Since most posters here have had their say about Leon, here's mine. He is (was?) the most iteresting poster by far. That includes my vicarious interest in his travel reports. Hopefully his Spectator pieces will continue, but they are no substitute for his more ad lib contributions here. The Paretian 80:20 rule applies here as in many areas of life and too many of the most interesting 20% have departed over the years. A bit more tolerance and give and take wouldn't go amiss, here and more generally
Sadly the logical path seems to be:
Being interesting => being different => being a target
The Trump campaign getting hacked because Roger Stone fell for a phishing email sent to the AOL account that he is still using in the year-of-our-Lord 2024 is incredibly on brand https://x.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1823238723502293331
Got to say an AOL email address screams will fall for any trick you can think of.
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
Considering she's speaking about politics, no its not, its fair game.
If this was happening at a social/family event then that'd be a different matter.
Free speech cuts both ways.
I am generally uncomfortable with humour which is designed to embarrass. So I'm a little squeamish about these banners - even the Farage one.
Context as always is key. What is this event they have hijacked? Its Truss, addressing a very small group of Trump supporters, championing both the crook and the "free speech" nonsense where freedom is supporting Yaxley-Lennon.
Reminding her micro audience that she has zero credibility is absolutely free speech. Not bullying as she is sat there claiming some kind of relevant experience which puts her on the stage.
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
Here is a recent decision by my council regarding dogs in cemeteries. I'd be furious if I went to visit a family grave and some excitable Spaniel came jumping up at me.
I think some dog owners simply cannot comprehend that not everyone loves their dog as much as they do, and that the world doesn't revolve around Rover.
Dog owners are generally fine, it is cats and cat owners that are the problem.
One plus is this year I have not had any cat shit on my lawn. But my neighbours cats are going out of their homes less due to age.
The downside is in a couple of years they will have new cats who will be out dumping to their hearts content.
I cannot stand cats.
If you don't like cats shitting on your lawn you should get a cat.
Or a dog ?
Dogs look for jobs, though, and a dog that decides that's its job can be a mixed blessing. My dog long ago decided one of his responsibilities is stopping any bird from landing on the conservatory roof, from the inside. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes annoying.
Anyhow he's been out of action this month due to emergency surgery a few weeks back and a vets bill for me this month that has topped £3500.
Since most posters here have had their say about Leon, here's mine. He is (was?) the most iteresting poster by far. That includes my vicarious interest in his travel reports. Hopefully his Spectator pieces will continue, but they are no substitute for his more ad lib contributions here. The Paretian 80:20 rule applies here as in many areas of life and too many of the most interesting 20% have departed over the years. A bit more tolerance and give and take wouldn't go amiss, here and more generally
Sadly the logical path seems to be:
Being interesting => being different => being a target
@SeanT couldn't seem to understand that posting semi-demi-racist bollocks during rioting about race is on the edge of getting banned.
There are many, many ways to talk about immigration without getting even vaguely close to a banner hammer.
No-one, in my many years here, has been banned for anything other than repeatedly breaking a rule. And being warned about it many times. And the rules are pretty simple.
Years and years ago one of my family hoofed ours into the air walking down the drive, catching it in the perfect Jonny Wilkinson position, by mistake. I've never seen a cat be so disdainful.
The Trump campaign getting hacked because Roger Stone fell for a phishing email sent to the AOL account that he is still using in the year-of-our-Lord 2024 is incredibly on brand https://x.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1823238723502293331
Got to say an AOL email address screams will fall for any trick you can think of.
Not so much Roger Stone as R Stone-Age.
(I still use my old AOL username - but only as a password because it was so long and complicated that it's practically unhackable.)
QED about pet owning/cruelty. That is one fat mother of a cat (assuming it is not genuinely - about to be - a mother).
Or in a tribute to Leon you've made AI create a huge fat cat.
He's quite big, yes. Not obese though. The photo pose rather accentuates his size.
One of our previous cats was always a touch on the large side. (OK very fat indeed). He did slim down to about 5 Kg in the end though, sadly this was due to terminal stomach cancer. Don't let @Topping fat shame your cat ^_^
That cat, if real, is morbidly obese.
Better for birds though. Can't see that fella jumping on a bird table or lying in wait on a branch.
Surprisingly nimble actually. He can jump 5 times his height from a standing start. Imagine that. It's as if a high jumper could clear 10m without even a run-up. And we get excited about Armand Duplantis.
Here is a recent decision by my council regarding dogs in cemeteries. I'd be furious if I went to visit a family grave and some excitable Spaniel came jumping up at me.
I think some dog owners simply cannot comprehend that not everyone loves their dog as much as they do, and that the world doesn't revolve around Rover.
Dog owners are generally fine, it is cats and cat owners that are the problem.
One plus is this year I have not had any cat shit on my lawn. But my neighbours cats are going out of their homes less due to age.
The downside is in a couple of years they will have new cats who will be out dumping to their hearts content.
I cannot stand cats.
If you don't like cats shitting on your lawn you should get a cat.
Or a dog ?
Dogs look for jobs, though, and a dog that decides that's its job can be a mixed blessing. My dog long ago decided one of his responsibilities is stopping any bird from landing on the conservatory roof, from the inside. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes annoying.
Anyhow he's been out of action this month due to emergency surgery a few weeks back and a vets bill for me this month that has topped £3500.
Ooh dear, the cone of shame 🫠
Is that interfering with your plans for a mutual American jaunt?
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
All of the above - Walz has broad appeal. Especially to the kind of voters who categorise themselves as Independents. Very few negatives.
Since most posters here have had their say about Leon, here's mine. He is (was?) the most iteresting poster by far. That includes my vicarious interest in his travel reports. Hopefully his Spectator pieces will continue, but they are no substitute for his more ad lib contributions here. The Paretian 80:20 rule applies here as in many areas of life and too many of the most interesting 20% have departed over the years. A bit more tolerance and give and take wouldn't go amiss, here and more generally
Sadly the logical path seems to be:
Being interesting => being different => being a target
@SeanT couldn't seem to understand that posting semi-demi-racist bollocks during rioting about race is on the edge of getting banned.
There are many, many ways to talk about immigration without getting even vaguely close to a banner hammer.
No-one, in my many years here, has been banned for anything other than repeatedly breaking a rule. And being warned about it many times. And the rules are pretty simple.
Sometimes people have been banned without breaking rules, I was once for 24 hours, but its extremely rare.
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
She's still going around trying to be a massive influence on global politics - endorsing Trump, claiming that her approach to economics is the only good one, but was thwarted by a sinister cabal of Leftist puppet masters. This is serious stuff with consequences. She neither deserves, nor should be allowed, to go about unchallenged.
Yup. By apeing Farage and jumping with both feet into the deep and dangerous MAGA rabbit hole she hardly has grounds for complaining if there is a reaction to that.
Without Leon, this place won't be as much fun, or as informative on crazy subjects that don't usually pop up. PB is a lesser place without him. I haven't gone through the last thread so don't know why he flounced, but I hope he comes back.
The dog eater thinks cat and dog owners are selfish lonely losers as their pets are ruining the environment.
He got into a huff when a few people pointed out if he was so concerned about the environment would he be giving up plane travel.
In short he’s just like Polly Toynbee.
He said that owning animals is bizarre and that pets do a lot of damage. Both uncontrovertible.
And then people unleashed their insecurities.
Cycling in the New Forest yesterday I saw about 3 or 4 times as many bike trailers for stupid silly little dogs than I did for people's children. We might have been the only ones in fact.
It seems, in this country, people are far more interested in a dog or cat - who they freely let shit and wee everywhere with "oh, don't worry - he won't bite!" *SNAP* - than their own children, let alone anyone else's.
OTOH we had an otherwise excellent lunch at the Crab Shack Cafe in Wyke Regis ruined by a two year old brat on a neighbouring table who incessantly screamed at 80 dB for an hour and a half. Whatever happened to people keeping their kids under control?
(Ok, I exaggerate - we still had a great meal - and it must be bloody awful for the parents but jeez that kid was loud and persistent.)
You make my point for me. All parents struggle with this, and you will have been the same as a kid yourself. The parents will have been doing their best and as frustrated as anyone. But this sort of reaction is totally abnormal in the rest of Europe - where they love kids - as opposed to here where we hate them.
We just don't like other people very much, and need animals to project and express our emotions upon.
Mine's in my profile pic. Though I mostly missed our conversion to 'Political Petting', I don't particularly care that my cat is an ecological disaster - I would go Francois Mitterrand on all the Songbirds of England (and France, for that matter) for my cat! That's probably the Toxoplasmosis talking but what can you do?
Not quite clear. Seems he was threatened with the hammer if he kept going about cats and dogs and he got the huff.
Nah. He was talking about the ethics of owning animals and the damage pets do for the satisfaction of humans and people had a mini-pile on involving talk of being banned although no one said they wanted him banned for his opinions. Someone said, as a joke, that they wanted him banned for being a twat.
But as I started off by saying, almost whenever Leon has posted of late he has been subject to personal rancour by a number of posters who, I can only imagine, feel threatened by him/his lifestyle and conversely insecure and/or jealous. There really is no other explanation for the vituperation meted out to him.
And at the end of the exchanges yday he said fuck it, he'd had enough of the rancour towards him on PB.
Leon/SeanT is a stand out poster on here. His travel stuff is fantastic. His politics are nowhere close to mine but he generally expresses himself brilliantly. I enjoy it - even when the target. I guess some people object to the force he sometimes uses but this is an anonymous internet message board. Taking stuff personally is absurd.
He will be back, though. We've had these announcements before.
Without Leon, this place won't be as much fun, or as informative on crazy subjects that don't usually pop up. PB is a lesser place without him. I haven't gone through the last thread so don't know why he flounced, but I hope he comes back.
The dog eater thinks cat and dog owners are selfish lonely losers as their pets are ruining the environment.
He got into a huff when a few people pointed out if he was so concerned about the environment would he be giving up plane travel.
In short he’s just like Polly Toynbee.
He said that owning animals is bizarre and that pets do a lot of damage. Both uncontrovertible.
And then people unleashed their insecurities.
Cycling in the New Forest yesterday I saw about 3 or 4 times as many bike trailers for stupid silly little dogs than I did for people's children. We might have been the only ones in fact.
It seems, in this country, people are far more interested in a dog or cat - who they freely let shit and wee everywhere with "oh, don't worry - he won't bite!" *SNAP* - than their own children, let alone anyone else's.
OTOH we had an otherwise excellent lunch at the Crab Shack Cafe in Wyke Regis ruined by a two year old brat on a neighbouring table who incessantly screamed at 80 dB for an hour and a half. Whatever happened to people keeping their kids under control?
(Ok, I exaggerate - we still had a great meal - and it must be bloody awful for the parents but jeez that kid was loud and persistent.)
You make my point for me. All parents struggle with this, and you will have been the same as a kid yourself. The parents will have been doing their best and as frustrated as anyone. But this sort of reaction is totally abnormal in the rest of Europe - where they love kids - as opposed to here where we hate them.
We just don't like other people very much, and need animals to project and express our emotions upon.
Delighted to largely agree with you for a change.
We have a problem with child-friendliness in Britain - a lot of the children aren't friendly at all! Boom! Boom!
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
All of the above - Walz has broad appeal. Especially to the kind of voters who categorise themselves as Independents. Very few negatives.
Since most posters here have had their say about Leon, here's mine. He is (was?) the most iteresting poster by far. That includes my vicarious interest in his travel reports. Hopefully his Spectator pieces will continue, but they are no substitute for his more ad lib contributions here. The Paretian 80:20 rule applies here as in many areas of life and too many of the most interesting 20% have departed over the years. A bit more tolerance and give and take wouldn't go amiss, here and more generally
Sadly the logical path seems to be:
Being interesting => being different => being a target
@SeanT couldn't seem to understand that posting semi-demi-racist bollocks during rioting about race is on the edge of getting banned.
There are many, many ways to talk about immigration without getting even vaguely close to a banner hammer.
No-one, in my many years here, has been banned for anything other than repeatedly breaking a rule. And being warned about it many times. And the rules are pretty simple.
Looks like I missed all the fun while I was away, though I did notice from the news that filtered through that SKS has apparently eliminated the years-long backlog in the criminal courts system, which is great news.
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
They're suffering from cognitive dissonance now their hero is in Number Ten...
Yeah, they are just trying to cling onto the past when their centrist Dad political "insight", mainly tedious posters which appeal to those who think "The Rest is Politics" is edgy.
Must be tough for them.
Like Steve Nallon when Margaret Thatcher was no longer PM after all those years voicing her on Spitting Image.
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
All of the above - Walz has broad appeal. Especially to the kind of voters who categorise themselves as Independents. Very few negatives.
So we're probably divided on whether we are praising or burying Leon...
Some of us are doing neither.
Leon is an attention whore who will be delighted how much attention he's getting from this latest flounce.
Just as he loves the attention that you call pile on.
For Leon the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. He's got attention from his flounce and he'll be delighted with that.
Its a slow news day. Next time there's some news and the conversation moves on he'll be back and before long coming out with something else to grab attention.
We were a nation of pet lovers long before bees and butterflies started to disappear. Pets make a lot of very lonely people very happy. They probably save the taxpayer a fortune. My Mum got a dog when my Dad died. It helped her so much.
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
Walz was a genius pick, if only as it's driving Republicans insane trying to find something nasty to say about him.
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
Lol. What happened to the free speech warriors?
WTF are you on about now ? Haven't you got a cycle path to go and obsess over somewhere ?
How was my comment (I am not a so-called Free Speech warrior either) curtailing or criticising their right to free speech.
Years and years ago one of my family hoofed ours into the air walking down the drive, catching it in the perfect Jonny Wilkinson position, by mistake. I've never seen a cat be so disdainful.
One of our friends tripped over their small black poodle in the dark. Needed to go to hospital as a consequence. Where they found she had a pre-existing sepsis that could have easily killed her if they hadn't acted immediately.
In her case, the annoying foot-threading mutt was literally a life-saver.
2. Trump IS more popular this time, in the sense that his favorability polling isn't as bad this time compared to 2016 or 2020. I think this is something we should think about on this side of the Atlantic, as it's certainly surprising to me, and the consensus here is he is a much worse candidate in 2024 than the last 2 times.
...
This second point is the sort of thing that makes me think we're still on track for a Trump victory that will complete blindside almost everyone on pb.com.
Logically it shouldn't be possible, after January 6th, all the court cases, his obvious grifting, his age and incoherence - and above all being a bit fat crybaby loser who lost in 2020 but can't accept it.
But then, most of us thought that he couldn't possibly win in 2016, and too many people are still locked in the same mode of thought.
The most likely explanation is economic. People think better of Trump now because of the experience of inflation during the Biden Presidency, and so they think that going back to the economy of the Trump Presidency wouldn't be such a bad thing.
The Trump campaign getting hacked because Roger Stone fell for a phishing email sent to the AOL account that he is still using in the year-of-our-Lord 2024 is incredibly on brand https://x.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1823238723502293331
My favourite Donald Trump "hacking" story is the ethical hacker Mr Gevers who guessed Chump's Twitter password as "MAGA2020!" in 2020, and "yourefired" in 2016.
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
All of the above - Walz has broad appeal. Especially to the kind of voters who categorise themselves as Independents. Very few negatives.
The only potential downside I can see is that he's not going to be the right choice to run for President in 2032.
And that means people will start questioning his place towards the end of a first Harris term - will he still be her running mate for the next campaign? Should he not be replaced with a potential successor sooner rather than later? If he stays, how will the baton be passed to the next generation?
It's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but it's setting up a future point of debate which wouldn't have existed if Harris had picked someone a decade younger.
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
All of the above - Walz has broad appeal. Especially to the kind of voters who categorise themselves as Independents. Very few negatives.
You're only looking at a Harris lead of 1-2%, on average, and her favourability ratings are only slightly better than Trump's.
Just because I think Trump is awful, it doesn't mean vast numbers of American voters don't disagree.
I'm not sure the wider world has really quite appreciated the entire lack of impact that all the court cases have had. It does look like the 45% ish of the US public who are reasonably well disposed to him really have looked at it all as politically-motivated lawfare and discounted it.
For what it is worth I tend not to find the Led by donkeys jokes that funny. However, you have to have heart of stone not to laugh at how low Truss appears to have abased herself.
Quite frankly seeing the clips of her gig in Beccles reminded me of this other classic Q&A event of another Norfolk legend: https://youtu.be/ti57BTLjr0k
On topic I have repeatedly cautioned that Trump was a long way from finished in this campaign and I stick by that. There are a whole range of things that could go wrong yet for Harris.
But I don't agree this is any longer Trump's election to lose. The recent polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan has been pretty solid for Harris and that is where this election is going to be won or lost. The fact that Hilary piled up mountains of votes inefficiently in California and New York does not mean that the same pattern will repeat. The Harris campaign seems much more focused on the swing states and may well have a more efficient vote distribution as a result.
Trump is the one who now needs a game changer. The current trends suit Harris just fine.
The polling does seem to show a more efficient Democratic Electoral College vote than in 2016 and 2020, though whether this is down to Harris campaign focusing on the swing states is debatable, to say the least (though her VP voice hasn't hurt). After all Biden 2020 focused on those states and the 2020 vote was, if anything, less efficient than the 2016 Dem vote. And tbf Clinton 2016 only ignored Wisconsin, where Biden improved the Dem-Republican margin by less than he did nationally.
As an aside, both Clinton 2016 and Trump 2016 paid more attention to Florida than any other state.
I think this is spot on: campaigns can make only modest differences to local outcomes.
That said, I think the reason why Walz was an inspired pick is that he's popular across the great lakes region: Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. That means the Democrats may have got a similar effect in marginal states to picking Shapiro, but without the inevitable negatives on youth (and Muslim) support.
I think Walz gives her quite a bit of cover, kept her momentum going, bought some time to hone her campaign and a few policies, and if Republicans waste their time attacking him so much the better! Vance on the other hand should remind people of how Trump surrounds himself with fruitcakes and arseholes. A high proportion of them he later pretends never to have met and/or they end up condemning Trump in the strongest possible terms (or in the case of his last VP pick, he sets a mob on to attempt to murder them).
All of the above - Walz has broad appeal. Especially to the kind of voters who categorise themselves as Independents. Very few negatives.
The only potential downside I can see is that he's not going to be the right choice to run for President in 2032.
And that means people will start questioning his place towards the end of a first Harris term - will he still be her running mate for the next campaign? Should he not be replaced with a potential successor sooner rather than later? If he stays, how will the baton be passed to the next generation?
It's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but it's setting up a future point of debate which wouldn't have existed if Harris had picked someone a decade younger.
It's a long way off, and might never happen, but I think it's fine.
It means they can get on with governing while the next generation duke it out for the 2032 nomination. It will be an interesting battle, as they are not short of potential candidates. And off of them are 100% committed to getting this ticket elected (which might not have been the case had one of their number been elevated to the VP slot).
2. Trump IS more popular this time, in the sense that his favorability polling isn't as bad this time compared to 2016 or 2020. I think this is something we should think about on this side of the Atlantic, as it's certainly surprising to me, and the consensus here is he is a much worse candidate in 2024 than the last 2 times.
...
This second point is the sort of thing that makes me think we're still on track for a Trump victory that will complete blindside almost everyone on pb.com.
Logically it shouldn't be possible, after January 6th, all the court cases, his obvious grifting, his age and incoherence - and above all being a bit fat crybaby loser who lost in 2020 but can't accept it.
But then, most of us thought that he couldn't possibly win in 2016, and too many people are still locked in the same mode of thought.
The most likely explanation is economic. People think better of Trump now because of the experience of inflation during the Biden Presidency, and so they think that going back to the economy of the Trump Presidency wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Not sure we will all be "blindsided" by Trump 2.0.
Plenty on here saying too early, polls could change, Trump will do better in ECV, she's too liberal etc etc.
I'd say the collective PB vote would be 'too close to call' at this stage.
The Trump campaign getting hacked because Roger Stone fell for a phishing email sent to the AOL account that he is still using in the year-of-our-Lord 2024 is incredibly on brand https://x.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1823238723502293331
My favourite Donald Trump "hacking" story is the ethical hacker Mr Gevers who guessed Chump's Twitter password as "MAGA2020!" in 2020, and "yourefired" in 2016.
The Trump campaign getting hacked because Roger Stone fell for a phishing email sent to the AOL account that he is still using in the year-of-our-Lord 2024 is incredibly on brand https://x.com/SwannMarcus89/status/1823238723502293331
My favourite Donald Trump "hacking" story is the ethical hacker Mr Gevers who guessed Chump's Twitter password as "MAGA2020!" in 2020, and "yourefired" in 2016.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
So we're probably divided on whether we are praising or burying Leon...
Some of us are doing neither.
Leon is an attention whore who will be delighted how much attention he's getting from this latest flounce.
Just as he loves the attention that you call pile on.
For Leon the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. He's got attention from his flounce and he'll be delighted with that.
Its a slow news day. Next time there's some news and the conversation moves on he'll be back and before long coming out with something else to grab attention.
As I said, he provokes for some reason these type of responses. V interesting.
We were a nation of pet lovers long before bees and butterflies started to disappear. Pets make a lot of very lonely people very happy. They probably save the taxpayer a fortune. My Mum got a dog when my Dad died. It helped her so much.
Interesting. We had always had dogs (and cats!!) but when my father died and we asked whether my mother would be getting a dog she said you must be joking - it would mean she couldn't go away or be independent and travel on a whim.
Then again she plays bridge, chess, and scrabble plus has some great neighbours so has plenty of non-canine friends to occupy her and I appreciate this isn't always the case for people.
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
Lol. What happened to the free speech warriors?
WTF are you on about now ? Haven't you got a cycle path to go and obsess over somewhere ?
How was my comment (I am not a so-called Free Speech warrior either) curtailing or criticising their right to free speech.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
Weird, I'm pretty sure I read a post from you threatening to ban him. Then one saying you wouldn't but you might change his name.
I asked him to STFU.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
Perhaps that's the real problem - not the poster but the volume of posts.
I'm sure you can see who the most regular posters are and those who post the most in any 24-hour period.
I just wonder if restricting any poster to say 10 posts per 24 hour period might improve the quality of the posts even if it diminishes the quantity. I doubt you can do this and while I would suggest a voluntary self-curtailment, I suspect that won't get very far.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
Weird, I'm pretty sure I read a post from you threatening to ban him. Then one saying you wouldn't but you might change his name.
I asked him to STFU.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
Perhaps that's the real problem - not the poster but the volume of posts.
I'm sure you can see who the most regular posters are and those who post the most in any 24-hour period.
I just wonder if restricting any poster to say 10 posts per 24 hour period might improve the quality of the posts even if it diminishes the quantity. I doubt you can do this and while I would suggest a voluntary self-curtailment, I suspect that won't get very far.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I think there's a difference between gathering data for statistical purposes to judge generalities (which can be done in batch and anonymised) and gathering data for law enforcement purposes to judge individuals (which can be done in real time and not anonymised). I'm vehemently in favour of the former and mildly against the latter.
I think the UK prefers to be a safe country instead of a free country (as evidenced during Covid) and that people would be in favour of the latter, whereas I would not.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
Weird, I'm pretty sure I read a post from you threatening to ban him. Then one saying you wouldn't but you might change his name.
I asked him to STFU.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
Get Robert to design the following - A version of PB, sent to the specified IP, where the poster's posts will appear. Everyone else gets PB without the said poster.
So when someone gets banned, they will think that they are still allowed to post. Just no-one will see their posts or reply.
I kill 100's of people because its my job and thats ok You kill the odd person because its fun thats not ok
Why don't you focus on what YOU do, rather than me?
Can you make the world a significantly better place? Yes. Get rid of your pets; it is irredeemably selfish to keep cats or dogs
Why don't you focus on the shit you do to the environment rather than me....
Because I can do my own thing, or not, I am pointing out what YOU can do. What I do is irrelevant to whether you feel it is still morally justifiable to keep enslaved mammals merely for your own entertainment: when the evidence is now undeniable that they are destroying the ecosystem - and in multiple ways, from the medications polluting our rivers to their behaviours slaughtering our birds, mammals, amphibians
Go to the mirror, look yourself in the eye, and say "Yeah I'm cool with my chimp tea party, it's great, who cares if we have forests". If that is your conclusion, good for you
I am not the one obsessively lecturing you so you can frankly fuck off
Great, you like special "chimp tea parties". Good for you. Forests can all die, you don't care. Got it
If you care about the environment I take it you're never going to fly again?
No, thought not.
So kindly shut the fuck up on this topic.
i will say what the fuck I like, unless you're actually going to ban me for having an opinion on pets?
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
Seems a very good idea. Some uninsured drivers will be uninsured because they are disqualified due to having already demonstrated they shouldn't be driving. I've was rear ended by a new land rover discovery, bloke was driving but the woman gave her details, luckily I'd got the reg as they didn't contact their insurer. In hindsight I reckon he wasn't insured on that car.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
Weird, I'm pretty sure I read a post from you threatening to ban him. Then one saying you wouldn't but you might change his name.
I asked him to STFU.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
Get Robert to design the following - A version of PB, sent to the specified IP, where the poster's posts will appear. Everyone else gets PB without the said poster.
So when someone gets banned, they will think that they are still allowed to post. Just no-one will see their posts or reply.
Shadowbans are for cowards. Ban (or don't ban), but be honest.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I think there's a difference between gathering data for statistical purposes to judge generalities (which can be done in batch and anonymised) and gathering data for law enforcement purposes to judge individuals (which can be done in real time and not anonymised). I'm vehemently in favour of the former and mildly against the latter.
I think the UK prefers to be a safe country instead of a free country (as evidenced during Covid) and that people would be in favour of the latter, whereas I would not.
I wouldn't worry. The police wouldn't want this power as that means an expectation that they would actually do something about uninsured drivers etc.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
All very well in theory.
In practise, Chief Superintendent Savage (OBE, MBE, DipSHit) will have his men out arresting black drivers for driving black cars. Or some such.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
Weird, I'm pretty sure I read a post from you threatening to ban him. Then one saying you wouldn't but you might change his name.
I asked him to STFU.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
Get Robert to design the following - A version of PB, sent to the specified IP, where the poster's posts will appear. Everyone else gets PB without the said poster.
So when someone gets banned, they will think that they are still allowed to post. Just no-one will see their posts or reply.
Shadowbans are for cowards. Ban (or don't ban), but be honest.
It would be intensely funny though. The attention whore getting no attention, no matter how hard he tries....
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
At the time she left office I said that it would be very, very difficult for her to come to terms with what had just happened and without appropriate coping mechanisms it could actually be very traumatic.
I think the mechanism she is chosen is to sink into a sort of denialism which is that absolutely none of anything is her fault and everything bad that happens to her is other people being unfair to her. She is quite happy to create a fantasy around this, from small nuggets of truth.
It’s a way of coping but I’m not sure it will give her closure. She needs to come to terms with what happened, otherwise things like this will keep happening and she’ll keep getting angry at them.
Dave Leip's prediction map is about to flip to the Democrats. This site is probably the original site for US elections: I remember using it in 2004, and perhaps also 2000 (not sure).
I don't like Big Brother automatic pinging in most things in general but we're already required to have insurance etc by law and in the event I'm hit by another vehicle I want their insurance to put it right and they can't if they don't have any.
At the time she left office I said that it would be very, very difficult for her to come to terms with what had just happened and without appropriate coping mechanisms it could actually be very traumatic.
I think the mechanism she is chosen is to sink into a sort of denialism which is that absolutely none of anything is her fault and everything bad that happens to her is other people being unfair to her. She is quite happy to create a fantasy around this, from small nuggets of truth.
It’s a way of coping but I’m not sure it will give her closure. She needs to come to terms with what happened, otherwise things like this will keep happening and she’ll keep getting angry at them.
She needs to find the humour in the situation.
The truth is she's a complete fruit loop who should be no where near Westminster never-mind Downing St.
One of the best things that happened for the Tory Party on election night was her losing her seat.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
Weird, I'm pretty sure I read a post from you threatening to ban him. Then one saying you wouldn't but you might change his name.
I asked him to STFU.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
Plus who has Leon driven off the site? And how would anyone know.
People have messaged me (and occasionally Robert, and in the dim and distant past I OGH) saying x poster is doing this and I’m coming off the site.
Interesting. I suppose everyone has their own idea of what PB "should" be like but the reality is that it is full of a range of characters and it's a shame if one feels put upon to the extent of saying they are leaving.
While not quite crushing a butterfly on a wheel (or perhaps given likely future incarnations that should be caterpillar), it is imo a weakness of PB, but I suppose indicative of its older, grey (literally and character-wise) demographic that such characters are often hounded out.
We don't have pets, and I'm not a pet person. I put up a birdbox each spring, and that's about as far as I go.
But Mrs J is a cat lady, who has resisted getting a cat here in the UK because she knows she'll get more and more and more. But our son wants a cat as well, so we're going to get one or two.
I'm insisting that the cats have bells, to at least give wildlife a bit of a chance.
In general though, I see lots of selfishness in pet owners. We probably all like to think we'd look after our animals well, but we often do not. When I was in London, a friend of mine's dad kept greyhounds in a tower block flat. Dogs that are bred to run fast, kept in a small flat and allowed to run around a park once a day. IMV that's a big reason why many dogs become dangerous: they are kept locked up, when they should be running loose all day.
Actually that may not be too bad. Greyhounds are phenomenally lazy - selected to doze amiably in kennels most of the time then sprint like hell in a race. Whether that is enough is another matter, though the one a colleague rescued certainly gave that impression.
At the time she left office I said that it would be very, very difficult for her to come to terms with what had just happened and without appropriate coping mechanisms it could actually be very traumatic.
I think the mechanism she is chosen is to sink into a sort of denialism which is that absolutely none of anything is her fault and everything bad that happens to her is other people being unfair to her. She is quite happy to create a fantasy around this, from small nuggets of truth.
It’s a way of coping but I’m not sure it will give her closure. She needs to come to terms with what happened, otherwise things like this will keep happening and she’ll keep getting angry at them.
She needs to find the humour in the situation.
The truth is she's a complete fruit loop who should be no where near Westminster never-mind Downing St.
One of the best things that happened for the Tory Party on election night was her losing her seat.
Weird thing to say. She was elected into office in the face of fierce competition and ascended, likewise, in a super-competitive process.
If she's a complete fruit loop, then that's on us for electing her.
Dave Leip's prediction map is about to flip to the Democrats. This site is probably the original site for US elections: I remember using it in 2004, and perhaps also 2000 (not sure).
At the time she left office I said that it would be very, very difficult for her to come to terms with what had just happened and without appropriate coping mechanisms it could actually be very traumatic.
I think the mechanism she is chosen is to sink into a sort of denialism which is that absolutely none of anything is her fault and everything bad that happens to her is other people being unfair to her. She is quite happy to create a fantasy around this, from small nuggets of truth.
It’s a way of coping but I’m not sure it will give her closure. She needs to come to terms with what happened, otherwise things like this will keep happening and she’ll keep getting angry at them.
She needs to find the humour in the situation.
The truth is she's a complete fruit loop who should be no where near Westminster never-mind Downing St.
One of the best things that happened for the Tory Party on election night was her losing her seat.
Weird thing to say. She was elected into office in the face of fierce competition and ascended, likewise, in a super-competitive process.
If she's a complete fruit loop, then that's on us for electing her.
By "us" you're talking about Tory MP's and members? IE less than 0.0% is the population?
Whilst it's quite a funny stunt, it makes you wonder how this is allowed to happen to a former PM (albeit one for only 49 days) ?
Substitute a remote controlled banner of a lettuce for a remote controlled bomb and the results aren't quite so funny...
Aren't former PMs now expected to make (and pay for) their own security arrangements when working overseas?
The Telegraph kicked up a fuss about the cost of providing security for Blair a decade or so ago, with the aim of getting the rules changed. Certainly, the Public Duty Costs Allowance only allows them to expense secretarial and office costs, not security.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I'm against anything that might be described as Orwellian.
2. Trump IS more popular this time, in the sense that his favorability polling isn't as bad this time compared to 2016 or 2020. I think this is something we should think about on this side of the Atlantic, as it's certainly surprising to me, and the consensus here is he is a much worse candidate in 2024 than the last 2 times.
...
This second point is the sort of thing that makes me think we're still on track for a Trump victory that will complete blindside almost everyone on pb.com.
Logically it shouldn't be possible, after January 6th, all the court cases, his obvious grifting, his age and incoherence - and above all being a bit fat crybaby loser who lost in 2020 but can't accept it.
But then, most of us thought that he couldn't possibly win in 2016, and too many people are still locked in the same mode of thought.
The most likely explanation is economic. People think better of Trump now because of the experience of inflation during the Biden Presidency, and so they think that going back to the economy of the Trump Presidency wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Not sure we will all be "blindsided" by Trump 2.0.
Plenty on here saying too early, polls could change, Trump will do better in ECV, she's too liberal etc etc.
I'd say the collective PB vote would be 'too close to call' at this stage.
I think that's right.
I'm confident Trump is tracking to lose (and possibly lose big) but there's only a smallish group of PBers who share that opinion. Off the cuff I'd name MarqueMark, NigelB, Monksfield, ThomasNashe, IanB2. I'll have missed some (and apols to them) but not too many.
Everyone else are either 'coin toss' or Harris slight fav or Trump slight fav or Trump big fav.
Dave Leip's prediction map is about to flip to the Democrats. This site is probably the original site for US elections: I remember using it in 2004, and perhaps also 2000 (not sure).
At the time she left office I said that it would be very, very difficult for her to come to terms with what had just happened and without appropriate coping mechanisms it could actually be very traumatic.
I think the mechanism she is chosen is to sink into a sort of denialism which is that absolutely none of anything is her fault and everything bad that happens to her is other people being unfair to her. She is quite happy to create a fantasy around this, from small nuggets of truth.
It’s a way of coping but I’m not sure it will give her closure. She needs to come to terms with what happened, otherwise things like this will keep happening and she’ll keep getting angry at them.
She needs to find the humour in the situation.
The truth is she's a complete fruit loop who should be no where near Westminster never-mind Downing St.
One of the best things that happened for the Tory Party on election night was her losing her seat.
Weird thing to say. She was elected into office in the face of fierce competition and ascended, likewise, in a super-competitive process.
If she's a complete fruit loop, then that's on us for electing her.
By "us" you're talking about Tory MP's and members? IE less than 0.0% is the population?
By "us" I mean the entire electorate, one part of which made this decision, and another subset (Cons MPs) participated in the system that is one we want to have in this country.
Dave Leip's prediction map is about to flip to the Democrats. This site is probably the original site for US elections: I remember using it in 2004, and perhaps also 2000 (not sure).
2. Trump IS more popular this time, in the sense that his favorability polling isn't as bad this time compared to 2016 or 2020. I think this is something we should think about on this side of the Atlantic, as it's certainly surprising to me, and the consensus here is he is a much worse candidate in 2024 than the last 2 times.
...
This second point is the sort of thing that makes me think we're still on track for a Trump victory that will complete blindside almost everyone on pb.com.
Logically it shouldn't be possible, after January 6th, all the court cases, his obvious grifting, his age and incoherence - and above all being a bit fat crybaby loser who lost in 2020 but can't accept it.
But then, most of us thought that he couldn't possibly win in 2016, and too many people are still locked in the same mode of thought.
The most likely explanation is economic. People think better of Trump now because of the experience of inflation during the Biden Presidency, and so they think that going back to the economy of the Trump Presidency wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Not sure we will all be "blindsided" by Trump 2.0.
Plenty on here saying too early, polls could change, Trump will do better in ECV, she's too liberal etc etc.
I'd say the collective PB vote would be 'too close to call' at this stage.
I think that's right.
I'm confident Trump is tracking to lose (and possibly lose big) but there's only a smallish group of PBers who share that opinion. Off the cuff I'd name MarqueMark, NigelB, Monksfield, ThomasNashe, IanB2. I'll have missed some (and apols to them) but not too many.
Everyone else are either 'coin toss' or Harris slight fav or Trump slight fav or Trump big fav.
🙋♂️
Trump could win but its unlikely. Laying Trump up to 3 is value IMO.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I think it's an obvious thing to do. However it is only one of a cluster of issues around the same question, and all need addressing as they mutually reinforce.
- That 1% needs elucidating. The Motor Insurance Bureau says 300k at any one time, which means more than 1 million different vehicles across the year. I'm not sure I believe that it is that low, since no way exists easily reliably to detect cloned plates, unless they read the VIN on the dash at least, too. https://www.mib.org.uk/media-centre/news/2024/june/shocking-levels-of-uninsured-vehicle-on-uk-roads/
- There needs to be a willingness to enforce, and a practical way of doing so. I know of many, many people who report these as part of their Op SNAP camming activity but have stopped because nothing ever happens. There are cases of vehicles being parked daily on the same public roads for years at a time which have been reported repeatedly and not dealt with. This is often down to 'policing priorities' in particular police forces.
- Cloning causes problems for law-abiding drivers in places where camera enforcement has been set up as a process to force compliance with inapplicable fines because fighting it is difficult. Here's a piece about Dart Charge problems from 2 weeks ago: - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c897qq4d00po
- Ironically, finding these will help with detecting crime through intelligence-led poling because cloned plates are a routine technique.
- Addressing requires all of number plates to be more secure, locally based policing perhaps using trained PCSOs to catch them, and use of camera enforcement.
I don't like Big Brother automatic pinging in most things in general but we're already required to have insurance etc by law and in the event I'm hit by another vehicle I want their insurance to put it right and they can't if they don't have any.
I'm interested if there is a bit of a causation/correlation conflation happening here, but it would appear to be a strong signal that someone is not taking their duties to other road users seriously. Consider this recent revelation in Edinburgh - record of previous collisions, cancels insurance and then a toddler killed:
In this case, it might not have been callousness but rather a decline in faculties. Either way, the cancellation of insurance should've raised a flag with the police.
Comments
Being interesting => being different => being a target
Context as always is key. What is this event they have hijacked? Its Truss, addressing a very small group of Trump supporters, championing both the crook and the "free speech" nonsense where freedom is supporting Yaxley-Lennon.
Reminding her micro audience that she has zero credibility is absolutely free speech. Not bullying as she is sat there claiming some kind of relevant experience which puts her on the stage.
Anyhow he's been out of action this month due to emergency surgery a few weeks back and a vets bill for me this month that has topped £3500.
There are many, many ways to talk about immigration without getting even vaguely close to a banner hammer.
No-one, in my many years here, has been banned for anything other than repeatedly breaking a rule. And being warned about it many times. And the rules are pretty simple.
Years and years ago one of my family hoofed ours into the air walking down the drive, catching it in the perfect Jonny Wilkinson position, by mistake. I've never seen a cat be so disdainful.
(I still use my old AOL username - but only as a password because it was so long and complicated that it's practically unhackable.)
Is that interfering with your plans for a mutual American jaunt?
Mine's in my profile pic. Though I mostly missed our conversion to 'Political Petting', I don't particularly care that my cat is an ecological disaster - I would go Francois Mitterrand on all the Songbirds of England (and France, for that matter) for my cat! That's probably the Toxoplasmosis talking but what can you do?
He will be back, though. We've had these announcements before.
Must be tough for them.
Like Steve Nallon when Margaret Thatcher was no longer PM after all those years voicing her on Spitting Image.
Leon is an attention whore who will be delighted how much attention he's getting from this latest flounce.
Just as he loves the attention that you call pile on.
For Leon the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. He's got attention from his flounce and he'll be delighted with that.
Its a slow news day. Next time there's some news and the conversation moves on he'll be back and before long coming out with something else to grab attention.
How was my comment (I am not a so-called Free Speech warrior either) curtailing or criticising their right to free speech.
In her case, the annoying foot-threading mutt was literally a life-saver.
Logically it shouldn't be possible, after January 6th, all the court cases, his obvious grifting, his age and incoherence - and above all being a bit fat crybaby loser who lost in 2020 but can't accept it.
But then, most of us thought that he couldn't possibly win in 2016, and too many people are still locked in the same mode of thought.
The most likely explanation is economic. People think better of Trump now because of the experience of inflation during the Biden Presidency, and so they think that going back to the economy of the Trump Presidency wouldn't be such a bad thing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55337192
As well as being a career criminal, Donald Trump is also massively stupid.
You're only looking at a Harris lead of 1-2%, on average, and her favourability ratings are only slightly better than Trump's.
Just because I think Trump is awful, it doesn't mean vast numbers of American voters don't disagree.
And that means people will start questioning his place towards the end of a first Harris term - will he still be her running mate for the next campaign? Should he not be replaced with a potential successor sooner rather than later? If he stays, how will the baton be passed to the next generation?
It's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but it's setting up a future point of debate which wouldn't have existed if Harris had picked someone a decade younger.
I mused about changing his profile name to Leon the Cat Botherer and/or change his profile pic to a cat.
That time George Bush Sr’s dog got so fat, that, in 1992, the president had to send this memo to all White House staff.
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1823326233670594724
"All offices should take a formal pledge NOT TO FEED RANGER..."
Quite frankly seeing the clips of her gig in Beccles reminded me of this other classic Q&A event of another Norfolk legend: https://youtu.be/ti57BTLjr0k
It means they can get on with governing while the next generation duke it out for the 2032 nomination. It will be an interesting battle, as they are not short of potential candidates.
And off of them are 100% committed to getting this ticket elected (which might not have been the case had one of their number been elevated to the VP slot).
Plenty on here saying too early, polls could change, Trump will do better in ECV, she's too liberal etc etc.
I'd say the collective PB vote would be 'too close to call' at this stage.
Urgent tests under way after canal cyanide spill
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrj2g29kzxo
Not good. I hope it doesn't spread further.
As with AI once he gets monomanicial on a topic, he ends up spamming the site which ends up driving other people off the site.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets
...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
No one complains about that.
Then again she plays bridge, chess, and scrabble plus has some great neighbours so has plenty of non-canine friends to occupy her and I appreciate this isn't always the case for people.
I'm sure you can see who the most regular posters are and those who post the most in any 24-hour period.
I just wonder if restricting any poster to say 10 posts per 24 hour period might improve the quality of the posts even if it diminishes the quantity. I doubt you can do this and while I would suggest a voluntary self-curtailment, I suspect that won't get very far.
It does everybody good to have an occasional break from arguing with random on the Internet. Consider it a holiday.
Yes he adds to the place, rather than detracts.
Former prime minister walks out of event promoting her memoir"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/14/liz-truss-storms-off-stage/
So when someone gets banned, they will think that they are still allowed to post. Just no-one will see their posts or reply.
Substitute a remote controlled banner of a lettuce for a remote controlled bomb and the results aren't quite so funny...
In practise, Chief Superintendent Savage (OBE, MBE, DipSHit) will have his men out arresting black drivers for driving black cars. Or some such.
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/navy-news/2024/south-korea-to-build-testing-facility-for-nuclear-submarine-reactors-by-next-year
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
OGH) saying x poster is doing this and I’m coming off the site.
You might consider his contributions marvellous. Some of us don't see the Emperor's New Clothes, some of us just see an ageing bare-arsed tit!
Mess with
his irrational taste in XXXX musicit at your peril.At the time she left office I said that it would be very, very difficult for her to come to terms with what had just happened and without appropriate coping mechanisms it could actually be very traumatic.
I think the mechanism she is chosen is to sink into a sort of denialism which is that absolutely none of anything is her fault and everything bad that happens to her is other people being unfair to her. She is quite happy to create a fantasy around this, from small nuggets of truth.
It’s a way of coping but I’m not sure it will give her closure. She needs to come to terms with what happened, otherwise things like this will keep happening and she’ll keep getting angry at them.
She needs to find the humour in the situation.
https://uselectionatlas.org/PRED/PRESIDENT/2024/pred.php
I don't like Big Brother automatic pinging in most things in general but we're already required to have insurance etc by law and in the event I'm hit by another vehicle I want their insurance to put it right and they can't if they don't have any.
One of the best things that happened for the Tory Party on election night was her losing her seat.
While not quite crushing a butterfly on a wheel (or perhaps given likely future incarnations that should be caterpillar), it is imo a weakness of PB, but I suppose indicative of its older, grey (literally and character-wise) demographic that such characters are often hounded out.
If she's a complete fruit loop, then that's on us for electing her.
Florida: Leans Republican
Texas: Lean Republican
The Telegraph kicked up a fuss about the cost of providing security for Blair a decade or so ago, with the aim of getting the rules changed. Certainly, the Public Duty Costs Allowance only allows them to expense secretarial and office costs, not security.
I'm confident Trump is tracking to lose (and possibly lose big) but there's only a smallish group of PBers who share that opinion. Off the cuff I'd name MarqueMark, NigelB, Monksfield, ThomasNashe, IanB2. I'll have missed some (and apols to them) but not too many.
Everyone else are either 'coin toss' or Harris slight fav or Trump slight fav or Trump big fav.
'Thérèse Coffey was turned down for Labour Treasury job '
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/14/therese-coffey-was-turned-down-for-labour-treasury-job
Trump could win but its unlikely. Laying Trump up to 3 is value IMO.
- That 1% needs elucidating. The Motor Insurance Bureau says 300k at any one time, which means more than 1 million different vehicles across the year. I'm not sure I believe that it is that low, since no way exists easily reliably to detect cloned plates, unless they read the VIN on the dash at least, too.
https://www.mib.org.uk/media-centre/news/2024/june/shocking-levels-of-uninsured-vehicle-on-uk-roads/
- There needs to be a willingness to enforce, and a practical way of doing so. I know of many, many people who report these as part of their Op SNAP camming activity but have stopped because nothing ever happens. There are cases of vehicles being parked daily on the same public roads for years at a time which have been reported repeatedly and not dealt with. This is often down to 'policing priorities' in particular police forces.
- Cloning causes problems for law-abiding drivers in places where camera enforcement has been set up as a process to force compliance with inapplicable fines because fighting it is difficult. Here's a piece about Dart Charge problems from 2 weeks ago:
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c897qq4d00po
- Ironically, finding these will help with detecting crime through intelligence-led poling because cloned plates are a routine technique.
- Addressing requires all of number plates to be more secure, locally based policing perhaps using trained PCSOs to catch them, and use of camera enforcement.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3895xp7no
In this case, it might not have been callousness but rather a decline in faculties. Either way, the cancellation of insurance should've raised a flag with the police.
https://x.com/robertjenrick