore Street a few times but never saw Marc or Pinci.
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP.
The Conservative former minister Alan Duncan
Your original quote was about the differing attitudes towards antisemitism between Labour and Tory MPs.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP, in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s friends in years past, who were very much Labour MPs at the time, and many of them still are.
Those Labour MPs are scum, clearly.
But the way anti-Semitism is reported in the Tories vs Labour is different. Actually forget anti-Semitism, just racism in general, for example Islamophobia.
So where is the Tory MP who has a problem with antisemitism?
Well I sincerely believed Alan Duncan was still a Tory MP but I was wrong. Former MP then. For what it's worth, I am not saying Duncan is anti-Semitic, I don't think he is. More that his comments are given a fair hearing compared to MPs from other parties.
But the Tories clearly have problems with racism of their own, which is as bad in my view, as the anti-Semitism in Labour.
I know of Duncan from his days working for Marc Rich in the '80s. I didn't know him personally but from what I saw and by all accounts he was a decent enough guy. Quite a flamboyant gay, but not a hint of racial prejudice.
Did you work for Marc Rich too?
The Marc Rich charged with tax evasion, wire fraud, sanctions busting and various other offences, who fled to Switzerland, donated money to the Democratic Party and was pardoned by Clinton when he left office?
That Marc Rich?
Marc and Pinci travelled widely around Europe and the Middle East, especially Israel, including London for years despite the US's most wanted white collar criminal tag. I understood that despite the Clinton connection they were also friendly with the Bushes, and the Bin Ladens (Osama excepted).
Rich and Green were generous across the political spectrum in the US and Europe.
Interesting 15 year study from the Netherlands which finds that gender discontentedness is common in early adolescence but in very large part disappears with age (the cohort who have been followed since 11 are now 26).
The discontent seems to be closely linked to concepts of self worth and mental health generally with a slightly increased propensity amongst those who are not heterosexual. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38413534/
What it appears to me that this piece of substantial research indicates, once again, is that giving adolescents who have such anxieties puberty blockers and hormone treatment is neither necessary nor desirable. My view, rather than that of the authors, is that such interventions are far more likely to do harm than good for problems that have a very high propensity to resolve over time without them. It concerns me greatly that in Scotland there is still rigorous denial of this reality and a desire to use such troubled children as pawns in a game which seems designed to show that trans is more prevalent than it actually is.
Interesting. There are some other studies with similar findings.
The main limitation I see (from a quick skim - and they don't seem to discuss it) is that they don't appear to have any data on treatment for gender dysphoria, so they don't know whether gender dysphoria is resolving by itself or in response to treatment (psychological, puberty blockers, x-sex hormones). Worth noting that we also can't do that with any certainty in the UK (well, England at least - not certain for other nations) using already-collected data) as the GIDS and adult clinics data are not readily available for research and there are legal barriers to linkage if someone has gained a gender recognition certificate.
ETA: On the main message, it certainly seems like there is a group that experiences temporary gender dysphoria that does resolve (it may in those cases be a mask for other, different, underlying issues - not fitting in, mental health and gender seeming like the problem and solution). But then there is another group with persistent (or 'real', if you like) gender dysphoria and that group seems to benefit from the interventions. The trouble is that ideally you need to correctly discriminate those groups before puberty, to put the second group on the blockers and then the x-sex hormones (and likely, eventually, surgery) and to put the first group, if needed, on appropriate treatments for the real problem (and not blockers or x-sex hormones). But how do you tell which troubled young people are in which group?
It’s the 21st Century’s Eugenics
Consultant psychiatrist Dr David Bell, who served as a staff governor at the Tavistock Trust, wrote an internal report in 2018, raising the concerns brought to him by colleagues about the way the Gender Identity Development Service was treating patients.
He faced disciplinary action.
But after 24 years working with the Tavistock, Dr Bell, a former President of the British Psychoanalytic Society, has recently retired, and in his first television interview since then, he began by outlining his worries about the service.
I am sure Alan Duncan's comments will have a week of daily headlines, because everyone knows anti-Semitism is treated equally whether you are a Labour or Tory MP.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP.
The Conservative former minister Alan Duncan
Your original quote was about the differing attitudes towards antisemitism between Labour and Tory MPs.
Alan Duncan isn’t a Tory MP, in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s friends in years past, who were very much Labour MPs at the time, and many of them still are.
Those Labour MPs are scum, clearly.
But the way anti-Semitism is reported in the Tories vs Labour is different. Actually forget anti-Semitism, just racism in general, for example Islamophobia.
So where is the Tory MP who has a problem with antisemitism?
Well I sincerely believed Alan Duncan was still a Tory MP but I was wrong. Former MP then. For what it's worth, I am not saying Duncan is anti-Semitic, I don't think he is. More that his comments are given a fair hearing compared to MPs from other parties.
But the Tories clearly have problems with racism of their own, which is as bad in my view, as the anti-Semitism in Labour.
I know of Duncan from his days working for Marc Rich in the '80s. I didn't know him personally but from what I saw and by all accounts he was a decent enough guy. Quite a flamboyant gay, but not a hint of racial prejudice.
Did you work for Marc Rich too?
No, but I worked with someone who was associated with Marc Rich. I went to their offices on Wigmore Street a few times but never saw Marc or Pinci.
Phew. I thought I might have to ban you.
Have you read Metal Man?
R. Craig Copetas: Metal Men, it's about Rich and Green. It's actually quite well written in a tabloid kind of a way.
Had I worked for Rich, I suspect I would be considerably wealthier than I am.
I could give you a verse of Frankie by Denise Rich if you like.
Edit: I would have thought you too young to have crossed swords with Marc and Pinci.
Comments
The dishonesty is less striking than the utter incompetence which will come as no surprise to anyone who has had dealings with them.
In fairness I should add that they have recently been taken out of special measures. They can now no longer be regarded as one of the worst six forces in the country - a lo bar, but at least they have cleared it.
Btw, would you like to share the name of the officer in question? PM me if you like.
2) no dog for scale
Am I ready for the call up @englandcricket?
https://x.com/rishisunak/status/1776243623912194393?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
I don't hold Israel to higher standards than any other country. I am simply calling them out for what they have done, which is to kill many innocent people trying to provide aid to other innocent people. I believe they targeted these people on purpose, to try and starve the Gazan people to death. That is my opinion.
Now if we want to hold other states to the same standard, what Russia is doing is equally as appalling as what Hamas have done to Israel. What the UK did in Iraq was appalling. What the US does with the death penalty, with its actions abroad, Guantanamo Bay etc. is appalling.
Every country does appalling things. But the point is that I was talking about what Israel has just done - and they keep doing it. Why?
With any foot problem (I have an arthritic toe from an old injury) the exact fit is crucial, so I always wear new shoes around the house for a few days before going outside or removing the labels. That way can legitimately return them and try a different pair.
Nothing to do with republicanism; it's your royalism that is showing.
Gosh. I didn't think people still did.
Has a dog for scale. That’s one thing Rishi has done right. Anyone know of a second thing?
It was an embarrassing story and would have been embarrassing on whichever PM's watch it had happened. But Johnson turned a bad news story into a disaster by providing ministers via the Number 10 team with deliberately untrue briefings, including those going out on the morning news circuits to defend the Government - effectively setting them up (unwittingly) to lie.
Specifically, he initially claimed that he'd not known about previous incidents involving Pincher, then that he'd heard rumours but no more than that, that he'd never been briefed on it and that newspaper claims to the contrary were lies. That was categorically untrue, as he has since admitted - he'd been personally briefed.
Johnson's strained relationship with the truth had always been a problem, but he'd literally narrowly scraped through a VONC weeks before on the basis of a promise that he recognised the lack of trust and was resolved to change his ways. He was the unfaithful partner who'd begged forgiveness and IMMEDIATELY done the same again.
So it wasn't the "giving a dodgy bloke a job" thing - embarrassing though that was - but the lying and sending others out to lie for him. The "dodgy bloke" bit was quite eminently survivable... "I knew the allegations, I gave him another chance, and I clearly shouldn't have - I'm sorry".
I don't think the Tories are scum, I don't believe the Tory Party is scum. I think if they got back to the centre ground and appealed to me I would vote for them. I don't see that myself as a bad thing.
Anyway, I will urge myself to get off the scum thing as I can see it's not a helpful title.
Invisible and affordable.
It's still an odd image, and without the photoshop nonsense.
Edit: you mean Shirley, right?
"It's a champagne supper, Nova."
https://www.hugoboss.com/uk/titanium-trainers-with-knitted-uppers-and-suede-trims/hbeu50498245_401.html?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwwr6wBhBcEiwAfMEQs07B-fL86yYaajaaqU62g-wQl_PXWIGdCneCTPZV_UY853D7hLEUaxoCbs4QAvD_BwE
For what it is worth, I do think they'd be doing better if he was the leader. But they'd still be on course to lose handsomely.
Anduril unveils jet-powered interceptor designed to down enemy drones, missiles
The company says the U.S. government has operationally tested the weapon
https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/anduril-unveils-jet-powered-interceptor-designed-down-enemy-drones-missiles/392403/
...They believe the drone’s low cost compared to larger missile defense interceptors will make it a disruptor.
“I'm pretty sure that we've built the first recoverable weapon, which is pretty cool,” Brose said. “It fundamentally changes how operators can think about shot doctrine in the air defense fight.”
Road Runner was born from a napkin sketch about two years ago. Its explosive warhead could be replaced with an intelligence sensor that could take pictures of fast-moving enemy aircraft, ships, or even spot nascent wildfires before they spread. Luckey sees the Road Runner being used in a host of roles, from defending military bases to protecting critical infrastructure.
A company video shows the half-drone, half-missile launching from a white box that resembles an oversized refrigerator or deep freezer. The so-called “nest” is climate-controlled and monitors the health of the Road Runner, Luckey said.
“It's doing the job that typically would have required a team of aircraft maintainers in a hangar to do: keeping a jet aircraft ready to get off the ground very quickly,” he said. “It does that totally autonomously, for months at a time.”
Road Runner is powered by company-made jet engines, which are being used “in five different products,” Luckey said. When landing, the drone looks like a cape-wearing superhero slowly floating to the ground.
The company is building the drones on a production line here and aims to make hundreds or more per year.
“There's no reason that you can't have 100,000 Road Runners just sitting around all over the world ready to do their thing with a very small number of people managing all of them,” Luckey said.
So how did the company settle on the name Road Runner?
“One of the competitors is the Coyote block two,” Luckey said referring to the RTX-made counter-drone system. “We're all competitors. We're just having a little fun with each other.”..
Could he have survived fessing up from the start? I don't know, but the route he tried was a) what he has always done when cornered and b) doomed because you just can't lie at the despatch box.
Remember Boris Johnson was briefed about Pincher.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/05/no-10-not-telling-truth-over-chris-pincher-says-former-top-civil-servant
Not you - you tell it like you see it.
My point was just that some of the language you have been using to describe the Israelis seems to be out of a cult's lexicon.
The difference this time was that there wasn't really an upwards to fail to.
It’s not the first recoverable weapon - plenty of drones have been used as “hit something or bring it back”
Mini jet engines are getting cheap these days.
Maybe they were motivated by morality, but I think they just underestimated how much their majority was down to Boris, and how many 2019 voters they’d lose by replacing him. He had manoeuvred himself into a position where the Tories could only win with him, and now they are faced with quite a large chance of complete destruction
People over 60 should not be allowed training shoes. I think I handed my Vans in at one of those amnesty points.
Some are "just" (usually because we won them) and some less so (usually because we disagree with the premise of the aggressor if we are not the aggressor in which case it would be a Just War).
But it is a war. Now, you can say, a rag tag mob of militants blamming off a few rounds at their much more powerful neighbour and then the neighbour responds with the methods at its disposal, well that's just not fair (still less just). But you have to put yourself into the boots (or Adidas Spezials) of the person doing the responding or indeed initially the aggressing.
Hamas and the Gazans believe that Israel is occupying its historic lands. You then have to ask whether being given some of those lands "back" (they never had them to start with but still) and continuing to harass their supposed aggressor to the point of crossing the border and killing over a thousand of them is the right way to go about it but that is their right to do.
Likewise, it is Israel's right to respond. Which is what we're seeing right now.
Including quite a lot of beds that are not his own.
Anduril already market a conventional quad copter interceptor - available in a boxed package for defending stuff like oil platforms:
https://www.anduril.com/article/anvil-m-launch/
The larger point is that private companies in the US are innovating much more quickly than conventional military procurement allows.
1) The people who ousted him were long term Boris Johnson fans (the likes of Priti Patel, JRM, Zahawi, and even Jonathan Gullis) realised that they won down to Boris Johnson in 2019 but his behaviour on Pincher was unforgivable and would see the Tories lose the next election.
I knew a few people who worked at Downing Street/CCHQ for Boris Johnson, one of them put it in very stark terms, it was like me turning on Dave, even Boris knew if he was losing the likes of them it was over.
2) As Richard Nabavi pointed out the day after Boris Johnson became PM, the destruction was inevitable under Boris
"The party is no longer recognisable as the pragmatic, business-friendly, economically-sound, reality-based party of government which I have supported for decades. It will justifiably get the electoral blame for the consequences of the disastrous course it has chosen, and will probably never be forgiven by younger voters."
has turned out to be prescient.
In that case, if we are to conclude they did it for self-interest, they must have concluded that somebody else had a better chance of winning. Johnson was behind in the polls when he left (albeit less than now). Was there anyone else that could win, I do not think any polling showed that.
So I only conclude 14 years of government has picked a lot of brains and good judgment has gone out of the window completely. Much the same happened during the end of New Labour, when it was quite obvious removing Brown was the right thing to do but nobody did.
Magnitude 4.8, apparently.
I don't think that borne out by the polling. The decline in Tory polling began in summer 2021 and has been pretty much linear since, apart from a squiggle for the Trussocalypse, to present time. If you didn't know the point in time that Johnson resigned you couldn't pick it out on the graph.
The discontent seems to be closely linked to concepts of self worth and mental health generally with a slightly increased propensity amongst those who are not heterosexual.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38413534/
What it appears to me that this piece of substantial research indicates, once again, is that giving adolescents who have such anxieties puberty blockers and hormone treatment is neither necessary nor desirable. My view, rather than that of the authors, is that such interventions are far more likely to do harm than good for problems that have a very high propensity to resolve over time without them. It concerns me greatly that in Scotland there is still rigorous denial of this reality and a desire to use such troubled children as pawns in a game which seems designed to show that trans is more prevalent than it actually is.
The heartbreak we are witnessing in Gaza is an unmitigated disaster and Israel needs to reflect that incidents like killing innocent aid workers by accident or design is turning opinion against the continuation of this conflict and it is time for everyone to call on Netanyahu and Hamas to agree a ceasefire, release all hostages on both sides and seek a resolution but goodness knows what that will look like after the devastation in Gaza
Maybe this is unrealistic but the wise leaders will be those who get round the table with all sides and prosecute peace
I am not posting as much as quite a lot of discussions are polarised and at times rather unpleasant and I do not have the bandwidth to be involved
It was interesting that in Scotland 70% want change of leaderships and governing parties but that Starmer and labour have not convinced many that they are the answer. If true the SNP may perform above expectations at the GE
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/scots-agree-its-time-for-a-change-but-are-unsure-if-labour-can-make-changes-they-want#:~:text=The Scottish public would also,of the UK Conservative Government.
That Marc Rich?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-68744358
It's the standard dilemma any employer has. If you have a star performer who is also a terrible human being, do you keep them or chuck them? There comes a point where you have to chuck them, or you end up with the sort of talent scandals that the BBC had.
Check out some of the bigger jet models. There were some people trying for Mach 1 a while back.
There is a subtle Line of Duty reference in it, hopefully somebody will spot it when it is published.
2022 Johnson was not 2019 Johnson in the public's mind. The joke wasn't funny enough to enough people any more, the bright sunlit uplands the booster-in-chief had promised were nowhere to be seen, he'd proved chaotic and unable to maintain the trust of those working with him, and the idea of a man partying while gran died and ignoring the rules he set for others was hard to shake. He'd had a succession of by-election drubbings, was in deep trouble for lying to Parliament, and significant trouble for lying to colleagues.
He was and is a charismatic figure. He'd won a stonking election victory and the 2020s should have belonged to him. But he'd f***ed it all up through his own deep character flaws, within 20 months.
You can comfort yourself with the idea that he'd have changed and that the REAL Johnson would've shone through in the remainder of the Parliament and beyond, turning it all around. Maybe, but it doesn't sound at all realistic to me - sounds like hogwash and fantasy.
Ex-foreign minister calls out fellow Tories for supporting Israel | LBC opinion
It will probably take them over a decade to realise it of course.
It's probably not dissimilar to that between a football manager and the players. They think he has their back, and whatever he might say to the press, he will tell them the truth.
When a manager lies to the players' faces, it destroys trust.
And that's what happened. The MPs no longer felt they could trust Boris.
As for the people who sought to replace him, they’d have been better off waiting until he lost the next GE, if they thought it was so certain to happen. Then they could have started over as a new broom, where’s now they’re doomed, DOOMED I TELL YE
The main limitation I see (from a quick skim - and they don't seem to discuss it) is that they don't appear to have any data on treatment for gender dysphoria, so they don't know whether gender dysphoria is resolving by itself or in response to treatment (psychological, puberty blockers, x-sex hormones). Worth noting that we also can't do that with any certainty in the UK (well, England at least - not certain for other nations) using already-collected data as the GIDS and adult clinics data are not readily available for research and there are legal barriers to linkage if someone has gained a gender recognition certificate.
ETA: On the main message, it certainly seems like there is a group that experiences temporary gender dysphoria that does resolve (it may in those cases be a mask for other, different, underlying issues - not fitting in, mental health and gender seeming like the problem and solution). But then there is another group with persistent (or 'real', if you like) gender dysphoria and that group seems to benefit from the interventions. The trouble is that ideally you need to correctly discriminate those groups before puberty, to put the second group on the blockers and then the x-sex hormones (and likely, eventually, surgery) and to put the first group, if needed, on appropriate treatments for the real problem (and not blockers or x-sex hormones). But how do you tell which troubled young people are in which group?
Have you read Metal Man?
Rich and Green were generous across the political spectrum in the US and Europe.
Yahoo finance and Reuters reporting Tesla has abandoned plans for a low cost EV. Protecting the upper end of the market and the brand position ?
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-scraps-low-cost-car-plans-amid-fierce-chinese-ev-competition-2024-04-05/
Consultant psychiatrist Dr David Bell, who served as a staff governor at the Tavistock Trust, wrote an internal report in 2018, raising the concerns brought to him by colleagues about the way the Gender Identity Development Service was treating patients.
He faced disciplinary action.
But after 24 years working with the Tavistock, Dr Bell, a former President of the British Psychoanalytic Society, has recently retired, and in his first television interview since then, he began by outlining his worries about the service.
https://www.channel4.com/news/children-have-been-very-seriously-damaged-by-nhs-gender-clinic-says-former-tavistock-staff-governor
NEW THREAD
Had I worked for Rich, I suspect I would be considerably wealthier than I am.
I could give you a verse of Frankie by Denise Rich if you like.
Edit: I would have thought you too young to have crossed swords with Marc and Pinci.