Off topic, but possibly of interest: "Employers in the United States added 303,000 jobs in March, soaring past expectations and reflecting renewed strength in a labor market that continues to prop up the broader U.S. economy.
The jobs market is charging ahead in 2024, churning out more jobs per month on average than before the pandemic. The March job growth was notably higher than the average monthly gain over the past year, which was around 231,000, according to the agency. . . . Workers benefited in March from rising wages and more work hours. Average hourly earnings accelerated in March to $34.69 per hour, which is up 4.1 percent from the previous year. Wages have consistently beat inflation since last May 2023, after years of falling behind." source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/04/05/jobs-march-unemployment-rate/
Reminder: This is a preliminary report, which will be revised in the future.
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.
Yes there is no way back for the Tories if they continue to be the party of Johnson's Brexit. After the election there will be no one of consequence left in public life supporting it. It will come to be seen as the UK's biggest political and diplomatic failure since Munich.
I just found out that the film "The Devil Wears Prada" is 18 years old this year. Somebody kill me now.
Wow. That's.....remarkable.
The more remarkable thing is that my wife has watched it more than 18 times in that period.
At one point I could recite the cerulean speech from memory. And i have used the "you are not really trying" dialogue between Andy and Nigel more than once: in fact, it was instrumental in me not-fucking-up in my present job, for which i had to take a titanic pay cut just to get into the building. And the reason why I work weekends unasked, come to think of it...
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.
Or the equivalent of the application of genetics which can be good or bad, we don't know yet. That's the point. And a very, very good post that Selebian makes.
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 agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph, but need to see evidence for your second paragraph.
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.
On a pedantic note, adverse opinions about accordion players are not based on prejudice but are judgments with a firm empirical base. See also bagpipers.
I would direct discerning readers to Radio 3, where the lunchtime concerts last week included Bach Organ Fugues (and others) played on a classical accordion...
Example of classical accordion by classic accordionist:
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.
Yes there is no way back for the Tories if they continue to be the party of Johnson's Brexit. After the election there will be no one of consequence left in public life supporting it. It will come to be seen as the UK's biggest political and diplomatic failure since Munich.
Munich is a little harsh. Suez certainly.
However the effects on the Tory party are more profound than either in a way because the scandal and impact of Suez was not really felt by most people in a way that permanently damaged party affiliation, while Churchill quickly obliterated the idea that appeasement was essentially Tory.
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.
Yes there is no way back for the Tories if they continue to be the party of Johnson's Brexit. After the election there will be no one of consequence left in public life supporting it. It will come to be seen as the UK's biggest political and diplomatic failure since Munich.
Munich is a little harsh. Suez certainly.
However the effects on the Tory party are more profound than either in a way because the scandal and impact of Suez was not really felt by most people in a way that permanently damaged party affiliation, while Churchill quickly obliterated the idea that appeasement was essentially Tory.
Not only that- neither Suez or Munich was followed by a purge like that of 2019. The problem facing Future Conservatives might be finding enough people to staff a post-Brexit party, in the event that they want to go that way.
“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.”..
Hopefully their weapons have more structural integrity than their infinitives.
Comments
NEW THREAD
"Employers in the United States added 303,000 jobs in March, soaring past expectations and reflecting renewed strength in a labor market that continues to prop up the broader U.S. economy.
The jobs market is charging ahead in 2024, churning out more jobs per month on average than before the pandemic. The March job growth was notably higher than the average monthly gain over the past year, which was around 231,000, according to the agency.
. . .
Workers benefited in March from rising wages and more work hours. Average hourly earnings accelerated in March to $34.69 per hour, which is up 4.1 percent from the previous year. Wages have consistently beat inflation since last May 2023, after years of falling behind."
source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/04/05/jobs-march-unemployment-rate/
Reminder: This is a preliminary report, which will be revised in the future.
I'm Coming Home (To See My Mother - Clifton Chenier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_06Ig59jo8
Suez certainly.
However the effects on the Tory party are more profound than either in a way because the scandal and impact of Suez was not really felt by most people in a way that permanently damaged party affiliation, while Churchill quickly obliterated the idea that appeasement was essentially Tory.