Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
It’s all ‘predicted’, though - not based on any actual statistics.
Similarly to another topical issue today, when the hunting ban was implemented under the previous Labour government, it was predicted that most hunts would fold and packs of hounds would have to be euthanised. Yet, so many years later, here they are all riding out today.
In reality, the schools VAT rise will be partly absorbed by many schools, partly paid up by many parents, and the number of pupils pulled out to go into the state system will be significantly lower than all these rabid projections.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
That is not true, and you know it is not true (just as you knew Russell was a better keeper than Stewart).
What did happen is that most people who didn't want Harris to win for reasons of their own (mostly stupid or false ones, e.g. related to 'Woke' myths) were ramping the lies and nonsense put out by Trump and batting away all the very clear evidence of his unfitness as well as downplaying (or even denying) the crimes he had committed.
Exhibits A and B - William Glenn and Leon.
The rest of us are horrified that a fat old sex offender and forger with a track record of criminality, violence and treason and a mental age of three backed by a pair of deeply sinister figures in Vance and Musk has been voted back into office ahead of a perfectly capable team of Harris and Walz who may have been dull but were not malign. And, moreover, deeply concerned with what it shows about America's politics and society.
Its always deemed to be someone else's fault with an undertone of 'the thick people were deceived'.
Its easier for people to wallow in this denial rather than accept unfortunate truths.
Those unfortunate truths include Biden being a poor president, Harris being a poor presidential candidate and Walz being a poor VP candidate.
And those unfortunate truths also include the numerous mistakes the Dems have made from Biden opening the border, to an obsession about abortion to a bigoted sneering about a man who had risen from actual deprivation.
Too many Dems chose to be in denial and too many PBers chose to be in denial.
And still are.
I doubt any of us are in denial. The unraveling train wreck is all to clear.
History will view the Biden Administration as one of the more productive Presidencies.
You are quoting the Fox News, Newsmax woke propaganda rubbish to which @ydothur has referenced.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
That is not true, and you know it is not true (just as you knew Russell was a better keeper than Stewart).
What did happen is that most people who didn't want Harris to win for reasons of their own (mostly stupid or false ones, e.g. related to 'Woke' myths) were ramping the lies and nonsense put out by Trump and batting away all the very clear evidence of his unfitness as well as downplaying (or even denying) the crimes he had committed.
Exhibits A and B - William Glenn and Leon.
The rest of us are horrified that a fat old sex offender and forger with a track record of criminality, violence and treason and a mental age of three backed by a pair of deeply sinister figures in Vance and Musk has been voted back into office ahead of a perfectly capable team of Harris and Walz who may have been dull but were not malign. And, moreover, deeply concerned with what it shows about America's politics and society.
Its always deemed to be someone else's fault with an undertone of 'the thick people were deceived'.
Its easier for people to wallow in this denial rather than accept unfortunate truths.
Those unfortunate truths include Biden being a poor president, Harris being a poor presidential candidate and Walz being a poor VP candidate.
And those unfortunate truths also include the numerous mistakes the Dems have made from Biden opening the border, to an obsession about abortion to a bigoted sneering about a man who had risen from actual deprivation.
Too many Dems chose to be in denial and too many PBers chose to be in denial.
And still are.
Immediately, I am going to stop you. Biden did not ‘open the border.’ That is one of the myths. A persuasive one apparently but not a real one. Leaving aside the fact that his border policies were actually stricter than Trump’s, it was Republicans in the House acting on Trump’s orders who stopped them from being strengthened further.
I saw no ‘bigoted sneering’ about Vance’s background but plenty against Walz’s profession and military service. Vance’s own background is also a great deal more complicated than ‘actual deprivation.’
As for poor presidential candidates, Trump made Harris look like Abraham Lincoln. As has been patiently pointed out to you. That cannot be the explanation.
Which in its own way is much more worrying. If an utter loser displaying small man syndrome and an IQ of Spielman levels like Trump can win, how much more dangerous to democracy would a plausible and brainy candidate who isn’t a threat to young women be?
One of the proudest moments of my working career was delaying a LIVE switchover by thirty minutes because I could see that there were still some errors and a prior step has to be re-run.
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
That is not true, and you know it is not true (just as you knew Russell was a better keeper than Stewart).
What did happen is that most people who didn't want Harris to win for reasons of their own (mostly stupid or false ones, e.g. related to 'Woke' myths) were ramping the lies and nonsense put out by Trump and batting away all the very clear evidence of his unfitness as well as downplaying (or even denying) the crimes he had committed.
Exhibits A and B - William Glenn and Leon.
The rest of us are horrified that a fat old sex offender and forger with a track record of criminality, violence and treason and a mental age of three backed by a pair of deeply sinister figures in Vance and Musk has been voted back into office ahead of a perfectly capable team of Harris and Walz who may have been dull but were not malign. And, moreover, deeply concerned with what it shows about America's politics and society.
Its always deemed to be someone else's fault with an undertone of 'the thick people were deceived'.
Its easier for people to wallow in this denial rather than accept unfortunate truths.
Those unfortunate truths include Biden being a poor president, Harris being a poor presidential candidate and Walz being a poor VP candidate.
And those unfortunate truths also include the numerous mistakes the Dems have made from Biden opening the border, to an obsession about abortion to a bigoted sneering about a man who had risen from actual deprivation.
Too many Dems chose to be in denial and too many PBers chose to be in denial.
And still are.
This is said by apologists for Trump - 'Harris was a poor candidate'. It's hard to tell on this side of the Atlantic how true that is - she seemed 'Meh' to me - but if the election is won or lost primarily on quality of candidate then Harris would have won by a landslide.
(Being both female and non-white may have been a factor perhaps - I suspect as in the UK it will be the Republicans who provide the first female President)
But I agree the Dems do need to get a proper understanding of why voters preferred the wholly unfit Trump over even a mediocre Harris.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
It’s all ‘predicted’, though - not based on any actual statistics.
Similarly to another topical issue today, when the hunting ban was implemented under the previous Labour government, it was predicted that most hunts would fold and packs of hounds would have to be euthanised. Yet, so many years later, here they are all riding out today.
In reality, the schools VAT rise will be partly absorbed by many schools, partly paid up by many parents, and the number of pupils pulled out to go into the state system will be significantly lower than all these rabid projections.
The annoying irony is the schools best placed to ride out the VAT increase are the ones we would actually benefit from getting rid of - like Eton and Winchester. Their parents are best placed to afford it (and I think they have said they will charge full whack) and if they can’t, they have enormous financial reserves to draw on.
That is one reason why it is a bad policy.
I doubt if many will collapse overnight - this has been expected for nearly two years - but I would think in about three to four years you will start to see a major effect in terms of schools closing as current exam cohorts and primary ages move on (which is where it’s easiest to shift schools).
How bad will it be for the state sector? Probably they can absorb it due to shrinking numbers anyway (demographic changes). But it does mean that anyone spending money raised from these new taxes is likely to face a nasty black hole just before an election.
Coupled with the fact that they’re already facing failure on teacher recruitment and an absolute train crash on the national curriculum, education is going to be a difficult sell on the doorstep for Labour at the next election - even harder than it was after Gove’s inept meddling which was at least well-intentioned.
Equally, no government has ever lost an election over failures in education alone.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
That is a good point and an underrated reason for many otherwise inexplicable Vice-Presidential picks. Dan Quayle also springs to mind. Confident Presidential candidates on the other hand, like Ronald Reagan or John F Kennedy, choose first rate VPs who will add to their administration, like George HW Bush or Lyndon Johnson.
Of course the other reason Biden chose her was tokenism and pandering to the "it's time" idiots.
One of the proudest moments of my working career was delaying a LIVE switchover by thirty minutes because I could see that there were still some errors and a prior step has to be re-run.
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
I've had quite some success with SOX
- "If you go ahead, there is a danger of a SOX violation. Up to you, of course"
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
That is a good point and an underrated reason for many otherwise inexplicable Vice-Presidential picks. Dan Quayle also springs to mind. Confident Presidential candidates on the other hand, like Ronald Reagan or John F Kennedy, choose first rate VPs who will add to their administration, like George HW Bush or Lyndon Johnson.
Of course the other reason Biden chose her was tokenism and pandering to the "it's time" idiots.
Johnson was picked to shore up Kennedy’s southern flank, and then ignored for two and a half years.
In fact, that showed poor judgement by Kennedy as if he’d put Johnson (who loved deal making and whacking Congressional heads together) in charge of getting his legislative programme through rather than freezing him out, he would have achieved a great deal more domestically.
One of the proudest moments of my working career was delaying a LIVE switchover by thirty minutes because I could see that there were still some errors and a prior step has to be re-run.
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
The converse would be Y2k. Hundreds, nay thousands of people were expecting disasters. At the hospital where I worked very senior management spent the night in sleeping bags in the boardroom waiting for a collapse which never came.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
That is not true, and you know it is not true (just as you knew Russell was a better keeper than Stewart).
What did happen is that most people who didn't want Harris to win for reasons of their own (mostly stupid or false ones, e.g. related to 'Woke' myths) were ramping the lies and nonsense put out by Trump and batting away all the very clear evidence of his unfitness as well as downplaying (or even denying) the crimes he had committed.
Exhibits A and B - William Glenn and Leon.
The rest of us are horrified that a fat old sex offender and forger with a track record of criminality, violence and treason and a mental age of three backed by a pair of deeply sinister figures in Vance and Musk has been voted back into office ahead of a perfectly capable team of Harris and Walz who may have been dull but were not malign. And, moreover, deeply concerned with what it shows about America's politics and society.
Its always deemed to be someone else's fault with an undertone of 'the thick people were deceived'.
Its easier for people to wallow in this denial rather than accept unfortunate truths.
Those unfortunate truths include Biden being a poor president, Harris being a poor presidential candidate and Walz being a poor VP candidate.
And those unfortunate truths also include the numerous mistakes the Dems have made from Biden opening the border, to an obsession about abortion to a bigoted sneering about a man who had risen from actual deprivation.
Too many Dems chose to be in denial and too many PBers chose to be in denial.
And still are.
Immediately, I am going to stop you. Biden did not ‘open the border.’ That is one of the myths. A persuasive one apparently but not a real one. Leaving aside the fact that his border policies were actually stricter than Trump’s, it was Republicans in the House acting on Trump’s orders who stopped them from being strengthened further.
I saw no ‘bigoted sneering’ about Vance’s background but plenty against Walz’s profession and military service. Vance’s own background is also a great deal more complicated than ‘actual deprivation.’
As for poor presidential candidates, Trump made Harris look like Abraham Lincoln. As has been patiently pointed out to you. That cannot be the explanation.
Which in its own way is much more worrying. If an utter loser displaying small man syndrome and an IQ of Spielman levels like Trump can win, how much more dangerous to democracy would a plausible and brainy candidate who isn’t a threat to young women be?
You're still in denial.
Hours after being sworn in as president, Joe Biden reversed several Donald Trump immigration policies by executive action, marking a stark change in tone from the previous four years of anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions.
The president had a slate of immigration actions planned for his first day in office, including the unveiling of an immigration reform bill, which provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people.
On Wednesday at the White House, Biden used executive actions to roll back Trump’s attempt to exclude undocumented people from the census, end his travel ban, roll back his policy that eliminated deportation priorities and ended an emergency declaration the former president used to divert funds to the wall on the US-Mexico border.
As someone for whom the Challenger disaster was one of his earliest news memories, aged eight at the time, the inquiry and reporting on the incident have always struck a nerve. It only took a couple of days before the playground jokes started about NASA being an acronym for Need Another Seven Astronauts, but only later when reading the material on the disaster (incuding Adam Higginbotham’s excellent book) did it dawn on me just how much it was a human failure rather than a technological one, on that cold January day.
Almost everyone involved in the project knew that it wasn’t safe to launch the Shuttle in freezing ambient temperatures, yet somehow they all convinced each other it was going to be fine, because it was more important to keep going than to be the one who called stop when it needed to be stopped. The O-rings in the boosters had almost failed before, and a disaster had been averted more by luck than by judgement. They’d delayed STS-51-L several times already, and the senior management at NASA were very keen to avoid further delays to the mission.
Making things worse on the day, was that one of the mission tasks was an outreach programme to American schoolchildren about spaceflight, called the Teacher In Space project. Astronaut Christa McAucliffe was to be the first teacher in space, having won a national competition, and would be giving lessons from orbit. For this reason millions of American kids watched the disaster unfold live, on televisions brought into classrooms and assembly halls across the country. Thousands of teachers had to explain to the children what had just happened, minutes after the event.
Reagan’s address to the Nation that evening was a masterclass in communication, something from which today’s politicians can learn a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7icmqgsow
I’m sure that, like the rest of us, he was absolutely furious when he discovered what had actually happened in the lead up to the decision to fly. Nixon had pre-recorded several addresses to be broadcast in the event of the Apollo 11 mission failing, because he said that he couldn’t have coped with having to do it live. Reagan’s words that day, incuding the extract from John Magee’s poem that’s been read at the funerals of many aviators over the decades, perfectly captured the mood of the public at the time.
There’s obviously so much that can be learned from the disaster, from the treatment of whistleblowers to the need for timely investigations into incidents, but sadly NASA needed yet another seven astronauts only a few years later, after Shuttle Columbia succumbed to yet another well-known issue that the system failed to properly address before a disaster occurred.
Right, now back to the LEGO.
An interesting book I am reading currently, by Dan Davies, titled the Unaccountability Machine, draws on the history of cybernetics to argue that large organisations can be considered a form of artificial intelligence, with the people working within largely applying preset policies to each situation as it comes along with no-one exercising real accountability or discretion. It’s a thought provoking read with lots of examples of organisations doing counter-productive things for which no-one turns out to be personally accountable, usually when a general policy meets an unanticipated circumstance.
Clearly his thesis is pertinent to a range of topical scandals including many covered in leads by our own Sig.ra Ciclolibero. Despite our thirst for holding individuals involved in such scandals to account afterwards, the reality is that you could swap out all the people and run the simulation again, and get exactly the same outcome, because it’s the system design that drives how the people within it are behaving.
Sig.ra CicloLibera?! Lovely. Sig.ra LiberaBici would be even better though!😀
One of the proudest moments of my working career was delaying a LIVE switchover by thirty minutes because I could see that there were still some errors and a prior step has to be re-run.
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
The converse would be Y2k. Hundreds, nay thousands of people were expecting disasters. At the hospital where I worked very senior management spent the night in sleeping bags in the boardroom waiting for a collapse which never came.
Because they expected a disaster, they actually spent money on replacing and updating the systems in question. Far enough ahead of the Y2K that it was possible to get the job done. Which fixed the problem (about 99.9% of it).
Bit like if NASA had not "normalised deviance" and actually fixed problems on the Shuttle.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
Yes. My cynical half always felt that she was a poison pill VP, chosen to protect Biden from being pushed aside. It nearly worked for him too.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
A(nother) great article from Cyclefree.
It is the departure from reality that is most worrying about the recent surge of populist politics. Pretending climate change isn’t real won’t stop its effects. Pretending vaccines are dangerous will kill. And so on.
Of course the reverse can be equally argued..electric cars can't be sold with high costs/lack of infrastructure..vaccines can't be promoted honestly when they don't stop transmission..🧐🥴
Stopping transmission is not needed: reducing it is enough to make most of them worthwhile.
More importantly vaccines transform severe or fatal conditions into minor, often asymptomatic infections. Reducing transmission is a bonus, not the primary purpose.
I still remember when there was annoyance by many that the Government wouldn't go with that and insisted that vaccinated people should still take care not to spread the virus, because they couldn't say whether the retardation in transmission would be sufficient.
Goalpost switch by the antivaxxer morons over the years that if immunity doesn't totally stop all transmission in all circumstances then vaccination is useless. (along with the "gene therapy" bollocks, the "magnetisation" crap, and the like)
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
That is not true, and you know it is not true (just as you knew Russell was a better keeper than Stewart).
What did happen is that most people who didn't want Harris to win for reasons of their own (mostly stupid or false ones, e.g. related to 'Woke' myths) were ramping the lies and nonsense put out by Trump and batting away all the very clear evidence of his unfitness as well as downplaying (or even denying) the crimes he had committed.
Exhibits A and B - William Glenn and Leon.
The rest of us are horrified that a fat old sex offender and forger with a track record of criminality, violence and treason and a mental age of three backed by a pair of deeply sinister figures in Vance and Musk has been voted back into office ahead of a perfectly capable team of Harris and Walz who may have been dull but were not malign. And, moreover, deeply concerned with what it shows about America's politics and society.
Its always deemed to be someone else's fault with an undertone of 'the thick people were deceived'.
Its easier for people to wallow in this denial rather than accept unfortunate truths.
Those unfortunate truths include Biden being a poor president, Harris being a poor presidential candidate and Walz being a poor VP candidate.
And those unfortunate truths also include the numerous mistakes the Dems have made from Biden opening the border, to an obsession about abortion to a bigoted sneering about a man who had risen from actual deprivation.
Too many Dems chose to be in denial and too many PBers chose to be in denial.
And still are.
This is said by apologists for Trump - 'Harris was a poor candidate'. It's hard to tell on this side of the Atlantic how true that is - she seemed 'Meh' to me - but if the election is won or lost primarily on quality of candidate then Harris would have won by a landslide.
(Being both female and non-white may have been a factor perhaps - I suspect as in the UK it will be the Republicans who provide the first female President)
But I agree the Dems do need to get a proper understanding of why voters preferred the wholly unfit Trump over even a mediocre Harris.
I'll suggest there is a general pattern across western countries.
The centre-right party promises to make the country richer. The centre-left party promises to make the country fairer.
It seems that the Dems were not perceived to be making the country fairer (or richer).
All the boasting about how 'blue states' are richer and how more educated Dem supporters are does not align well with making the country fairer or suggest empathy for those who are struggling.
One of the proudest moments of my working career was delaying a LIVE switchover by thirty minutes because I could see that there were still some errors and a prior step has to be re-run.
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
The converse would be Y2k. Hundreds, nay thousands of people were expecting disasters. At the hospital where I worked very senior management spent the night in sleeping bags in the boardroom waiting for a collapse which never came.
I've seen code modified to fix the Y2K bug. This was a problem foreseen and then avoided as a result. Which has now gone down in myth and legend as people crying wolf.
There is the opposite of credit for anticipating a problem and fixing it.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
Yes. My cynical half always felt that she was a poison pill VP, chosen to protect Biden from being pushed aside. It nearly worked for him too.
I wonder if having an early debate was part of Biden's plan which backfired.
The White House must have been scheming and plotting with the Biden clan trying to hold on and Harris also trying to drag things out so there wasn't time for a primary election.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
Yes. My cynical half always felt that she was a poison pill VP, chosen to protect Biden from being pushed aside. It nearly worked for him too.
I wonder if having an early debate was part of Biden's plan which backfired.
The White House must have been scheming and plotting with the Biden clan trying to hold on and Harris also trying to drag things out so there wasn't time for a primary election.
"Two women have died and a teenage boy and a man have been seriously injured in a suspected stabbing at a block of flats. They were found by police following an incident in Santa Cruz Avenue, Bletchley, in Milton Keynes at about 18:36 GMT on Christmas Day. The women, aged 38 and 24, died at the scene while the man, in his late 20s, and the boy were taken to hospital, where they are said to be in a stable condition. A 49-year-old man from Milton Keynes was arrested on suspicion of murder"
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
That's possible, but if so it was a rather silly strategy. The reason I say that is because under the procedure for invoking the 25th two thirds of Congress would be required to vote through a contested declaration of inability and that will happen when BJO declares for Starmer or Leon admits he's wrong about something.
They could of course just get rid of Trump. Unexplained heart attack, maybe?
Given Trump's diet, "unexplained" wouldn't enter into it.
One word on the death certificate: "Inevitable".
Since everyone dies of heart failure at some point...
Not sure that is entirely true. A very close friend of mine died because her brain just switched off. Didn't give the heart a chance to pack up.
Even under such sad circumstances isn't @ydoethur 's assertion still correct. Even without a functioning brain it requires the heart to stop pumping blood (possibly as a result of the former) before it is goodnight Vienna.
Blimey. What happened to festive fun. 🤦♀️
Couldn’t you just have a ham and cheese toastie with pumpkin latte and lighten up?
Growing up, “festive fun” always included a Bond movie…
I enjoyed the BBC2 documentary “From Roger Moore with Love”, if I’ve remembered the title correctly. It was on last night, will be on iPlayer.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
Our Russia enthusiast is eagerly anticipating January 20th. I really have no idea why.
It's risk and responsibility, isn't it? I hope I can be forgiven a modest Boxing Day rant.
An "anybody else but me" culture which tolerates risk, in the belief it won't happen this time so we can ignore it, followed by "it" happening, followed by revenge by those who chose to turn a blind eye on those who did not do so.
Then those who ignored the risk will lie about it afterwards, to cover their arses, most perniciously lying even to themselves.
That's human nature 99% of the time, I'm afraid, and we have to build cultures to counter it. When I was doing software engineering, we used concepts such as "egoless programming" to make things "our problem" not "HIS or HER problem". The techniques go back to Fagan inspections and before, which was formalised 47 years ago. But if it is not institutionalised, the cultural values are lost.
At its root the principle is exactly the same as a school-run mum in her SUV blocking visibility of the school gates for 3 minutes "because I need to drop my daughter off". Or the Notts County Highway Maintenance team I caught with their van / lorry parked on the entrance to a mini roundabout, outside a busy chip shop on Friday lunchtime, in a pinch point, across the dropped pedestrian kerb, on the pavement, blocking visibility of the pedestrian crossing from the roundabout, all because his team of three would not walk an extra 10m carrying one bag of asphalt to fill one pothole. If something happens they will lie to their employer, they will lie to the police, they will lie to the Courts, and they will lie to themselves - and their employer will back them up.
Here's my photo quota of the above. It's the official contractor, VIA. They have also blocked the dropped kerb from the side road :
The lying-to-himself excuses are always the same: "I need to", "I won't be very long", "I'll move if anyone asks *, "They can go round". Pathetic little twunt of a man.
Complaints will cause the organisation to do into self-protect-and-cover-the-arse mode.
That one got a jail sentence, but were it not a policeman or the injury to the pedestrian or cyclist less severe, in many places the police would be complicit in minimising or victim blaming, or it would be treated as a "tragic accident" - hiding behind "but are roads are safe" generalist BS.
* They are unlikely to ask, because when they did ask before they will have received self-serving lies, often a mouthful of abuse, and sometimes threats. That I am afraid is the Conservative Government legacy - create a Wild West, and you get cowboys.
Good morning all. Seeing the front page of the Telegraph has given me a Boxing Day smile. And I'm not referring to the picture of Kate.
This story?
Rocket scientist’s cast iron pan threatens to topple Le Creuset
A rocket scientist from the University of Oxford has invented a new type of cast iron pan using thermodynamics that could persuade home cooks away from their Le Creuset.
The enamelled cast iron Dutch oven with fins around the outside was inspired by heat transfer methods of jet engines and rocket design and leads to quicker cooking.
The fins around the pans are designed to improve heat distribution and improve efficiency. Heat that would otherwise be lost around the outside of a pan can be captured and used to create an “oven-like” effect.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
That's possible, but if so it was a rather silly strategy. The reason I say that is because under the procedure for invoking the 25th two thirds of Congress would be required to vote through a contested declaration of inability and that will happen when BJO declares for Starmer or Leon admits he's wrong about something.
They could of course just get rid of Trump. Unexplained heart attack, maybe?
Given Trump's diet, "unexplained" wouldn't enter into it.
One word on the death certificate: "Inevitable".
Since everyone dies of heart failure at some point...
Not sure that is entirely true. A very close friend of mine died because her brain just switched off. Didn't give the heart a chance to pack up.
Even under such sad circumstances isn't @ydoethur 's assertion still correct. Even without a functioning brain it requires the heart to stop pumping blood (possibly as a result of the former) before it is goodnight Vienna.
Blimey. What happened to festive fun. 🤦♀️
Couldn’t you just have a ham and cheese toastie with pumpkin latte and lighten up?
Growing up, “festive fun” always included a Bond movie…
On Her Majesties Secret Service on later today, the Pineapple Pizza of the Bond franchise, either loved or not.
The best theme tune of any Bond film. And I know all the lyrics.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
One of the proudest moments of my working career was delaying a LIVE switchover by thirty minutes because I could see that there were still some errors and a prior step has to be re-run.
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
The converse would be Y2k. Hundreds, nay thousands of people were expecting disasters. At the hospital where I worked very senior management spent the night in sleeping bags in the boardroom waiting for a collapse which never came.
Because they expected a disaster, they actually spent money on replacing and updating the systems in question. Far enough ahead of the Y2K that it was possible to get the job done. Which fixed the problem (about 99.9% of it).
Bit like if NASA had not "normalised deviance" and actually fixed problems on the Shuttle.
Yes, for 20 years I worked alongside someone who had broken into computing fixing y2k problems under some government training scheme or other.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
https://x.com/TopGunOptionsHQ/status/1871930461095616691 ....Check out of DCA, Head towards home. Avoid the shotgun cruiser and destroyer by 15 miles, which was what they told us to do. We are up button 17, about 300 knots in the descent towards final bearing. All of a sudden we see a missile launch visually from the Gettysburg at our 2:30-3:00
We talked about it on ICS, Like "Yooooo that shit is crazy, I can't believe they're shooting a drone down"
Missile hits it's apex, and it looked exactly like the SFARP sact lecture animations, so congrats to all the top gun people who made them, confirmed that's what it looks like
Sm-2 rocket motor was lit for the entire time. I saw the missile make a correction to lead pursuit (yes I know what that looks like), and then come back to pure, and I asked blunder "dude, you want to get out?"
He said something, I don't remember what it was, and then I was just watching this thing guide, thinking about the only option being to eject, and I just grabbed the handle and pulled.
It was the most violent 5 seconds of anything I've ever experienced...
It's risk and responsibility, isn't it? I hope I can be forgiven a modest Boxing Day rant.
An "anybody else but me" culture which tolerates risk, in the belief it won't happen this time so we can ignore it, followed by "it" happening, followed by revenge by those who chose to turn a blind eye on those who did not do so.
Then those who ignored the risk will lie about it afterwards, to cover their arses, most perniciously lying even to themselves.
That's human nature 99% of the time, I'm afraid, and we have to build cultures to counter it. When I was doing software engineering, we used concepts such as "egoless programming" to make things "our problem" not "HIS or HER problem". The techniques go back to Fagan inspections and before, which was formalised 47 years ago. But if it is not institutionalised, the cultural values are lost.
At its root the principle is exactly the same as a school-run mum in her SUV blocking visibility of the school gates for 3 minutes "because I need to drop my daughter off". Or the Notts County Highway Maintenance team I caught with their van / lorry parked on the entrance to a mini roundabout, outside a busy chip shop on Friday lunchtime, in a pinch point, across the dropped pedestrian kerb, on the pavement, blocking visibility of the pedestrian crossing from the roundabout, all because his team of three would not walk an extra 10m carrying one bag of asphalt to fill one pothole. If something happens they will lie to their employer, they will lie to the police, they will lie to the Courts, and they will lie to themselves - and their employer will back them up.
Here's my photo quota of the above. It's the official contractor, VIA. They have also blocked the dropped kerb from the side road :
The lying-to-himself excuses are always the same: "I need to", "I won't be very long", "I'll move if anyone asks *, "They can go round". Pathetic little twunt of a man.
Complaints will cause the organisation to do into self-protect-and-cover-the-arse mode.
That one got a jail sentence, but were it not a policeman or the injury to the pedestrian or cyclist less severe, in many places the police would be complicit in minimising or victim blaming, or it would be treated as a "tragic accident" - hiding behind "but are roads are safe" generalist BS.
* They are unlikely to ask, because when they did ask before they will have received self-serving lies, often a mouthful of abuse, and sometimes threats. That I am afraid is the Conservative Government legacy - create a Wild West, and you get cowboys.
There does seem to have been a decline in road use over the past couple of years. I don't know if it is malicious or just ignorance, but things like, as you say, parking at pinch points or on bends, three-point turns on main roads, close overtaking (do drivers even know how wide their vehicles are?), I could go on.
It's risk and responsibility, isn't it? I hope I can be forgiven a modest Boxing Day rant.
An "anybody else but me" culture which tolerates risk, in the belief it won't happen this time so we can ignore it, followed by "it" happening, followed by revenge by those who chose to turn a blind eye on those who did not do so.
Then those who ignored the risk will lie about it afterwards, to cover their arses, most perniciously lying even to themselves.
That's human nature 99% of the time, I'm afraid, and we have to build cultures to counter it. When I was doing software engineering, we used concepts such as "egoless programming" to make things "our problem" not "HIS or HER problem". The techniques go back to Fagan inspections and before, which was formalised 47 years ago. But if it is not institutionalised, the cultural values are lost.
At its root the principle is exactly the same as a school-run mum in her SUV blocking visibility of the school gates for 3 minutes "because I need to drop my daughter off". Or the Notts County Highway Maintenance team I caught with their van / lorry parked on the entrance to a mini roundabout, outside a busy chip shop on Friday lunchtime, in a pinch point, across the dropped pedestrian kerb, on the pavement, blocking visibility of the pedestrian crossing from the roundabout, all because his team of three would not walk an extra 10m carrying one bag of asphalt to fill one pothole. If something happens they will lie to their employer, they will lie to the police, they will lie to the Courts, and they will lie to themselves - and their employer will back them up.
Here's my photo quota of the above. It's the official contractor, VIA. They have also blocked the dropped kerb from the side road :
The lying-to-himself excuses are always the same: "I need to", "I won't be very long", "I'll move if anyone asks *, "They can go round". Pathetic little twunt of a man.
Complaints will cause the organisation to do into self-protect-and-cover-the-arse mode.
That one got a jail sentence, but were it not a policeman or the injury to the pedestrian or cyclist less severe, in many places the police would be complicit in minimising or victim blaming, or it would be treated as a "tragic accident" - hiding behind "but are roads are safe" generalist BS.
* They are unlikely to ask, because when they did ask before they will have received self-serving lies, often a mouthful of abuse, and sometimes threats. That I am afraid is the Conservative Government legacy - create a Wild West, and you get cowboys.
A paradox here is that the harsher you treat offenders, the keener they are to cover it up. If you treat single offenders mildly, they're more likely to accept the "our problem" approach. But each scandal increases demand for harsher consequences, which increases the likelihood of cover-ups.
To take an example with which most of us are familiar, I've sometimes driven carelessly - over the speed limit, or not checking properly for people popping out unexpectedly or slowing down unexpectedly. I don't believe that many drivers have never done any of that. But if vigilance was greater (e.g. hidden speed cameras, why not?) and initial penalties milder, we'd all adjust more sensibly.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
That is not true, and you know it is not true (just as you knew Russell was a better keeper than Stewart).
What did happen is that most people who didn't want Harris to win for reasons of their own (mostly stupid or false ones, e.g. related to 'Woke' myths) were ramping the lies and nonsense put out by Trump and batting away all the very clear evidence of his unfitness as well as downplaying (or even denying) the crimes he had committed.
Exhibits A and B - William Glenn and Leon.
The rest of us are horrified that a fat old sex offender and forger with a track record of criminality, violence and treason and a mental age of three backed by a pair of deeply sinister figures in Vance and Musk has been voted back into office ahead of a perfectly capable team of Harris and Walz who may have been dull but were not malign. And, moreover, deeply concerned with what it shows about America's politics and society.
Its always deemed to be someone else's fault with an undertone of 'the thick people were deceived'.
Its easier for people to wallow in this denial rather than accept unfortunate truths.
Those unfortunate truths include Biden being a poor president, Harris being a poor presidential candidate and Walz being a poor VP candidate.
And those unfortunate truths also include the numerous mistakes the Dems have made from Biden opening the border, to an obsession about abortion to a bigoted sneering about a man who had risen from actual deprivation.
Too many Dems chose to be in denial and too many PBers chose to be in denial.
And still are.
Immediately, I am going to stop you. Biden did not ‘open the border.’ That is one of the myths. A persuasive one apparently but not a real one. Leaving aside the fact that his border policies were actually stricter than Trump’s, it was Republicans in the House acting on Trump’s orders who stopped them from being strengthened further.
I saw no ‘bigoted sneering’ about Vance’s background but plenty against Walz’s profession and military service. Vance’s own background is also a great deal more complicated than ‘actual deprivation.’
As for poor presidential candidates, Trump made Harris look like Abraham Lincoln. As has been patiently pointed out to you. That cannot be the explanation.
Which in its own way is much more worrying. If an utter loser displaying small man syndrome and an IQ of Spielman levels like Trump can win, how much more dangerous to democracy would a plausible and brainy candidate who isn’t a threat to young women be?
You're still in denial.
Hours after being sworn in as president, Joe Biden reversed several Donald Trump immigration policies by executive action, marking a stark change in tone from the previous four years of anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions.
The president had a slate of immigration actions planned for his first day in office, including the unveiling of an immigration reform bill, which provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people.
On Wednesday at the White House, Biden used executive actions to roll back Trump’s attempt to exclude undocumented people from the census, end his travel ban, roll back his policy that eliminated deportation priorities and ended an emergency declaration the former president used to divert funds to the wall on the US-Mexico border.
Likewise you're still in denial about the sneering and insinuations about Vance or even about Vance's background.
Its denial, more denial, endless denial.
And that's why Trump is President.
Now nobody can do anything about Trump being President now but people can stop being in denial and start thinking rationally.
Now look at the actual policies he put in place. Trump’s policies had not only failed, most of them even the Supreme Court had said were illegal. Biden came up with policies that were stricter, and legal, and practicable. They would have been stricter still but for Trump, who wanted the border to be as porous as possible for his own reasons. They weren’t able to stop the flow of migrants because that’s due to external factors. But the claim Biden opened the borders is as nonsensical as claiming that Vance is normal.
As for the rest, you are just making false assertions. You haven’t even tried to prove them.
As you did when, for example, falsely claiming Jack Russell didn’t stand up to fast bowlers even when shown video evidence that you were wrong.
Have you considered that this constant claim others are in denial may simply be a form of projection?
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
Yes. My cynical half always felt that she was a poison pill VP, chosen to protect Biden from being pushed aside. It nearly worked for him too.
I wonder if having an early debate was part of Biden's plan which backfired.
The White House must have been scheming and plotting with the Biden clan trying to hold on and Harris also trying to drag things out so there wasn't time for a primary election.
You are just making stuff up.
No, I was speculating.
Which is why I wrote I wonder.
Perhaps you think there was no scheming and plotting in the Biden administration.
If so it would be pretty unique among politicians and governments.
And would contradict the basic fact that Biden was replaced as Dem candidate and against his own wishes.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
That is a good point and an underrated reason for many otherwise inexplicable Vice-Presidential picks. Dan Quayle also springs to mind. Confident Presidential candidates on the other hand, like Ronald Reagan or John F Kennedy, choose first rate VPs who will add to their administration, like George HW Bush or Lyndon Johnson.
Of course the other reason Biden chose her was tokenism and pandering to the "it's time" idiots.
Johnson was picked to shore up Kennedy’s southern flank ...
No. Kennedy didn't want to pick Johnson. He wanted to pick Symington instead, and offered it as a courtesy, being almost certain that LBJ would refuse. Then, according to Caro's definitive biography, JFK sent RFK to talk LBJ out of accepting when he did, in vain as it happened and the rest is history. But it shows Kennedy's self-confidence and competence that he made the best of a bad job.
The Southern balance point was ex-post rationalisation.
We might have had a President Symington grappling with Vietnam and campus protests instead. One of the small points on which history turned...
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
Due to the appalling grammar, Trump’s actually just said he has no idea what he is doing.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
Both 3,000 and 37,000 are an almost invisible blip among the over 10,000,000 pupils in about 25,000 state schools. This is massively exaggerated nonsense.
It is no greater than normal numbers fluctuation from year to year.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
Harris was simply second rate at national level politics. Which is why she lost the nomination to Biden, originally.
Hoping that the proven second rater would mutate into a first rate politician....
I remember when people said that America would never elect a black president - citing the joke candidacies of Jesse Jackson. They elected the first black presidential candidate actually offered to them. Because he was a good candidate.
I was referencing Adam Boulton, although I don't necessarily disagree.
If Harris was second rate (I thought after the late hospital pass from Biden she did just fine) what rate was Trump?
She did as well as could be expected, I think.
Trump is something else, again - from outside conventional politics. The previous closest example was Berlusconi. And he was a good deal more sane and sensible.
I'd say that Harris did better than expected.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
Yes. My cynical half always felt that she was a poison pill VP, chosen to protect Biden from being pushed aside. It nearly worked for him too.
I wonder if having an early debate was part of Biden's plan which backfired.
The White House must have been scheming and plotting with the Biden clan trying to hold on and Harris also trying to drag things out so there wasn't time for a primary election.
You are just making stuff up.
No, I was speculating.
Which is why I wrote I wonder.
Perhaps you think there was no scheming and plotting in the Biden administration.
If so it would be pretty unique among politicians and governments.
And would contradict the basic fact that Biden was replaced as Dem candidate and against his own wishes.
You have not qualified your speculation with any tangible fact other than "politicians scheme", which is why I stand by "you are just making stuff up".
https://x.com/TopGunOptionsHQ/status/1871930461095616691 ....Check out of DCA, Head towards home. Avoid the shotgun cruiser and destroyer by 15 miles, which was what they told us to do. We are up button 17, about 300 knots in the descent towards final bearing. All of a sudden we see a missile launch visually from the Gettysburg at our 2:30-3:00
We talked about it on ICS, Like "Yooooo that shit is crazy, I can't believe they're shooting a drone down"
Missile hits it's apex, and it looked exactly like the SFARP sact lecture animations, so congrats to all the top gun people who made them, confirmed that's what it looks like
Sm-2 rocket motor was lit for the entire time. I saw the missile make a correction to lead pursuit (yes I know what that looks like), and then come back to pure, and I asked blunder "dude, you want to get out?"
He said something, I don't remember what it was, and then I was just watching this thing guide, thinking about the only option being to eject, and I just grabbed the handle and pulled.
It was the most violent 5 seconds of anything I've ever experienced...
Worth reading the whole (on the tweet itself).
Rather reminiscent of FAA pilots being shot down by their own convoy, and with almost the same understatement (certainly in Usonian terms).
Good morning all. Seeing the front page of the Telegraph has given me a Boxing Day smile. And I'm not referring to the picture of Kate.
This story?
Rocket scientist’s cast iron pan threatens to topple Le Creuset
A rocket scientist from the University of Oxford has invented a new type of cast iron pan using thermodynamics that could persuade home cooks away from their Le Creuset.
The enamelled cast iron Dutch oven with fins around the outside was inspired by heat transfer methods of jet engines and rocket design and leads to quicker cooking.
The fins around the pans are designed to improve heat distribution and improve efficiency. Heat that would otherwise be lost around the outside of a pan can be captured and used to create an “oven-like” effect.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
A safe prediction. The ISC are the private schools trade union, they are bound to say it.
The ISC are really messing things up at the moment. They’ve backed an extremely stupid and vexatious legal challenge to VAT on school fees, which is bound to fail and has just annoyed the government.
As a result, there’s a real risk that private schools will be ordered to follow whatever nonsense emerges from the current curriculum review.
There is also a suggestion HMC schools will lose the ISI and be inspected by Ofsted. Which, given the ISI is toothless has merit as an idea, but given Ofsted is a shambles and managing a disaster of an inspection system would be bad news for leading private schools.
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
Speaking of 'nature cannot be fooled,' I assumed that Trump tweet @williamglenn regaled is with on the last thread was a parody.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
The even bigger worry is that Trump was put forward and financed by malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt bastards displaying truly shocking judgement - who intend to move him on using the 25th and install sombody who is so malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, and displaying truly shocking judgement that he would never have got elected in his own right.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
The election's over.
You don't have to keep up the pretence that Vance is the worst ever VP candidate.
Or that Tim Walz wasn't anything other than a weak VP candidate chosen by a weak presidential candidate.
And do you think Trump will make a better President? Do you think threatening to invade Panama and Greenland is a good idea? Have you read the report into Matt Gaetz, who used prostitutes illegally (including one who was under the age of consent), took all sorts of drugs, cheated on campaign finances and lied to passport officials? Do you think Trump was right to nominate him for Attorney General? Is Trump right to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, despite the rape case? Do you think Hegseth and Tusli Gabbard are good nominations given their anti-Ukraine comments? Is Mehmet Oz a good nomination given the many health scams he’s been involved with?
That Trump is so evidently unfit to be president merely highlights how weak the Harris-Walz combination were.
Too many Pbers indulged in imbecilic levels of cheerleading and wishful thinking about Harris-Walz.
The peak being when people were defending 'Coach Walz' insinuating that Vance was a furniture-fucker.
With anyone not joining in with the groupthink being accused of being a Trump supporter.
Merry Christmas to you too.
I suspect a number of us overdosed on hopium in the light of the Republican being absolutely unfit for office. In fact the candidate should have spent the election serving time in Terra Haute for sedition and treason.
I don't recall many posters making too much of Vance and the sofa, although it was absurdly funny. He could be condemned on more substantive evidence.
Adam Boulton called it right. Harris overcoming being both a woman and a woman of colour was perhaps too much to ask.
The EC is a flawed system. If you want to compare the relative performances of Clinton and Harris you are probably better off reviewing the percentage difference between each of them and Trump in 2016:and 2024.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Good morning all. Seeing the front page of the Telegraph has given me a Boxing Day smile. And I'm not referring to the picture of Kate.
This story?
Rocket scientist’s cast iron pan threatens to topple Le Creuset
A rocket scientist from the University of Oxford has invented a new type of cast iron pan using thermodynamics that could persuade home cooks away from their Le Creuset.
The enamelled cast iron Dutch oven with fins around the outside was inspired by heat transfer methods of jet engines and rocket design and leads to quicker cooking.
The fins around the pans are designed to improve heat distribution and improve efficiency. Heat that would otherwise be lost around the outside of a pan can be captured and used to create an “oven-like” effect.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Yes ive just mentioned that now. Ive seen stuff like this.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications.
This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign labor and signaling anti-racism.
The pro-immigration tech bro side of the immigration debate is doing a better job turning people against immigration than the actual restrictionists
"You're a dying race of dumb inbred losers and all your achievements are because of foreigners anyway" isn't really the best pitch 1:28 PM · Dec 26, 2024 · 37K Views
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
In other news, Taiwan has for some time been building its own alternative-to-Starlink satellite internet service, since they think Musk, in some way the real POTUS (maybe), is vulnerable to pressure from China and Putin.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
The increased Danish funding for Greenland defence was decided before Trump’s comments. The timing is just a coincidence.
As we said at the time, there are major policy differences between the Vance (protect American jobs; bar imports and immigrants) and Musk wings of the vice-presidency (sack Americans and keep the doors open) while Elon Musk's other problem is Trump might resent him hogging the limelight.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Sorry but you don't do yourself any favours by inventing utter rubbish.
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Yes ive just mentioned that now. Ive seen stuff like this.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications.
This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign labor and signaling anti-racism.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Yes ive just mentioned that now. Ive seen stuff like this.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications.
This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign labor and signaling anti-racism.
It's risk and responsibility, isn't it? I hope I can be forgiven a modest Boxing Day rant.
An "anybody else but me" culture which tolerates risk, in the belief it won't happen this time so we can ignore it, followed by "it" happening, followed by revenge by those who chose to turn a blind eye on those who did not do so.
Then those who ignored the risk will lie about it afterwards, to cover their arses, most perniciously lying even to themselves.
That's human nature 99% of the time, I'm afraid, and we have to build cultures to counter it. When I was doing software engineering, we used concepts such as "egoless programming" to make things "our problem" not "HIS or HER problem". The techniques go back to Fagan inspections and before, which was formalised 47 years ago. But if it is not institutionalised, the cultural values are lost.
At its root the principle is exactly the same as a school-run mum in her SUV blocking visibility of the school gates for 3 minutes "because I need to drop my daughter off". Or the Notts County Highway Maintenance team I caught with their van / lorry parked on the entrance to a mini roundabout, outside a busy chip shop on Friday lunchtime, in a pinch point, across the dropped pedestrian kerb, on the pavement, blocking visibility of the pedestrian crossing from the roundabout, all because his team of three would not walk an extra 10m carrying one bag of asphalt to fill one pothole. If something happens they will lie to their employer, they will lie to the police, they will lie to the Courts, and they will lie to themselves - and their employer will back them up.
Here's my photo quota of the above. It's the official contractor, VIA. They have also blocked the dropped kerb from the side road :
The lying-to-himself excuses are always the same: "I need to", "I won't be very long", "I'll move if anyone asks *, "They can go round". Pathetic little twunt of a man.
Complaints will cause the organisation to do into self-protect-and-cover-the-arse mode.
That one got a jail sentence, but were it not a policeman or the injury to the pedestrian or cyclist less severe, in many places the police would be complicit in minimising or victim blaming, or it would be treated as a "tragic accident" - hiding behind "but are roads are safe" generalist BS.
* They are unlikely to ask, because when they did ask before they will have received self-serving lies, often a mouthful of abuse, and sometimes threats. That I am afraid is the Conservative Government legacy - create a Wild West, and you get cowboys.
There does seem to have been a decline in road use over the past couple of years. I don't know if it is malicious or just ignorance, but things like, as you say, parking at pinch points or on bends, three-point turns on main roads, close overtaking (do drivers even know how wide their vehicles are?), I could go on.
You and @NickPalmer make good points, which I'll aim to pick up later after seeing what others say. It's about cultural expectations as well as individual behavioural decisions (with deliberate or assumed). And these things can be changed, even if it takes time.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
This is what I've been wondering - I have raised similar issues about Musk's support for Reform and their stance on petrol and diesel cars. Musk has been very clever at getting on the Trump train, but he needs to avoid overplaying his hand. Same with Reform.
As we said at the time, there are major policy differences between the Vance (protect American jobs; bar imports and immigrants) and Musk wings of the vice-presidency (sack Americans and keep the doors open) while Elon Musk's other problem is Trump might resent him hogging the limelight.
Indeed. I give the Musk Trump bromance a couple of months tops.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
As we said at the time, there are major policy differences between the Vance (protect American jobs; bar imports and immigrants) and Musk wings of the vice-presidency (sack Americans and keep the doors open) while Elon Musk's other problem is Trump might resent him hogging the limelight.
Indeed. I give the Musk Trump bromance a couple of months tops.
Maybe Musk will end up as the American Khodorkovsky and have his businesses expropriated while he gets sent to Rikers Island.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Yes ive just mentioned that now. Ive seen stuff like this.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications.
This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign labor and signaling anti-racism.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
That’s a false narrative. He increased immigration massively in absolute terms. It wasn’t some Brexit-induced necessity but an ideological position, and we didn’t send anybody home.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
This is what I've been wondering - I have raised similar issues about Musk's support for Reform and their stance on petrol and diesel cars. Musk has been very clever at getting on the Trump train, but he needs to avoid overplaying his hand. Same with Reform.
A lot of these tech billionaires have a very "narrow" intelligence. Good at their speciality but often without a more holistic view of the world. Unfortunately their money gives them massive power.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Yes ive just mentioned that now. Ive seen stuff like this.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications.
This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign labor and signaling anti-racism.
I think he is talking about the US workforce rather than the UK political party that squandered the 14 year Tory golden legacy.
Both cheap foreign labour and cheap foreign Labour should be spelled with a 'u'. But the guy was probably American, so one must allow it in the spirit of the goodwill.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
That’s a false narrative. He increased immigration massively in absolute terms. It wasn’t some Brexit-induced necessity but an ideological position, and we didn’t send anybody home.
That is even less true than my "false narrative", and someone gave you a like for that post! Wow!
The majority left because we made life unpleasant for them post Brexit. Brexit wasn't the only reason but it was a contributory factor (as you well know as a Eurofederalist). There are now better paid jobs back on the mainland. I seldom see Eastern Europeans working in England and Wales in the municipal waste collection/ sorting sector although there are still quite a few I meet in a work capacity over in Northern Ireland.
And correct me if I am wrong that Johnson offered any vacancy shortfalls to "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent"*.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
In other news, Taiwan has for some time been building its own alternative-to-Starlink satellite internet service, since they think Musk, in some way the real POTUS (maybe), is vulnerable to pressure from China and Putin.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
In other news, Taiwan has for some time been building its own alternative-to-Starlink satellite internet service, since they think Musk, in some way the real POTUS (maybe), is vulnerable to pressure from China and Putin.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
In other news, Taiwan has for some time been building its own alternative-to-Starlink satellite internet service, since they think Musk, in some way the real POTUS (maybe), is vulnerable to pressure from China and Putin.
Smart move. I don't think Taiwan can rely on Either Musk or Trump. Indeed can anyone?
Taiwan is actually looking at building a constellation of a few hundred sats. Which will provide some capability, but nothing like Starlink/Starshield.
Quite a few countries are doing the same. Bit like having aircraft carriers…
For comedy value - many of them are launching via SpaceX. Which has the only availability in the non-Russian, non-Chinese launch market, let along the price.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Sorry but you don't do yourself any favours by inventing utter rubbish.
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
That’s a false narrative. He increased immigration massively in absolute terms. It wasn’t some Brexit-induced necessity but an ideological position, and we didn’t send anybody home.
That is even less true than my "false narrative", and someone gave you a like for that post! Wow!
The majority left because we made life unpleasant for them post Brexit. Brexit wasn't the only reason but it was a contributory factor (as you well know as a Eurofederalist). There are now better paid jobs back on the mainland. I seldom see Eastern Europeans working in England and Wales in the municipal waste collection/ sorting sector although there are still quite a few I meet in a work capacity over in Northern Ireland.
And correct me if I am wrong that Johnson offered any vacancy shortfalls to "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent"*.
*My precis.
Still quite a few in nursing, caring etc. Although quite a few from East and SE Asia, too.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
That’s a false narrative. He increased immigration massively in absolute terms. It wasn’t some Brexit-induced necessity but an ideological position, and we didn’t send anybody home.
That is even less true than my "false narrative", and someone gave you a like for that post! Wow!
The majority left because we made life unpleasant for them post Brexit. Brexit wasn't the only reason but it was a contributory factor (as you well know as a Eurofederalist). There are now better paid jobs back on the mainland. I seldom see Eastern Europeans working in England and Wales in the municipal waste collection/ sorting sector although there are still quite a few I meet in a work capacity over in Northern Ireland.
And correct me if I am wrong that Johnson offered any vacancy shortfalls to "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent"*.
*My precis.
I should caveat that post. You ( @williamglenn ) are right that, to his credit Johnson increased immigration in absolute terms to cover short term vacancy shortfalls. However he replaced returning Europeans with our friends from the Commonwealth which is contrary to your assertion.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Sorry but you don't do yourself any favours by inventing utter rubbish.
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
It's a repeat of comments he made previously, in his first term. So this has been known for some time.
Trump is a bullshitter, we know that. The problem for everryone else is that he's a random bullshitter, so it all has to be covered.
We'll see what happens - in the long-term one of the big ones is the status of the North-West passage.
Well quite, but you intimated that Denmark had taken steps after this statement to spend this money to defend Greenland from US invasion, which was patent nonsense. I'm not defending Trump's spouting off about it - seems to be his standard mo, but your statement was still nonsense.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
It’s all ‘predicted’, though - not based on any actual statistics.
Similarly to another topical issue today, when the hunting ban was implemented under the previous Labour government, it was predicted that most hunts would fold and packs of hounds would have to be euthanised. Yet, so many years later, here they are all riding out today.
In reality, the schools VAT rise will be partly absorbed by many schools, partly paid up by many parents, and the number of pupils pulled out to go into the state system will be significantly lower than all these rabid projections.
It seems slightly exaggerated.
Even in Surrey, where there have been press claims recently, only 20% of pupils are in Independent Schools. If 6% move, that's a movement of around .06 * .2 or 1.2% of all pupils in Surrey moving - IF the claim is true.
On an average per State School Class (using class size 30), that's 0.36 pupils per class.
Obviously there's statistical variation around a mean and so on, but it's not earth-shattering.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
In other news, Taiwan has for some time been building its own alternative-to-Starlink satellite internet service, since they think Musk, in some way the real POTUS (maybe), is vulnerable to pressure from China and Putin.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Sorry but you don't do yourself any favours by inventing utter rubbish.
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
That’s a false narrative. He increased immigration massively in absolute terms. It wasn’t some Brexit-induced necessity but an ideological position, and we didn’t send anybody home.
That is even less true than my "false narrative", and someone gave you a like for that post! Wow!
The majority left because we made life unpleasant for them post Brexit. Brexit wasn't the only reason but it was a contributory factor (as you well know as a Eurofederalist). There are now better paid jobs back on the mainland. I seldom see Eastern Europeans working in England and Wales in the municipal waste collection/ sorting sector although there are still quite a few I meet in a work capacity over in Northern Ireland.
And correct me if I am wrong that Johnson offered any vacancy shortfalls to "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent"*.
*My precis.
I should caveat that post. You (@williamglenn) are right that, to his credit Johnson increased immigration in absolute terms to cover short term vacancy shortfalls. However he replaced returning Europeans with our friends from the Commonwealth which is contrary to your assertion.
I don't think it's correct to say that he did it in response to shortfalls caused by Brexit. He did it because he believed immigration was good for the economy, and believed that people would accept it because it was being 'controlled' by the government instead of the free for all of free movement. You could say that he made the mistake of believing his own propaganda.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
Are you suggesting the God that is Boris Johnson, the deity who got all the big calls right, made an error when he invited workers from Asia to cover the labour shortfall after we sent all those Europeans who we apparently don't like home after the Brexit vote? Breathe!
That’s a false narrative. He increased immigration massively in absolute terms. It wasn’t some Brexit-induced necessity but an ideological position, and we didn’t send anybody home.
That is even less true than my "false narrative", and someone gave you a like for that post! Wow!
The majority left because we made life unpleasant for them post Brexit. Brexit wasn't the only reason but it was a contributory factor (as you well know as a Eurofederalist). There are now better paid jobs back on the mainland. I seldom see Eastern Europeans working in England and Wales in the municipal waste collection/ sorting sector although there are still quite a few I meet in a work capacity over in Northern Ireland.
And correct me if I am wrong that Johnson offered any vacancy shortfalls to "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent"*.
*My precis.
Still quite a few in nursing, caring etc. Although quite a few from East and SE Asia, too.
I knew a few Spanish and Portuguese nurses at the Princess of Wales in Bridgend, they went back after Brexit was confirmed but then that also coincided with the COVID epidemic, so COVID could have been another contributing factor.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Sorry but you don't do yourself any favours by inventing utter rubbish.
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
It's a repeat of comments he made previously, in his first term. So this has been known for some time.
Trump is a bullshitter, we know that. The problem for everryone else is that he's a random bullshitter, so it all has to be covered.
We'll see what happens - in the long-term one of the big ones is the status of the North-West passage.
I wonder if people are aware of what happened in WW2? The USA took over Greenland, de facto (IANAE in the legalities and details so can't be specific on exactly what happened). And the US and UK occupied Iceland.
I can tell you a little about Iceland.
It was an invasion - ie troops appeared without warning, without diplomacy etc on the side, with a few hundred mainly inexperienced troops, to occupy to forestall any risk that the Germans would, Denmark having been invaded one month earlier, and for bases. It followed up the UK failing to persuade Iceland to come in on our side previously. There was minimal argy-bargy.
Reading the Wiki account, the bit I like is that they posted the announcement of occupation on the door of the Post Office - very Luther.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
In other news, Taiwan has for some time been building its own alternative-to-Starlink satellite internet service, since they think Musk, in some way the real POTUS (maybe), is vulnerable to pressure from China and Putin.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
Smaller private schools will be hit in particular reducing parental choice.
Yet do we expect any better from this awful socialist government having already hit pensioners, business owners and farmers?
"already hit"
Unless you have a Tardis, that's not true of farmers or business owners as far as IHT is concerned. Not only do they have to die but they have to do it after 6 April 2026.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
The significant political development in the US over Christmas has been a major split emerging in the MAGA coalition between the Musk faction who want to ramp up H1B immigration and the America First faction who want serious immigration restrictions.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
This is what I've been wondering - I have raised similar issues about Musk's support for Reform and their stance on petrol and diesel cars. Musk has been very clever at getting on the Trump train, but he needs to avoid overplaying his hand. Same with Reform.
The anti immigration wing will win out as they represent the bigger share of the GOP electorate, even with Musk's money on the other.
Rishi to be fair to him cut net non EU immigration after it surged under Boris but the seeds had already been sown for the harder on immigration vote to shift to Farage and Reform
Personally I'm looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet when Trump gets in, which is more or less what happened last time. Someone was criticising him for not 'liking war'* enough earlier this month, which (whilst the criticism is nuts) is I think true. I think he'll be quite strong on foreign policy - I don’t actually expect a peacenik/Putin-lovin' policy, but I do think there will be a less interventionist stance. Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant that is skeptical about blowing up brown people in the cause of freedom. That naturally won't stop the bleating about his wickedness from the usual suspects. Biden and Obama's friendly double tap drone attacks will no doubt be contrasted with Trump's viscious lack of regime destabilisation.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
That’s a laughable comment. You expect a less interventionist stance, do you? How does that fit with Trump threatening to invade Panama and Greenland, and going on about taking over Canada too? He’s talking about starting wars in places that weren’t even on anyone’s lists of places where the US might go to war.
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
How's it going so far?
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Sorry but you don't do yourself any favours by inventing utter rubbish.
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
It's a repeat of comments he made previously, in his first term. So this has been known for some time.
Trump is a bullshitter, we know that. The problem for everryone else is that he's a random bullshitter, so it all has to be covered.
We'll see what happens - in the long-term one of the big ones is the status of the North-West passage.
Well quite, but you intimated that Denmark had taken steps after this statement to spend this money to defend Greenland from US invasion, which was patent nonsense. I'm not defending Trump's spouting off about it - seems to be his standard mo, but your statement was still nonsense.
But I certainly think that Denmark are being more assertive to make the point to Trump. He would quite easily treat such things as being frivolous.
The USA have intervened by force many times before, including in both Grenada and Panama recently, and magicked up wars under false pretences at will; I wouldn't put it past them for a minute.
The two patrol vessels - roughly the equivalent of our OPVs such as the one in the Pacific, and upgrading an air base for the use of F-35s, are fairly serious moves.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the costs in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
Smaller private schools will be hit in particular reducing parental choice.
Yet do we expect any better from this awful socialist government having already hit pensioners, business owners and farmers?
Isn't the article suggesting the expected impact is pretty low?
It also mentions that the schools at most risk are the ones where there are higher levels of competition. Which I read as there being other private schools that are more popular in the same area. Sounds more like capitalism than socialism to me.
Whitehall ‘braced for private schools collapse’ due to fee rises
The Independent Schools Council says the threat of closures after the imposition of VAT on fees is ‘very rea
Contingency plans are being drawn up in Whitehall for an influx in demand for state school places amid fears private schools will go bankrupt and close because of fee increases.
Officials are braced for the prospect that some independent schools may collapse when VAT on school fees comes into force in the new year.
Schools that are smaller, with lower fees and in areas with higher levels of competition are most at risk, government sources told The Times.
They are being monitored to see how they fare under the change, combined with publicly available information about their finances from Companies House.
Campaigners against the change warn some parents will be unable to pay a fee rise of 20 per cent, given some private schools are preparing to pass on the itIt in full.
The VAT imposition will come into effect on January 1, with Treasury estimates suggesting it will lead to 37,000 fewer private school pupils in the long term — equal to about 6 per cent of children at private schools.
However, there is expected to be a smaller, more immediate impact. About 3,000 children will be taken out of private schools and will need a state place before the end of the academic year, the government believes.
Smaller private schools will be hit in particular reducing parental choice.
Yet do we expect any better from this awful socialist government having already hit pensioners, business owners and farmers?
This government doesn't strike me as particularly 'socialist'.
It is the most socialist class war ridden government of my lifetime, even more than Brown's. Farmers, pensioners, small business owners, private school parents, the remaining hereditary peers, even foxhunters on scent trails are within the sights of Starmer and Reeves
Comments
Similarly to another topical issue today, when the hunting ban was implemented under the previous Labour government, it was predicted that most hunts would fold and packs of hounds would have to be euthanised. Yet, so many years later, here they are all riding out today.
In reality, the schools VAT rise will be partly absorbed by many schools, partly paid up by many parents, and the number of pupils pulled out to go into the state system will be significantly lower than all these rabid projections.
History will view the Biden Administration as one of the more productive Presidencies.
You are quoting the Fox News, Newsmax woke propaganda rubbish to which @ydothur has referenced.
I saw no ‘bigoted sneering’ about Vance’s background but plenty against Walz’s profession and military service. Vance’s own background is also a great deal more complicated than ‘actual deprivation.’
As for poor presidential candidates, Trump made Harris look like Abraham Lincoln. As has been patiently pointed out to you. That cannot be the explanation.
Which in its own way is much more worrying. If an utter loser displaying small man syndrome and an IQ of Spielman levels like Trump can win, how much more dangerous to democracy would a plausible and brainy candidate who isn’t a threat to young women be?
To add to all the professional pressure to call it done, and not to hold things up, I also had a plane to catch home.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened on the Tuesday after the weekend that the TSB computer failure, when a weekend computer migration went badly wrong. I had seen the consequences of an IT deployment gone wrong, and I was not about to be involved in a repeat.
The problem being she was expected to be unelectable.
Which was likely one reason Biden chose her to be VP.
(Being both female and non-white may have been a factor perhaps - I suspect as in the UK it will be the Republicans who provide the first female President)
But I agree the Dems do need to get a proper understanding of why voters preferred the wholly unfit Trump over even a mediocre Harris.
That is one reason why it is a bad policy.
I doubt if many will collapse overnight - this has been expected for nearly two years - but I would think in about three to four years you will start to see a major effect in terms of schools closing as current exam cohorts and primary ages move on (which is where it’s easiest to shift schools).
How bad will it be for the state sector? Probably they can absorb it due to shrinking numbers anyway (demographic changes). But it does mean that anyone spending money raised from these new taxes is likely to face a nasty black hole just before an election.
Coupled with the fact that they’re already facing failure on teacher recruitment and an absolute train crash on the national curriculum, education is going to be a difficult sell on the doorstep for Labour at the next election - even harder than it was after Gove’s inept meddling which was at least well-intentioned.
Equally, no government has ever lost an election over failures in education alone.
Of course the other reason Biden chose her was tokenism and pandering to the "it's time" idiots.
- "If you go ahead, there is a danger of a SOX violation. Up to you, of course"
In fact, that showed poor judgement by Kennedy as if he’d put Johnson (who loved deal making and whacking Congressional heads together) in charge of getting his legislative programme through rather than freezing him out, he would have achieved a great deal more domestically.
Hours after being sworn in as president, Joe Biden reversed several Donald Trump immigration policies by executive action, marking a stark change in tone from the previous four years of anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions.
The president had a slate of immigration actions planned for his first day in office, including the unveiling of an immigration reform bill, which provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people.
On Wednesday at the White House, Biden used executive actions to roll back Trump’s attempt to exclude undocumented people from the census, end his travel ban, roll back his policy that eliminated deportation priorities and ended an emergency declaration the former president used to divert funds to the wall on the US-Mexico border.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/20/biden-immigration-reform-trump-executive-order
Likewise you're still in denial about the sneering and insinuations about Vance or even about Vance's background.
Its denial, more denial, endless denial.
And that's why Trump is President.
Now nobody can do anything about Trump being President now but people can stop being in denial and start thinking rationally.
Bit like if NASA had not "normalised deviance" and actually fixed problems on the Shuttle.
Goalpost switch by the antivaxxer morons over the years that if immunity doesn't totally stop all transmission in all circumstances then vaccination is useless.
(along with the "gene therapy" bollocks, the "magnetisation" crap, and the like)
The centre-right party promises to make the country richer.
The centre-left party promises to make the country fairer.
It seems that the Dems were not perceived to be making the country fairer (or richer).
All the boasting about how 'blue states' are richer and how more educated Dem supporters are does not align well with making the country fairer or suggest empathy for those who are struggling.
There is the opposite of credit for anticipating a problem and fixing it.
The White House must have been scheming and plotting with the Biden clan trying to hold on and Harris also trying to drag things out so there wasn't time for a primary election.
*from the comfort of the Oval office naturally
In the King George, BANBRIDGE is one of the best jumpers I’ve seen for a while. IF IL EST FRANCAIS is back to last year’s level, he’ll be hard to beat so my play would be BANBRIDGE each way.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5070906#Comment_5070906
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05pv0yy5y3o
It's risk and responsibility, isn't it? I hope I can be forgiven a modest Boxing Day rant.
An "anybody else but me" culture which tolerates risk, in the belief it won't happen this time so we can ignore it, followed by "it" happening, followed by revenge by those who chose to turn a blind eye on those who did not do so.
Then those who ignored the risk will lie about it afterwards, to cover their arses, most perniciously lying even to themselves.
That's human nature 99% of the time, I'm afraid, and we have to build cultures to counter it. When I was doing software engineering, we used concepts such as "egoless programming" to make things "our problem" not "HIS or HER problem". The techniques go back to Fagan inspections and before, which was formalised 47 years ago. But if it is not institutionalised, the cultural values are lost.
At its root the principle is exactly the same as a school-run mum in her SUV blocking visibility of the school gates for 3 minutes "because I need to drop my daughter off". Or the Notts County Highway Maintenance team I caught with their van / lorry parked on the entrance to a mini roundabout, outside a busy chip shop on Friday lunchtime, in a pinch point, across the dropped pedestrian kerb, on the pavement, blocking visibility of the pedestrian crossing from the roundabout, all because his team of three would not walk an extra 10m carrying one bag of asphalt to fill one pothole. If something happens they will lie to their employer, they will lie to the police, they will lie to the Courts, and they will lie to themselves - and their employer will back them up.
Here's my photo quota of the above. It's the official contractor, VIA. They have also blocked the dropped kerb from the side road :
The lying-to-himself excuses are always the same: "I need to", "I won't be very long", "I'll move if anyone asks *, "They can go round". Pathetic little twunt of a man.
Complaints will cause the organisation to do into self-protect-and-cover-the-arse mode.
To cover the difference between those two extremes, here's a recent one where a mum ran down an Irish Policeman cycling home, and when she got home his amputated foot was stuck in her car. Everyday tales of ordinary folk.
https://www.limerickpost.ie/2022/07/01/limerick-garda-inspectors-foot-severed-in-hit-and-run/
That one got a jail sentence, but were it not a policeman or the injury to the pedestrian or cyclist less severe, in many places the police would be complicit in minimising or victim blaming, or it would be treated as a "tragic accident" - hiding behind "but are roads are safe" generalist BS.
* They are unlikely to ask, because when they did ask before they will have received self-serving lies, often a mouthful of abuse, and sometimes threats. That I am afraid is the Conservative Government legacy - create a Wild West, and you get cowboys.
Although it has taken a rocket scientist to apply it to a cooking pot.
Kamala 226 Electoral votes
“Statements from Trump and Vance seem to have a grown-up slant”? Here’s Trump’s Xmas message:
“Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing”
Is that a “grown-up slant?
https://x.com/TopGunOptionsHQ/status/1871930461095616691
....Check out of DCA, Head towards home. Avoid the shotgun cruiser and destroyer by 15 miles, which was what they told us to do. We are up button 17, about 300 knots in the descent towards final bearing. All of a sudden we see a missile launch visually from the Gettysburg at our 2:30-3:00
We talked about it on ICS, Like "Yooooo that shit is crazy, I can't believe they're shooting a drone down"
Missile hits it's apex, and it looked exactly like the SFARP sact lecture animations, so congrats to all the top gun people who made them, confirmed that's what it looks like
Sm-2 rocket motor was lit for the entire time. I saw the missile make a correction to lead pursuit (yes I know what that looks like), and then come back to pure, and I asked blunder "dude, you want to get out?"
He said something, I don't remember what it was, and then I was just watching this thing guide, thinking about the only option being to eject, and I just grabbed the handle and pulled.
It was the most violent 5 seconds of anything I've ever experienced...
To take an example with which most of us are familiar, I've sometimes driven carelessly - over the speed limit, or not checking properly for people popping out unexpectedly or slowing down unexpectedly. I don't believe that many drivers have never done any of that. But if vigilance was greater (e.g. hidden speed cameras, why not?) and initial penalties milder, we'd all adjust more sensibly.
As for the rest, you are just making false assertions. You haven’t even tried to prove them.
As you did when, for example, falsely claiming Jack Russell didn’t stand up to fast bowlers even when shown video evidence that you were wrong.
Have you considered that this constant claim others are in denial may simply be a form of projection?
Which is why I wrote I wonder.
Perhaps you think there was no scheming and plotting in the Biden administration.
If so it would be pretty unique among politicians and governments.
And would contradict the basic fact that Biden was replaced as Dem candidate and against his own wishes.
The Southern balance point was ex-post rationalisation.
We might have had a President Symington grappling with Vietnam and campus protests instead. One of the small points on which history turned...
What an admission…
It is no greater than normal numbers fluctuation from year to year.
Rather reminiscent of FAA pilots being shot down by their own convoy, and with almost the same understatement (certainly in Usonian terms).
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/jeremy-corbyn-city-of-london-the-shard-skyscraper-b1200978.html
The man has a point, although it was fellow-lefty Red Ken who made London safe for property developers.
The fundamentals of thermodynamics and heat transfer are usually seen as part of mechanical engineering. Air & fluid fow modeling definitely is.
You could probably do better but precise CNC manufacturing of domestic items might be overkill.
As a result, there’s a real risk that private schools will be ordered to follow whatever nonsense emerges from the current curriculum review.
There is also a suggestion HMC schools will lose the ISI and be inspected by Ofsted. Which, given the ISI is toothless has merit as an idea, but given Ofsted is a shambles and managing a disaster of an inspection system would be bad news for leading private schools.
The EC is a flawed system. If you want to compare the relative performances of Clinton and Harris you are probably better off reviewing the percentage difference between each of them and Trump in 2016:and 2024.
Still duck left for tomorrow too.
Will Trump make the same mistake as Boris Johnson and betray his own supporters, or will Musk find himself sidelined?
This on X.
If "winning" means importing millions of Indians then I'll take the silver medal bro.
https://x.com/GranTorinoDSA/status/1872040689254703335
Well, Denmark are investing an extra $1.5bn in Defence ... to defend Greenland from the USA which will be run by a corrupt, narcissistic criminal - Donald Chump, in a style reminiscent of a many-times-larger version of Venezuela.
https://news.sky.com/story/denmark-to-boost-defence-spending-for-greenland-after-trump-repeats-call-for-us-control-13279706
The more Chump pursues the latest version of "America First", the more the rest of the West will invest to stand on its own two feet, and the more Chump will undermine the influence of the USA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Panama reviews its own defence arrangements, which are quite pacifist. The GDP of Panama has quadrupled since 2007; they can afford to do more should they need and change the legal framework.
I'll be interested to see how the other members of Five Eyes protect ourselves from a country run by a man who steals national security documents, than lies to the FBI about what he has done. I've heard a fair bit of chatter on this in the last month or three from specialist commentators. I doubt we'll here about it though; Trump needs to be managed like a mad, drunk Grandpa - to protect us, but also to protect the USA.
Ive seen stuff like this.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications.
This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign labor and signaling anti-racism.
https://x.com/soulofpetronius/status/1871977670256238833
The pro-immigration tech bro side of the immigration debate is doing a better job turning people against immigration than the actual restrictionists
"You're a dying race of dumb inbred losers and all your achievements are because of foreigners anyway" isn't really the best pitch
1:28 PM · Dec 26, 2024
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37K
Views
https://x.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1872273281916842258
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/15/taiwan-to-have-satellite-internet-service-as-protection-in-case-of-chinese-attack
How does this:
He told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper the money would be used to buy two inspection ships, two long-range drones and two sled dog teams as well as more personnel for Denmark's Arctic Command in the capital Nuuk.
...defend Greenland against the USA, which already apparently has a large military base there? What are they going to do, set the huskies on them? If anything, the announcement is a success for Donald Trump's strategy (which I don't agree with btw) of forcing other countries to spend more on defence.
'Managing' the President is what administrations have done for many decades, including to a large extent in Trump's last administration. He seems prepared to 'manage' rathet than be managed this time around, which is fair, as the American people elected him, not 'managers'.
The majority left because we made life unpleasant for them post Brexit. Brexit wasn't the only reason but it was a contributory factor (as you well know as a Eurofederalist). There are now better paid jobs back on the mainland. I seldom see Eastern Europeans working in England and Wales in the municipal waste collection/ sorting sector although there are still quite a few I meet in a work capacity over in Northern Ireland.
And correct me if I am wrong that Johnson offered any vacancy shortfalls to "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent"*.
*My precis.
Quite a few countries are doing the same. Bit like having aircraft carriers…
For comedy value - many of them are launching via SpaceX. Which has the only availability in the non-Russian, non-Chinese launch market, let along the price.
Trump is on record asserting "“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5055179-denmark-greenland-security-package/
It's a repeat of comments he made previously, in his first term. So this has been known for some time.
Trump is a bullshitter, we know that. The problem for everryone else is that he's a random bullshitter, so it all has to be covered.
We'll see what happens - in the long-term one of the big ones is the status of the North-West passage.
( @williamglenn ) are right that, to his credit Johnson increased immigration in absolute terms to cover short term vacancy shortfalls. However he replaced returning Europeans with our friends from the Commonwealth which is contrary to your assertion.
Even in Surrey, where there have been press claims recently, only 20% of pupils are in Independent Schools. If 6% move, that's a movement of around .06 * .2 or 1.2% of all pupils in Surrey moving - IF the claim is true.
On an average per State School Class (using class size 30), that's 0.36 pupils per class.
Obviously there's statistical variation around a mean and so on, but it's not earth-shattering.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/12/26/reform-uk-overtakes-conservatives-as-membership-swells/
It was an invasion - ie troops appeared without warning, without diplomacy etc on the side, with a few hundred mainly inexperienced troops, to occupy to forestall any risk that the Germans would, Denmark having been invaded one month earlier, and for bases. It followed up the UK failing to persuade Iceland to come in on our side previously. There was minimal argy-bargy.
Reading the Wiki account, the bit I like is that they posted the announcement of occupation on the door of the Post Office - very Luther.
Brits were replaced by Yanks later on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Iceland
We also occupied the Faeroes. Not sure on the details of that without looking it up.
Yet do we expect any better from this awful socialist government having already hit pensioners, business owners and farmers?
However Taiwan is clearly taking no chances hence it is creating this new satellite system
Being against fox hunting is one of the few issues that unites every age group, and every political persuasion.
Unless you have a Tardis, that's not true of farmers or business owners as far as IHT is concerned. Not only do they have to die but they have to do it after 6 April 2026.
If you have to clutch pearls ...
Rishi to be fair to him cut net non EU immigration after it surged under Boris but the seeds had already been sown for the harder on immigration vote to shift to Farage and Reform
But I certainly think that Denmark are being more assertive to make the point to Trump. He would quite easily treat such things as being frivolous.
The USA have intervened by force many times before, including in both Grenada and Panama recently, and magicked up wars under false pretences at will; I wouldn't put it past them for a minute.
The two patrol vessels - roughly the equivalent of our OPVs such as the one in the Pacific, and upgrading an air base for the use of F-35s, are fairly serious moves.
It also mentions that the schools at most risk are the ones where there are higher levels of competition. Which I read as there being other private schools that are more popular in the same area. Sounds more like capitalism than socialism to me.
war ridden government of my
lifetime, even more than
Brown's. Farmers, pensioners,
small business owners,
private school parents, the remaining hereditary peers, even foxhunters on scent trails are within the sights of Starmer and Reeves