I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
Thanks for the article. Most interesting. A couple of points.
The 'blob' in the sense of a huge civil admin set of hierarchies (whether stricto sensu governmental, local authority, quango or privatised) is just inevitable in any modern state.
Our basic legal system is ancient and organic, like a 1000 year old tree. A modern state is placed within it as a new and massive growth. Common law is its history, so complexifying is certain, and simplifying more or less impossible. I have been out of the law now for exactly 40 years and have watched the massive complexification from outside with awe. These days even in a small provincial area - where I now live - local solicitors specialise in this or that little area, and more or less know nothing outside their specific field. This is a much wider truth too.
Finally: Grenfell. This answers the question of do we want safety or freedom? We want safety. What we get is neither.
What we want is a civil order ('blob' is tempting but not in the end quite fair) which works. The issues around this are most intellectual (too many dim people and jobsworths) and moral (too many people not properly brought up to discern between right and wrong, too little clarity about with whom the buck stops).
Everything we need to know and put right is encapsulated in Grenfell.
That’s an interesting case study. Perhaps people wouldn’t care too much about an excessive and overburdening State, if it actually worked.
Instead, what we have is a system that generates thousands of pages of paperwork, and generates lots of time billed by consultants and lawyers - yet utterly fails at what it’s primarily supposed to do, in this case make sure buildings aren’t cladded with flammable materials.
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
Excellent article and amusing to see the views on it splitting to some extent along political lines. Broadly those on the Left like the systems that fix in and limit change whilst those on the right are more concious/crictical of the Blob.
On thing I would say is that this is an issue that goes back considerable further than WW2. I have been doing alot of research on The Indian Office betwen the wars and that was in effect a completely separate civil service with very little political oversight in reality. I wonder if the ending of British rule in Indian and the reassignment of all those civil servants and administrators post war had some impact of the way the Civil Service operated.
The ideological divide I think probably just reflects the fact the right have been in power and expressing their frustrations in this way. Give it a few years and Labour will be blaming the blob (they’ll call it something else - remember Blair’s “forces of conservatism”) and the right will be defending it as the thin blue line keeping loony left policies in check.
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
And then where was the blob drafting laws to make it legal? The government has the power of legislation. The law, for parliament, is an obstacle not a blocker.
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
See the issue when Rory Stewart tried to stop a single “charity” receiving government money. He was literally and repeatedly lied to. Arguably, the lack of due diligence on the funding of the organisation broke laws.
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
And then where was the blob drafting laws to make it legal? The government has the power of legislation. The law, for parliament, is an obstacle not a blocker.
I thought Rishi's government passed legislation that made it a fact that Rwanda was the safest and nicest place on the planet.
I'm part of the blob that viewcode describes. And I largely agree with his thesis. The advantageof blobbery is that the blob, largely, has a fair degree of expertise in its subject. Government is very, very complex and you can't just wade in inexpertly. BUT - if you did want to suggest an alternative course of action to what the blob suggests - it's almost impossible. You can go against the experts, but the legal arm will envelop you. You can fight off the legal arm, and the third sector will suck you in. The democratic levers don't work. Virtually the only thing you can do is choose to spend more or less money in one area or another.
It's worth noting that the blob isn't uniform in intent, and much of its energy is spent fighting other bits of the blob.
I would like to posit the existence of the "Dark Blob". Which deliberately encourages people to act against their own interests. Such as encouraging the use of cash in a period of high interest rates.
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
And then where was the blob drafting laws to make it legal? The government has the power of legislation. The law, for parliament, is an obstacle not a blocker.
Politicians should be defining the laws. If the government wanted to shift asylum provision to Rwanda they needed to leave international treaties. The government wasn't willing, or didn't have a Commons majority, to do so, so instead gaslit the country and blamed the blob. It is just not a serious or credible approach to blame the blob.
This is a link to a Telegraph article you definitely ought to click - all you need is the headline and the video, which is not paywalled. 99% of us today will have better days than the driver of this car.
Excellent article and amusing to see the views on it splitting to some extent along political lines. Broadly those on the Left like the systems that fix in and limit change whilst those on the right are more concious/crictical of the Blob.
On thing I would say is that this is an issue that goes back considerable further than WW2. I have been doing alot of research on The Indian Office betwen the wars and that was in effect a completely separate civil service with very little political oversight in reality. I wonder if the ending of British rule in Indian and the reassignment of all those civil servants and administrators post war had some impact of the way the Civil Service operated.
The ideological divide I think probably just reflects the fact the right have been in power and expressing their frustrations in this way. Give it a few years and Labour will be blaming the blob (they’ll call it something else - remember Blair’s “forces of conservatism”) and the right will be defending it as the thin blue line keeping loony left policies in check.
Also the "right" has changed. Posters who would have been considered centre right conservatives and reasonably content with the coalition in 2012 are now seen as the "left". A large chunk of what is still considered the "right" live in a fantasy world.
Excellent article and amusing to see the views on it splitting to some extent along political lines. Broadly those on the Left like the systems that fix in and limit change whilst those on the right are more concious/crictical of the Blob.
On thing I would say is that this is an issue that goes back considerable further than WW2. I have been doing alot of research on The Indian Office betwen the wars and that was in effect a completely separate civil service with very little political oversight in reality. I wonder if the ending of British rule in Indian and the reassignment of all those civil servants and administrators post war had some impact of the way the Civil Service operated.
The ideological divide I think probably just reflects the fact the right have been in power and expressing their frustrations in this way. Give it a few years and Labour will be blaming the blob (they’ll call it something else - remember Blair’s “forces of conservatism”) and the right will be defending it as the thin blue line keeping loony left policies in check.
Imagine if Corbyn had got in. Substitute "the blob" for "the establishment".
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
And then where was the blob drafting laws to make it legal? The government has the power of legislation. The law, for parliament, is an obstacle not a blocker.
I thought Rishi's government passed legislation that made it a fact that Rwanda was the safest and nicest place on the planet.
The Attlee government passed a law which says "Ireland is not a foreign country". Yes, it fecking is.
@viewcode This is a very good article as usual. Whilst I think your historical trajectory is insightful I think the 'blob' is a bit of a nebulous concept though and defies theorisation. Notwithstanding this, I would say that it can be usefully thought of as an overpowering administrative state that uses process to thwart political will. In response to some other posts, if you want to follow 'blob failure' my suggestion is to watch the current attempts at planning reform unfold. The planning reforms are straight from the blob and the politicians have clearly bought in to it, but they are almost certainly destined to fail in achieving their objectives. In terms of how this may develop, an old civil service boss used to reminisce fondly of the days of 'mad cow disease' - DEFRA were never going to issue enough permits and fast enough; the army had to go in to shoot the cows and burn the carcasses.
Hang on is "The Blob" behind planning reforms, or is "The Blob" stifling them?
Or is it both, or perhaps neither?
The blob is the gap between what ministers promise and what they deliver. Nothing to do with ministers of course.
That's exactly the point.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy. Which generations of politicians have legislated into existence.
It's a generalised, amorphous, and largely meaningless abstraction used a a scapegoat for bad policy.
"The Blob", which politicians love to blame for their failures, is just civil servants or quangos trying (diligently, competently, or otherwise) to carry out government policy.
But the issue is when they don't carry out government policy, deportations to Rwanda being one of them, when the blob is personally opposed to it.
Unless the blob = the law then that is simply wrong.
And then where was the blob drafting laws to make it legal? The government has the power of legislation. The law, for parliament, is an obstacle not a blocker.
I thought Rishi's government passed legislation that made it a fact that Rwanda was the safest and nicest place on the planet.
The Attlee government passed a law which says "Ireland is not a foreign country". Yes, it fecking is.
Well some bits of it are. Other bits of it are most definitely not.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
I was talking to a school mum this morning after my daughter’s sleepover. She’s a teacher and has been getting trained on all sorts of AI. Got it to “do” the party activities last night, including the kids cocktail recipes and all the art work - 5 minutes. That sort of thing would have taken hours before.
And AI supported search is getting much better. I was trying to get information on Lake Chad refilling as a result of this year’s mega Sahel rainfall. All I got on Bing and Google was articles about flooding and aid agencies. Asked copilot the question and got a nicely sourced, well written answer to exactly what I’d been looking for.
Copilot has been recording meetings at work recently and writing excellent notes and action logs. 10x better than anything our junior staff could manage.
Have you tried 'perplexity.ai' for search? I've been using it quite a lot. Bit of AI but backed by a really quite impressive search engine.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
To this needs to be added the basic issue that Netanyahu is not, as far as can be seen, pursuing a just cause.
He may by dint of circumstance, be running alongside the clearly just cause for a while, but his own intentions, beliefs and actions are not in any way just nor supportable. These beliefs - in the eradication of both the fact and idea of a Palestinian State and a Greater Israel essentially swept clean of Palestinians - are not those of a just or reasonable man. Sadly for the moment, along with like minded extremists, he has control of the apparatus of state. But I am firmly of the belief that as long as he and his kind are in power than can and will be no peace.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
I was talking to a school mum this morning after my daughter’s sleepover. She’s a teacher and has been getting trained on all sorts of AI. Got it to “do” the party activities last night, including the kids cocktail recipes and all the art work - 5 minutes. That sort of thing would have taken hours before.
And AI supported search is getting much better. I was trying to get information on Lake Chad refilling as a result of this year’s mega Sahel rainfall. All I got on Bing and Google was articles about flooding and aid agencies. Asked copilot the question and got a nicely sourced, well written answer to exactly what I’d been looking for.
Copilot has been recording meetings at work recently and writing excellent notes and action logs. 10x better than anything our junior staff could manage.
The problem I see with this is it means you are removed from the actual research and reliant upon the AI to do it for you sight unseen. Building an argument - whether that is an article for PB or a scientific paper - means looking at all the data and weighing all the possible inputs you can find to reach a conclusion. I have both seen and experienced the fact of views being changed throughout that process so that the hypothesis you began with does not survive contact with the extended data set or with other previous research. Now in many areas - such as the planning of birthday parties - this may not matter. But when it comes to actually trying to form an opinion on something - whther it is 'The Blob' or Lake Chad, the distance placed upon you by the use of AI in the way you mention it seems to me to undermine the whole process of research.
Of course I am also reminded of the legal firm a couple of years ago who got into serious trouble after they used AI and it made up ficticious precedents. Obviously that is an extreme example but the question of what the AI is choosing to use and ignore and how much sight you have of that process is one that troubles me.
This is a link to a Telegraph article you definitely ought to click - all you need is the headline and the video, which is not paywalled. 99% of us today will have better days than the driver of this car.
In addition to 'the blob' slowing down and stopping reform, it has a habit of continuing with projects that have obvious flaws, often spotted early on, but because a decision has been made, the project must continue. Seen it in large businesses too, who create their own 'blob'. £millions wasted on things that will fail or be catastrophically flawed.
In other news, the EU (was Brexit not a fight against a blob?) seems determined to continue with the launch of it's biometric border control on 10th November, using a completely untried and untested system across the whole bloc.
What could possibly go wrong with a system that introduces new control measures that can only be completed at the point of entry?
Expect to be told to turn up at ports and airports 5 hours in advance. Expect the system to crash causing travel chaos.
December is likely to have competing headlines over 'freezing grannies' and 'Christmas travel chaos'.
What are the rules on linking to a very naughty interview given on talktv yesterday by Isabelle Oakeshott, about the thing that no one is supposed to talk about?
TSE was pretty clear that it's an instant dismissal for anyone who does.
I think if all we have is Mrs Tice chiselling away on an obscure Youtube platform there isn't much for Mr Starmer to worry about at this time.
IMO Isobel O has firmly established her reputation as an unreliable, lazy, personally untrustworthy writer / rumour-mongerer.
If he wants to go for them, there's plenty of obvious BS there - for example the stuff about his "400k income" and "25% tax rate" and "how did he get it down" followed by speculation. If they had just read a single piece on the BBC website they would know that most (2/3) of it was capital gains not income.
The tell tale may be whether KS choses to take them on, or ignore them as media midges flying around in a swamp.
But that's the playbook imo - bait the useful idiots.
As I understand it the blob is there to stop the government doing what it wants.
This begs the larger question do we want government to have dictatorial powers?
We have just elected a Labour government with a large majority in the house of commons.
But, only on 1/3 of the votes actually cast.
Should that be sufficient to give the government dictatorial powers?
The problem being argued is to what extent 'The Blob' has its own disparate views and ideas on how the country should be run and how powerful they are in perpetuating those views. If elected power is mitigated or nullified by unelected inertia to the extent that the politicians cannot do what they wish to do (if it runs counter to the accepted beliefs) then you have to ask what is the point of elections. All we are electing is a froth that makes the coffee look nice.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
I'm on the Steering Group for an 'oldies' on-line educational group called u3acommunities. We've been using Zoom for our 'meetings' ever since we started but the recently added recording facility enables us to do away with any form of secretarial activity, apart from checking the summary produced, as one or two ion us have accents and one or two others unusual names. We're looking forward to the day when we can have reliable instantaneous translation as at the moment everything is in English. I'll have to look into Gemini.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
That has been on Youtube for quite some time, except iirc for the realistic voice - it is subtitles.
One of the nice features of my new 2 year old phone is that it gives me a pretty good auto text of phone calls.
As I understand it the blob is there to stop the government doing what it wants.
This begs the larger question do we want government to have dictatorial powers?
We have just elected a Labour government with a large majority in the house of commons.
But, only on 1/3 of the votes actually cast.
Should that be sufficient to give the government dictatorial powers?
The problem being argued is to what extent 'The Blob' has its own disparate views and ideas on how the country should be run and how powerful they are in perpetuating those views. If elected power is mitigated or nullified by unelected inertia to the extent that the politicians cannot do what they wish to do (if it runs counter to the accepted beliefs) then you have to ask what is the point of elections. All we are electing is a froth that makes the coffee look nice.
Rwanda is the most commonly cited example. But the real issue was there was never an enthusiastic Commons majority. Half the Tory MPs didn't really agree with it even if they would reluctantly get whipped along. If it came to leaving international treaties or scrapping Rwanda, the Commons would have voted to scrap Rwanda.
If we had 350 Reform MPs Rwanda could have passed and been enacted and delivered. But that really wasn't what the electorate voted for.
Excellent article and amusing to see the views on it splitting to some extent along political lines. Broadly those on the Left like the systems that fix in and limit change whilst those on the right are more concious/crictical of the Blob.
On thing I would say is that this is an issue that goes back considerable further than WW2. I have been doing alot of research on The Indian Office betwen the wars and that was in effect a completely separate civil service with very little political oversight in reality. I wonder if the ending of British rule in Indian and the reassignment of all those civil servants and administrators post war had some impact of the way the Civil Service operated.
I think that's something of a false dichotomy. There some overlap with left/right but I don't think it's good politics to frame it in that way.
A small counterexample would be the recent interest - on both sides of the Atlantic - in planning reform (simplification) manifested by left of centre parties.
As I understand it the blob is there to stop the government doing what it wants.
This begs the larger question do we want government to have dictatorial powers?
We have just elected a Labour government with a large majority in the house of commons.
But, only on 1/3 of the votes actually cast.
Should that be sufficient to give the government dictatorial powers?
All uk governments have had dictatorial powers, irrespective of the size of the majority of the party in parliament.
Commons majorities aligned with the governments have those powers, not the governments alone. Even with a keen government and reasonable majority if the commons is not enthusiastically in favour that is a far bigger block than the mythical blob.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
At one point they, and Israel were. And then Rabin was assassinated.
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
Isn't that... more blob?
Appoint a SPAD as regulations tzar to oversee the ombudsman....
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
I'm on the Steering Group for an 'oldies' on-line educational group called u3acommunities. We've been using Zoom for our 'meetings' ever since we started but the recently added recording facility enables us to do away with any form of secretarial activity, apart from checking the summary produced, as one or two ion us have accents and one or two others unusual names. We're looking forward to the day when we can have reliable instantaneous translation as at the moment everything is in English. I'll have to look into Gemini.
Be careful. There are recent instances where the AI has continued transcribing the post meeting conversations of participants who stayed on to chat, and emailed out the notes to everyone, with embarrassing results.
A feature of The Blob is that once you reach a senior enough level, success is rewarded, and failure is … rewarded.
If there is a scandal, then the automatic instinct is to organise the cover-up. When the cover-up gets exposed, then the strategy changes to delaying and blocking redress - whilst proclaiming that “lessons have been learned.”
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
As I understand it the blob is there to stop the government doing what it wants.
This begs the larger question do we want government to have dictatorial powers?
We have just elected a Labour government with a large majority in the house of commons.
But, only on 1/3 of the votes actually cast.
Should that be sufficient to give the government dictatorial powers?
All uk governments have had dictatorial powers, irrespective of the size of the majority of the party in parliament.
Commons majorities aligned with the governments have those powers, not the governments alone. Even with a keen government and reasonable majority if the commons is not enthusiastically in favour that is a far bigger block than the mythical blob.
This is misleading. We are not talking about absolute opposition but about the transformation and amendment of policy by both past decisions/laws/precedent and the obstruction and inertia which undermines and changes policy. That is exactly what Viewcode correctly references in his article.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
The size of the State is a point of contention in the US election.
Here’s former presidentail candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy talking to Lex Fridman about the problem. Ramaswarmy reckons that around 75% of Federal employees, including whole departments, could be lost without significant impact on services. Most of the Federal agencies simply send money to States with strings attached, and the federal department exists only to implement and monitor compliance with the strings.
And you consistently ignore the massive elephant in the room:
Do you really believe that the Russians did not feed them pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian editorial lines, even if you accept that the 'talent' had no idea they were working for the Russians?
Of course they did; just look at some of Tim Pool's output to see how he parroted pro-Russian lines.
Pool, Rubin, Johnson and others have said that there was no editorial control, and a quick review of the actual output of these programmes the vast majority were pop-culture tyre shows with little to no political content at all.
Their main shows on their own channels are mostly political in nature, but not the Tenet Media shows.
LOL. Russia wants to spread discord. These nasty idiots did that for them. And gullible fools lapped it all up. And what makes you think they would only follow the money on the Tenet shows?
(Apparently many of the videos have been taken down, so an 'independent' quick review of them might not show anything.)
I’ll continue to stick with what the DOJ and FBI have to say, and you can continue to stick with LOL Russia how did they not know this was all a set up Russia LOL, and we can agree to disagree.
No.
You believe that the Russians gave them this money out of the kindness of their hearts, and it is a pure coincidence that the lines these shits took was coincident with Russian interests.
I'd argue that is a ridiculous position to take. And interestingly, it isn't contradicted by that link you give. They may not have known it was Russian money, but they sure as heck knew they were pro-Russian lines.
Jeez this is getting difficult.
The FBI and DOJ said that the presenters of shows on Tenet were victims, who were unaware that the company was partly financed by RT, and were lied to by the (Canadian) directors of the company. The programmes themselves were mostly non-political, and the creators have said themselves that there was never any editorial control over the programmes being shown.
Here’s Dave Rubin being interviewed by Megyn Kelly about Tenet. And Here’s Tim Pool being interviewed by Ben Shapiro about Tenet.
A real conspiracy theorist might suggest that the whole thing was set up by the Biden-Harris administration, to try and discredit mainstream online voices who are supporting Trump, with stories of how the Russians are funding conservative commentators, just as they spent two years after the 2016 election trying unsuccessfully to tie Trump to Russia.
Your last paragraph is unworthy of you, and shows just how far down the Trump rabbithole you have fallen.
And if you read the article I linked to, you can see 'mostly non-political' is irrelevant, as the idea was to post divisive content. As I have pointed out before, that's one of Russia's gameplans. Division.
As is often the case, Occam's razor applies.
You are saying that the vast amounts of money given to them had zero effect on their editorial content, which utterly coincidentally matched what Russia would want them to say.
I contend that that is an unlikely thing to occur, and it is much more likely that they were fed lines by their paymasters. They may not have *known* those paymasters were Russians; but they used the lines nonetheless. I do wonder at their lack of curiosity about it, though.
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
Isn't that... more blob?
Appoint a SPAD as regulations tzar to oversee the ombudsman....
That’ll never work.
What you need is The Department of Reducing Regulation, with 3,000 civil servants, biased towards the higher ranks, with careful attention paid to their skin colour, sexual preference, and gender identity, all working five days a week in the Whitehall office. They will be expected to produce 100,000 pages of reports every year to Parliament, which will have a Select Committee overseeing their work.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
Does he never wear the same suit twice?
One would think a prominent lawyer would already have plenty of suits. Perhaps the trousers reached the limits of adjustment.
Terrific piece @viewcode - very fresh and non-cliched. I think the Blob is mainly a term used to signal the following sentiment:
"I am an out-of-the-box thinker unencumbered by common assumptions of what is possible. It's simple really, only dullards make things complicated. Unfortunately the world is full of them. God it can be frustrating being me."
As I understand it the blob is there to stop the government doing what it wants.
This begs the larger question do we want government to have dictatorial powers?
We have just elected a Labour government with a large majority in the house of commons.
But, only on 1/3 of the votes actually cast.
Should that be sufficient to give the government dictatorial powers?
All uk governments have had dictatorial powers, irrespective of the size of the majority of the party in parliament.
Commons majorities aligned with the governments have those powers, not the governments alone. Even with a keen government and reasonable majority if the commons is not enthusiastically in favour that is a far bigger block than the mythical blob.
This is misleading. We are not talking about absolute opposition but about the transformation and amendment of policy by both past decisions/laws/precedent and the obstruction and inertia which undermines and changes policy. That is exactly what Viewcode correctly references in his article.
This is lazy politicians not being on top of brief. See the example cited in the header of Cameron not understanding what Lansleys reforms actually did. The PM, regarded as one of the more competent ones of recent times, had no understanding of what major reforms to the NHS meant. Whose fault is that?
My suggestion in this area is encouraging MPs to specialise and gain subject matter experties by limiting Cabinet appointments to those with at least 3 years experience as minister/shadow/select committee in relevant positions.
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
It’s interesting that JHB admits she supports it in her own neighbourhood! (Fair play to her for saying that I guess). The Welsh scheme has been, by any reasonable metric, a success. My sense is there are tens of thousands of Julias - who support 20mph in their own neighbourhoods but not in ‘WALES’.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
Another thoughtful and well-researched article from Viewcode.
What I find interesting is the article begins in the post-war era of recovery and reconstruction. Which forces us to ask what the blob was like before WWII? Did it exist? In what form, and what size?
Think of Sir Peregrine Craddock in A Very British Coup, who gives a speech near the end that his lot - i.e. the establishment - have been running the country since the beginning of time. This is possibly - indeed, probably - true. But until WWII, did we have a relatively small, non-interventionist state? Or did the long arm of the blob reach out even in Victorian, even in Georgian times?
The alternative view is that the blob is a postwar construction. Malmesbury's "NU10k" displaced the old, aristocratic establishment - a kind of revolution, in a sense. But one that was only possible because of the extraordinary events of WWII which broke down the old order and forced us to rebuild from scratch.
Arguably, therefore, it would take a revolutionary event (note, not necessarily a revolution, but an event on an enormous magnitude, such as another world war) to displace the current order. Covid wasn't radical enough to displace the blob, in fact, it strengthened it. Ditto Brexit. Would a great depression leading to a post-Farage fascist government (or post-Corbyn Marxist government) be the sort of revolution that finally displaces the blob? Or would it take something greater? What does a 'revolution' against the blob look like?
Sci fi fans will be reminded of the eternal battle between the Vorlons and the Shadows. The Vorlons believing in gradual evolution, while the Shadows pop out ever few years or so to 'kick over all the anthills' and force a complete re-think by every major civilization. Without an occasional kicking over of the anthills, the blob will continue to evolve.
Who or what is big enough to take on the blob, kick over the anthills, and displace the NU10k?
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
"environmental rules hold up house building"
I call that a fail. The rules should be blocking house building, in the wrong places.
I think the country is wreathed in rules and regulations that stultify growth and waste mountains of time and energy.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops. Others are not. The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
We are a bureaucratic superpower.
I was always too low down in every organisation to have much view of the high-powered machinations, but what seemed clear to me is that they develop a group-think over the years. Only like-minded people progress very far and the organisation develops blind spots, sometimes quite serious ones.
I found it useful to develop a good understanding of policies, processes and procedures because that allows you to do things that are within the rules but creatively so, enabling much more freedom. Unfortunately it seems to me that the only people who can be bothered to get properly to grips with PPP are usually the ones who are blind to the problems they cause.
Good morning, everyone. An interesting article, @viewcode, thank you.
I'm not convinced by the leading article. The "evidence" of the blob is casually furnished by reference to two satirical TV programmes. It's undoubtedly true that many people believe that the blob exists and systematically resists change, and it's likely that reforms to transfer control from X to Y will be resisted by X, but the underlying issue is not a systematic block on change but a caution by elected governments against introducing change which will create opponents faster than it creates benefits.
Arguably we suffer from permanent electionitis, because of local elections happening every year in addition to the General Election at least every 5 years. But that's a somewhat different problem from an institutional barrier to change. Starmer's indifference to current opinion is unusual, and probably healthy, even though the consequences aren't always welcome to me. It's possible to effect radical change - just electorally risky.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
Is it right that Bibi phoned in (or more likely indulged in a bit of play acting for the camera) the latest air strike on Beirut from NYC shortly before or after his UN address? This prick is essentially telling his allies to suck it up as he knows they’re too cuck to apply even minimal sanctions on him. Impunity is the word I think.
The size of the State is a point of contention in the US election.
Here’s former presidentail candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy talking to Lex Fridman about the problem. Ramaswarmy reckons that around 75% of Federal employees, including whole departments, could be lost without significant impact on services. Most of the Federal agencies simply send money to States with strings attached, and the federal department exists only to implement and monitor compliance with the strings.
And you consistently ignore the massive elephant in the room:
Do you really believe that the Russians did not feed them pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian editorial lines, even if you accept that the 'talent' had no idea they were working for the Russians?
Of course they did; just look at some of Tim Pool's output to see how he parroted pro-Russian lines.
Pool, Rubin, Johnson and others have said that there was no editorial control, and a quick review of the actual output of these programmes the vast majority were pop-culture tyre shows with little to no political content at all.
Their main shows on their own channels are mostly political in nature, but not the Tenet Media shows.
LOL. Russia wants to spread discord. These nasty idiots did that for them. And gullible fools lapped it all up. And what makes you think they would only follow the money on the Tenet shows?
(Apparently many of the videos have been taken down, so an 'independent' quick review of them might not show anything.)
I’ll continue to stick with what the DOJ and FBI have to say, and you can continue to stick with LOL Russia how did they not know this was all a set up Russia LOL, and we can agree to disagree.
No.
You believe that the Russians gave them this money out of the kindness of their hearts, and it is a pure coincidence that the lines these shits took was coincident with Russian interests.
I'd argue that is a ridiculous position to take. And interestingly, it isn't contradicted by that link you give. They may not have known it was Russian money, but they sure as heck knew they were pro-Russian lines.
Jeez this is getting difficult.
The FBI and DOJ said that the presenters of shows on Tenet were victims, who were unaware that the company was partly financed by RT, and were lied to by the (Canadian) directors of the company. The programmes themselves were mostly non-political, and the creators have said themselves that there was never any editorial control over the programmes being shown.
Here’s Dave Rubin being interviewed by Megyn Kelly about Tenet. And Here’s Tim Pool being interviewed by Ben Shapiro about Tenet.
A real conspiracy theorist might suggest that the whole thing was set up by the Biden-Harris administration, to try and discredit mainstream online voices who are supporting Trump, with stories of how the Russians are funding conservative commentators, just as they spent two years after the 2016 election trying unsuccessfully to tie Trump to Russia.
Your last paragraph is unworthy of you, and shows just how far down the Trump rabbithole you have fallen.
And if you read the article I linked to, you can see 'mostly non-political' is irrelevant, as the idea was to post divisive content. As I have pointed out before, that's one of Russia's gameplans. Division.
As is often the case, Occam's razor applies.
You are saying that the vast amounts of money given to them had zero effect on their editorial content, which utterly coincidentally matched what Russia would want them to say.
I contend that that is an unlikely thing to occur, and it is much more likely that they were fed lines by their paymasters. They may not have *known* those paymasters were Russians; but they used the lines nonetheless. I do wonder at their lack of curiosity about it, though.
I have no idea why you persist in trying to make this personal, when all I have done is post the facts of the case as presented by the government, and all you post in return is conjecture and option that is in opposition to the published facts.
I have better things to do with my time than continue to argue with government-published facts, against people who are determined to take the opposite view for purely political reasons.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
The size of the State is a point of contention in the US election.
Here’s former presidentail candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy talking to Lex Fridman about the problem. Ramaswarmy reckons that around 75% of Federal employees, including whole departments, could be lost without significant impact on services. Most of the Federal agencies simply send money to States with strings attached, and the federal department exists only to implement and monitor compliance with the strings.
And you consistently ignore the massive elephant in the room:
Do you really believe that the Russians did not feed them pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian editorial lines, even if you accept that the 'talent' had no idea they were working for the Russians?
Of course they did; just look at some of Tim Pool's output to see how he parroted pro-Russian lines.
Pool, Rubin, Johnson and others have said that there was no editorial control, and a quick review of the actual output of these programmes the vast majority were pop-culture tyre shows with little to no political content at all.
Their main shows on their own channels are mostly political in nature, but not the Tenet Media shows.
LOL. Russia wants to spread discord. These nasty idiots did that for them. And gullible fools lapped it all up. And what makes you think they would only follow the money on the Tenet shows?
(Apparently many of the videos have been taken down, so an 'independent' quick review of them might not show anything.)
I’ll continue to stick with what the DOJ and FBI have to say, and you can continue to stick with LOL Russia how did they not know this was all a set up Russia LOL, and we can agree to disagree.
No.
You believe that the Russians gave them this money out of the kindness of their hearts, and it is a pure coincidence that the lines these shits took was coincident with Russian interests.
I'd argue that is a ridiculous position to take. And interestingly, it isn't contradicted by that link you give. They may not have known it was Russian money, but they sure as heck knew they were pro-Russian lines.
Jeez this is getting difficult.
The FBI and DOJ said that the presenters of shows on Tenet were victims, who were unaware that the company was partly financed by RT, and were lied to by the (Canadian) directors of the company. The programmes themselves were mostly non-political, and the creators have said themselves that there was never any editorial control over the programmes being shown.
Here’s Dave Rubin being interviewed by Megyn Kelly about Tenet. And Here’s Tim Pool being interviewed by Ben Shapiro about Tenet.
A real conspiracy theorist might suggest that the whole thing was set up by the Biden-Harris administration, to try and discredit mainstream online voices who are supporting Trump, with stories of how the Russians are funding conservative commentators, just as they spent two years after the 2016 election trying unsuccessfully to tie Trump to Russia.
Your last paragraph is unworthy of you, and shows just how far down the Trump rabbithole you have fallen.
And if you read the article I linked to, you can see 'mostly non-political' is irrelevant, as the idea was to post divisive content. As I have pointed out before, that's one of Russia's gameplans. Division.
As is often the case, Occam's razor applies.
You are saying that the vast amounts of money given to them had zero effect on their editorial content, which utterly coincidentally matched what Russia would want them to say.
I contend that that is an unlikely thing to occur, and it is much more likely that they were fed lines by their paymasters. They may not have *known* those paymasters were Russians; but they used the lines nonetheless. I do wonder at their lack of curiosity about it, though.
I have no idea why you persist in trying to make this personal, when all I have done is post the facts of the case as presented by the government, and all you post in return is conjecture and option that is in opposition to the published facts.
I have better things to do with my time than continue to argue with government-published facts, against people who are determined to take the opposite view for purely political reasons.
The scenario I presented - the likely scenario IMV - fits the published facts.
So does yours.
But your scenario assumes that the Russians paid them hundreds of thousands for nothing, an that it is utterly coincidental that what the youtubers did matched what Russia wanted.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
I'm on the Steering Group for an 'oldies' on-line educational group called u3acommunities. We've been using Zoom for our 'meetings' ever since we started but the recently added recording facility enables us to do away with any form of secretarial activity, apart from checking the summary produced, as one or two ion us have accents and one or two others unusual names. We're looking forward to the day when we can have reliable instantaneous translation as at the moment everything is in English. I'll have to look into Gemini.
Be careful. There are recent instances where the AI has continued transcribing the post meeting conversations of participants who stayed on to chat, and emailed out the notes to everyone, with embarrassing results.
Good point; at the moment the 'host' switches off recording at the end, and tells us. We'll have to make a note to continue to do that as part of Standing Orders.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
That has been on Youtube for quite some time, except iirc for the realistic voice - it is subtitles.
One of the nice features of my new 2 year old phone is that it gives me a pretty good auto text of phone calls.
In the past week or two Youtube announced they'll be rolling out automatic video translation. Supposedly including picking up your intonations, slang, gestures etc and 'mapping' those into the other language along with making your mouth/expressions fit the translation so you don't get that weird 'mouth out of sync with the words' thing we used to get back in the day.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
At one point they, and Israel were. And then Rabin was assassinated.
You think that Rabin could have made peace with Hamas or any other Iranian proxy ?
Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005 didn't bring peace did it.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
For myself, I find the whole 'clothes donation' thing rather unpleasant. I cannot conceive that anyone gives a 'donation' to a politician without expecting something in return, even if it's only general sympathy with whatever cause one is promoting.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
I'm on the Steering Group for an 'oldies' on-line educational group called u3acommunities. We've been using Zoom for our 'meetings' ever since we started but the recently added recording facility enables us to do away with any form of secretarial activity, apart from checking the summary produced, as one or two ion us have accents and one or two others unusual names. We're looking forward to the day when we can have reliable instantaneous translation as at the moment everything is in English. I'll have to look into Gemini.
I'm now retired except for translation, which keeps me as busy as I like. It's changed a lot - the agency will supply an AI translation, and only asks me to check it - it takes perhaps a quarter of the time and is paid at around 60% of the rate. There are still sytematic errors (e.g. inconsistency in translation of the same phrase, as it hits on different sources for the overall sentence, and of course the original translation may not be perfect) which I think will be hard to remove altogether when the result is to be legally binding, so for now it's just win-win. But humans (including me, obviously) aren't guaranteed to be perfect either, so it may be that we'll get phased out in a while - hasn't happened yet, though.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
At one point they, and Israel were. And then Rabin was assassinated.
You think that Rabin could have made peace with Hamas or any other Iranian proxy ?
Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005 didn't bring peace did it.
Given that there are thousands of Palestinians who feel robbed of their ancestral land, and in doing so were driven onto land which is 'less good', I don't see an answer. Further I suspect that many Israelis have very little genuine ancestral connection to 'the land God gave them'.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
What are we up to now, £50k for Mr Starmer, in the last year alone.
I’m not even sure that our own Mr Eagles can spend that much.
Suits, £2,500 x 5 - £12,500 Shirts, £150 x 15 = £2,250 Shoes, £400 x 5 = £2,000 Casual wear (polo shirts, slacks etc) £2,000 Grand Total £18,750.
What else does he wear? Unlike Mr Eagles he doesn’t look like he was dragged through Valentino and Gucci when he’s off-duty.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
What are we up to now, £50k for Mr Starmer, in the last year alone.
I’m not even sure that our own Mr Eagles can spend that much.
Suits, £2,500 x 5 - £12,500 Shirts, £150 x 15 = £2,250 Shoes, £400 x 5 = £2,000 Casual wear (polo shirts, slacks etc) £2,000 Grand Total £18,750.
What else does he wear? Unlike Mr Eagles he doesn’t look like he was dragged through Valentino and Gucci when he’s off-duty.
Why would anyone want 15 new shirts (for example) in a single year?
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
It’s interesting that JHB admits she supports it in her own neighbourhood! (Fair play to her for saying that I guess). The Welsh scheme has been, by any reasonable metric, a success. My sense is there are tens of thousands of Julias - who support 20mph in their own neighbourhoods but not in ‘WALES’.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
I think in the end very few 20mph roads will revert to 30mph in Wales because the standard required for that is too high: During reassessment, the authority must ensure that any proposed speed limit increase will not negatively impact road safety. How on earth do you prove that?
Even if a street is assessed to be safe for 30mph, it then has to go through the TRO process (more consultations with local residents). It's this kind of JHB YIMBYism that will see even Conservative councils retain their 20mph limits in order to please the people who actually live on these roads.
I was on a peasant wagon yesterday and two oldies were talking about how they are using Gemini for talking to their foreign relatives...I think AI might have some cut through. Don't fancy chances for all these other translation and foreign language learns apps.
Meta/FB are rolling out live automatic translations with realistic voices into all their messenger/instagram products over the next few weeks. Almost getting to the babel fish now.
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
Or as the Meta founder prefers it: “We are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection.” Go on. “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.” Historically, of course, there has always been another way to feel truly present with another person, which is to be truly present with another person. But this is not what the emperor would wish for his citizens. He prefers the world atomised, mediated via his machines. One of the most lunatic moments at his event saw Zuckerberg call an affiliated creator on stage, but then proceed to have a conversation with an AI chatbot version of the creator on a giant screen, while the genuine article stood like a lemon on stage just watching.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
Personally I don't see the problem with this, a wealthy Labour peer has provided a means for the leader of his party and the county to be dressed appropriately to make a good impression.
The problem with this once again is optics. The amounts are eye-watering for normal people. For about the last 20 years (until relaxing it a bit this year) my clothing budget has been about £500 per year in current terms so that's about what I've spent on clothing in my entire adult life. There will be many people like me, or even worse off, who have no concept of how much top end clothes can cost. This just looks like a gravy train to them.
Thanks for the article. Most interesting. A couple of points.
The 'blob' in the sense of a huge civil admin set of hierarchies (whether stricto sensu governmental, local authority, quango or privatised) is just inevitable in any modern state.
Our basic legal system is ancient and organic, like a 1000 year old tree. A modern state is placed within it as a new and massive growth. Common law is its history, so complexifying is certain, and simplifying more or less impossible. I have been out of the law now for exactly 40 years and have watched the massive complexification from outside with awe. These days even in a small provincial area - where I now live - local solicitors specialise in this or that little area, and more or less know nothing outside their specific field. This is a much wider truth too.
Finally: Grenfell. This answers the question of do we want safety or freedom? We want safety. What we get is neither.
What we want is a civil order ('blob' is tempting but not in the end quite fair) which works. The issues around this are most intellectual (too many dim people and jobsworths) and moral (too many people not properly brought up to discern between right and wrong, too little clarity about with whom the buck stops).
Everything we need to know and put right is encapsulated in Grenfell.
What we currently have is incompetence, a lack of integrity and accountability and a culture of low expectations with regard to all 3 of these.
Read the Grenfell Report and the Blood Contamination report and listen to the evidence at the Williams Inquiry. Everything we need to know is in those 3 (and all the previous ones saying pretty much the same thing). It's just no-one ever bothers to learn anything from them. So we keep on repeating the same mistakes.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
Thing is, I don't know what an appropriate amount would be in this context. There's probably a dynamic where Starmer is in the awkward middle bit of Parkinson's Law of money- it's enough for us to semi-understand and get cross about it, whereas some people spend so much that it becomes blah blah numberblah.
I 'm pretty sure I haven't spent £32000 on clothes in my life, but I'm a surburban part-time science master who spends the rest of the week working from home on other projects.
But if you are going to be in the public eye, and people are going to judge you by how you look... Is £1000 a suit stupid? I don't know because it isn't my world. Is 30 suits unreasonable? Again, I don't know, but you can't wear on the repeat if you're on the telly every day.
How much should a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover cost under the circumstances? 30 grand for Labour to get better photos of their leader in the media is probably cheap at the price.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
Does he never wear the same suit twice?
Maybe he is like the rappers, new box fresh white t and trainers every day.
The size of the State is a point of contention in the US election.
Here’s former presidentail candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy talking to Lex Fridman about the problem. Ramaswarmy reckons that around 75% of Federal employees, including whole departments, could be lost without significant impact on services. Most of the Federal agencies simply send money to States with strings attached, and the federal department exists only to implement and monitor compliance with the strings.
Ramaswamy has floated 9/11 conspiracy theories. He’s not exactly credible.
You can call him what you like, but there’s a good chance he could be in the US Cabinet next January, so he’s probably worth listening to even if you disagree with what he has to say.
I referenced something he said. I am listening to him. You would do well to actually listen to the crazy he puts out.
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
It’s interesting that JHB admits she supports it in her own neighbourhood! (Fair play to her for saying that I guess). The Welsh scheme has been, by any reasonable metric, a success. My sense is there are tens of thousands of Julias - who support 20mph in their own neighbourhoods but not in ‘WALES’.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
I think in the end very few 20mph roads will revert to 30mph in Wales because the standard required for that is too high: During reassessment, the authority must ensure that any proposed speed limit increase will not negatively impact road safety. How on earth do you prove that?
Even if a street is assessed to be safe for 30mph, it then has to go through the TRO process (more consultations with local residents). It's this kind of JHB YIMBYism that will see even Conservative councils retain their 20mph limits in order to please the people who actually live on these roads.
It does appear that the multitude support raising speed limits to 30mph in other people’s neighbourhoods.
The size of the State is a point of contention in the US election.
Here’s former presidentail candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy talking to Lex Fridman about the problem. Ramaswarmy reckons that around 75% of Federal employees, including whole departments, could be lost without significant impact on services. Most of the Federal agencies simply send money to States with strings attached, and the federal department exists only to implement and monitor compliance with the strings.
And you consistently ignore the massive elephant in the room:
Do you really believe that the Russians did not feed them pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian editorial lines, even if you accept that the 'talent' had no idea they were working for the Russians?
Of course they did; just look at some of Tim Pool's output to see how he parroted pro-Russian lines.
Pool, Rubin, Johnson and others have said that there was no editorial control, and a quick review of the actual output of these programmes the vast majority were pop-culture tyre shows with little to no political content at all.
Their main shows on their own channels are mostly political in nature, but not the Tenet Media shows.
As discussed previously, the pop culture stuff is just as much part of Russia’s disinformation campaigns. Making videos complaining Star Wars has gone woke all adds to the culture war. It’s all about inventing talking points to scare and outrage people: that generates $$$ for Tim Pool and generates instability for Russia.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
At one point they, and Israel were. And then Rabin was assassinated.
You think that Rabin could have made peace with Hamas or any other Iranian proxy ?
Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005 didn't bring peace did it.
Given that there are thousands of Palestinians who feel robbed of their ancestral land, and in doing so were driven onto land which is 'less good', I don't see an answer. Further I suspect that many Israelis have very little genuine ancestral connection to 'the land God gave them'.
The Ionian Greeks, Karelian Finns and Sudeten Germans could have said the same - and many likely did for a generation or so.
But they had to accept the reality and they made something of the new lives forced upon them.
I wonder how much more affluent, free and successful the Palestinians would have been if they had accepted the result of 1948 instead of attempting for three generations to reverse it.
Certainly the Palestinians who remained in Israel have done pretty well, very likely better than they would have done in an independent Palestine.
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
It’s interesting that JHB admits she supports it in her own neighbourhood! (Fair play to her for saying that I guess). The Welsh scheme has been, by any reasonable metric, a success. My sense is there are tens of thousands of Julias - who support 20mph in their own neighbourhoods but not in ‘WALES’.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
I think in the end very few 20mph roads will revert to 30mph in Wales because the standard required for that is too high: During reassessment, the authority must ensure that any proposed speed limit increase will not negatively impact road safety. How on earth do you prove that?
Even if a street is assessed to be safe for 30mph, it then has to go through the TRO process (more consultations with local residents). It's this kind of JHB YIMBYism that will see even Conservative councils retain their 20mph limits in order to please the people who actually live on these roads.
It was a neat example of using the system to get something done. There was lots of noise about the blanket change, and it sounds like some councils did a better job of implimentation than others. But the promise of a review was enough to pacify many opponents, and give them the impression that they had won something. As that review happens, my suspicion is that very few roads will revert.
Part of the problem with the 2019-24 government. They had things they wanted to do, but went for pushing them through by brute force, just shouting at opponents who pointed out problems, like contradiction with existing laws. So some of them (Rwanda, say) never happened, and others don't look like sticking.
One of my hopes for having a process guy at the top is that, by working more in harmony with The Process, things he does are more likely to happen and to stick.
The size of the State is a point of contention in the US election.
Here’s former presidentail candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy talking to Lex Fridman about the problem. Ramaswarmy reckons that around 75% of Federal employees, including whole departments, could be lost without significant impact on services. Most of the Federal agencies simply send money to States with strings attached, and the federal department exists only to implement and monitor compliance with the strings.
Ramaswamy has floated 9/11 conspiracy theories. He’s not exactly credible.
You can call him what you like, but there’s a good chance he could be in the US Cabinet next January, so he’s probably worth listening to even if you disagree with what he has to say.
I referenced something he said. I am listening to him. You would do well to actually listen to the crazy he puts out.
I listened to the podcast I linked yesterday. Don’t agree with all he says, but he does have some good ideas. I like listening to people willing to step outside the comfort zone of established political thought, whether on the left or on the right. Even people with whom I vehemently disagree on almost everything, will occasionally have a good idea in there somewhere.
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
It’s interesting that JHB admits she supports it in her own neighbourhood! (Fair play to her for saying that I guess). The Welsh scheme has been, by any reasonable metric, a success. My sense is there are tens of thousands of Julias - who support 20mph in their own neighbourhoods but not in ‘WALES’.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
I think in the end very few 20mph roads will revert to 30mph in Wales because the standard required for that is too high: During reassessment, the authority must ensure that any proposed speed limit increase will not negatively impact road safety. How on earth do you prove that?
Even if a street is assessed to be safe for 30mph, it then has to go through the TRO process (more consultations with local residents). It's this kind of JHB YIMBYism that will see even Conservative councils retain their 20mph limits in order to please the people who actually live on these roads.
JHB? I'm thinking Johannes Brahms, but probably not.
I think a safety case could be based around proper provision for different modes.
I'm quite happy with the default having been switched.
Next up: reverse the "you can park anywhere" assumption to "you can park where it is marked".
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
I could not disagree with you more.
Was every Nazi killed when we were at war with Germany resulting in further entrenchment of hatred and intolerance there? Or did defeating them to the point they surrendered unconditionally mean that afterwards the land could be rebuilt with a Marshall Plan?
A "ceasefire" that leaves Gaza ruled by Hamas and returns Gaza to being a blockaded cesspit with no economic development, no hope, no future, no democracy, no opportunities will just guarantee more misery, more Hamas and guarantee this never ending cycle of violence continues with more fighting, more deaths, more bombs in the future.
The only way to move on is to break the cycle of violence. A Marshall Plan to lead to economic security, jobs, opportunities and more so people can move on from the cycle of violence.
But a Marshall Plan can only follow a military victory. The comprehensive and complete defeat and unconditional surrender of Hamas.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
Thing is, I don't know what an appropriate amount would be in this context. There's probably a dynamic where Starmer is in the awkward middle bit of Parkinson's Law of money- it's enough for us to semi-understand and get cross about it, whereas some people spend so much that it becomes blah blah numberblah.
I 'm pretty sure I haven't spent £32000 on clothes in my life, but I'm a surburban part-time science master who spends the rest of the week working from home on other projects.
But if you are going to be in the public eye, and people are going to judge you by how you look... Is £1000 a suit stupid? I don't know because it isn't my world. Is 30 suits unreasonable? Again, I don't know, but you can't wear on the repeat if you're on the telly every day.
How much should a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover cost under the circumstances? 30 grand for Labour to get better photos of their leader in the media is probably cheap at the price.
Some people are interested in clothes and some people aren't.
Jeremy Hunt looked like he got his suits from a supermarket and Boris often looked like a scarecrow.
Whereas John McDonnell always looked sharply dressed.
So there's no issue with anyone spending £1,000 or even £10,000 of their own money on a suit if that's what they want to do.
Their own money.
It becomes an issue when its someone else's money.
Now if its taxpayer's money then perhaps the taxpayers will be getting a return of their political leaders looking well dressed.
But is that the only return a political donor gets ?
On Talk TV, it was amusing to see Julian Hartley-Brewer reaching for increasingly desperate straw men as she was mugged on air by someone who had come armed with some facts.
It’s interesting that JHB admits she supports it in her own neighbourhood! (Fair play to her for saying that I guess). The Welsh scheme has been, by any reasonable metric, a success. My sense is there are tens of thousands of Julias - who support 20mph in their own neighbourhoods but not in ‘WALES’.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
I think in the end very few 20mph roads will revert to 30mph in Wales because the standard required for that is too high: During reassessment, the authority must ensure that any proposed speed limit increase will not negatively impact road safety. How on earth do you prove that?
Even if a street is assessed to be safe for 30mph, it then has to go through the TRO process (more consultations with local residents). It's this kind of JHB YIMBYism that will see even Conservative councils retain their 20mph limits in order to please the people who actually live on these roads.
It does appear that the multitude support raising speed limits to 30mph in other people’s neighbourhoods.
Both of you speak about Wales as if you live there and frankly seem to have a view that is not shared by the people or politicians of Wales
Of course you are at liberty to try to force your opinion on the 20mph limit but no amount of repetitive posts will alter the fact roads across Wales are being reassessed and some will change
The nonsense of this argument is that most everyone agrees with 20mph limits in given areas such as schools and busy residential areas but not generalized especially on roads that have no children on them
And as far as Drakeford is concerned he has now said he wants income tax rates to rise in defiance of labour's stance in Westminster and like the 20mph policy his colleagues have had to slap him down
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
What are we up to now, £50k for Mr Starmer, in the last year alone.
I’m not even sure that our own Mr Eagles can spend that much.
Suits, £2,500 x 5 - £12,500 Shirts, £150 x 15 = £2,250 Shoes, £400 x 5 = £2,000 Casual wear (polo shirts, slacks etc) £2,000 Grand Total £18,750.
What else does he wear? Unlike Mr Eagles he doesn’t look like he was dragged through Valentino and Gucci when he’s off-duty.
Why would anyone want 15 new shirts (for example) in a single year?
I admit that a couple of years ago I bought 20+ shirts in a single afternoon. It was ultra-sale time at stock rollover in Jeff Banks in the local outlet centre, and the intention was to not buy any more in quantity for 2 or 3 years.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
I could not disagree with you more.
Was every Nazi killed when we were at war with Germany resulting in further entrenchment of hatred and intolerance there? Or did defeating them to the point they surrendered unconditionally mean that afterwards the land could be rebuilt with a Marshall Plan?
A "ceasefire" that leaves Gaza ruled by Hamas and returns Gaza to being a blockaded cesspit with no economic development, no hope, no future, no democracy, no opportunities will just guarantee more misery, more Hamas and guarantee this never ending cycle of violence continues with more fighting, more deaths, more bombs in the future.
The only way to move on is to break the cycle of violence. A Marshall Plan to lead to economic security, jobs, opportunities and more so people can move on from the cycle of violence.
But a Marshall Plan can only follow a military victory. The comprehensive and complete defeat and unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I don't think a total Israeli victory looks like a Marshall Plan for a Palestinian state.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
At one point they, and Israel were. And then Rabin was assassinated.
Except Israel continued to move towards peace, Clinton continued to move towards peace.
It was Arafat and the Palestinians that rejected Clinton's peace proposals, not Israel.
Because to the gangsters that rule Palestine, like Arafat, and like Russia's Putin, they actually enjoy the benefits from the conflict and have no desire for peace.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
I could not disagree with you more.
Was every Nazi killed when we were at war with Germany resulting in further entrenchment of hatred and intolerance there? Or did defeating them to the point they surrendered unconditionally mean that afterwards the land could be rebuilt with a Marshall Plan?
A "ceasefire" that leaves Gaza ruled by Hamas and returns Gaza to being a blockaded cesspit with no economic development, no hope, no future, no democracy, no opportunities will just guarantee more misery, more Hamas and guarantee this never ending cycle of violence continues with more fighting, more deaths, more bombs in the future.
The only way to move on is to break the cycle of violence. A Marshall Plan to lead to economic security, jobs, opportunities and more so people can move on from the cycle of violence.
But a Marshall Plan can only follow a military victory. The comprehensive and complete defeat and unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I don't think a total Israeli victory looks like a Marshall Plan for a Palestinian state.
I do.
Israel has tried time and time again to accept peace with the Palestinians. In 1948, in 2000, in many times. Sadly its not the Israelis who've rejected it every single damned time.
As long as Hamas exists, peace is impossible. If Hamas surrender unconditionally, then America, Europe and the world would be prepared to give Marshall-style aid to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank once borders are peacefully agreed but as long as Hamas exists its going to be blockades, entrenched poverty and a never-ending cycle of violence.
Anyone who wants a ceasefire is just calling for a cessation in the cycle of violence, not an end of it. The cycle needs to be broken, like it was in 1945 in Germany and Japan by rebuilding after an unconditional surrender.
All it takes is Hamas to surrender unconditionally.
A £1,000 suit worn poorly will look terrible. A £200 suit, worn well, can look great.
It's not about the cost of the clothes, it's knowing how to wear them. That's an art (and one I don't have).
If Starmer wants to appear smarter, he does not need to be given new clothes; he can learn how to wear what he has properly. Although tbf, he's never appeared like a scruffbag IMO.
It's all such an unnecessary mess for him to have got himself into.
I'm increasingly coming round to my wife's view, who is a Jewish person who even knows a couple of the lefr-wing Israelis protesting against Netanyahu outside the U.N., that if the Americans cannot bring him to heel, his government should be subject to international sanctions, and travel bans.
There's also the question of the ICC indictment against Netanyahu, as I recall it, and the ICC is not the "U.N. Pro-Arabists'l", as his far-right ministers like to call it. The Israeli population at large need to understand that if their nation continues on this kind of trajectory, then it's heading for South African-style, pariah status in the world
Utter rubbish, Israel has every right to defend itself and to seek to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
For the war to end only requires Hamas and Hezbollah to surrender and lay down their arms. If they don't, then war it is until they do. That's the nature of war, its sad but the world has wars and Hamas and Hezbollah are attacking Israel which has every right to defend itself and they need to be comprehensively and completely defeated.
What do you think about the way in which Israel is fighting this war?
In Gaza they seem not to be occupying territory and establishing an occupation authority that would have responsibility for looking after civilians and would create a sense of a positive future for Gaza being possible, but instead they go into an area, trash everything, then retreat, let Hamas come back, then repeat.
It seems to be a recipe for permanent war, rather than for a complete defeat of Hamas. We are close to one year in and Hamas still have large numbers of hostages. The Israeli strategy has failed, except insofar as it keeps Netanyahu safe from a corruption trial.
I don't agree at all with the way Netanyahu is running the country or conducting the war.
I think Israel is being far too soft with Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu as I agree that I think he wants the war to be ongoing and not won. Similarly he was way too soft with Hamas before October last year leading to those tragic events.
Netanyahu is like Chamberlain, only much worse. Israel needs its Churchill who can lead them to victory and actually destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu is indeed making things much too easy for Hamas and Hezbollah.
He is providing them with all the recruits and worldwide sympathy they could ask for and need to make sure the war goes on for another generation.
Indeed.
Israel needs to replace Netanyahu with a Churchill-like figure that will win the war by killing those recruits until the enemy surrenders unconditionally, just as the Nazis did after they were defeated, and then we can move on from war.
Instead Netanyahu is doing just enough to continue the violence but not enough to win. Israel needs to fight much harder than it is doing to win.
But many of those recruits won't become active for years or decades. They will hate Israel internally until then. So short of an outright genocide, Israel/Palestine will never be able to "move on" from war without the legitimate grievances of the more persuadable Palestinians being addressed, which Netanyahu has stubbornly and totally failed to do. But every bomb or civilian casualty means there are fewer of those and many more fanatics sadly.
Israel's war is totally self-defeating in the medium-long term no matter how successful it is in the short term. But tragically that's par for the course in that part of the Middle East.
And it's also where the analogy with the Nazis in 1945 breaks down. They were embodied in individuals and encircled, so it was possible, by sufficient effort, to trap and destroy them.
Th enemies of Israel are on the outside of the doughnut and far too numerous. Besides, anti-Semitism is an idea, and those are much harder to destroy. And the actions of the Netanyahu are fortifying the idea, even as they are the destroying the military leaders of the idea.
And, no matter the rightness of the cause, there is a point where fighting an impossible war in that cause becomes unjust. And it's not obvious that the Israeli state didn't cross that line some while back.
So why weren't the other side moving towards peace before that line was crossed, or before Netanyahu took power, or any other time in the last 75 years for that matter?
At one point they, and Israel were. And then Rabin was assassinated.
Except Israel continued to move towards peace, Clinton continued to move towards peace.
It was Arafat and the Palestinians that rejected Clinton's peace proposals, not Israel.
Because to the gangsters that rule Palestine, like Arafat, and like Russia's Putin, they actually enjoy the benefits from the conflict and have no desire for peace.
That applies on both sides, the settler political parties propping up Netanyahu have no interest in peace just a land grab in the occupied territories.
Andrew Neil @afneil Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
So what? Alli is a Labour politician and a Labour donor. The fact that he donates to Labour is a truism.
It seems like an extraordinary amount of money to spend on clothes, especially someone else's money?
What are we up to now, £50k for Mr Starmer, in the last year alone.
I’m not even sure that our own Mr Eagles can spend that much.
Suits, £2,500 x 5 - £12,500 Shirts, £150 x 15 = £2,250 Shoes, £400 x 5 = £2,000 Casual wear (polo shirts, slacks etc) £2,000 Grand Total £18,750.
What else does he wear? Unlike Mr Eagles he doesn’t look like he was dragged through Valentino and Gucci when he’s off-duty.
Why would anyone want 15 new shirts (for example) in a single year?
It was just an example, but I have 15 work shirts in total, bought in three lots of five over around three years. My local tailor gives a discount if you buy five at once, and gives another discount if you still fit your old shirts and take one back to be copied, rather than going to get measured again.
I’m lucky to live somewhere where tailoring is cheap, so can usually get five cotton work shirts for £250 or thereabouts, same price as M&S nice ones off the shelf.
Comments
Time and again, an elaborate process or procedure hides total ignorance, incompetence and potential failure.
Excessive, bullshit, process isn’t “better than nothing”.
It kills.
So anyone who says - “I have no problem with more process” - should ask themselves a simple question.
How many people do you want to kill for your form filling?
BUT - if you did want to suggest an alternative course of action to what the blob suggests - it's almost impossible. You can go against the experts, but the legal arm will envelop you. You can fight off the legal arm, and the third sector will suck you in. The democratic levers don't work. Virtually the only thing you can do is choose to spend more or less money in one area or another.
It's worth noting that the blob isn't uniform in intent, and much of its energy is spent fighting other bits of the blob.
Such as encouraging the use of cash in a period of high interest rates.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/27/watch-burst-sewage-pipe-spurts-human-waste-chinese-highway/
He may by dint of circumstance, be running alongside the clearly just cause for a while, but his own intentions, beliefs and actions are not in any way just nor supportable. These beliefs - in the eradication of both the fact and idea of a Palestinian State and a Greater Israel essentially swept clean of Palestinians - are not those of a just or reasonable man. Sadly for the moment, along with like minded extremists, he has control of the apparatus of state. But I am firmly of the belief that as long as he and his kind are in power than can and will be no peace.
This begs the larger question do we want government to have dictatorial powers?
We have just elected a Labour government with a large majority in the house of commons.
But, only on 1/3 of the votes actually cast.
Should that be sufficient to give the government dictatorial powers?
I remember about a year ago watching someone doing a presentation about automatically generating a sign-language avatar. While the person who was doing the sign-language to the side of stage looked increasingly horrified.
Of course I am also reminded of the legal firm a couple of years ago who got into serious trouble after they used AI and it made up ficticious precedents. Obviously that is an extreme example but the question of what the AI is choosing to use and ignore and how much sight you have of that process is one that troubles me.
In addition to 'the blob' slowing down and stopping reform, it has a habit of continuing with projects that have obvious flaws, often spotted early on, but because a decision has been made, the project must continue. Seen it in large businesses too, who create their own 'blob'. £millions wasted on things that will fail or be catastrophically flawed.
In other news, the EU (was Brexit not a fight against a blob?) seems determined to continue with the launch of it's biometric border control on 10th November, using a completely untried and untested system across the whole bloc.
What could possibly go wrong with a system that introduces new control measures that can only be completed at the point of entry?
Expect to be told to turn up at ports and airports 5 hours in advance. Expect the system to crash causing travel chaos.
December is likely to have competing headlines over 'freezing grannies' and 'Christmas travel chaos'.
IMO Isobel O has firmly established her reputation as an unreliable, lazy, personally untrustworthy writer / rumour-mongerer.
If he wants to go for them, there's plenty of obvious BS there - for example the stuff about his "400k income" and "25% tax rate" and "how did he get it down" followed by speculation. If they had just read a single piece on the BBC website they would know that most (2/3) of it was capital gains not income.
The tell tale may be whether KS choses to take them on, or ignore them as media midges flying around in a swamp.
But that's the playbook imo - bait the useful idiots.
We're looking forward to the day when we can have reliable instantaneous translation as at the moment everything is in English.
I'll have to look into Gemini.
One of the nice features of my new 2 year old phone is that it gives me a pretty good auto text of phone calls.
If we had 350 Reform MPs Rwanda could have passed and been enacted and delivered. But that really wasn't what the electorate voted for.
There some overlap with left/right but I don't think it's good politics to frame it in that way.
A small counterexample would be the recent interest - on both sides of the Atlantic - in planning reform (simplification) manifested by left of centre parties.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/pensions/labour-give-retired-miners-billion/
And then Rabin was assassinated.
Some rules are important. Drive on the left. Don't steal from shops.
Others are not.
The money laundering rules are time consuming for the ordinary citizen and the big operators are able to get round them. The environmental rules hold up house building.
Because the rules often seem to be unnecessary they are sometimes ignored cf Grenfell where the problem was not lack of regulation but regulations ignored or, in the case of the rule of stay in place, obeyed.
The cause is that the writers of the rules are only concerned with one side of the issue - safety, preventing fraud, protecting the environment, and do not consider the other side - massive time wasting, economic costs etc. Rules here are not for the greater good but for one side of the issue. It's not the blob. It can be any pressure group.
The solution is a regulations ombudsman to whom one can appeal stultifying rules, and who can strike down unnecessary rules or refer then to parliament to reconsider if they are in primary legislation.
(Not everyone here will agree, of course.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beCzK8tVQmM
There are recent instances where the AI has continued transcribing the post meeting conversations of participants who stayed on to chat, and emailed out the notes to everyone, with embarrassing results.
If there is a scandal, then the automatic instinct is to organise the cover-up. When the cover-up gets exposed, then the strategy changes to delaying and blocking redress - whilst proclaiming that “lessons have been learned.”
Andrew Neil
@afneil
Keir Starmer was given an additional £16,000 worth of clothes by Lord Alli, which was declared as money for his private office. The donations by the Labour peer were not previously known and included £10,000 last October and £6,000 in February this year, taking the total in clothes donated to Starmer to £32,000.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/sep/28/major-fears-over-labours-nursery-plan-for-9-month-olds-in-schools
Crossover.
Joe Biden Approval Polling:
Approve: 43%
Disapprove: 41%
Net: +2%
Redfield / Sept 26, 2024 / n=2500
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1839736680808378647
And if you read the article I linked to, you can see 'mostly non-political' is irrelevant, as the idea was to post divisive content. As I have pointed out before, that's one of Russia's gameplans. Division.
As is often the case, Occam's razor applies.
You are saying that the vast amounts of money given to them had zero effect on their editorial content, which utterly coincidentally matched what Russia would want them to say.
I contend that that is an unlikely thing to occur, and it is much more likely that they were fed lines by their paymasters. They may not have *known* those paymasters were Russians; but they used the lines nonetheless. I do wonder at their lack of curiosity about it, though.
What you need is The Department of Reducing Regulation, with 3,000 civil servants, biased towards the higher ranks, with careful attention paid to their skin colour, sexual preference, and gender identity, all working five days a week in the Whitehall office. They will be expected to produce 100,000 pages of reports every year to Parliament, which will have a Select Committee overseeing their work.
"I am an out-of-the-box thinker unencumbered by common assumptions of what is possible. It's simple really, only dullards make things complicated. Unfortunately the world is full of them. God it can be frustrating being me."
My suggestion in this area is encouraging MPs to specialise and gain subject matter experties by limiting Cabinet appointments to those with at least 3 years experience as minister/shadow/select committee in relevant positions.
We’ve had 20mph universally near me and I was 100% against it when they brought it in. Now I’m 100% for it. You get used to it, it makes urban driving less stressful and the streets more serene.
It is true, as ever, that you can’t shake THE DRAKE.
Another thoughtful and well-researched article from Viewcode.
What I find interesting is the article begins in the post-war era of recovery and reconstruction. Which forces us to ask what the blob was like before WWII? Did it exist? In what form, and what size?
Think of Sir Peregrine Craddock in A Very British Coup, who gives a speech near the end that his lot - i.e. the establishment - have been running the country since the beginning of time. This is possibly - indeed, probably - true. But until WWII, did we have a relatively small, non-interventionist state? Or did the long arm of the blob reach out even in Victorian, even in Georgian times?
The alternative view is that the blob is a postwar construction. Malmesbury's "NU10k" displaced the old, aristocratic establishment - a kind of revolution, in a sense. But one that was only possible because of the extraordinary events of WWII which broke down the old order and forced us to rebuild from scratch.
Arguably, therefore, it would take a revolutionary event (note, not necessarily a revolution, but an event on an enormous magnitude, such as another world war) to displace the current order. Covid wasn't radical enough to displace the blob, in fact, it strengthened it. Ditto Brexit. Would a great depression leading to a post-Farage fascist government (or post-Corbyn Marxist government) be the sort of revolution that finally displaces the blob? Or would it take something greater? What does a 'revolution' against the blob look like?
Sci fi fans will be reminded of the eternal battle between the Vorlons and the Shadows. The Vorlons believing in gradual evolution, while the Shadows pop out ever few years or so to 'kick over all the anthills' and force a complete re-think by every major civilization. Without an occasional kicking over of the anthills, the blob will continue to evolve.
Who or what is big enough to take on the blob, kick over the anthills, and displace the NU10k?
I call that a fail. The rules should be blocking house building, in the wrong places.
I found it useful to develop a good understanding of policies, processes and procedures because that allows you to do things that are within the rules but creatively so, enabling much more freedom. Unfortunately it seems to me that the only people who can be bothered to get properly to grips with PPP are usually the ones who are blind to the problems they cause.
Good morning, everyone. An interesting article, @viewcode, thank you.
Arguably we suffer from permanent electionitis, because of local elections happening every year in addition to the General Election at least every 5 years. But that's a somewhat different problem from an institutional barrier to change. Starmer's indifference to current opinion is unusual, and probably healthy, even though the consequences aren't always welcome to me. It's possible to effect radical change - just electorally risky.
https://x.com/mikegalsworthy/status/1839935500209000837?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
I have better things to do with my time than continue to argue with government-published facts, against people who are determined to take the opposite view for purely political reasons.
So does yours.
But your scenario assumes that the Russians paid them hundreds of thousands for nothing, an that it is utterly coincidental that what the youtubers did matched what Russia wanted.
That, I think, is unlikely.
So maybe things will work out for Dough Brummel after all.
Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005 didn't bring peace did it.
Further I suspect that many Israelis have very little genuine ancestral connection to 'the land God gave them'.
I’m not even sure that our own Mr Eagles can spend that much.
Suits, £2,500 x 5 - £12,500
Shirts, £150 x 15 = £2,250
Shoes, £400 x 5 = £2,000
Casual wear (polo shirts, slacks etc) £2,000
Grand Total £18,750.
What else does he wear? Unlike Mr Eagles he doesn’t look like he was dragged through Valentino and Gucci when he’s off-duty.
Even if a street is assessed to be safe for 30mph, it then has to go through the TRO process (more consultations with local residents). It's this kind of JHB YIMBYism that will see even Conservative councils retain their 20mph limits in order to please the people who actually live on these roads.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-ai-elections-mental-health
The problem with this once again is optics. The amounts are eye-watering for normal people. For about the last 20 years (until relaxing it a bit this year) my clothing budget has been about £500 per year in current terms so that's about what I've spent on clothing in my entire adult life. There will be many people like me, or even worse off, who have no concept of how much top end clothes can cost. This just looks like a gravy train to them.
What we currently have is incompetence, a lack of integrity and accountability and a culture of low expectations with regard to all 3 of these.
Read the Grenfell Report and the Blood Contamination report and listen to the evidence at the Williams Inquiry. Everything we need to know is in those 3 (and all the previous ones saying pretty much the same thing). It's just no-one ever bothers to learn anything from them. So we keep on repeating the same mistakes.
I 'm pretty sure I haven't spent £32000 on clothes in my life, but I'm a surburban part-time science master who spends the rest of the week working from home on other projects.
But if you are going to be in the public eye, and people are going to judge you by how you look... Is £1000 a suit stupid? I don't know because it isn't my world. Is 30 suits unreasonable? Again, I don't know, but you can't wear on the repeat if you're on the telly every day.
How much should a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover cost under the circumstances? 30 grand for Labour to get better photos of their leader in the media is probably cheap at the price.
*innocent face*
But they had to accept the reality and they made something of the new lives forced upon them.
I wonder how much more affluent, free and successful the Palestinians would have been if they had accepted the result of 1948 instead of attempting for three generations to reverse it.
Certainly the Palestinians who remained in Israel have done pretty well, very likely better than they would have done in an independent Palestine.
Part of the problem with the 2019-24 government. They had things they wanted to do, but went for pushing them through by brute force, just shouting at opponents who pointed out problems, like contradiction with existing laws. So some of them (Rwanda, say) never happened, and others don't look like sticking.
One of my hopes for having a process guy at the top is that, by working more in harmony with The Process, things he does are more likely to happen and to stick.
I think a safety case could be based around proper provision for different modes.
I'm quite happy with the default having been switched.
Next up: reverse the "you can park anywhere" assumption to "you can park where it is marked".
Was every Nazi killed when we were at war with Germany resulting in further entrenchment of hatred and intolerance there? Or did defeating them to the point they surrendered unconditionally mean that afterwards the land could be rebuilt with a Marshall Plan?
A "ceasefire" that leaves Gaza ruled by Hamas and returns Gaza to being a blockaded cesspit with no economic development, no hope, no future, no democracy, no opportunities will just guarantee more misery, more Hamas and guarantee this never ending cycle of violence continues with more fighting, more deaths, more bombs in the future.
The only way to move on is to break the cycle of violence. A Marshall Plan to lead to economic security, jobs, opportunities and more so people can move on from the cycle of violence.
But a Marshall Plan can only follow a military victory. The comprehensive and complete defeat and unconditional surrender of Hamas.
Jeremy Hunt looked like he got his suits from a supermarket and Boris often looked like a scarecrow.
Whereas John McDonnell always looked sharply dressed.
So there's no issue with anyone spending £1,000 or even £10,000 of their own money on a suit if that's what they want to do.
Their own money.
It becomes an issue when its someone else's money.
Now if its taxpayer's money then perhaps the taxpayers will be getting a return of their political leaders looking well dressed.
But is that the only return a political donor gets ?
Of course you are at liberty to try to force your opinion on the 20mph limit but no amount of repetitive posts will alter the fact roads across Wales are being reassessed and some will change
The nonsense of this argument is that most everyone agrees with 20mph limits in given areas such as schools and busy residential areas but not generalized especially on roads that have no children on them
And as far as Drakeford is concerned he has now said he wants income tax rates to rise in defiance of labour's stance in Westminster and like the 20mph policy his colleagues have had to slap him down
It was Arafat and the Palestinians that rejected Clinton's peace proposals, not Israel.
Because to the gangsters that rule Palestine, like Arafat, and like Russia's Putin, they actually enjoy the benefits from the conflict and have no desire for peace.
Israel has tried time and time again to accept peace with the Palestinians. In 1948, in 2000, in many times. Sadly its not the Israelis who've rejected it every single damned time.
As long as Hamas exists, peace is impossible. If Hamas surrender unconditionally, then America, Europe and the world would be prepared to give Marshall-style aid to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank once borders are peacefully agreed but as long as Hamas exists its going to be blockades, entrenched poverty and a never-ending cycle of violence.
Anyone who wants a ceasefire is just calling for a cessation in the cycle of violence, not an end of it. The cycle needs to be broken, like it was in 1945 in Germany and Japan by rebuilding after an unconditional surrender.
All it takes is Hamas to surrender unconditionally.
A £200 suit, worn well, can look great.
It's not about the cost of the clothes, it's knowing how to wear them. That's an art (and one I don't have).
If Starmer wants to appear smarter, he does not need to be given new clothes; he can learn how to wear what he has properly. Although tbf, he's never appeared like a scruffbag IMO.
It's all such an unnecessary mess for him to have got himself into.
I’m lucky to live somewhere where tailoring is cheap, so can usually get five cotton work shirts for £250 or thereabouts, same price as M&S nice ones off the shelf.