The biggest MRP misses (As at the 26th June model) for Yougov were as follows.
47.34% Leicester South 45.35% Birmingham Perry Barr 40.39% Edinburgh West 34.87% Ilford North 33.34% Blackburn 33.21% Dewsbury and Batley 31.57% Slough 30.12% Rochdale 30.09% Bradford West 29.65% Birmingham Ladywood
OK So they didn't see the muslim Labour vote collapse, but how on God's green earth did they ever ever have Edinburgh West going SNP by 9%. Checking the final MRP it was a Lib Dem hold by 6%, still absolutely miles out and a bigger miss than Leicester East was in the last but one MRP (25.4% out vs 23.5%)
Anyone with a brain knew that Edinburgh West was going to be a LD hold.
Did they not bother to model the Muslim vote or something? Did any of the pollsters?
Obviously not but I don't know whether it would be possible to do it.
Also I'm eating cold roast chicken, ripe Cavaillon melon, and sipping chilled rose wine, as I gaze over the Luberon, and my flint knapping is done for the day. So all I have to do is loaf about, maybe have a siesta, go look at a church in the lavender fields, then drink Bandol
As a man of advanced years, that is close to perfect happiness
You'll get bored and be back trolling for argument fairly soon, I'm guessing.
Looks nice, though.
I dunno. My absence from the forum these last few days is not cause I'm busy busy busy
It is because life here is blissful. There are probably very few places nicer in the world than the Luberon in good calm summer weather. As we have discussed, that is often not the case - the winters are cruel and apparently rhis place, Oppede le Vieux, gets the Mistral worse than almost anywhere in France. It is so exposed on its mad crag. Marcel Duchamp apparently preferred life under the Nazis than hiding out here, with his fellow artists, he lasted about a day
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
Michelle Obama is never, will never and has never wanted or is going to run this electoral cycle. She is one of those that needs to have been deepest red in anyone's book.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
This is just the prosecution opening. "You will hear differing versions of the position, speed and reaction of the parties..."
15mph is obviously achievable on a level towpath. No clue what sort of cyclist he was yet but if he is a Strava wanker his own records will give him away
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
The vast majority of these incidents are minor and/or maintenance-related. But once the media have got it in for you, you get dragged through the mud every time.
It happens to the most professional operators and the RAF.
That ASRAAM is a war shot with a a live warhead and seeker just to add to the gaiety of the occasion.
Whoops, someone had a bad day.
If I were to guess, a small remote-controlled truck with an airbag on top, driven in somewhere under the fus just inboard of the broken wheel, that could lift it clear of the ground by inflating the bag?
The models and MRPs for Scotland never quite passed the sniff test (as indeed the national ones did not). I wonder if less weight needs to be put on big monolithic convictions such as independence or leave/remain - they matter, but don’t trump other things people do also care a lot about, e.g. public services, tax, mortgages, corruption and incompetence in high office etc.
Inverness [etc] seat did feel like a bit of a surprise nonetheless though, given the relative size of the swing. It’s one of many mini-stories of this election I’d like to know more about.
Inverness wasn't a surprise because it was a seat where the Tories were in second place to the SNP but most Tory voters would have known their party was never going to be strong enough to defeat the SNP whereas the LDs would have a chance of doing so due to their historic strength in the constituency. I didn't actually predict an SNP loss but I did forecast SNP 17,000 LD 16,000 with the Tories a long way behind.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
Why? Why do we need new laws when existing laws will do. People get killed by reckless skiing but we don't have a specific law for that. In the case of motor cars it is a frequent event needing specific consideration, but in the case of cycling it is very rare indeed and current laws cope with it as they would do for skiing, football, rugby or even tiddly-winks.
They could tack a new law onto something, just to give less ammunition to the many arseholes who get angry at the mere sight of a cyclist. If it makes them calm down a bit for a short while, it would definitely make cycling safer.
Nah, once you give in to bullies they just come back for more.
The people who piss & moan endlessly about cyclists will just find a new thing to demand once they get their unnecessary law written into the books.
The reason we need special laws for drivers written into the books (which almost precisely mirror the existing crimes of murder, assault etc etc down the hierarchy of intent & injury) is because the system was so reluctant to convict drivers of these crimes that special “no it’s still a crime when a driver does it, look it says so in the name of the crime” laws had to be drawn up. Why else do you think think we have “Causing death by careless driving”? - that’s just manslaughter.
Cyclists don’t get this kind of privileged treatment, so there’s no need to pass new laws that say “no, it’s still a crime when a cyclist does it, look it says so in the name” crimes. They get prosecuted under existing legislation just fine.
That drivers /still/ complain because now they have laws that call them out specifically when nobody else gets called out in this way is just another example of car brain in action.
How many cyclists get convicted of manslaughter?
The riposte to that is "How many drivers get convicted of manslaughter?"
An original reason for "Death by .... driving" laws being introduced was juries refusing to convict the blatantly guilty.
We have the same things now, with a long catalogue going back decades of drivers who admit to committing an offence causing a death being found not guilty by juries.
The fairly general view amongst my communities is that it is down to jurors thinking "but that's how I behave, and I could *never* be guilty of that". That's why I'm interested in the possibility of charging and judicial approaches to motoring offences being improved.
One storied case is Helen Measures in 2013, who went round a bend at 50mph on the wrong side of the road overtaking a cyclist, and killing a cyclist lawfully coming the other way on the correct side of the road.
The defence was essentially to demonise the dead cyclist for not getting out of the way and navigating through the gap she had left. The jury found her not guilty of Causing Death by Dangerous Driving.
I can probably find you scores or hundreds of others, just from media reports. It's just a constant week-by-week happening.
One current favourite excuse is "but I was driving into the sun", as if driving into the sun is a reasonable excuse for driving at unsafe speed into places where you have no visibility.
As I predicted on election day or the day after, it looks like the Lichfield to Crewe bit of HS2 is going to be back on in short order.
"Rail minister appointment fuels hopes of HS2 revival Network Rail chief Lord Hendy is likely to be an advocate for extending the network"
"His appointment as rail minister may represent the best chance of saving elements of the scheme, including a link from the Midlands to Crewe that would allow full formations of HS2 trains to travel at top speed through to Manchester, leading figures in the sector said."
It will come down to whether Lord Hendy can gets things through the Department of Transport
But he's clueful enough to know how to get HS2 back on track and to kick off a number of quick win projects. For instance there are 60 miles of track that were they electrified opens up 2million track mile of freight a year shifting to electric...
In a highly competitive list cancelling HS2 was right up there for the Sunak government in terms of worst decisions.
You should be blaming the greed and incompetence that surrounded HS2 for a decade before Sunak became PM. Or even CoE.
I lot of the blame for the costs rests on the head of the former MP for Chesham and Amersham and look at the gratitude that waste of £10bn gold plating a set of tunnels did for the tory party (they lost the byelection).
The funny bit is that the air vents look worse and are way more visible than the original cutting would have looked like...
The bigger the project the greater the scope for excess spending when issues arise.
When a project is declared to be 'the biggest in Europe' the scope for excess spending becomes the biggest in Europe.
When a project is declared to be 'world beating' the scope for excess spending becomes world beating.
After a while the excess spending is deemed to be a good thing - the more that is spent means that the project becomes ever more 'biggest in Europe' or 'world beating'. Bigger is always deemed to be better.
The problem with these projects is that the moment you've signed the contract then the contractors hold you to ransom. The issue with a cutting is that it's a physical barrier, my uncle and aunt sold up in deepest Buckinghamshire because my uncle said that, rather than a 15 minute meander along country lanes to get to his friends on the other side of the route, it would become a 30 minute drive just to get to a crossing point.
This is especially so when government is involved and always so when its a government 'prestige project'.
The extra money is always paid and then used as a justification for supporting the project on a 'the bigger, the better' basis.
Yet that isn't the case elsewhere in Europe where High speed routes are being built for a fraction of the cost in the UK..
Now they are multiple reasons for that 1 of which is that companies in Europe know that work is continual so there is little risk of the project being cancelled once they start work on it.
That hasn't been the case in the UK for the past 12 years - hence additional risk costs are added into every project bid.
Comparing 'prestige' infrastructure spending between different countries is worthy of in depth research and discussion.
I expect we would discover that some countries are good at X and bad at Y with other countries the opposite. Perhaps for reasons which are intrinsic and impossible to change.
Which would suggest that countries should stick to what they are capable of doing well instead of incompetently and expensively trying to imitate what other countries do better.
For example its likely to be a lot easier and cheaper to build rail lines through the emptiness of Castille and Leon than through the Chiltern nimbys.
https://x.com/Sam_Dumitriu has done lots of deep dives on UK civil engineering. It's exactly how you think it is.
I don't know his area of expertise but last night he commented on one of my areas and this is a beyond stupid take.
Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu Digital ID (a good idea) is different to ID Cards (not a good idea).
Hint Digital ID has all the bad bits of an ID card without the physical benefit that it would confirm I am fullname here with the right to work in the UK with an ID number that matches the one in your system...
And my final point is - given that he talks crap on an area I know something about his other viewpoints are probably equally poor (being generous there by using poor when other words may be better).
But right to work checks are already going digital thanks to the eVisa system, which replaces physical BRP/BRCs from the end of this year.
A universal Digital ID in the UK is mainly scuppered because we don't actually have a canonical list of who is or isn't a UK citizen.
The Verify programme was probably the best possible substitute that we could hope to manage, but it failed for a variety of reasons including limited buy-in from some govt departments (HMRC and Home Office!), and changing priorities in the face of Brexit. Its replacement, One Login, is much more limited in scope.
The chances of the new govt pushing for anything beyond this in the near future are pretty slim (I hope!)
I would note the flaw in that scheme is the existing one of how do you remotely verify a UK citizen who has not got a passport.... Round here that's a far bigger problem than you may think it is...
For British and Irish citizens, the employer just needs to see a copy of your birth certificate (or naturalisation certificate) plus an official letter addressed to you by name and containing your NINO (from HMRC or DWP, for example). There's no need to check anything online.
The real edge case is Commonwealth citizens who have the right to work but who may not have a passport or birth certificate - think of the Windrush scheme, for example. They need fall back to the Employer Checking Service, which I believe is operated using manual verification by the Home Office and which therefore takes an age.
So let me tell you what actually happens in such cases. The employer says sorry we have an issue and moves on to the next candidate...
There are an awful lot of people who are unemployed and unemployable for want of spare £100 and a passport...
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Well, no. Assuming a car weighs about 1000 kg, your calculation would imply that, had she been hit by a car, the velocity of the woman after the collision would be 300 mph. This is clearly absurd, which indicates that your calculation is incorrect.
Apart from equating newtons with kilograms, which makes no sense at all if the Earth's gravity isn't involved, you're making the incorrect assumption that all of the bike + rider's momentum is transferred to the woman. This can't happen because it would violate conservation of energy. In an inelastic collision, the rider + bike would continue to move in the same direction after the collision, albeit more slowly. Not all of the momentum would be transferred. This is more obvious if you imagine a car/pedestrian collision.
An inelastic collision bringing a car to a complete halt when hitting a pedestrian does not happen - the car continues for some distance or maybe never stops at all.
People bumping into each other produce a totally different outcome because their masses are comparable. If you knock someone over you, you usually halt.
Different scenarios. You simply cannot upgrade a person to a car. Due to the paucity of information a lot of assumptions are in the calculations but upping the mass of one person by a factor of 10 or more invalidates an already strecthed scenario.
Fair point about converting to Newtons - I did not need that but it cancels out anyway
People don’t come to a halt either, they tend to move together when they collide, not perfectly transfer momentum from the collider to the collided.
Your assumptions are simply wrong, which leads to this ludicrous idea that this woman was launched into the air at 30mph.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
The models and MRPs for Scotland never quite passed the sniff test (as indeed the national ones did not). I wonder if less weight needs to be put on big monolithic convictions such as independence or leave/remain - they matter, but don’t trump other things people do also care a lot about, e.g. public services, tax, mortgages, corruption and incompetence in high office etc.
Inverness [etc] seat did feel like a bit of a surprise nonetheless though, given the relative size of the swing. It’s one of many mini-stories of this election I’d like to know more about.
Except that the pollster that faired second-best GB-wide was Norstat, who are the ones who weight most heavily on leave/remain!
In Scotland, the trad polls got closer to the actual vote shares than those implied by the MRPs, but the reverse was true GB-wide. I can't see any reason why that should have been the case, though!
The best predictions of all seem to have been created 'bottom up', analysing each constituency in turn (Andy_JS, take a bow!). I wonder if, in future, a hybrid approach might be viable - using MRP-style data, but with individual weights in each constituency derived from manual analysis?
That's pretty much what I was thinking should be the approach in the future.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
Even Stephen King - fanatically anti-Trump, and very Democrat- thinks Biden has to go
"Joe Biden has been a fine president, but it’s time for him—in the interests of the America he so clearly loves—to announce he will not run for re-election."
A good story teller can see how this story ends, unless there is a dramatic plot twist. King also has 7m followers on TwiX, not a voice to be blithely ignored
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Well, no. Assuming a car weighs about 1000 kg, your calculation would imply that, had she been hit by a car, the velocity of the woman after the collision would be 300 mph. This is clearly absurd, which indicates that your calculation is incorrect.
Apart from equating newtons with kilograms, which makes no sense at all if the Earth's gravity isn't involved, you're making the incorrect assumption that all of the bike + rider's momentum is transferred to the woman. This can't happen because it would violate conservation of energy. In an inelastic collision, the rider + bike would continue to move in the same direction after the collision, albeit more slowly. Not all of the momentum would be transferred. This is more obvious if you imagine a car/pedestrian collision.
An inelastic collision bringing a car to a complete halt when hitting a pedestrian does not happen - the car continues for some distance or maybe never stops at all.
People bumping into each other produce a totally different outcome because their masses are comparable. If you knock someone over you, you usually halt.
Different scenarios. You simply cannot upgrade a person to a car. Due to the paucity of information a lot of assumptions are in the calculations but upping the mass of one person by a factor of 10 or more invalidates an already strecthed scenario.
Fair point about converting to Newtons - I did not need that but it cancels out anyway
Sorry, but your calculation is simply wrong; plugging numbers in for other vehicles merely highlights that.
It is incorrect to say that the velocity of the woman after being hit by the cyclist would be 30 mph, or anything near that, and it is incorrect to say she might as well have been hit by a car. Your calculations are wrong for an elastic collision, but, in addition to that, collisions between squashy objects are almost completely inelastic. This means that after the collision, the cyclist and the woman would end up moving at about the same speed, which would obviously be lower than the initial speed of the cyclist.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Hold on, this maths is complete bullshit. You don’t convert mass to force & then do a calculation based on Newtons! But that’s a side issue - the real problem is that you have assumed that all of his momentum is transferred to her, which is physically extremely unlikely - people do not rebound off each other in this way.
A more physically plausible outcome is that the two people roughly move as one after the collision, so assuming an inelastic collision where the two people move together after the collision with no elastic rebound - given your numbers the momentum beforehand is 110kg * 7.5m/s + 55*0 = 825 N m / s. Afterwards the mass is 165kg, momentum is conserved so the velocity of the two people would be 5 m / s or about 11 mph.
Although obviously a real world collision would be different because of the complexity of two bodies colliding, but a joint post impact velocity of 11mph is far more plausible than 30mph!
(your approach would also imply that the heavier the object that is moving beforehand, the fast the hit person will be moving afterwards which is clearly physically implausible - people hit by lorries do not sproing off into the distance at 100s of mph.)
That would be because hitting the pedestrian does NOT result in a complete (or near complete) transfer of momentum from the lorry. The lorry barely slows at all. It is the lorry's brakes being pressed by its panicking driver that brings it to a halt.
For an impact where one body is very much more massive than the other, impulse is more important. You can safely assume with a pedestrian and truck that, if the driver does not hit the brakes, then the pedestrian will be accelerated up to the velocity of the truck in a very short time before sliding off in whichever direction any resultant forces work.
It is unlikely that a cyclist would pin the pedestrian to the front of the bike unless it was in an AI generated Youtube Short.
As I predicted on election day or the day after, it looks like the Lichfield to Crewe bit of HS2 is going to be back on in short order.
"Rail minister appointment fuels hopes of HS2 revival Network Rail chief Lord Hendy is likely to be an advocate for extending the network"
"His appointment as rail minister may represent the best chance of saving elements of the scheme, including a link from the Midlands to Crewe that would allow full formations of HS2 trains to travel at top speed through to Manchester, leading figures in the sector said."
It will come down to whether Lord Hendy can gets things through the Department of Transport
But he's clueful enough to know how to get HS2 back on track and to kick off a number of quick win projects. For instance there are 60 miles of track that were they electrified opens up 2million track mile of freight a year shifting to electric...
In a highly competitive list cancelling HS2 was right up there for the Sunak government in terms of worst decisions.
You should be blaming the greed and incompetence that surrounded HS2 for a decade before Sunak became PM. Or even CoE.
I lot of the blame for the costs rests on the head of the former MP for Chesham and Amersham and look at the gratitude that waste of £10bn gold plating a set of tunnels did for the tory party (they lost the byelection).
The funny bit is that the air vents look worse and are way more visible than the original cutting would have looked like...
The bigger the project the greater the scope for excess spending when issues arise.
When a project is declared to be 'the biggest in Europe' the scope for excess spending becomes the biggest in Europe.
When a project is declared to be 'world beating' the scope for excess spending becomes world beating.
After a while the excess spending is deemed to be a good thing - the more that is spent means that the project becomes ever more 'biggest in Europe' or 'world beating'. Bigger is always deemed to be better.
The problem with these projects is that the moment you've signed the contract then the contractors hold you to ransom. The issue with a cutting is that it's a physical barrier, my uncle and aunt sold up in deepest Buckinghamshire because my uncle said that, rather than a 15 minute meander along country lanes to get to his friends on the other side of the route, it would become a 30 minute drive just to get to a crossing point.
This is especially so when government is involved and always so when its a government 'prestige project'.
The extra money is always paid and then used as a justification for supporting the project on a 'the bigger, the better' basis.
Yet that isn't the case elsewhere in Europe where High speed routes are being built for a fraction of the cost in the UK..
Now they are multiple reasons for that 1 of which is that companies in Europe know that work is continual so there is little risk of the project being cancelled once they start work on it.
That hasn't been the case in the UK for the past 12 years - hence additional risk costs are added into every project bid.
Comparing 'prestige' infrastructure spending between different countries is worthy of in depth research and discussion.
I expect we would discover that some countries are good at X and bad at Y with other countries the opposite. Perhaps for reasons which are intrinsic and impossible to change.
Which would suggest that countries should stick to what they are capable of doing well instead of incompetently and expensively trying to imitate what other countries do better.
For example its likely to be a lot easier and cheaper to build rail lines through the emptiness of Castille and Leon than through the Chiltern nimbys.
https://x.com/Sam_Dumitriu has done lots of deep dives on UK civil engineering. It's exactly how you think it is.
I don't know his area of expertise but last night he commented on one of my areas and this is a beyond stupid take.
Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu Digital ID (a good idea) is different to ID Cards (not a good idea).
Hint Digital ID has all the bad bits of an ID card without the physical benefit that it would confirm I am fullname here with the right to work in the UK with an ID number that matches the one in your system...
And my final point is - given that he talks crap on an area I know something about his other viewpoints are probably equally poor (being generous there by using poor when other words may be better).
But right to work checks are already going digital thanks to the eVisa system, which replaces physical BRP/BRCs from the end of this year.
A universal Digital ID in the UK is mainly scuppered because we don't actually have a canonical list of who is or isn't a UK citizen.
The Verify programme was probably the best possible substitute that we could hope to manage, but it failed for a variety of reasons including limited buy-in from some govt departments (HMRC and Home Office!), and changing priorities in the face of Brexit. Its replacement, One Login, is much more limited in scope.
The chances of the new govt pushing for anything beyond this in the near future are pretty slim (I hope!)
I would note the flaw in that scheme is the existing one of how do you remotely verify a UK citizen who has not got a passport.... Round here that's a far bigger problem than you may think it is...
For British and Irish citizens, the employer just needs to see a copy of your birth certificate (or naturalisation certificate) plus an official letter addressed to you by name and containing your NINO (from HMRC or DWP, for example). There's no need to check anything online.
The real edge case is Commonwealth citizens who have the right to work but who may not have a passport or birth certificate - think of the Windrush scheme, for example. They need fall back to the Employer Checking Service, which I believe is operated using manual verification by the Home Office and which therefore takes an age.
So let me tell you what actually happens in such cases. The employer says sorry we have an issue and moves on to the next candidate...
There are an awful lot of people who are unemployed and unemployable for want of spare £100 and a passport...
Sure, but crappy employers are a different class of problem. If they can't be arsed to look at a birth certificate rather than a passport, then they're not going to want to faff around with some sort of digital ID system either.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
That's fair. I was torn on this, but am now less so
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Forget about the Tories, Braverman is clearly preparing a bid to challenge Farage to be Reform leader on the grounds he is a relative dripping wet woke liberal leftie compared to her
AI summary: The internet has evolved from a tool for sharing data and programs to a global network of hypertext documents accessible to the public. However, the internet has become dominated by a few big companies, leading to a concentration of power and a shift towards semi-closed applications. The rise of AI and bots has led to a Shady Marketplace for engagement, with companies offering services to artificially boost online presence. The Dead Internet Theory suggests that the internet has become a dystopian ghost town populated by simulated actors, with human-to-human interaction becoming rare. The emergence of advanced AI, such as chat GPT, has blurred the lines between humans and AI, raising concerns about the future of the internet. Bots account for nearly 52% of all internet traffic, and the integration of AI technology into search engines has raised concerns about the quality and trustworthiness of online content. The commercialization of the internet, concentration of power, and the rise of generative AI have led to a carefully constructed reality that is manipulating human weaknesses. It is a wakeup call to change course and prioritize humanity over profit to keep the internet alive.
The models and MRPs for Scotland never quite passed the sniff test (as indeed the national ones did not). I wonder if less weight needs to be put on big monolithic convictions such as independence or leave/remain - they matter, but don’t trump other things people do also care a lot about, e.g. public services, tax, mortgages, corruption and incompetence in high office etc.
Inverness [etc] seat did feel like a bit of a surprise nonetheless though, given the relative size of the swing. It’s one of many mini-stories of this election I’d like to know more about.
Inverness wasn't a surprise because it was a seat where the Tories were in second place to the SNP but most Tory voters would have known their party was never going to be strong enough to defeat the SNP whereas the LDs would have a chance of doing so due to their historic strength in the constituency. I didn't actually predict an SNP loss but I did forecast SNP 17,000 LD 16,000 with the Tories a long way behind.
At one time this was a tight four way marginal.
General election 1992: Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber
Party Candidate Votes % ±% Liberal Democrats Russell Johnston 13,258 26.0 −10.8 Labour David Stewart 12,800 25.1 −0.3 SNP Fergus Ewing 12,562 24.7 +9.9 Conservative John Scott 11,517 22.6 −0.4 Scottish Green John Martin 766 1.5 New
Majority 458 0.9 −10.5 Turnout 50,903 73.6 +2.7 Liberal Democrats hold Swing −5.3
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Well, no. Assuming a car weighs about 1000 kg, your calculation would imply that, had she been hit by a car, the velocity of the woman after the collision would be 300 mph. This is clearly absurd, which indicates that your calculation is incorrect.
Apart from equating newtons with kilograms, which makes no sense at all if the Earth's gravity isn't involved, you're making the incorrect assumption that all of the bike + rider's momentum is transferred to the woman. This can't happen because it would violate conservation of energy. In an inelastic collision, the rider + bike would continue to move in the same direction after the collision, albeit more slowly. Not all of the momentum would be transferred. This is more obvious if you imagine a car/pedestrian collision.
An inelastic collision bringing a car to a complete halt when hitting a pedestrian does not happen - the car continues for some distance or maybe never stops at all.
People bumping into each other produce a totally different outcome because their masses are comparable. If you knock someone over you, you usually halt.
Different scenarios. You simply cannot upgrade a person to a car. Due to the paucity of information a lot of assumptions are in the calculations but upping the mass of one person by a factor of 10 or more invalidates an already strecthed scenario.
Fair point about converting to Newtons - I did not need that but it cancels out anyway
People don’t come to a halt either, they tend to move together when they collide, not perfectly transfer momentum from the collider to the collided.
Your assumptions are simply wrong, which leads to this ludicrous idea that this woman was launched into the air at 30mph.
Can a fly stop a train? Imagine a fly flying at 5 mph towards a train travelling at 50 mph. And they collide. Draw a graph of the fly's progress. At one time it is flying in one direction at 5 mph, then it is travelling at 50 mph (squished on the train's windscreen) in the opposite direction. So at some instant, the fly must have been stationary. At that point it was in contact with the train, therefore the train was also stationary.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Forget about the Tories, Braverman is clearly preparing a bid to challenge Farage to be Reform leader on the grounds he is a relative dripping wet woke liberal leftie compared to her
She clearly went to be the leader of a merged Con/Reform - which would be a fairly accurate name for such a misbegotten institution.
Has anyone done a count of the surviving parliamentary party to tell if there are the sufficient MPs who might fall for it ?
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
The principle that every part of the justice system is functionally innumerate and incapable of dealing with statistical evidence appropriately applies. That her defence didn’t understand the flaws in the prosecution, nor listen to their own experts on the matter is entirely consistent with this reality sadly.
Women convicted of heinous crimes on the basis of statistical evidence & dubious expert testimony has a defence that doesn’t understand the problems with the prosecution case is, again, not exactly unknown in recent times.
I really do fail to understand why people like you continue to insist on this level of faith in the justice system: It’s been proven to be flawed over and over again in cases just like this one. Those people were also found guilty in long court cases that “looked at all the evidence in more detail than anyone else”. Sadly the legal system often mistakes effort & expense for quality of outcome & refuses to examine it’s own blunders, treating them as individual failures rather than evidence of systemic issues in the system itself.
Even Stephen King - fanatically anti-Trump, and very Democrat- thinks Biden has to go
"Joe Biden has been a fine president, but it’s time for him—in the interests of the America he so clearly loves—to announce he will not run for re-election."
A good story teller can see how this story ends, unless there is a dramatic plot twist. King also has 7m followers on TwiX, not a voice to be blithely ignored
47% of Democratic voters would prefer to keep Biden as nominee over Harris still, only 32% prefer his VP. Only Michelle Obama gets majority support from Democrats as better able to take on Trump than Biden
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Wonder if she's trying to get kicked out of the Tory Party so she can head off to REF?
If that were true, she'd have been better to wait until a new leader was in place - that way she'd have been able to paint them as unbearably woke, rather than Rishi. The sort of person who supports her already believes that Sunak is beyond redemption.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
If you went with polls in July of election year it would have been President Hillary, President Romney, President Kerry, President Perot, President Dukakis etc. Presidential election polls don't really mean much until after the conventions and subsequent poll bounces and any economic or foreign policy events in the autumn like the 2008 crash
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
That's fair. I was torn on this, but am now less so
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
The jury in the second trial was instructed that they could assume her guilty verdict in the first trial as evidence in the second IIRC. So it’s really one trial, not two independent ones
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
If you went with polls in July of election year it would have been President Hillary, President Romney, President Kerry, President Perot, President Dukakis etc. Presidential election polls don't really mean much until after the conventions and subsequent poll bounces and any economic or foreign policy events in the autumn like the 2008 crash
HE. IS. SENILE.
Listen to this, and this is CNN brutally mocking his candidacy - CNN!
As I predicted on election day or the day after, it looks like the Lichfield to Crewe bit of HS2 is going to be back on in short order.
"Rail minister appointment fuels hopes of HS2 revival Network Rail chief Lord Hendy is likely to be an advocate for extending the network"
"His appointment as rail minister may represent the best chance of saving elements of the scheme, including a link from the Midlands to Crewe that would allow full formations of HS2 trains to travel at top speed through to Manchester, leading figures in the sector said."
It will come down to whether Lord Hendy can gets things through the Department of Transport
But he's clueful enough to know how to get HS2 back on track and to kick off a number of quick win projects. For instance there are 60 miles of track that were they electrified opens up 2million track mile of freight a year shifting to electric...
In a highly competitive list cancelling HS2 was right up there for the Sunak government in terms of worst decisions.
You should be blaming the greed and incompetence that surrounded HS2 for a decade before Sunak became PM. Or even CoE.
I lot of the blame for the costs rests on the head of the former MP for Chesham and Amersham and look at the gratitude that waste of £10bn gold plating a set of tunnels did for the tory party (they lost the byelection).
The funny bit is that the air vents look worse and are way more visible than the original cutting would have looked like...
The bigger the project the greater the scope for excess spending when issues arise.
When a project is declared to be 'the biggest in Europe' the scope for excess spending becomes the biggest in Europe.
When a project is declared to be 'world beating' the scope for excess spending becomes world beating.
After a while the excess spending is deemed to be a good thing - the more that is spent means that the project becomes ever more 'biggest in Europe' or 'world beating'. Bigger is always deemed to be better.
The problem with these projects is that the moment you've signed the contract then the contractors hold you to ransom. The issue with a cutting is that it's a physical barrier, my uncle and aunt sold up in deepest Buckinghamshire because my uncle said that, rather than a 15 minute meander along country lanes to get to his friends on the other side of the route, it would become a 30 minute drive just to get to a crossing point.
This is especially so when government is involved and always so when its a government 'prestige project'.
The extra money is always paid and then used as a justification for supporting the project on a 'the bigger, the better' basis.
Yet that isn't the case elsewhere in Europe where High speed routes are being built for a fraction of the cost in the UK..
Now they are multiple reasons for that 1 of which is that companies in Europe know that work is continual so there is little risk of the project being cancelled once they start work on it.
That hasn't been the case in the UK for the past 12 years - hence additional risk costs are added into every project bid.
Comparing 'prestige' infrastructure spending between different countries is worthy of in depth research and discussion.
I expect we would discover that some countries are good at X and bad at Y with other countries the opposite. Perhaps for reasons which are intrinsic and impossible to change.
Which would suggest that countries should stick to what they are capable of doing well instead of incompetently and expensively trying to imitate what other countries do better.
For example its likely to be a lot easier and cheaper to build rail lines through the emptiness of Castille and Leon than through the Chiltern nimbys.
https://x.com/Sam_Dumitriu has done lots of deep dives on UK civil engineering. It's exactly how you think it is.
I don't know his area of expertise but last night he commented on one of my areas and this is a beyond stupid take.
Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu Digital ID (a good idea) is different to ID Cards (not a good idea).
Hint Digital ID has all the bad bits of an ID card without the physical benefit that it would confirm I am fullname here with the right to work in the UK with an ID number that matches the one in your system...
And my final point is - given that he talks crap on an area I know something about his other viewpoints are probably equally poor (being generous there by using poor when other words may be better).
But right to work checks are already going digital thanks to the eVisa system, which replaces physical BRP/BRCs from the end of this year.
A universal Digital ID in the UK is mainly scuppered because we don't actually have a canonical list of who is or isn't a UK citizen.
The Verify programme was probably the best possible substitute that we could hope to manage, but it failed for a variety of reasons including limited buy-in from some govt departments (HMRC and Home Office!), and changing priorities in the face of Brexit. Its replacement, One Login, is much more limited in scope.
The chances of the new govt pushing for anything beyond this in the near future are pretty slim (I hope!)
I would note the flaw in that scheme is the existing one of how do you remotely verify a UK citizen who has not got a passport.... Round here that's a far bigger problem than you may think it is...
For British and Irish citizens, the employer just needs to see a copy of your birth certificate (or naturalisation certificate) plus an official letter addressed to you by name and containing your NINO (from HMRC or DWP, for example). There's no need to check anything online.
The real edge case is Commonwealth citizens who have the right to work but who may not have a passport or birth certificate - think of the Windrush scheme, for example. They need fall back to the Employer Checking Service, which I believe is operated using manual verification by the Home Office and which therefore takes an age.
So let me tell you what actually happens in such cases. The employer says sorry we have an issue and moves on to the next candidate...
There are an awful lot of people who are unemployed and unemployable for want of spare £100 and a passport...
Sure, but crappy employers are a different class of problem. If they can't be arsed to look at a birth certificate rather than a passport, then they're not going to want to faff around with some sort of digital ID system either.
Again that's not the problem. The issue is that employers don't 100% trust their local staff and the fine for illegal employees is now so significant that the checks are done centrally and outsourced to a firm that does it as a full time job.
And many firms want the 100% safe and cheapest option of passport checks only - because staff are substitutable..
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Has an angry politician ever won high office in Britain? By high office I mean PM, CoE, FS or Health. I can’t think of one.
Certainly all PMs in my lifetime have been either avuncular, or bland but serious. Even Truss didn’t do angry. Brown might have got cross with his colleagues but he didn’t project anger to the electorate.
There have been a few moderately angry LOTOs, most recently Corbyn, but they never won.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
Yep.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
Why? Why do we need new laws when existing laws will do. People get killed by reckless skiing but we don't have a specific law for that. In the case of motor cars it is a frequent event needing specific consideration, but in the case of cycling it is very rare indeed and current laws cope with it as they would do for skiing, football, rugby or even tiddly-winks.
They could tack a new law onto something, just to give less ammunition to the many arseholes who get angry at the mere sight of a cyclist. If it makes them calm down a bit for a short while, it would definitely make cycling safer.
Nah, once you give in to bullies they just come back for more.
The people who piss & moan endlessly about cyclists will just find a new thing to demand once they get their unnecessary law written into the books.
The reason we need special laws for drivers written into the books (which almost precisely mirror the existing crimes of murder, assault etc etc down the hierarchy of intent & injury) is because the system was so reluctant to convict drivers of these crimes that special “no it’s still a crime when a driver does it, look it says so in the name of the crime” laws had to be drawn up. Why else do you think think we have “Causing death by careless driving”? - that’s just manslaughter.
Cyclists don’t get this kind of privileged treatment, so there’s no need to pass new laws that say “no, it’s still a crime when a cyclist does it, look it says so in the name” crimes. They get prosecuted under existing legislation just fine.
That drivers /still/ complain because now they have laws that call them out specifically when nobody else gets called out in this way is just another example of car brain in action.
How many cyclists get convicted of manslaughter?
The riposte to that is "How many drivers get convicted of manslaughter?"
An original reason for "Death by .... driving" laws being introduced was juries refusing to convict the blatantly guilty.
We have the same things now, with a long catalogue going back decades of drivers who admit to committing an offence causing a death being found not guilty by juries.
The fairly general view amongst my communities is that it is down to jurors thinking "but that's how I behave, and I could *never* be guilty of that". That's why I'm interested in the possibility of charging and judicial approaches to motoring offences being improved.
One storied case is Helen Measures in 2013, who went round a bend at 50mph on the wrong side of the road overtaking a cyclist, and killing a cyclist lawfully coming the other way on the correct side of the road.
The defence was essentially to demonise the dead cyclist for not getting out of the way and navigating through the gap she had left. The jury found her not guilty of Causing Death by Dangerous Driving.
I can probably find you scores or hundreds of others, just from media reports. It's just a constant week-by-week happening.
One current favourite excuse is "but I was driving into the sun", as if driving into the sun is a reasonable excuse for driving at unsafe speed into places where you have no visibility.
At least juries have the option to convict of death by dangerous driving or death by careless driving though and they often do.
Cyclists can't be convicted of either now if they kill pedestrians
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Wonder if she's trying to get kicked out of the Tory Party so she can head off to REF?
or she is targeting a particular sector of the Tory party membership (old, racist, homophobic)... Wouldn't surprise me if that covers 60%+ of the remaining membership...
@leon: Now you are not mildly drunk (your words) have you re-looked at the discussion last night where @rcs1000 , @TimS and myself were trying to explain where you were having a logic fail when you said 'She won the popular vote by a canter' referring to the RN vote in France compared to NFP and Macron.
Personally I blame @Alanbrooke for putting the figures up in the first place. Correct they may be but totally meaningless and misleading. One wonders whether he trying to snare you on the hook.
I have sort of run out of explanations and analogies but I do just have one more. Here it is:
It is like saying that Accrington Stanley are better at football than Real Madrid because they have more points in EFL League 2 than Real Madrid.
It is true they have more points, but it doesn't prove they are better than Real Madrid because Real Madrid do not play in the EFL league 2.
The same was true in the 2nd round of the French elections. RN 'played' in many more of the individual contests than either NFP or Macron. Therefore they will get more votes. They lost because combined they got less votes.
By comparing those figures Alan posted you were comparing Apples with Pears.
Also I'm eating cold roast chicken, ripe Cavaillon melon, and sipping chilled rose wine, as I gaze over the Luberon, and my flint knapping is done for the day. So all I have to do is loaf about, maybe have a siesta, go look at a church in the lavender fields, then drink Bandol
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
If you went with polls in July of election year it would have been President Hillary, President Romney, President Kerry, President Perot, President Dukakis etc. Presidential election polls don't really mean much until after the conventions and subsequent poll bounces and any economic or foreign policy events in the autumn like the 2008 crash
HE. IS. SENILE.
Listen to this, and this is CNN brutally mocking his candidacy - CNN!
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Wonder if she's trying to get kicked out of the Tory Party so she can head off to REF?
or she is targeting a particular sector of the Tory party membership (old, racist, homophobic)... Wouldn't surprise me if that covers 60%+ of the remaining membership...
That won't do her any good though, as the remaining Con MP's won't put her through to the final two.
I think she knows her leadership is dead before it ever took off and she's looking for an "out" to REF.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
If you went with polls in July of election year it would have been President Hillary, President Romney, President Kerry, President Perot, President Dukakis etc. Presidential election polls don't really mean much until after the conventions and subsequent poll bounces and any economic or foreign policy events in the autumn like the 2008 crash
HE. IS. SENILE.
Listen to this, and this is CNN brutally mocking his candidacy - CNN!
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
Yep.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
He's too fucking old and that's the end of it.
Check that link from CNN. That clip is Demented Joe ringing in to a US morning TV programme to reassure everyone he's fine. And..... he sounds really senile and totally lost. Fuck me. How bad does it have to get??
Virtually all Democrat media has turned against him and 72% of American voters want him to step down, urgently. The Dems are hurtling towards disaster if they persist
Not surprised you've already noticed the improvement. The grown-ups are back in charge now.
I thought the whole point of getting Starmer in was to get rid of the criminals and sociopaths.
Tony is neither a criminal nor a sociopath. What he is, is highly experienced, having run the best government of the last many decades.
What was your favoured part of Tony's Government?
The explosion of house prices?
The introduction of tuition fees?
The increase in national insurance?
If you're a pensioner who wanted to not pay tax and were free to call at 8am to get an NHS appointment whenever you wanted then Tony's government was great. If you were a young adult, or a child who'd grow into a young adult subsequently, then his legacy was utterly toxic.
Almost everything (besides masts) that you regularly complain about can be traced back to his government.
Why are you having a go at my posting on masts? It's an area I have experience and knowledge of, it's no more boring than listening to you talk about housing say.
The Sunderland story was a none story
The Blackpool story was the wrong place for the mast (as decided by both the planners at the council, the council itself and the planning inspectorate at appeal).
It wasn't the "wrong place" though. The location was chosen because it provided the coverage the MNO needed. That is the baseline for why it was there.
They couldn't choose another location as it did not provide sufficient coverage. This is exactly the point I am making, objecting to these masts should be a thing of the past.
So you need to build 2 masts rather than 1 - tough get on with both applications.
I have zero sympathy for the issue - given the way your industry has been trying to improve reception on the M6 by putting a mast up that would be visible from 20 miles away on a prime part of the Yorkshire Dales. Being blunt all I see is people who are lazy and don't want to spend money doing things appropriately...
And in any case, an industry which places masts in the middle of a cycle path as already discussed ...
What I don't understand is how they can credibly insist that it's essential to put the mast in the middle of the path rather than 2m to either side.
If cyclists can't see or steer round stationary phone masts, it is no wonder they keep having inelastic collisions with pedestrians.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Wonder if she's trying to get kicked out of the Tory Party so she can head off to REF?
or she is targeting a particular sector of the Tory party membership (old, racist, homophobic)... Wouldn't surprise me if that covers 60%+ of the remaining membership...
Is she puts off enough Tory MPs she thankfully won’t get the backing to get voted on by the members so her disloyalty, shit talking, her lack of delivery in office and general dark heart isn’t going to help her.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Hold on, this maths is complete bullshit. You don’t convert mass to force & then do a calculation based on Newtons! But that’s a side issue - the real problem is that you have assumed that all of his momentum is transferred to her, which is physically extremely unlikely - people do not rebound off each other in this way.
A more physically plausible outcome is that the two people roughly move as one after the collision, so assuming an inelastic collision where the two people move together after the collision with no elastic rebound - given your numbers the momentum beforehand is 110kg * 7.5m/s + 55*0 = 825 N m / s. Afterwards the mass is 165kg, momentum is conserved so the velocity of the two people would be 5 m / s or about 11 mph.
Although obviously a real world collision would be different because of the complexity of two bodies colliding, but a joint post impact velocity of 11mph is far more plausible than 30mph!
(your approach would also imply that the heavier the object that is moving beforehand, the fast the hit person will be moving afterwards which is clearly physically implausible - people hit by lorries do not sproing off into the distance at 100s of mph.)
That would be because hitting the pedestrian does NOT result in a complete (or near complete) transfer of momentum from the lorry. The lorry barely slows at all. It is the lorry's brakes being pressed by its panicking driver that brings it to a halt.
For an impact where one body is very much more massive than the other, impulse is more important. You can safely assume with a pedestrian and truck that, if the driver does not hit the brakes, then the pedestrian will be accelerated up to the velocity of the truck in a very short time before sliding off in whichever direction any resultant forces work.
It is unlikely that a cyclist would pin the pedestrian to the front of the bike unless it was in an AI generated Youtube Short.
Look, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Physics says you’re wrong. Why are you wrong? Because your collision numbers don’t conserve energy. There is no hope for you if you think a collision generates kinetic energy:
Before KE: 110kg * (7.5 m/s)^2 = 6182 J After KE: 55 kg * (15 m/s)^2 = 12375 J
You cannot generate energy from a collision between two people. There is no hope for you, please desist with this ludicrous argument.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
Why? Why do we need new laws when existing laws will do. People get killed by reckless skiing but we don't have a specific law for that. In the case of motor cars it is a frequent event needing specific consideration, but in the case of cycling it is very rare indeed and current laws cope with it as they would do for skiing, football, rugby or even tiddly-winks.
They could tack a new law onto something, just to give less ammunition to the many arseholes who get angry at the mere sight of a cyclist. If it makes them calm down a bit for a short while, it would definitely make cycling safer.
Nah, once you give in to bullies they just come back for more.
The people who piss & moan endlessly about cyclists will just find a new thing to demand once they get their unnecessary law written into the books.
The reason we need special laws for drivers written into the books (which almost precisely mirror the existing crimes of murder, assault etc etc down the hierarchy of intent & injury) is because the system was so reluctant to convict drivers of these crimes that special “no it’s still a crime when a driver does it, look it says so in the name of the crime” laws had to be drawn up. Why else do you think think we have “Causing death by careless driving”? - that’s just manslaughter.
Cyclists don’t get this kind of privileged treatment, so there’s no need to pass new laws that say “no, it’s still a crime when a cyclist does it, look it says so in the name” crimes. They get prosecuted under existing legislation just fine.
That drivers /still/ complain because now they have laws that call them out specifically when nobody else gets called out in this way is just another example of car brain in action.
How many cyclists get convicted of manslaughter?
The riposte to that is "How many drivers get convicted of manslaughter?"
An original reason for "Death by .... driving" laws being introduced was juries refusing to convict the blatantly guilty.
We have the same things now, with a long catalogue going back decades of drivers who admit to committing an offence causing a death being found not guilty by juries.
The fairly general view amongst my communities is that it is down to jurors thinking "but that's how I behave, and I could *never* be guilty of that". That's why I'm interested in the possibility of charging and judicial approaches to motoring offences being improved.
One storied case is Helen Measures in 2013, who went round a bend at 50mph on the wrong side of the road overtaking a cyclist, and killing a cyclist lawfully coming the other way on the correct side of the road.
The defence was essentially to demonise the dead cyclist for not getting out of the way and navigating through the gap she had left. The jury found her not guilty of Causing Death by Dangerous Driving.
I can probably find you scores or hundreds of others, just from media reports. It's just a constant week-by-week happening.
One current favourite excuse is "but I was driving into the sun", as if driving into the sun is a reasonable excuse for driving at unsafe speed into places where you have no visibility.
You wont win this one. IBS is about as high on the HYUFD hierarchy as the Russel Group and HMC schools.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
Yep.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
He's too fucking old and that's the end of it.
Maybe he’s so far gone he thinks he’s the Queen and needs to keep going until death.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
That's fair. I was torn on this, but am now less so
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
The jury in the second trial was instructed that they could assume her guilty verdict in the first trial as evidence in the second IIRC. So it’s really one trial, not two independent ones
Jeepers. Really? So now I have to worry she's innocent again?
lol. There is only so much one person can fret about
I really don't like to think this woman is banged up on bogus charges
@leon: Now you are not mildly drunk (your words) have you re-looked at the discussion last night where @rcs1000 , @TimS and myself were trying to explain where you were having a logic fail when you said 'She won the popular vote by a canter' referring to the RN vote in France compared to NFP and Macron.
Personally I blame @Alanbrooke for putting the figures up in the first place. Correct they may be but totally meaningless and misleading. One wonders whether he trying to snare you on the hook.
I have sort of run out of explanations and analogies but I do just have one more. Here it is:
It is like saying that Accrington Stanley are better at football than Real Madrid because they have more points in EFL League 2 than Real Madrid.
It is true they have more points, but it doesn't prove they are better than Real Madrid because Real Madrid do not play in the EFL league 2.
The same was true in the 2nd round of the French elections. RN 'played' in many more of the individual contests than either NFP or Macron. Therefore they will get more votes. They lost because combined they got less votes.
By comparing those figures Alan posted you were comparing Apples with Pears.
I don’t think ultimately it’s that controversial what happened, or that there’s much to argue about.
RN got pretty much the same in round two as round one. They were beaten on seats by tactical voting.
Incidentally I do like the way we Brits keep up with Apples and Pears in the face of the corporate American onslaught of Apples and Oranges. Ils ne passeront pas.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
Yep.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
He's too fucking old and that's the end of it.
Check that link from CNN. That clip is Demented Joe ringing in to a US morning TV programme to reassure everyone he's fine. And..... he sounds really senile and totally lost. Fuck me. How bad does it have to get??
Virtually all Democrat media has turned against him and 72% of American voters want him to step down, urgently. The Dems are hurtling towards disaster if they persist
Biden will do a solo news conference on Thursday.
Maybe that will be the final straw?
Apparently it is the first solo one he has done since 2022!!!!
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
Also I'm eating cold roast chicken, ripe Cavaillon melon, and sipping chilled rose wine, as I gaze over the Luberon, and my flint knapping is done for the day. So all I have to do is loaf about, maybe have a siesta, go look at a church in the lavender fields, then drink Bandol
As a man of advanced years, that is close to perfect happiness
You can buy cold roast chicken, tropical fruit and Kylie's finest pink plonk at the big Sainsbury's where you live. No need for foreign travel.
Much as I love Camden, it doesn't have sunkissed lavender fields extending to the rosy horizon, in a rolling green expanse studded with historic stone villages and ancient vineyards and Roman fountain towns, each one with an idyllic cafe under the palms and the cypress trees, and ending at the wild and lofty heights of Mont Ventoux
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
Yep.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
He's too fucking old and that's the end of it.
Maybe he’s so far gone he thinks he’s the Queen and needs to keep going until death.
That is definitely the case, ie I reckon he's so demented he no longer realises he is demented, he's gone beyond that crucial stage of self awareness. Which is
1. Really sad
and
2. Really dangerous, for America, and thus everyone else
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
That's fair. I was torn on this, but am now less so
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
The jury in the second trial was instructed that they could assume her guilty verdict in the first trial as evidence in the second IIRC. So it’s really one trial, not two independent ones
Jeepers. Really? So now I have to worry she's innocent again?
lol. There is only so much one person can fret about
I really don't like to think this woman is banged up on bogus charges
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's a [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Why? We know who Suella Braverman is. The question is whether she is likely to become leader, so we can back or lay appropriately. Whether she is a good person is a secondary consideration, a distraction.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Hold on, this maths is complete bullshit. You don’t convert mass to force & then do a calculation based on Newtons! But that’s a side issue - the real problem is that you have assumed that all of his momentum is transferred to her, which is physically extremely unlikely - people do not rebound off each other in this way.
A more physically plausible outcome is that the two people roughly move as one after the collision, so assuming an inelastic collision where the two people move together after the collision with no elastic rebound - given your numbers the momentum beforehand is 110kg * 7.5m/s + 55*0 = 825 N m / s. Afterwards the mass is 165kg, momentum is conserved so the velocity of the two people would be 5 m / s or about 11 mph.
Although obviously a real world collision would be different because of the complexity of two bodies colliding, but a joint post impact velocity of 11mph is far more plausible than 30mph!
(your approach would also imply that the heavier the object that is moving beforehand, the fast the hit person will be moving afterwards which is clearly physically implausible - people hit by lorries do not sproing off into the distance at 100s of mph.)
That would be because hitting the pedestrian does NOT result in a complete (or near complete) transfer of momentum from the lorry. The lorry barely slows at all. It is the lorry's brakes being pressed by its panicking driver that brings it to a halt.
For an impact where one body is very much more massive than the other, impulse is more important. You can safely assume with a pedestrian and truck that, if the driver does not hit the brakes, then the pedestrian will be accelerated up to the velocity of the truck in a very short time before sliding off in whichever direction any resultant forces work.
It is unlikely that a cyclist would pin the pedestrian to the front of the bike unless it was in an AI generated Youtube Short.
Look, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Physics says you’re wrong. Why are you wrong? Because your collision numbers don’t conserve energy. There is no hope for you if you think a collision generates kinetic energy:
Before KE: 110kg * (7.5 m/s)^2 = 6182 J After KE: 55 kg * (15 m/s)^2 = 12375 J
You cannot generate energy from a collision between two people. There is no hope for you, please desist with this ludicrous argument.
Ben Houchen on R4 insists on need for unity. Calls Braverman "absolutely despicable.' Seems to fancy himself as kingmaker.
He understands that the tory party need to focus on the centre ground and not spend x years in a rightwing reform attacking wilderness.
Whether MPs will listen to him is a different question and I hope they don't - not because I want to see the tory party destroyed but I want it to try to improve things for everyone rather than just the voters it's targeting - and a time in the wilderness will allow it to shed a lot of dead weight.
Also I'm eating cold roast chicken, ripe Cavaillon melon, and sipping chilled rose wine, as I gaze over the Luberon, and my flint knapping is done for the day. So all I have to do is loaf about, maybe have a siesta, go look at a church in the lavender fields, then drink Bandol
Also I'm eating cold roast chicken, ripe Cavaillon melon, and sipping chilled rose wine, as I gaze over the Luberon, and my flint knapping is done for the day. So all I have to do is loaf about, maybe have a siesta, go look at a church in the lavender fields, then drink Bandol
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
If you went with polls in July of election year it would have been President Hillary, President Romney, President Kerry, President Perot, President Dukakis etc. Presidential election polls don't really mean much until after the conventions and subsequent poll bounces and any economic or foreign policy events in the autumn like the 2008 crash
The polls this year have been pretty stable. Even Trump getting convicted or Biden showing the world he's well past his sell-by-date didn't shift the polls very much.
Obviously we've got 2 very well-known quantities, who have been presumptive nominees for months already, and especially in Trump a candidate who a lot of people are definitely going to vote for or against come what may. I don't see the polls having any dramatic shifts with these 2 candidates between now and November, but every chance that Trump will slowly increase his current lead due to Biden looking increasingly like he's not up to the job.
A tape of Trump complaining about "f**king n****rs" surfacing might help Biden a bit.
Not surprised you've already noticed the improvement. The grown-ups are back in charge now.
I thought the whole point of getting Starmer in was to get rid of the criminals and sociopaths.
Tony is neither a criminal nor a sociopath. What he is, is highly experienced, having run the best government of the last many decades.
What was your favoured part of Tony's Government?
The explosion of house prices?
The introduction of tuition fees?
The increase in national insurance?
If you're a pensioner who wanted to not pay tax and were free to call at 8am to get an NHS appointment whenever you wanted then Tony's government was great. If you were a young adult, or a child who'd grow into a young adult subsequently, then his legacy was utterly toxic.
Almost everything (besides masts) that you regularly complain about can be traced back to his government.
Why are you having a go at my posting on masts? It's an area I have experience and knowledge of, it's no more boring than listening to you talk about housing say.
The Sunderland story was a none story
The Blackpool story was the wrong place for the mast (as decided by both the planners at the council, the council itself and the planning inspectorate at appeal).
It wasn't the "wrong place" though. The location was chosen because it provided the coverage the MNO needed. That is the baseline for why it was there.
They couldn't choose another location as it did not provide sufficient coverage. This is exactly the point I am making, objecting to these masts should be a thing of the past.
So you need to build 2 masts rather than 1 - tough get on with both applications.
I have zero sympathy for the issue - given the way your industry has been trying to improve reception on the M6 by putting a mast up that would be visible from 20 miles away on a prime part of the Yorkshire Dales. Being blunt all I see is people who are lazy and don't want to spend money doing things appropriately...
And in any case, an industry which places masts in the middle of a cycle path as already discussed ...
What I don't understand is how they can credibly insist that it's essential to put the mast in the middle of the path rather than 2m to either side.
If cyclists can't see or steer round stationary phone masts, it is no wonder they keep having inelastic collisions with pedestrians.
I know it was a joke and one that made me smile, but this really is an issue when this happens. As a cyclist you need to clear the post with your handle bars that puts your wheel on the margin of the concrete/tarmac and the grass. A cyclists can cross these margins at 90 degrees or even 45 degrees but cycling down the margin is very dodgy and makes you wobble or throws you off the bike. It is never fun getting into one of these ruts so the cyclist is likely going to take to the grass and not risk going into the strip where the tarmac meets the grass. All because someone didn't use their brain when putting up a post.
You can't expect Joe B to know it, but one does expect those around him to be able to say whether he's compos mentis. It's up to Jill B and his close associates to persuade him to throw in the towel. Imo her role in this drawn-out car crash is now transparent.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
There are at least two outright lies in her speech.
Firstly, no "mutilation of children" takes place in any UK hospital. Under 18s can't undergo surgical gender reassignment.
Secondly, as @sundersays has pointed out, it was the traditional six-stripe Pride flag that could not be removed, not the enhanced version that includes trans colours.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
That's fair. I was torn on this, but am now less so
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
I'm going to have to introduce you to the concept of independence. If the first trial was mistried and this is not recognised, then the probability that the second trial will be mistried increases.
@leon: Now you are not mildly drunk (your words) have you re-looked at the discussion last night where @rcs1000 , @TimS and myself were trying to explain where you were having a logic fail when you said 'She won the popular vote by a canter' referring to the RN vote in France compared to NFP and Macron.
Personally I blame @Alanbrooke for putting the figures up in the first place. Correct they may be but totally meaningless and misleading. One wonders whether he trying to snare you on the hook.
I have sort of run out of explanations and analogies but I do just have one more. Here it is:
It is like saying that Accrington Stanley are better at football than Real Madrid because they have more points in EFL League 2 than Real Madrid.
It is true they have more points, but it doesn't prove they are better than Real Madrid because Real Madrid do not play in the EFL league 2.
The same was true in the 2nd round of the French elections. RN 'played' in many more of the individual contests than either NFP or Macron. Therefore they will get more votes. They lost because combined they got less votes.
By comparing those figures Alan posted you were comparing Apples with Pears.
I don’t think ultimately it’s that controversial what happened, or that there’s much to argue about.
RN got pretty much the same in round two as round one. They were beaten on seats by tactical voting.
Incidentally I do like the way we Brits keep up with Apples and Pears in the face of the corporate American onslaught of Apples and Oranges. Ils ne passeront pas.
Yep. I just get a bee in my bonnet when people have a logic fail and can't see it (drink is a valid excuse).
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
For all the expertise coming out of the corner now to cast doubt, the reality is that we have had two trials and not a single one of them was called to give evidence for the defence; from the tactical point of view the fact that the defence had no experts they believed could assist them is a most compelling feature. Only one conclusion can be drawn. Note from para 5 of the Court of Appeal judgment:
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
That's fair. I was torn on this, but am now less so
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
I'm going to have to introduce you to the concept of independence. If the first trial was mistried and this is not recognised, then the probability that the second trial will be mistried increases.
Fuck. I really don't have the time or mental energy to expend on this case. I was kinda hoping to rely on British justice being basically fit-for-purpose
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Hold on, this maths is complete bullshit. You don’t convert mass to force & then do a calculation based on Newtons! But that’s a side issue - the real problem is that you have assumed that all of his momentum is transferred to her, which is physically extremely unlikely - people do not rebound off each other in this way.
A more physically plausible outcome is that the two people roughly move as one after the collision, so assuming an inelastic collision where the two people move together after the collision with no elastic rebound - given your numbers the momentum beforehand is 110kg * 7.5m/s + 55*0 = 825 N m / s. Afterwards the mass is 165kg, momentum is conserved so the velocity of the two people would be 5 m / s or about 11 mph.
Although obviously a real world collision would be different because of the complexity of two bodies colliding, but a joint post impact velocity of 11mph is far more plausible than 30mph!
(your approach would also imply that the heavier the object that is moving beforehand, the fast the hit person will be moving afterwards which is clearly physically implausible - people hit by lorries do not sproing off into the distance at 100s of mph.)
That would be because hitting the pedestrian does NOT result in a complete (or near complete) transfer of momentum from the lorry. The lorry barely slows at all. It is the lorry's brakes being pressed by its panicking driver that brings it to a halt.
For an impact where one body is very much more massive than the other, impulse is more important. You can safely assume with a pedestrian and truck that, if the driver does not hit the brakes, then the pedestrian will be accelerated up to the velocity of the truck in a very short time before sliding off in whichever direction any resultant forces work.
It is unlikely that a cyclist would pin the pedestrian to the front of the bike unless it was in an AI generated Youtube Short.
Look, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Physics says you’re wrong. Why are you wrong? Because your collision numbers don’t conserve energy. There is no hope for you if you think a collision generates kinetic energy:
Before KE: 110kg * (7.5 m/s)^2 = 6182 J After KE: 55 kg * (15 m/s)^2 = 12375 J
You cannot generate energy from a collision between two people. There is no hope for you, please desist with this ludicrous argument.
I think it might qualify as "not even wrong"...
People can die by falling over in the wrong way without any momentum at all especially if they are caught unawares. It doesn't need them to be launched into the air.
Are there any statistics on 'collisions with other pedestrians' or 'collisions between toe and pavement'?
Has an angry politician ever won high office in Britain? By high office I mean PM, CoE, FS or Health. I can’t think of one.
Certainly all PMs in my lifetime have been either avuncular, or bland but serious. Even Truss didn’t do angry. Brown might have got cross with his colleagues but he didn’t project anger to the electorate.
There have been a few moderately angry LOTOs, most recently Corbyn, but they never won.
Bonar Law might qualify - he made his name through the harshness of his rhetoric, at a time when politics was becoming much rougher than it had been before.
On the other hand, he was already ill when he became leader and had begun to noticeably slow down - Violet Bonham Carter famously described him as "a man with sleeping sickness", when compared to "a man with St Vitus' Dance" (Lloyd-George).
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
There are at least two outright lies in her speech.
Firstly, no "mutilation of children" takes place in any UK hospital. Under 18s can't undergo surgical gender reassignment.
Secondly, as @sundersays has pointed out, it was the traditional six-stripe Pride flag that could not be removed, not the enhanced version that includes trans colours.
I have no idea what Braverman said, but the fact is young British kids - well under 18 - have been given puberty blocking drugs and things like "breast suppressing clothes" that alter the body. Is that mutilation?
I dunno. It's all so depressing. But I know this happened because it happened to the 13 year old child of one of my best friends, courtesy of the Tavistock Clinic
You can't expect Joe B to know it, but one does expect those around him to be able to say whether he's compos mentis. It's up to Jill B and his close associates to persuade him to throw in the towel. Imo her role in this drawn-out car crash is now transparent.
Unless Michelle Obama is the alternative Jill B should not under any circumstances get Joe out of the race, he must remain nominee
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
There are at least two outright lies in her speech.
Firstly, no "mutilation of children" takes place in any UK hospital. Under 18s can't undergo surgical gender reassignment.
Secondly, as @sundersays has pointed out, it was the traditional six-stripe Pride flag that could not be removed, not the enhanced version that includes trans colours.
You can't expect Joe B to know it, but one does expect those around him to be able to say whether he's compos mentis. It's up to Jill B and his close associates to persuade him to throw in the towel. Imo her role in this drawn-out car crash is now transparent.
Unless Michelle Obama is the alternative Jill B should not under any circumstances get Joe out of the race, he must remain nominee
Why do you say that? It looks like he's not fit for office
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
Those polls though are a snapshot of “now”. Of course they could stay like that for Harris v Trump but there is also a chance that if Harris is pushed forward, gets big airtime, national support, able to expand on her policies and personality those polls can shift.
I heard someone the other day say “nobody really knows more than one or two things about Harris”. She’s been quite invisible but if she comes to the fore and is sane, articulate, decent and balanced she could turn those polls about face against Trump, but because it hasn’t been tried the polls don’t reflect the possibilities.
If I was American I would vote for Biden over Trump or Michelle Obama or even Whitmer over Trump.
I would vote for Trump over Harris though, she is too woke and too left liberal for me
Do you mean the woke liberal Kamala Harris that introduced a law criminalising truancy to the extent that saw the parents of seriously ill children rounded up by the boys and girls in blue?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that challenged the release of an innocent man jailed for a minimum term of 27 years for somebody else's crime (throwing a knife under a car)?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that tried to block a court ruling in favour of gender reassignment surgery for a trans woman prisoner?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that played a key role in shutting down a classified ads website that was one of the safer options for sex workers to meet and vet potential clients rather than taking their chances on the streets?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that pledged to continue plying the Tel Aviv regime with unconditional military aid?
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Then why did Letbys lawyers not call expert witnesses to that effect?
They could hardly be ignorant of the stories in the US press.
While rare, there has been at least one prior case of murder by deliberate air embolism.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
Hold on, this maths is complete bullshit. You don’t convert mass to force & then do a calculation based on Newtons! But that’s a side issue - the real problem is that you have assumed that all of his momentum is transferred to her, which is physically extremely unlikely - people do not rebound off each other in this way.
A more physically plausible outcome is that the two people roughly move as one after the collision, so assuming an inelastic collision where the two people move together after the collision with no elastic rebound - given your numbers the momentum beforehand is 110kg * 7.5m/s + 55*0 = 825 N m / s. Afterwards the mass is 165kg, momentum is conserved so the velocity of the two people would be 5 m / s or about 11 mph.
Although obviously a real world collision would be different because of the complexity of two bodies colliding, but a joint post impact velocity of 11mph is far more plausible than 30mph!
(your approach would also imply that the heavier the object that is moving beforehand, the fast the hit person will be moving afterwards which is clearly physically implausible - people hit by lorries do not sproing off into the distance at 100s of mph.)
That would be because hitting the pedestrian does NOT result in a complete (or near complete) transfer of momentum from the lorry. The lorry barely slows at all. It is the lorry's brakes being pressed by its panicking driver that brings it to a halt.
For an impact where one body is very much more massive than the other, impulse is more important. You can safely assume with a pedestrian and truck that, if the driver does not hit the brakes, then the pedestrian will be accelerated up to the velocity of the truck in a very short time before sliding off in whichever direction any resultant forces work.
It is unlikely that a cyclist would pin the pedestrian to the front of the bike unless it was in an AI generated Youtube Short.
Look, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Physics says you’re wrong. Why are you wrong? Because your collision numbers don’t conserve energy. There is no hope for you if you think a collision generates kinetic energy:
Before KE: 110kg * (7.5 m/s)^2 = 6182 J After KE: 55 kg * (15 m/s)^2 = 12375 J
You cannot generate energy from a collision between two people. There is no hope for you, please desist with this ludicrous argument.
We have a recent practical example of a collision between a large body going at that kind of speed and a much smaller body when the police car rammed the cow in West London and it got sent flying quite a long way down the road.
Comments
It is because life here is blissful. There are probably very few places nicer in the world than the Luberon in good calm summer weather. As we have discussed, that is often not the case - the winters are cruel and apparently rhis place, Oppede le Vieux, gets the Mistral worse than almost anywhere in France. It is so exposed on its mad crag. Marcel Duchamp apparently preferred life under the Nazis than hiding out here, with his fellow artists, he lasted about a day
But for these calm summer weeks, ahhhhhhh
The douceur de vivre, indeed
Apols - missed the earlier posts.
15mph is obviously achievable on a level towpath. No clue what sort of cyclist he was yet but if he is a Strava wanker his own records will give him away
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
An original reason for "Death by .... driving" laws being introduced was juries refusing to convict the blatantly guilty.
We have the same things now, with a long catalogue going back decades of drivers who admit to committing an offence causing a death being found not guilty by juries.
The fairly general view amongst my communities is that it is down to jurors thinking "but that's how I behave, and I could *never* be guilty of that". That's why I'm interested in the possibility of charging and judicial approaches to motoring offences being improved.
One storied case is Helen Measures in 2013, who went round a bend at 50mph on the wrong side of the road overtaking a cyclist, and killing a cyclist lawfully coming the other way on the correct side of the road.
The defence was essentially to demonise the dead cyclist for not getting out of the way and navigating through the gap she had left. The jury found her not guilty of Causing Death by Dangerous Driving.
I can probably find you scores or hundreds of others, just from media reports. It's just a constant week-by-week happening.
https://road.cc/content/news/95681-pharmaceutical-consultant-who-killed-cyclist-while-driving-wrong-side-road
One current favourite excuse is "but I was driving into the sun", as if driving into the sun is a reasonable excuse for driving at unsafe speed into places where you have no visibility.
There are an awful lot of people who are unemployed and unemployable for want of spare £100 and a passport...
Your assumptions are simply wrong, which leads to this ludicrous idea that this woman was launched into the air at 30mph.
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
"Two points may be noted at the outset. First, though the defence instructed a number of expert witnesses of their own, and many reports were served from them before and during the trial, no expert evidence was called on the applicant's behalf."
"Joe Biden has been a fine president, but it’s time for him—in the interests of the America he so clearly loves—to announce he will not run for re-election."
https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1810276684345573721
A good story teller can see how this story ends, unless there is a dramatic plot twist. King also has 7m followers on TwiX, not a voice to be blithely ignored
It is incorrect to say that the velocity of the woman after being hit by the cyclist would be 30 mph, or anything near that, and it is incorrect to say she might as well have been hit by a car. Your calculations are wrong for an elastic collision, but, in addition to that, collisions between squashy objects are almost completely inelastic. This means that after the collision, the cyclist and the woman would end up moving at about the same speed, which would obviously be lower than the initial speed of the cyclist.
For an impact where one body is very much more massive than the other, impulse is more important. You can safely assume with a pedestrian and truck that, if the driver does not hit the brakes, then the pedestrian will be accelerated up to the velocity of the truck in a very short time before sliding off in whichever direction any resultant forces work.
It is unlikely that a cyclist would pin the pedestrian to the front of the bike unless it was in an AI generated Youtube Short.
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's a [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
I have my friend who is a massive expert, one of the top forensic psych boffins in the UK, and he is doubtful about this case, but only from his leisure time reading of the transcripts and evidence
But then I look at TWO trials and I think, really? TWO mistrials?
- TLDR: Most internet content is AI generated and run by bots
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y0iO4c5XqM 13 mins
- AI summary: The internet has evolved from a tool for sharing data and programs to a global network of hypertext documents accessible to the public. However, the internet has become dominated by a few big companies, leading to a concentration of power and a shift towards semi-closed applications. The rise of AI and bots has led to a Shady Marketplace for engagement, with companies offering services to artificially boost online presence. The Dead Internet Theory suggests that the internet has become a dystopian ghost town populated by simulated actors, with human-to-human interaction becoming rare. The emergence of advanced AI, such as chat GPT, has blurred the lines between humans and AI, raising concerns about the future of the internet. Bots account for nearly 52% of all internet traffic, and the integration of AI technology into search engines has raised concerns about the quality and trustworthiness of online content. The commercialization of the internet, concentration of power, and the rise of generative AI have led to a carefully constructed reality that is manipulating human weaknesses. It is a wakeup call to change course and prioritize humanity over profit to keep the internet alive.
https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools/summarizerGeneral election 1992: Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Liberal Democrats Russell Johnston 13,258 26.0 −10.8
Labour David Stewart 12,800 25.1 −0.3
SNP Fergus Ewing 12,562 24.7 +9.9
Conservative John Scott 11,517 22.6 −0.4
Scottish Green John Martin 766 1.5 New
Majority 458 0.9 −10.5
Turnout 50,903 73.6 +2.7
Liberal Democrats hold Swing −5.3
Imagine a fly flying at 5 mph towards a train travelling at 50 mph. And they collide.
Draw a graph of the fly's progress. At one time it is flying in one direction at 5 mph, then it is travelling at 50 mph (squished on the train's windscreen) in the opposite direction.
So at some instant, the fly must have been stationary. At that point it was in contact with the train, therefore the train was also stationary.
Has anyone done a count of the surviving parliamentary party to tell if there are the sufficient MPs who might fall for it ?
Women convicted of heinous crimes on the basis of statistical evidence & dubious expert testimony has a defence that doesn’t understand the problems with the prosecution case is, again, not exactly unknown in recent times.
I really do fail to understand why people like you continue to insist on this level of faith in the justice system: It’s been proven to be flawed over and over again in cases just like this one. Those people were also found guilty in long court cases that “looked at all the evidence in more detail than anyone else”. Sadly the legal system often mistakes effort & expense for quality of outcome & refuses to examine it’s own blunders, treating them as individual failures rather than evidence of systemic issues in the system itself.
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Alternative_Democratic_Nominees_poll_results.pdf
A Jenrick/Braverman dream ticket would indeed be a dream ticket for Lib Dems defending their new seats in the amber wall.
Can you guess why?
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2022/11/06/what-boris-johnson-pulling-out-really-means/
Listen to this, and this is CNN brutally mocking his candidacy - CNN!
https://x.com/tomselliott/status/1810433619128615070
And many firms want the 100% safe and cheapest option of passport checks only - because staff are substitutable..
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Certainly all PMs in my lifetime have been either avuncular, or bland but serious. Even Truss didn’t do angry. Brown might have got cross with his colleagues but he didn’t project anger to the electorate.
There have been a few moderately angry LOTOs, most recently Corbyn, but they never won.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
He's too fucking old and that's the end of it.
Cyclists can't be convicted of either now if they kill pedestrians
Personally I blame @Alanbrooke for putting the figures up in the first place. Correct they may be but totally meaningless and misleading. One wonders whether he trying to snare you on the hook.
I have sort of run out of explanations and analogies but I do just have one more. Here it is:
It is like saying that Accrington Stanley are better at football than Real Madrid because they have more points in EFL League 2 than Real Madrid.
It is true they have more points, but it doesn't prove they are better than Real Madrid because Real Madrid do not play in the EFL league 2.
The same was true in the 2nd round of the French elections. RN 'played' in many more of the individual contests than either NFP or Macron. Therefore they will get more votes. They lost because combined they got less votes.
By comparing those figures Alan posted you were comparing Apples with Pears.
I think she knows her leadership is dead before it ever took off and she's looking for an "out" to REF.
Virtually all Democrat media has turned against him and 72% of American voters want him to step down, urgently. The Dems are hurtling towards disaster if they persist
Before KE: 110kg * (7.5 m/s)^2 = 6182 J
After KE: 55 kg * (15 m/s)^2 = 12375 J
You cannot generate energy from a collision between two people. There is no hope for you, please desist with this ludicrous argument.
ETA: what rubbish am I talking? It just didn't show up immediately...
lol. There is only so much one person can fret about
I really don't like to think this woman is banged up on bogus charges
RN got pretty much the same in round two as round one. They were beaten on seats by tactical voting.
Incidentally I do like the way we Brits keep up with Apples and Pears in the face of the corporate American onslaught of Apples and Oranges. Ils ne passeront pas.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/09/dyson-cut-almost-third-uk-workforce/
Maybe that will be the final straw?
Apparently it is the first solo one he has done since 2022!!!!
Firm makes people redundant - hardly a story that requires Government intervention.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-63599076
1. Really sad
and
2. Really dangerous, for America, and thus everyone else
But it could also be the writing of someone struggling to come to terms with the deaths of so many babies in their care.
I don’t know what to think personally.
Whether MPs will listen to him is a different question and I hope they don't - not because I want to see the tory party destroyed but I want it to try to improve things for everyone rather than just the voters it's targeting - and a time in the wilderness will allow it to shed a lot of dead weight.
Obviously we've got 2 very well-known quantities, who have been presumptive nominees for months already, and especially in Trump a candidate who a lot of people are definitely going to vote for or against come what may. I don't see the polls having any dramatic shifts with these 2 candidates between now and November, but every chance that Trump will slowly increase his current lead due to Biden looking increasingly like he's not up to the job.
A tape of Trump complaining about "f**king n****rs" surfacing might help Biden a bit.
Excerpts of the speech are online, but the speech was made in the National Conservatism Conference in Washington and the speech will be online in video form in due course via its YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@NationalConservatism/videos
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Firstly, no "mutilation of children" takes place in any UK hospital. Under 18s can't undergo surgical gender reassignment.
Secondly, as @sundersays has pointed out, it was the traditional six-stripe Pride flag that could not be removed, not the enhanced version that includes trans colours.
https://x.com/frances_coppola/status/1810433282166923488?s=61&t=c6bcp0cjChLfQN5Tc8A_6g
People can die by falling over in the wrong way without any momentum at all especially if they are caught unawares. It doesn't need them to be launched into the air.
Are there any statistics on 'collisions with other pedestrians' or 'collisions between toe and pavement'?
On the other hand, he was already ill when he became leader and had begun to noticeably slow down - Violet Bonham Carter famously described him as "a man with sleeping sickness", when compared to "a man with St Vitus' Dance" (Lloyd-George).
I dunno. It's all so depressing. But I know this happened because it happened to the 13 year old child of one of my best friends, courtesy of the Tavistock Clinic
It's Flick Drummond, who lost the battle for the Fareham and Waterlooville nomination, I feel sorry for.
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that challenged the release of an innocent man jailed for a minimum term of 27 years for somebody else's crime (throwing a knife under a car)?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that tried to block a court ruling in favour of gender reassignment surgery for a trans woman prisoner?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that played a key role in shutting down a classified ads website that was one of the safer options for sex workers to meet and vet potential clients rather than taking their chances on the streets?
The woke liberal Kamala Harris that pledged to continue plying the Tel Aviv regime with unconditional military aid?
(Etc, etc.)
That woke liberal Kamala Harris?
They could hardly be ignorant of the stories in the US press.
While rare, there has been at least one prior case of murder by deliberate air embolism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverley_Allitt