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What is it about British party leaders and sandwiches? – politicalbetting.com
What is it about British party leaders and sandwiches? – politicalbetting.com
Ed Miliband must sympathise with Kemi Badenoch today. Given how he was mercilessly mocked over his attempt to eat a bacon sandwich seeing Kemi Badenoch getting mocked over her views on sandwiches Tories cannot complain about the coverage meted out to Kemi Badenoch.
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The economy had been expected to return to growth following a fall during September.
However, the Office for National Statistics said that activity had stalled or declined, with pubs, restaurants and retail among sectors reporting "weak months".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5lw84w1yeo
Steven Bartlett sharing harmful health misinformation in Diary of CEO podcast
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gpz163vg2o
Remember that the changing sunset time is a combination of clock effect - the differing pace of the earth around the sun compared to steady clock time - and geometric effect - the changing angle of the sun’s track against the horizon, as the tilt of the earth turns a little more toward or away from the sun.
The clock effect is the same everywhere, but the geometric effect varies by latitude. Because the change in sunset time is the difference between (or sum of, depending on which way it’s going) the two effects, the actual day when the sun sets earliest or latest can be different by a day either way, in different locations - because the net daily change at the solstices is only a few seconds - or, in the islands case yesterday, remarkably evened out at zero seconds such that two days running had exactly the same sunset time.
Potts replaces Woakes for final New Zealand Test
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/articles/ce8xgplj0zro
https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/en-direct-emmanuel-macron-toujours-a-la-recherche-d-un-premier-ministre-une-nomination-attendue-ce-matin-20241213
LA does however have to wait until after the first few days of January before its sunrise starts to improve.
They will, but they own this. Largely down to their doom and gloom and talking down the economy,
"KPMG's chief economist Yael Selfin said that activity was "held back by uncertainty ahead of the Budget on 30 October" as businesses and consumers held back on spending."
Haven't they suffered enough?
I need context on the header.
Was John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, a Tory? Has Kemi forgotten her tradition, or correctly rejected a subversive Whig social structure that is destroying our society from within?
I think @HYUFD might know.
(I also question the verisimilitude of the Star's sandwich. I really don't think Kemi is a Kingsmill Mighty White girl, even in caricature. Though having been force fed such sandwiches as a child would go some way to justify her fear of sandwiches; it's a recognised cause of sandwich-focused cibophobia .
https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/why-some-people-have-a-food-phobia-fear-of-sandwiches-article )
However, the reaction to it reveals something significant about our (or rather the USA's) politics which we would do well to take notice of given that they are still such a close ally of ours.
Whatever you or I think about people's reactions, we live in a democracy and the majority generally gets what it wants, however damaging cf Brexit. In that sense we have just witnessed a valuable piece of political theatre because it has shown us a significant political view (murder is justified as a response to the inequitable healthcare system) that we might otherwise not have been aware of.
We've seen reports; this is more detailed analysis.
Russia uses civilians as ‘target practice’ for killer drones
Southern Ukrainian city of Kherson hit more than 9,500 times as Moscow attempts to drive out residents
Full article: https://archive.is/20241204061855/https://www.ft.com/content/31b630b3-2639-456c-ba50-3caea7a9b2b5
(You also get free access if you download the FT Edit app. I have no idea if that is good, but I thought I should mention.)
What it does show is how the media presents politics and politicians and what they choose to focus on. Nothing else from that interview was focussed on just some trivial stuff about what she eats for lunch or has sandwiches for breakfast and then this gets discussed.
Last week we had Gregg Wallace and various politicians including the PM feeling the need to comment on it.
IT is all just clickbait to drive traffic. Kemi talking about sandwiches for breakfast is far more likely to engage people than what her comments about policy would be.
All of this was avoidable.
You're saying he's French toast ?
I think Rachel Reeves comment is a little bit delusional too. I cannot see how her policies are going to deliver the long term growth we need and the current trend is for job openings to shrink in response to the changes to NI in the budget. The "they should just take it from their profits, my heart bleeds for the multi millionaires running these companies who can pay for it" brigade will not be so smug about it when the effects of the changes start to impact.
"Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the figure was "disappointing", but added: "We have put in place policies to deliver long-term economic growth.""
The majority frequently don't get what they want. And social media reaction often isn't significant.
But mostly, it's that the British Right are borderline crazy- both she and the Spectator thought this was a good idea.
The run up to the budget was a disaster, the budget even more so and now companies all across the country are gearing up for a new round of price rises and wage/hiring freezes. 2025 is going to be a horrible year for the private sector.
The Ukranian defenders, on the other hand, have mostly been very observant of the Geneva conventions, and even when they went into Kursk did not attack civilians.
Is Yoon out of his mind? Possibly, according to psychiatrists
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=388388
President Yoon Suk Yeol claims that his declaration of martial law is justified as a decisive act of governance. But a group of psychiatrists warn that he may be "in a state of danger in which he might require a psychiatric evaluation."
One psychiatrist said on condition of anonymity Friday that Yoon could have a "narcissist personality type," leaving him unable to endure criticisms for his wrongdoings.
"The fundamental problem is that (a narcissist) is unable to properly self-reflect and keeps finding information that justifies what they did," the doctor said, explaining that such a person tends to make more enemies and keep creating objects of hatred when they are driven into a corner...
The problem is really a media which doesn't understand or explain big issues, so instead is reduced to shouting about personalities.
ODNB does not mention sarnies ...
Edit: in the Grenville administration. But prosecuted Wilkes.
Whether someone likes a sandwich or not is clearly more important than that!
(And she was obviously just channeling what she says to her kids when they claim that a sandwich is sufficient nutrition)
Arthur Mee (Of "The Kings England" 1930s guide books, and the Childrens Newspaper) in Monty Python. I can see that the Python Oxbridge set would know him.
In my architectural set he's viewed as trying to do a Pevsner or Betjeman, but being hampered by a stereotypical Rudyard Kipling worldview.
Mee had one child, but, despite his work, declared that he had no particular affinity with children. His works for them suggest[to whom?] that his interest was in trying to encourage the raising of a generation of patriotic and moral citizens. (Wiki).
He came from Stapleford, and went from child of a railwayman to literary editor of the Daily Mail before 1900, and made good.
I like this:
As a boy he earned money from reading the reports of Parliament to a local blind man.
We put it on the backburner. Looked at a couple of others but nothing of any
They came back to us a couple of months later and offered us the room at the price we had budgeted for as they had had no takers.
I had my father's one as a child - loved it, especially the bits on prehistoric animals and steam locos. Aeroplanes a bit out of date by then though.
Well, PB rightists have of late been going on about their fantasies of orgies in the public sector, completely detached from reality, in contrast to the situation in the private sector ...
Edit: tongue in cheek ...
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/11/malibu-wildfire-evacuation-celebrity-mansions
I doubt the Spectator are too unhappy about it either if it is driving them traffic.
Had she anything interesting to say about the "big issues", it would have been reported.
An opposition leader facing four and a half years of the other party in government shouldn't be saying she had no time for lunch.
Lack of thinking, not time, is her problem.
Did Churchill and the MPs have a lighter side during WW2? They certainly looked beyond the immediate - they were talking about what future society would be in 1941 and 1942, eg the committee behind the The Beveridge Report was appointed one month after the London Blitz.
She was asked about foods she liked and disliked. She said what she clearly tells her children (“sandwiches aren’t real food” - what else do you say to an 8 year old who claims a PBJ is sufficient nutrition?).
It’s not a policy or a culture war or a tactical judgement. It’s just something she said
This year in the US was the long-predicted breakthrough of new media dominance in an election campaign, it’s very likely that by the next UK election no-one under 50 is going to be watching anything on TV at all. Kemi could do a lot worse than going around the top 20 podcasts in the next couple of years, talking for an hour or two on whatever subject comes up. She’d be a lot better at that format than Starmer.
Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks
https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036
This report describes the technical feasibility of creating mirror bacteria and the potentially serious and wide-ranging risks that they could pose to humans, other animals, plants, and the environment. It accompanies the Science Policy Forum article titled “Confronting risks of mirror life”, published in December 2024.
In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images. Mirror bacteria could not evolve from existing life, but their creation will become increasingly feasible as science advances. Interactions between organisms often depend on chirality, and so interactions between natural organisms and mirror bacteria would be profoundly different from those between natural organisms. Most importantly, immune defenses and predation typically rely on interactions between chiral molecules that could often fail to detect or kill mirror bacteria due to their reversed chirality. It therefore appears plausible, even likely, that sufficiently robust mirror bacteria could spread through the environment unchecked by natural biological controls and act as dangerous opportunistic pathogens in an unprecedentedly wide range of other multicellular organisms, including humans.
This report draws on expertise from synthetic biology, immunology, ecology, and related fields to provide the first comprehensive assessment of the risks from mirror bacteria. It consists of eight chapters and starts with a general introduction, followed by an examination of the initial creation of mirror bacteria, their further engineering, as well as biosecurity and biosafety implications. The remaining five chapters cover risks to human health, medical countermeasures, risks to other animals, risks to plants, and the potential ecological consequences of their introduction into the environment...
She tends to let her mouth run ahead of her brain in interviews, whether that leads to a weird denunciation of sarnies or suggesting maternity pay is a good example of the appalling red tape faced by companies. This sort of thing will happen again and again... and on more serious matters than lunch.
Worth noting that the historians non- academics read to this day are the great story tellers - Tom Holland, Dan Jones etc, not the post-modern critical analysts.
Still at least they are fully prepared for the damaging effects of Trump returning to power, right?
I genuinely thought she would be better at communicating than she is. Maybe is because she seems impervious to advice.
(I still don’t understand why Labour have talked economy down for months and then slapped a huge tax on business, expecting that to have any other outcome than what we see now..)
They don’t have to.
In her interview with the Spectator, Kemi Badenoch also associated herself with Daenerys Targaryen of Game of Thrones, a character who is initially lauded as a great leader, but who becomes a tyrant and is assassinated. According to Badenoch, Daenerys is “a much misunderstood character”.
https://bsky.app/profile/ianfraser.bsky.social/post/3ld4i57oi5c2e
against private healthcare this risks becoming more than a social media reaction and spilling out into real politics (arguably it is already an aspect of Trump's appeal, however egregiously misplaced). The lack of public societal or political condemnation of Mangione is important to take note of because of what it could lead to. Is that better?
But look where ours are.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1864683112057213028
Or did you mean role ?
Firstly, whilst establishing the modern NHS and welfare state and defeating Nazism are both very different challenges, neither was ever frivilous. Talking about pensions wasn't in any meaningful sense the 1940s equivalent of BLT chat.
Secondly, whilst this may have been unfair to a degree, Churchill famously failed to convince the public he'd looked enough at how to win the peace. He lost the General Election in a landslide less than two months after the triumph of VE Day.
Just avoid discussing horrible things being
done to animals.
The author of Horrible Histories intended that his readers should share his loathing for past figures. Instead, children found them good fun.
It would be a Manhattan Project size problem to create such organisms, but it's almost certainly possible. Not doing it would be a very good idea.
If the inflation figures are poor then we're in a real gordion knot.
Also don't forget Labour's jobs tax hasn't come in yet.
https://x.com/goddeketal/status/1867215329224507670
“So proud of our 6yo son for coming out as a pirate…”
An example of just how bonkers the gender stuff has got in the past few years.
The frigged and clearly unsustainable "gangbusters" of Q1 2024 when Sunak conned himself and the tory Party that it was anything but a blip.
Q3 figures almost entirely as a result of the Farage supported and encouraged riots and some adverse early Autumn weather.
November won't look great either given various named storms delaying Construction and delaying early Christmas foot fall...
Judge Labour in 2025 as the green shoots of their work in Q3 and Q4 this year starts to deliver tangible benefits.
You don't refloat a sunken and stripped out tanker in 5 minutes....you have to get it back to the surface, invest in refitting and only then can you sail the seven seas into an increasing bright future...
I'm not familiar enough with the ins and outs of politics and media in 1939-45 to know how humour and levity around politicians functioned alongside the war effort.
I have about 20 years of inherited Giles Annuals from that mid-century period (the murderous grandma with her umbrella), but I think they only go back to the late 1940s.
Perhaps I need to go and listen to some ITMA (1939-48) for Churchill references.
I'm all for Huw Wheldon's "make the good popular and the popular good". But in a competitive market, that mostly gets squeezed out by making the popular even more popular because that's where the profits are.
But surely the problem goes both ways. Yes it is possible to have organisms based on reverse geometry, but surely they would struggle to live in an orthodox world as their own enzymes and binding sites wouldn't work on us either.
Diabolical.
Not only "in the French system the poor don't pay anything and the well-off pay more" facepalm "how do you think a system paid for out of taxation compares to that?"
But introducing payment at delivery increases admin costs.
Interestingly friends in France report that as the refund system speeds up it is becoming closer and closer to the UK system.
Maybe it’s all good publicity for a LOTO when 1 in 1.5M could name the leader of his maj opposition, in 24hrs Gove has it down to only 1 in 750K.
Right now we have a confidence problem, and I'm not sure many companies or people want to invest when they're being squeezed heavily by tax in a stagnant economy, with very likely more to come.
I feel young again !