US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son.
Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
A pardon for Ulbricht was Trump’s promise to the Libertarian Party Conference last year.
He’s spent 12 years in prison for running a Bitcoin marketplace, convicted as a drug dealer because others were using the platform to sell drugs.
For some reason the authorities didn’t care much to go after Facebook, Craigslist, or any other online platform full of illegal goods and services, only Ulbricht, and the judge made a point of throwing the book at him.
eBay but not eBay.
The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: a well-organized community marketplace, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names—you put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin!
Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash, Mercury’s Famous uncut cocaine flakes, Mario Invincibility Star XTC, white Mitsubishi MDMA, a black tar heroin called the Devil’s Licorice.
Then there were the prescription meds, everything from Oxycontin and Xanax to Fentanyl and Dilaudid. Silk Road’s product descriptions and user ratings amounted to an encyclopedic information source.
Well worth a read. Not at all the OK kind of guy people of a political persuasion make him out to be:
Ars had a good set of stories on it too - might be the same ones actually, they're both Conde Nast, aren't they, so could be shared.
In addition to the site activities, there's also the small number of paying for people to be bumped off, although I'm not sure he was ever convicted on that (water muddied as at least some of the 'hit-men' were undercover FBI agents, I think, and no bodies were ever linked to the other payments). Wasn't one of the FBI people involved also seriously dodgy, which complicated the case?
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
There was a video on Twix showing how varied Nazi salutes were, even by the higher-ups, with camera angles mattering a fair bit as well. Just vaguely put your arm straight in the air, like an upper-quadrant signal. (*)
Musk was either stupid or deliberately using Nazi symbiology.
(*) Perhaps the GWR were the least-Nazi railway company?
Yes, and the clutching the heart thing was a Hitler-special. I hadn't realised, but that's why football ultras use it Europe. My initial attempt at Devil's advocate was misplaced.
Fascinating watching PBers trying to come to terms with it. I think Leon accepted it wasn't very good, but we still have a few people clinging on.
No, I accepted it was at least half a Heil Hitler, but I never said it was a bad thing
Perhaps before you edit that post you might want to reflect on the Holocaust and all that the symbolic gesture you celebrate in your post represents.
The Holocaust was pretty bad - certainly more bad than good, even if there were positives - when have I ever tried to minimise it?
However it only happened because Hitler is on the spectrum. It’s called “stimming”. It’s what autistic people do when they are overstimulated - hence “stim”
Some autistic people jump or hum or wave their arms, some crack knuckles or roll their eyes, Hitler built a complex machine of death across all of central/Eastern Europe so as to transport around eight million people to an industrialised massacre, on a different day he might have just hopped up and down
We just got unlucky
You really are a juvenile tw@t!
If you weren’t such a bedwetting dimwit you’d realise I’m actually satirising those who would defend Musk on the grounds he’s an Aspie
However to get this subtlety you probably need an IQ of 120 minimum so, as you were
Everyone knows, and most still think juvenile twat is quite correct. Your desperate, constant need for attention doesn't trump the holocaust.
On the other hand, the spectacle of the PB left having a collective meltdown of asinine piety and moral hysteria, complete with uterine prolapse, at anything to do with Trump or Musk, is deeply hilarious
So if my humble efforts keep that going, or even inflame it, we’re all winners
You get to vent and rage, we get to quietly laugh
A tedious bore who thinks he is some Swiftian satirist.
That doesn’t exactly help the Musk-isn’t-a-Nazi argument…
You’re forgetting that the Overton window has shifted now and we need to get with the programme. Tommy Robinson is a concerned centre-right citizen held hostage by our woke government.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
A typo in your last sentence with a superfluos f being added somehow.
That doesn’t exactly help the Musk-isn’t-a-Nazi argument…
You’re forgetting that the Overton window has shifted now and we need to get with the programme. Tommy Robinson is a concerned centre-right citizen held hostage by our woke government.
Daily Mail = Left Wing?
They’ll need to keep their wits about them. Historically they’ve been quite adept at drifting with the old Overton but occasionally they surprise us all.
This next 4 years will certainly be interesting. Not the first time a populist strongman has tried, failed, but then come back second time having learned their lessons, but the first time we’ve seen this kind of thing in the USA since its ascent to superpower.
US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son.
Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
A pardon for Ulbricht was Trump’s promise to the Libertarian Party Conference last year.
He’s spent 12 years in prison for running a Bitcoin marketplace, convicted as a drug dealer because others were using the platform to sell drugs.
For some reason the authorities didn’t care much to go after Facebook, Craigslist, or any other online platform full of illegal goods and services, only Ulbricht, and the judge made a point of throwing the book at him.
eBay but not eBay.
The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: a well-organized community marketplace, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names—you put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin!
Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash, Mercury’s Famous uncut cocaine flakes, Mario Invincibility Star XTC, white Mitsubishi MDMA, a black tar heroin called the Devil’s Licorice.
Then there were the prescription meds, everything from Oxycontin and Xanax to Fentanyl and Dilaudid. Silk Road’s product descriptions and user ratings amounted to an encyclopedic information source.
Well worth a read. Not at all the OK kind of guy people of a political persuasion make him out to be:
Ars had a good set of stories on it too - might be the same ones actually, they're both Conde Nast, aren't they, so could be shared.
In addition to the site activities, there's also the small number of paying for people to be bumped off, although I'm not sure he was ever convicted on that (water muddied as at least some of the 'hit-men' were undercover FBI agents, I think, and no bodies were ever linked to the other payments). Wasn't one of the FBI people involved also seriously dodgy, which complicated the case?
Wikipedia says:
Federal prosecutors alleged with mixed evidence that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[33] because they purportedly threatened to reveal the Silk Road enterprise.[43][44] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[33] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with murder for hire,[33][45] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[33][46] The district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did commission the murders.[47] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to uphold the sentence.[46] Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator).[48] Prosecutors moved to drop this indictment after his New York conviction and sentence became final.[49][50]
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
Can't believe we are back onto should we build a third runway at Heathrow?
We're not. It looks like we're debating if Musk is a Nazi (he isn't) was it a Hitler salute (it wasn't) was there any good in the Holocaust (there wasn't)
Still, it's better (marginally) than the endless droning on about Brexit from diehard Remainers who have not come to "acceptance" on the grief cycle.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son.
Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
A pardon for Ulbricht was Trump’s promise to the Libertarian Party Conference last year.
He’s spent 12 years in prison for running a Bitcoin marketplace, convicted as a drug dealer because others were using the platform to sell drugs.
For some reason the authorities didn’t care much to go after Facebook, Craigslist, or any other online platform full of illegal goods and services, only Ulbricht, and the judge made a point of throwing the book at him.
eBay but not eBay.
The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: a well-organized community marketplace, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names—you put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin!
Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash, Mercury’s Famous uncut cocaine flakes, Mario Invincibility Star XTC, white Mitsubishi MDMA, a black tar heroin called the Devil’s Licorice.
Then there were the prescription meds, everything from Oxycontin and Xanax to Fentanyl and Dilaudid. Silk Road’s product descriptions and user ratings amounted to an encyclopedic information source.
Well worth a read. Not at all the OK kind of guy people of a political persuasion make him out to be:
Ars had a good set of stories on it too - might be the same ones actually, they're both Conde Nast, aren't they, so could be shared.
In addition to the site activities, there's also the small number of paying for people to be bumped off, although I'm not sure he was ever convicted on that (water muddied as at least some of the 'hit-men' were undercover FBI agents, I think, and no bodies were ever linked to the other payments). Wasn't one of the FBI people involved also seriously dodgy, which complicated the case?
He was never convicted, as the charges never went to court (though the trial judge, when sentencing, commented that the evidence against him on this was fairly strong).
There was also a separate case, which was dropped after he was sentenced to life without parole.
Convicted benefits cheats who fail to pay back the taxpayer could be stripped of their driving licences, under government plans to crack down on fraud. Those who repeatedly cheat the system and have debts of £1,000 or more could be punished with a driving ban of up to two years.
The plans also include new powers to force banks to hand over account information about benefit claimants to help target investigations, echoing a scheme announced by the previous Conservative government. But this is likely to face strong opposition from the banks and privacy campaigners.
More performative crap. DWP already have a full range of powers to investigate and sanction. Pity HMG doesn't use the same approach to those that defraud them on contracts (Covid contracts anyone?)
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
A friend who is an expert in modern US history, said a few months ago that they seem to want to return to the Jim Crow era. The restrictions on abortion and women's reproductive rights harking back to the '60s - '70s enforced sterilisation of native American, black and poor women.
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
There was a video on Twix showing how varied Nazi salutes were, even by the higher-ups, with camera angles mattering a fair bit as well. Just vaguely put your arm straight in the air, like an upper-quadrant signal. (*)
Musk was either stupid or deliberately using Nazi symbiology.
(*) Perhaps the GWR were the least-Nazi railway company?
Yes, and the clutching the heart thing was a Hitler-special. I hadn't realised, but that's why football ultras use it Europe. My initial attempt at Devil's advocate was misplaced.
Fascinating watching PBers trying to come to terms with it. I think Leon accepted it wasn't very good, but we still have a few people clinging on.
No, I accepted it was at least half a Heil Hitler, but I never said it was a bad thing
Perhaps before you edit that post you might want to reflect on the Holocaust and all that the symbolic gesture you celebrate in your post represents.
The Holocaust was pretty bad - certainly more bad than good, even if there were positives - when have I ever tried to minimise it?
However it only happened because Hitler is on the spectrum. It’s called “stimming”. It’s what autistic people do when they are overstimulated - hence “stim”
Some autistic people jump or hum or wave their arms, some crack knuckles or roll their eyes, Hitler built a complex machine of death across all of central/Eastern Europe so as to transport around eight million people to an industrialised massacre, on a different day he might have just hopped up and down
We just got unlucky
Err, what were the good bits of the Holocaust?
He's just being an edgelord. Ignore him.
I’m hoping for at least a ‘they didn’t manage to round up and gas all the lefties but they had a good go’.
What Leon doesn’t realise is that OGH says to permanently Leon if goes down the whole white babies racism route.
Why should OGH be on the hook for Leon’s nonsense?
I can't believe that Tiger King arsehole hasn't got a pardon. He seems exactly the right combination of strange, evil and white that would appeal to DJT.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
This is utter nonsense - and you know that - unless you’re a cretin
There are numerous American laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, there is also the US Constitution. What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour. The American people decided - rightly, in my view - that this is wrong and it should go.
Are we going to have four years of the PB left whining and LYING about what Trump is doing? Trump in reality is enough of a target, you don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent him
US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son.
Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
A pardon for Ulbricht was Trump’s promise to the Libertarian Party Conference last year.
He’s spent 12 years in prison for running a Bitcoin marketplace, convicted as a drug dealer because others were using the platform to sell drugs.
For some reason the authorities didn’t care much to go after Facebook, Craigslist, or any other online platform full of illegal goods and services, only Ulbricht, and the judge made a point of throwing the book at him.
eBay but not eBay.
The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: a well-organized community marketplace, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names—you put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin!
Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash, Mercury’s Famous uncut cocaine flakes, Mario Invincibility Star XTC, white Mitsubishi MDMA, a black tar heroin called the Devil’s Licorice.
Then there were the prescription meds, everything from Oxycontin and Xanax to Fentanyl and Dilaudid. Silk Road’s product descriptions and user ratings amounted to an encyclopedic information source.
Well worth a read. Not at all the OK kind of guy people of a political persuasion make him out to be:
Ars had a good set of stories on it too - might be the same ones actually, they're both Conde Nast, aren't they, so could be shared.
In addition to the site activities, there's also the small number of paying for people to be bumped off, although I'm not sure he was ever convicted on that (water muddied as at least some of the 'hit-men' were undercover FBI agents, I think, and no bodies were ever linked to the other payments). Wasn't one of the FBI people involved also seriously dodgy, which complicated the case?
He was never convicted, as the charges never went to court (though the trial judge, when sentencing, commented that the evidence against him on this was fairly strong).
There was also a separate case, which was dropped after he was sentenced to life without parole.
How is this consistent with trade threats to China and others for supplying opiates, and other narcotics, to the US market? Trump fans please expl.... no, don't bother
Convicted benefits cheats who fail to pay back the taxpayer could be stripped of their driving licences, under government plans to crack down on fraud. Those who repeatedly cheat the system and have debts of £1,000 or more could be punished with a driving ban of up to two years.
The plans also include new powers to force banks to hand over account information about benefit claimants to help target investigations, echoing a scheme announced by the previous Conservative government. But this is likely to face strong opposition from the banks and privacy campaigners.
More performative crap. DWP already have a full range of powers to investigate and sanction. Pity HMG doesn't use the same approach to those that defraud them on contracts (Covid contracts anyone?)
DWP Fraud is measured and runs at about 2%.
Absolutely and we should be very wary about some of these measures. People cheering them now won't be happy if/when they get extended to all of us.
As for monitoring bank accounts the banks do this anyway flagging up irregular payments and the like, due to money laundering legislation.
Meanwhile we get stories like this, about the clinically fed up "rinsing" the system. Softens us up for further action.
I can't believe that Tiger King arsehole hasn't got a pardon. He seems exactly the right combination of strange, evil and white that would appeal to DJT.
He was due to get one when Trump left office last time. He had a limo waiting to take him home. Trump failed him. C'Mon Trump, let him out.
Is the entire US media really about to lose their collective minds for the next four years?
You need to watch the video, it's obviously a fascist-style salute. Pictures of someone with a raised arm whether it's Musk or Jesus Christ are pretty meaningless so can someone link to a video of Obama doing something similar?
Also I know that Musk supports people like the AfD and promotes holocaust deniers, so my priors are different to Obama who AFAIK doesn't.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
This is utter nonsense - and you know that - unless you’re a cretin
There are numerous American laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, there is also the US Constitution. What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour. The American people decided - rightly, in my view - that this is wrong and it should go.
Are we going to have four years of the PB left whining and LYING about what Trump is doing? Trump in really is enough of a target, you don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent him
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
There was a video on Twix showing how varied Nazi salutes were, even by the higher-ups, with camera angles mattering a fair bit as well. Just vaguely put your arm straight in the air, like an upper-quadrant signal. (*)
Musk was either stupid or deliberately using Nazi symbiology.
(*) Perhaps the GWR were the least-Nazi railway company?
Yes, and the clutching the heart thing was a Hitler-special. I hadn't realised, but that's why football ultras use it Europe. My initial attempt at Devil's advocate was misplaced.
Fascinating watching PBers trying to come to terms with it. I think Leon accepted it wasn't very good, but we still have a few people clinging on.
No, I accepted it was at least half a Heil Hitler, but I never said it was a bad thing
Perhaps before you edit that post you might want to reflect on the Holocaust and all that the symbolic gesture you celebrate in your post represents.
The Holocaust was pretty bad - certainly more bad than good, even if there were positives - when have I ever tried to minimise it?
However it only happened because Hitler is on the spectrum. It’s called “stimming”. It’s what autistic people do when they are overstimulated - hence “stim”
Some autistic people jump or hum or wave their arms, some crack knuckles or roll their eyes, Hitler built a complex machine of death across all of central/Eastern Europe so as to transport around eight million people to an industrialised massacre, on a different day he might have just hopped up and down
We just got unlucky
Err, what were the good bits of the Holocaust?
He's just being an edgelord. Ignore him.
I’m hoping for at least a ‘they didn’t manage to round up and gas all the lefties but they had a good go’.
What Leon doesn’t realise is that OGH says to permanently Leon if goes down the whole white babies racism route.
Why should OGH be on the hook for Leon’s nonsense?
What's the position on the holocaust being blamed on Hitler having undiagnosed autism? That would seem to be seriously offensive to 100% of people with autism.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
This is utter nonsense - and you know that - unless you’re a cretin
There are numerous American laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, there is also the US Constitution. What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour. The American people decided - rightly, in my view - that this is wrong and it should go.
Are we going to have four years of the PB left whining and LYING about what Trump is doing? Trump in really is enough of a target, you don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent him
So it's just racist virtue signalling?
Do you honestly not understand what “affirmative action” is, in the US context?
After the last 14 years the Tories lead on the economy !!!! I know Reeves has had a shaky start but now does seem to be doing something about growth.
The very nature of a BB like this one is that conversation focuses on the latest minutiae and over-reacts and over-extrapolates. Otherwise, there would be no conversation.
The fact is it's far too early to draw any conclusions about Labour's economic competence or otherwise.
The most recent growth figures reflect decisions and conditions that pre-existed Labour coming to power. Give them another year, then there'll be something substantive to judge.
I disagree.
Talking down the economy for blatantly political reasons (and not even sensible ones at that) leading to business confidence falling off a cliff, shovelling money from the productive private sector to the unproductive and unreformed public sector, and adding massively to the wildly excessive burden of red tape give us plenty substantive to judge.
We may not yet be able to say just how bad the economic effects will be, but we already know that, despite promising "the fastest growth in the G7" or whatever it was, this government has unnecessarily damaged growth more than just about any other government in history.
After the last 14 years the Tories lead on the economy !!!! I know Reeves has had a shaky start but now does seem to be doing something about growth.
The very nature of a BB like this one is that conversation focuses on the latest minutiae and over-reacts and over-extrapolates. Otherwise, there would be no conversation.
The fact is it's far too early to draw any conclusions about Labour's economic competence or otherwise.
The most recent growth figures reflect decisions and conditions that pre-existed Labour coming to power. Give them another year, then there'll be something substantive to judge.
I disagree.
Talking down the economy for blatantly political reasons (and not even sensible ones at that) leading to business confidence falling off a cliff, shovelling money from the productive private sector to the unproductive and unreformed public sector, and adding massively to the wildly excessive burden of red tape give us plenty substantive to judge.
We may not yet be able to say just how bad the economic effects will be, but we already know that, despite promising "the fastest growth in the G7" or whatever it was, this government has unnecessarily damaged growth more than just about any other government in history.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
This is utter nonsense - and you know that - unless you’re a cretin
There are numerous American laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, there is also the US Constitution. What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour. The American people decided - rightly, in my view - that this is wrong and it should go.
Are we going to have four years of the PB left whining and LYING about what Trump is doing? Trump in reality is enough of a target, you don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent him
What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour.
I can't believe that Tiger King arsehole hasn't got a pardon. He seems exactly the right combination of strange, evil and white that would appeal to DJT.
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
There was a video on Twix showing how varied Nazi salutes were, even by the higher-ups, with camera angles mattering a fair bit as well. Just vaguely put your arm straight in the air, like an upper-quadrant signal. (*)
Musk was either stupid or deliberately using Nazi symbiology.
(*) Perhaps the GWR were the least-Nazi railway company?
Yes, and the clutching the heart thing was a Hitler-special. I hadn't realised, but that's why football ultras use it Europe. My initial attempt at Devil's advocate was misplaced.
Fascinating watching PBers trying to come to terms with it. I think Leon accepted it wasn't very good, but we still have a few people clinging on.
No, I accepted it was at least half a Heil Hitler, but I never said it was a bad thing
Perhaps before you edit that post you might want to reflect on the Holocaust and all that the symbolic gesture you celebrate in your post represents.
The Holocaust was pretty bad - certainly more bad than good, even if there were positives - when have I ever tried to minimise it?
However it only happened because Hitler is on the spectrum. It’s called “stimming”. It’s what autistic people do when they are overstimulated - hence “stim”
Some autistic people jump or hum or wave their arms, some crack knuckles or roll their eyes, Hitler built a complex machine of death across all of central/Eastern Europe so as to transport around eight million people to an industrialised massacre, on a different day he might have just hopped up and down
We just got unlucky
Err, what were the good bits of the Holocaust?
He's just being an edgelord. Ignore him.
I’m hoping for at least a ‘they didn’t manage to round up and gas all the lefties but they had a good go’.
What Leon doesn’t realise is that OGH says to permanently Leon if goes down the whole white babies racism route.
Why should OGH be on the hook for Leon’s nonsense?
What's the position on the holocaust being blamed on Hitler having undiagnosed autism? That would seem to be seriously offensive to 100% of people with autism.
1. It was a joke
2. It was a joke against those who would defend Musk on the grounds that he is a self-declared person-on-the-spectrum
The joke IS “let’s try and defend Hitler in the same way”
I’ve said before that, even tho I admire Musk in many ways, I found that salute ugly and I don’t believe he was unaware of what he was doing
Can't believe we are back onto should we build a third runway at Heathrow?
We're not. It looks like we're debating if Musk is a Nazi (he isn't) was it a Hitler salute (it wasn't) was there any good in the Holocaust (there wasn't)
Still, it's better (marginally) than the endless droning on about Brexit from diehard Remainers who have not come to "acceptance" on the grief cycle.
I hesitate to respond to this, as a remainer myself, for fear of being called a snide twat. I appreciate that your side won and that snide insults are only permitted in one direction.
However, this “endless droning on” amounts to, what, one wry post per day on average? About one of the most divisive and disruptive events in Britain’s recent political history. On a politics forum.
US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son.
Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
US Libertarians think he’s a martyr, presumably on the ground that drug trafficking is a legitimate business activity.
Bit inconsistent from the Trumpsters. Didn't Trump say unless Canada stops drugs crossing its border within days he'll slap one million %tarrif on all trade?
Life in some pound-you-in-the-ass hellhole is for the poor, and blacks, not for the elite.
Wasn't for these guys until Trump got in, wasn't for the likes of Weinstein, Epstein and Ken Lay either
Can't believe we are back onto should we build a third runway at Heathrow?
We're not. It looks like we're debating if Musk is a Nazi (he isn't) was it a Hitler salute (it wasn't) was there any good in the Holocaust (there wasn't)
Still, it's better (marginally) than the endless droning on about Brexit from diehard Remainers who have not come to "acceptance" on the grief cycle.
I hesitate to respond to this, as a remainer myself, for fear of being called a snide twat. I appreciate that your side won and that snide insults are only permitted in one direction.
However, this “endless droning on” amounts to, what, one wry post per day on average? About one of the most divisive and disruptive events in Britain’s recent political history. On a politics forum.
Also at a time when reversing it partly or wholly is becoming an increasingly salient issue. Not least because of the gentleman who is now in the White House.
If Trump dismantles all diversity programmes, UK must boycott the US Olympics.
World Cup before then (Scotland will boycott that, obviously).
In a “if we had qualified, we wouldn’t have gone to the pariah state anyway, shame on everyone who has” kind of boycott?
Being serious, it's worth remembering that Salisbury was before the 2018 World Cup. And we (England) still went.
To my shame I actually went to Moscow on business in May 2018. The last time I was there. It was grimly fascinating in a sort of travellers in the 3rd reich way, much more so than my previous visits, but I still should have refused to go.
If Trump dismantles all diversity programmes, UK must boycott the US Olympics.
World Cup before then (Scotland will boycott that, obviously).
In a “if we had qualified, we wouldn’t have gone to the pariah state anyway, shame on everyone who has” kind of boycott?
Being serious, it's worth remembering that Salisbury was before the 2018 World Cup. And we (England) still went.
True. We went to Putin’s Cup after he had done that. Didn’t US take stronger action against UK based Oligarchs in response to Salisbury, than even UK did too?
I agree with you, boycotts of upcoming US sporting events more likely like the boycott of Soviet Olympics in 1970’s, lots of individual stars boycotting the event, the UK government urging them not to go, but the sport governing bodies staying in.
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
'Government borrowing rose more than expected in December to hit its highest level for the month for four years, piling more pressure on the UK's finances. Borrowing - the difference between spending and tax revenue - was £17.8bn last month, £10.1bn more than in December 2023, official figures show.
Spending on public services, benefits, and debt interest were all up on the year, while an increase in tax receipts was offset by National Insurance cuts made by the previous government.'
If Trump dismantles all diversity programmes, UK must boycott the US Olympics.
World Cup before then (Scotland will boycott that, obviously).
In a “if we had qualified, we wouldn’t have gone to the pariah state anyway, shame on everyone who has” kind of boycott?
If England overdoes the anti-Trump virtue signalling this time, maybe supporting the Donald will become fashionable north of the border.
It’s not virtue signalling. The world really doesn’t need anymore of this childish, ultimately selfish and greed based disruption right now.
There maybe a season for it, disruption, but that season has passed. The need now is for stability in world economies and peoples lives and the money in their pocket, and a time of healing divisions and coming together.
Trump is certainly not a man for all seasons. You need to lift the fog from your eyes and become a bit more woke yourself.
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
60 years old seems strangely precise - "The artsan was bopping away to Rubber Soul as he fashioned it!"
Buy it cos you like it which is always the best reason. Looks like the perfect stash box..
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
I am sorry but this graphic is utter nonsense.
Who calls a taxi these days?
Uber for the win.
That horizontal arm is for (Londoners) stopping a bus at a request stop. Hailing a taxi is more of an upward point with optional whistling, and then watching the cab sail by with a family of four in the back because those bloody awful new cabs always look like they've got their light on.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I wonder effect this will have on the following.
For many years, the US government has operated a system of giving preference, in contracts, to business owned by various groups - veterans, Native Americans, disabled etc etc.
If the owner is in one or more of those groups, they would have a higher chance of getting the contract.
As is usual in the US, this was a patch to try and deal with discrimination *against* various groups. Again, as is usual, it became a favour handed out by politicians to their favoured groups.
As is usual, again, it became part of a form of corruption. A company owned by one of the preferred groups would get a contract - on the understanding that they subcontract to another company that actually does the work. So the minority owner in question doesn’t get much benefit.
A lot of money is then recycled to the politicians…
Changing this has the probability of making a lot of people angry. Including lots of politicians you wouldn’t think of as pro-minority.
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
Same price as a round of drinks. No brainer even if it turns out to be repro.
My wife’s an artist who relies on selling at exhibitions, fairs and open studio events, and I find it fascinating but frustrating to see people agonising over parting with a couple of hundred quid for a print when that’s what they’ll be spending on a single meal out later that day.
'Trump puts all US government diversity staff on paid leave, starting 'immediately'. ...We can now bring you more details about US President Donald Trump's latest executive order, which calls for an end to diversity policies within the federal government and in the private sector.
In the order, the Trump administration describes initiatives under the Diversity Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and the Diversity, Equity Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) umbrella as policies that "violate the text and spirit of our longstanding federal civil rights laws".
These policies, the document reads, undermine national unity as they "deny, discredit and undermine the traditional American values of hard work".
The Trump-led White House used the order to instruct government agencies to "combat" DEI preferences, mandates, policies and activities in the private sector.'
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
It's pretty and it's cheap. If you get second thoughts then I'm sure you can gift it as a jewellery box to someone.
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
There was a video on Twix showing how varied Nazi salutes were, even by the higher-ups, with camera angles mattering a fair bit as well. Just vaguely put your arm straight in the air, like an upper-quadrant signal. (*)
Musk was either stupid or deliberately using Nazi symbiology.
(*) Perhaps the GWR were the least-Nazi railway company?
Yes, and the clutching the heart thing was a Hitler-special. I hadn't realised, but that's why football ultras use it Europe. My initial attempt at Devil's advocate was misplaced.
Fascinating watching PBers trying to come to terms with it. I think Leon accepted it wasn't very good, but we still have a few people clinging on.
No, I accepted it was at least half a Heil Hitler, but I never said it was a bad thing
Perhaps before you edit that post you might want to reflect on the Holocaust and all that the symbolic gesture you celebrate in your post represents.
He's just joking bro. /s
The context of this in the UK is also worth noting. The country's top podcast, The Rest is History, is doing a harrowing series on the Nazi invasion of eastern Europe at the moment. Lots of echoes to what is going on right now, particularly the pardons for the Jan 6th rioters and the farcical behaviour of the top people in the regime. People will make the link.
I'd been working really hard on my Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I'm afraid the inaugaration speech, pardons and actual Nazi salute have set me back a few months.
Can't see those episodes on The Rest Is History (BBC sounds) - am I missing a link to somehwere?
Is the entire US media really about to lose their collective minds for the next four years?
You need to watch the video, it's obviously a fascist-style salute. Pictures of someone with a raised arm whether it's Musk or Jesus Christ are pretty meaningless so can someone link to a video of Obama doing something similar?
Also I know that Musk supports people like the AfD and promotes holocaust deniers, so my priors are different to Obama who AFAIK doesn't.
Nonsense, it's widely accepted that this gesture is a giving of your heart to the audience. Look at the guys on the left(sic) for example.
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
There was a video on Twix showing how varied Nazi salutes were, even by the higher-ups, with camera angles mattering a fair bit as well. Just vaguely put your arm straight in the air, like an upper-quadrant signal. (*)
Musk was either stupid or deliberately using Nazi symbiology.
(*) Perhaps the GWR were the least-Nazi railway company?
Yes, and the clutching the heart thing was a Hitler-special. I hadn't realised, but that's why football ultras use it Europe. My initial attempt at Devil's advocate was misplaced.
Fascinating watching PBers trying to come to terms with it. I think Leon accepted it wasn't very good, but we still have a few people clinging on.
No, I accepted it was at least half a Heil Hitler, but I never said it was a bad thing
Perhaps before you edit that post you might want to reflect on the Holocaust and all that the symbolic gesture you celebrate in your post represents.
The Holocaust was pretty bad - certainly more bad than good, even if there were positives - when have I ever tried to minimise it?
However it only happened because Hitler is on the spectrum. It’s called “stimming”. It’s what autistic people do when they are overstimulated - hence “stim”
Some autistic people jump or hum or wave their arms, some crack knuckles or roll their eyes, Hitler built a complex machine of death across all of central/Eastern Europe so as to transport around eight million people to an industrialised massacre, on a different day he might have just hopped up and down
We just got unlucky
Err, what were the good bits of the Holocaust?
He's just being an edgelord. Ignore him.
I’m hoping for at least a ‘they didn’t manage to round up and gas all the lefties but they had a good go’.
What Leon doesn’t realise is that OGH says to permanently Leon if goes down the whole white babies racism route.
Why should OGH be on the hook for Leon’s nonsense?
What's the position on the holocaust being blamed on Hitler having undiagnosed autism? That would seem to be seriously offensive to 100% of people with autism.
1. It was a joke
2. It was a joke against those who would defend Musk on the grounds that he is a self-declared person-on-the-spectrum
The joke IS “let’s try and defend Hitler in the same way”
I’ve said before that, even tho I admire Musk in many ways, I found that salute ugly and I don’t believe he was unaware of what he was doing
Jokes can still be extremely offensive
I'm certain you'll get a pass because of the privilege your perceived high status as a professional sex tourist gives you, however numerous people have been cancelled for satire that was less offensive or was just perceived to be offensive
US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold.
Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son.
Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
A pardon for Ulbricht was Trump’s promise to the Libertarian Party Conference last year.
He’s spent 12 years in prison for running a Bitcoin marketplace, convicted as a drug dealer because others were using the platform to sell drugs.
For some reason the authorities didn’t care much to go after Facebook, Craigslist, or any other online platform full of illegal goods and services, only Ulbricht, and the judge made a point of throwing the book at him.
eBay but not eBay.
The site was modeled, sensibly, on Amazon and eBay. And that’s what it looked like: a well-organized community marketplace, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. Everything was anonymous, and shipments often went through the regular old postal service. No need for fake names—you put your real address, and if any one asks, you just say you didn’t order all that heroin!
Silk Road’s “Seller’s Guide” had helpful instructions on how to vacuum-seal or otherwise hide drugs to evade electronic sensors or canine olfactories. Most shipments made it to happy customers. That the small percentage of intercepted Silk Road packages represented an uptick spoke to the quickly rising volume of the site’s trade, a vast pharmacopeia covering dozens of categories with 13,000 listings. It was a colorful smorgasbord for every type of connoisseur: fishscale Colombian cocaine, Afghan No. 4 heroin, strawberry LSD, Caramello hash, Mercury’s Famous uncut cocaine flakes, Mario Invincibility Star XTC, white Mitsubishi MDMA, a black tar heroin called the Devil’s Licorice.
Then there were the prescription meds, everything from Oxycontin and Xanax to Fentanyl and Dilaudid. Silk Road’s product descriptions and user ratings amounted to an encyclopedic information source.
Well worth a read. Not at all the OK kind of guy people of a political persuasion make him out to be:
Ars had a good set of stories on it too - might be the same ones actually, they're both Conde Nast, aren't they, so could be shared.
In addition to the site activities, there's also the small number of paying for people to be bumped off, although I'm not sure he was ever convicted on that (water muddied as at least some of the 'hit-men' were undercover FBI agents, I think, and no bodies were ever linked to the other payments). Wasn't one of the FBI people involved also seriously dodgy, which complicated the case?
He was never convicted, as the charges never went to court (though the trial judge, when sentencing, commented that the evidence against him on this was fairly strong).
There was also a separate case, which was dropped after he was sentenced to life without parole.
How is this consistent with trade threats to China and others for supplying opiates, and other narcotics, to the US market? Trump fans please expl.... no, don't bother
Trump is consistent only in doing what he perceives as beneficial to him. This was transactional payback for the libertarian vote.
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
Same price as a round of drinks. No brainer even if it turns out to be repro.
My wife’s an artist who relies on selling at exhibitions, fairs and open studio events, and I find it fascinating but frustrating to see people agonising over parting with a couple of hundred quid for a print when that’s what they’ll be spending on a single meal out later that day.
See also trying to whittle you down from a £100 when that wouldn't buy half a tyre on their BMW.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
White supremacy is BACK.
Doubtless what the White Supremacists hope. Other ethnicities are available.
Someone kindly placed a useful guide on Twitter for those compelled to raise their arms in public.
I hope this is a help to those on PB who might have to speak at a large rally of weirdos in the future.
I am sorry but this graphic is utter nonsense.
Who calls a taxi these days?
Uber for the win.
That horizontal arm is for (Londoners) stopping a bus at a request stop. Hailing a taxi is more of an upward point with optional whistling, and then watching the cab sail by with a family of four in the back because those bloody awful new cabs always look like they've got their light on.
I took a taxi for the first time in forever last Saturday in Reading - Uber wanted 30-odd quid and the black cab charged us £14.40.
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
Same price as a round of drinks. No brainer even if it turns out to be repro.
My wife’s an artist who relies on selling at exhibitions, fairs and open studio events, and I find it fascinating but frustrating to see people agonising over parting with a couple of hundred quid for a print when that’s what they’ll be spending on a single meal out later that day.
No brainer - so long as one has checked the export control issue for old stuff. No idea what it is like in Myanmar.
And for that matter import control into the UK. Anything with ivory, or from certain endangered species ...
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
60 years old seems strangely precise - "The artsan was bopping away to Rubber Soul as he fashioned it!"
Buy it cos you like it which is always the best reason. Looks like the perfect stash box..
That’s sound advice. Thanks
I think I shall buy a pair. I’m almost certain they are legitimately old because the shop owner - in a shop established in 1936! - is quite happy to point all the stuff that is new or repro, he makes a point of it. But when it’s old he says that too
He has a 100 year old Chinese opium pipe from Yunnan - made of decorated bone! - which gives me the horn TBH but I don’t know what I’d do with it or where I’d put it. $200
I’m pretty sure all these prices are massively depressed because there are zero foreign tourists
Convicted benefits cheats who fail to pay back the taxpayer could be stripped of their driving licences, under government plans to crack down on fraud. Those who repeatedly cheat the system and have debts of £1,000 or more could be punished with a driving ban of up to two years.
The plans also include new powers to force banks to hand over account information about benefit claimants to help target investigations, echoing a scheme announced by the previous Conservative government. But this is likely to face strong opposition from the banks and privacy campaigners.
How does it possibly help society to remove driving licences for non-driving offences?
All that happens is that someone working to pay their debts ends up losing their job, which isn’t going to help the situation.
If you employ more than a couple of people then chances are you will have received an attachment of earnings order from a court that relates to a whole host of unpaid debts. I have had employees with deductions that have gone back as far as 15 years from the original magistrates order (employee had worked for us for 15 months before I recieved notification).
It would be far better making the existing system work (benefits can be reduced, attachments of earning can be swiftly processed), than adding more penalties that in all likelihood won't be imposed.
It will need a court order so there is some checks and balances - which just adds more work, delays and costs to an over worked judicial system.
It seems like a gimmick and more performative nonsense from the government to make them look 'tough'.
A similar performative nonsense was solicitor general, Lucy Rigby, referring Urfan Sharif's sentence to the Court of Appeal for undue leniency. He was sentenced to life with a 40 year minimum tarriff. He would not even be eligible for parole until he aged 83. A heinous crime but the sentence feels right and I doubt the CoA will increase it. But appealing it makes the solicitor general look tough. Perfomative nonsense - please stop it.
I agree. Although I suspect there is a difference, in that Sharif's case was probably politically motivated, with the initiative coming from the minister, whereas the 'banning driving as a general punishment' idea has been kicking around the government for ages and may well have resurfaced as a civil service suggestion / option, whether off-the-shelf, or an individual official pushing the idea as a pet project.
Good for the Tories, Labour have shitted up the economy and people have noticed and the situation is only going to get worse. Inflation will rise more than expected this year, pay growth outside of the public sector will slow down as companies clawback NI costs and hiring has already ground to a halt. The slight pause over the last week in bond yields rising won't hold, already today we're bucking market trend and our yields are up 3-4bp across the board and as the inflation disaster unfolds it is only going to get worse. There was a market overreaction to a 0.1% undershoot of CPI expectations so next month if there's an overshoot there will be another overreaction.
Can't believe we are back onto should we build a third runway at Heathrow?
We're not. It looks like we're debating if Musk is a Nazi (he isn't) was it a Hitler salute (it wasn't) was there any good in the Holocaust (there wasn't)
Still, it's better (marginally) than the endless droning on about Brexit from diehard Remainers who have not come to "acceptance" on the grief cycle.
I hesitate to respond to this, as a remainer myself, for fear of being called a snide twat. I appreciate that your side won and that snide insults are only permitted in one direction.
However, this “endless droning on” amounts to, what, one wry post per day on average? About one of the most divisive and disruptive events in Britain’s recent political history. On a politics forum.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
This is utter nonsense - and you know that - unless you’re a cretin
There are numerous American laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, there is also the US Constitution. What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour. The American people decided - rightly, in my view - that this is wrong and it should go.
Are we going to have four years of the PB left whining and LYING about what Trump is doing? Trump in really is enough of a target, you don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent him
So it's just racist virtue signalling?
Do you honestly not understand what “affirmative action” is, in the US context?
In the context of that executive order, it is explicit in the text. Whatever has come since is irrelevant to the legal meaning of the order just repealed.
The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. Such action shall include, but not be limited to the following: employment, upgrading, demotion, or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship. The contractor agrees to post in conspicuous places, available to employees and applicants for employment, notices to be provided by the contracting officer setting forth the provisions of this nondiscrimination clause...
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I wonder effect this will have on the following.
For many years, the US government has operated a system of giving preference, in contracts, to business owned by various groups - veterans, Native Americans, disabled etc etc.
If the owner is in one or more of those groups, they would have a higher chance of getting the contract.
As is usual in the US, this was a patch to try and deal with discrimination *against* various groups. Again, as is usual, it became a favour handed out by politicians to their favoured groups.
As is usual, again, it became part of a form of corruption. A company owned by one of the preferred groups would get a contract - on the understanding that they subcontract to another company that actually does the work. So the minority owner in question doesn’t get much benefit.
A lot of money is then recycled to the politicians…
Changing this has the probability of making a lot of people angry. Including lots of politicians you wouldn’t think of as pro-minority.
I think those are rather sweeping statements, provided without evidence. How often was that a problem?
Dominic Cummings forays into occasional hard truths continue. Rudakubana was 7 days off being 18. Suspect significant number of <18's have fake ID. This is just usual political displacement that solves nothing. Despicable for what they are trying to do.
Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306 How the bullshit old media works & why nobody trusts it any more - desperate spin doctors try to shift blame from Whitehall's uselessness to AMAZON and the Sun r*****s swallow it. The issue isn't where he bought a knife, it's how our Idiocracy behaved and covered up as usual.
I hope the Dems are learning the lesson of rule by EO. Biden used EOs instead of doing the hard work to get legislation through Congress and now Trump is, at the wave of a wand, undoing everything. The next Dem POTUS needs to work with Congress a lot better to get a proper legislative agenda through rather than just use a series of EOs that will just be rescinded by the next guy.
"The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”"
Heather Cox Richardson email summary of day's events
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
They weren't protections, they were bigotry.
I think the quote is from Johnson's EO, as shown below. Trump has rescinded that.
"The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”"
Heather Cox Richardson email summary of day's events
Glad to see they are now happy to discuss these issues. A welcome change from the Biden era.
"The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”"
Heather Cox Richardson email summary of day's events
He doesn't seem anywhere near as fucking gooned out as JRB was but four years is a long time.
Hopefully, the Ukrainians will stop getting their assassins off FB Marketplace before then.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
They weren't protections, they were bigotry.
I think the quote is from Johnson's EO, as shown below. Trump has rescinded that.
Looking around the world, you can see the 'strongman/oligarch' system being put into place instead of democracy. The strongman is backed and supported by the oligarchs in return for patronage.
Nice to see the Irish contributing to political thought.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
"The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”"
Heather Cox Richardson email summary of day's events
He doesn't seem anywhere near as fucking gooned out as JRB was but four years is a long time.
Hopefully, the Ukrainians will stop getting their assassins off FB Marketplace before then.
You really do have contempt for the Ukrainians don't you? Hard to say why though I have my suspicions.
To change the subject and lighten the mood, I’m starting a new PB tradition of
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
60 years old seems strangely precise - "The artsan was bopping away to Rubber Soul as he fashioned it!"
Buy it cos you like it which is always the best reason. Looks like the perfect stash box..
That’s sound advice. Thanks
I think I shall buy a pair. I’m almost certain they are legitimately old because the shop owner - in a shop established in 1936! - is quite happy to point all the stuff that is new or repro, he makes a point of it. But when it’s old he says that too
He has a 100 year old Chinese opium pipe from Yunnan - made of decorated bone! - which gives me the horn TBH but I don’t know what I’d do with it or where I’d put it. $200
I’m pretty sure all these prices are massively depressed because there are zero foreign tourists
In the early 90's, I bought a teapot in the Russian Market in Pnomh Penh for $50. I was advised by a companion that it would sell for $750 in Bangkok. Tourism in Cambodia was almost non-existent back then.
I suspect today the prices are much nearer parity.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I wonder why some Americans might have finally had enough of “affirmative action” when, according to PB, it is so innocent and just
Oh
“1 in 6 Hiring Managers Have Been Told to Stop Hiring White Men”
“52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring 1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men 48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications 53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees 70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake”
Dominic Cummings forays into occasional hard truths continue. Rudakubana was 7 days off being 18. Suspect significant number of <18's have fake ID. This is just usual political displacement that solves nothing. Despicable for what they are trying to do.
Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306 How the bullshit old media works & why nobody trusts it any more - desperate spin doctors try to shift blame from Whitehall's uselessness to AMAZON and the Sun r*****s swallow it. The issue isn't where he bought a knife, it's how our Idiocracy behaved and covered up as usual.
As discussed a thread or two back, Yvette Cooper also complained that Amazon did not know about Rudakubana's conviction, as if they should or even could. Meanwhile, since Prevent knocked him back as not a terrorist, it looks like Starmer's big wheeze is to muddle the definition of terrorism (is that an Icelandic bank waving?) rather than extend Prevent's mandate or set up a new body for non-terrorist spree killer wannabes.
Not to mention that kitchen knives are easily found in kitchens. The clue is in the name.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
White supremacy is BACK.
That's a racist assumption.
No, it's an assumption about racists.
As I'm sure you know all the plaintiffs who went to the Supreme Court over affirmative action in US Colleges were Asian Americans. It's a bit complicated.
Convicted benefits cheats who fail to pay back the taxpayer could be stripped of their driving licences, under government plans to crack down on fraud. Those who repeatedly cheat the system and have debts of £1,000 or more could be punished with a driving ban of up to two years.
The plans also include new powers to force banks to hand over account information about benefit claimants to help target investigations, echoing a scheme announced by the previous Conservative government. But this is likely to face strong opposition from the banks and privacy campaigners.
How does it possibly help society to remove driving licences for non-driving offences?
All that happens is that someone working to pay their debts ends up losing their job, which isn’t going to help the situation.
If you employ more than a couple of people then chances are you will have received an attachment of earnings order from a court that relates to a whole host of unpaid debts. I have had employees with deductions that have gone back as far as 15 years from the original magistrates order (employee had worked for us for 15 months before I recieved notification).
It would be far better making the existing system work (benefits can be reduced, attachments of earning can be swiftly processed), than adding more penalties that in all likelihood won't be imposed.
It will need a court order so there is some checks and balances - which just adds more work, delays and costs to an over worked judicial system.
It seems like a gimmick and more performative nonsense from the government to make them look 'tough'.
A similar performative nonsense was solicitor general, Lucy Rigby, referring Urfan Sharif's sentence to the Court of Appeal for undue leniency. He was sentenced to life with a 40 year minimum tarriff. He would not even be eligible for parole until he aged 83. A heinous crime but the sentence feels right and I doubt the CoA will increase it. But appealing it makes the solicitor general look tough. Perfomative nonsense - please stop it.
I agree. Although I suspect there is a difference, in that Sharif's case was probably politically motivated, with the initiative coming from the minister, whereas the 'banning driving as a general punishment' idea has been kicking around the government for ages and may well have resurfaced as a civil service suggestion / option, whether off-the-shelf, or an individual official pushing the idea as a pet project.
Michael Howard commented that a requirement for the job of Home Sec is saying no to the totalitarian ideas that get presented.
Apparently these ideas are inherited in various departments, and re-presented at intervals. Indefinite detention without trial is a classic of the genre.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
White supremacy is BACK.
That's a racist assumption.
No, it's an assumption about racists.
The preference system in Federal contracting was put in to try and *reduce* the bias against various minorities.
Project 2025 well under way- the thing is, though, quite a lot of it is not going to work or will bring unintended consequences.
I´m reminded of the late, great P J O´Rourke:
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”
Something needs to be done, this is something, so let's do it.
Its mad, isn't it. I get it with guns. Its ought to be hard to buy guns and it is in this country. But every kitchen in the country has several lethal weapons just waiting to be picked up and used. And don't get me started on screwdrivers in the garage.
Comments
In addition to the site activities, there's also the small number of paying for people to be bumped off, although I'm not sure he was ever convicted on that (water muddied as at least some of the 'hit-men' were undercover FBI agents, I think, and no bodies were ever linked to the other payments). Wasn't one of the FBI people involved also seriously dodgy, which complicated the case?
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
This next 4 years will certainly be interesting. Not the first time a populist strongman has tried, failed, but then come back second time having learned their lessons, but the first time we’ve seen this kind of thing in the USA since its ascent to superpower.
Federal prosecutors alleged with mixed evidence that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[33] because they purportedly threatened to reveal the Silk Road enterprise.[43][44] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[33] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with murder for hire,[33][45] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[33][46] The district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did commission the murders.[47] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to uphold the sentence.[46] Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator).[48] Prosecutors moved to drop this indictment after his New York conviction and sentence became final.[49][50]
Still, it's better (marginally) than the endless droning on about Brexit from diehard Remainers who have not come to "acceptance" on the grief cycle.
There was also a separate case, which was dropped after he was sentenced to life without parole.
DWP Fraud is measured and runs at about 2%.
The restrictions on abortion and women's reproductive rights harking back to the '60s - '70s enforced sterilisation of native American, black and poor women.
Why should OGH be on the hook for Leon’s nonsense?
There are numerous American laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, there is also the US Constitution. What “affirmative action” means is, in itself, racial discrimination - the favouring of one person over another purely because of skin colour. The American people decided - rightly, in my view - that this is wrong and it should go.
Are we going to have four years of the PB left whining and LYING about what Trump is doing? Trump in reality is enough of a target, you don’t need to exaggerate or misrepresent him
Trump fans please expl.... no, don't bother
As for monitoring bank accounts the banks do this anyway flagging up irregular payments and the like, due to money laundering legislation.
Meanwhile we get stories like this, about the clinically fed up "rinsing" the system. Softens us up for further action.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/rise-of-adhd-sickfluencers-drives-surge-in-claims-for-69-000-a-year-disability-benefits-over-self-diagnosed-mental-health-conditions/ar-AA1xChbS?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=8b1717081948491faeb8fa0b919f6179&ei=28
Also I know that Musk supports people like the AfD and promotes holocaust deniers, so my priors are different to Obama who AFAIK doesn't.
If Trump dismantles all diversity programmes, UK must boycott the US Olympics.
That would seem to be seriously offensive to 100% of people with autism.
Talking down the economy for blatantly political reasons (and not even sensible ones at that) leading to business confidence falling off a cliff, shovelling money from the productive private sector to the unproductive and unreformed public sector, and adding massively to the wildly excessive burden of red tape give us plenty substantive to judge.
We may not yet be able to say just how bad the economic effects will be, but we already know that, despite promising "the fastest growth in the G7" or whatever it was, this government has unnecessarily damaged growth more than just about any other government in history.
This is simply a myth.
2. It was a joke against those who would defend Musk on the grounds that he is a self-declared person-on-the-spectrum
The joke IS “let’s try and defend Hitler in the same way”
I’ve said before that, even tho I admire Musk in many ways, I found that salute ugly and I don’t believe he was unaware of what he was doing
However, this “endless droning on” amounts to, what, one wry post per day on average? About one of the most divisive and disruptive events in Britain’s recent political history. On a politics forum.
(I await someone to discover that Salisbury FC, in 2018, had an Icelandic centre back did attend)
I agree with you, boycotts of upcoming US sporting events more likely like the boycott of Soviet Olympics in 1970’s, lots of individual stars boycotting the event, the UK government urging them not to go, but the sport governing bodies staying in.
PB ANTIQUES CORNER
We can all come here and gather under this rubric when the world is too much with us. It will be a regular slot - possibly one comment every three years - for the discussion of antiques we have encountered, lost, inherited, stolen, sold for fentanyl, or are considering purchasing
I’ll go first (and also maybe last)
I just went to an amazing old market here in Rangoon. They sell everything from prawns to silk, old car parts to wedding gowns, and also antiques.
I spotted these. “Sixty year old Mandalay lacquerware boxes”. For £50 each (possibly less after haggling). This seems like an amazing bargain to me, but is it? They are exquisitely pretty. Buy?
I know NOTHING about antiques
Spending on public services, benefits, and debt interest were all up on the year, while an increase in tax receipts was offset by National Insurance cuts made by the previous government.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwxzpqrnjko
There maybe a season for it, disruption, but that season has passed. The need now is for stability in world economies and peoples lives and the money in their pocket, and a time of healing divisions and coming together.
Trump is certainly not a man for all seasons. You need to lift the fog from your eyes and become a bit more woke yourself.
Buy it cos you like it which is always the best reason. Looks like the perfect stash box..
For many years, the US government has operated a system of giving preference, in contracts, to business owned by various groups - veterans, Native Americans, disabled etc etc.
If the owner is in one or more of those groups, they would have a higher chance of getting the contract.
As is usual in the US, this was a patch to try and deal with discrimination *against* various groups. Again, as is usual, it became a favour handed out by politicians to their favoured groups.
As is usual, again, it became part of a form of corruption. A company owned by one of the preferred groups would get a contract - on the understanding that they subcontract to another company that actually does the work. So the minority owner in question doesn’t get much benefit.
A lot of money is then recycled to the politicians…
Changing this has the probability of making a lot of people angry. Including lots of politicians you wouldn’t think of as pro-minority.
My wife’s an artist who relies on selling at exhibitions, fairs and open studio events, and I find it fascinating but frustrating to see people agonising over parting with a couple of hundred quid for a print when that’s what they’ll be spending on a single meal out later that day.
In the order, the Trump administration describes initiatives under the Diversity Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and the Diversity, Equity Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) umbrella as policies that "violate the text and spirit of our longstanding federal civil rights laws".
These policies, the document reads, undermine national unity as they "deny, discredit and undermine the traditional American values of hard work".
The Trump-led White House used the order to instruct government agencies to "combat" DEI preferences, mandates, policies and activities in the private sector.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cn0y51z7wedt
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly92g14edro
https://x.com/JoshEakle/status/1881835396981514319
I'm certain you'll get a pass because of the privilege your perceived high status as a professional sex tourist gives you, however numerous people have been cancelled for satire that was less offensive or was just perceived to be offensive
There are numerous people
I can't imagine that the Labour lead on 'Provide more jobs' and 'Tackling the government deficit' will last many more months.
And for that matter import control into the UK. Anything with ivory, or from certain endangered species ...
I think I shall buy a pair. I’m almost certain they are legitimately old because the shop owner - in a shop established in 1936! - is quite happy to point all the stuff that is new or repro, he makes a point of it. But when it’s old he says that too
He has a 100 year old Chinese opium pipe from Yunnan - made of decorated bone! - which gives me
the horn TBH but I don’t know what I’d do with it or where I’d put it. $200
I’m pretty sure all these prices are massively depressed because there are zero foreign tourists
A bit of research says these “Mandalay boxes” weee very popular from 1900-50. Then it seems they largely stopped making them (end of empire?)
That would explain the “60 year” reference by the shop owner - it’s close enough
Whatever has come since is irrelevant to the legal meaning of the order just repealed.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/executive-order-11246/as-amended
...During the performance of this contract, the contractor agrees as follows:
The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. Such action shall include, but not be limited to the following: employment, upgrading, demotion, or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship. The contractor agrees to post in conspicuous places, available to employees and applicants for employment, notices to be provided by the contracting officer setting forth the provisions of this nondiscrimination clause...
“The tramadol is in the Mandalay box”
Sorted. I’m buying them
Dominic Cummings
@Dominic2306
How the bullshit old media works & why nobody trusts it any more - desperate spin doctors try to shift blame from Whitehall's uselessness to AMAZON and the Sun r*****s swallow it.
The issue isn't where he bought a knife, it's how our Idiocracy behaved and covered up as usual.
Heather Cox Richardson email summary of day's events
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/executive-order-11246/regulations
Basically, what Trump's done is remove the requirement for those people not to be racist or sexist asshats when they employ people.
Hopefully, the Ukrainians will stop getting their assassins off FB Marketplace before then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxHbSmSkIzA
Nice to see the Irish contributing to political thought.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/tanistry
https://www.itv.com/news/2025-01-22/two-ids-could-be-needed-to-buy-knives-online-as-starmer-promises-tougher-laws
Something needs to be done, this is something, so let's do it.
I suspect today the prices are much nearer parity.
Oh
“1 in 6 Hiring Managers Have Been Told to Stop Hiring White Men”
“52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring
1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men
48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications
53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees
70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake”
https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/
Not to mention that kitchen knives are easily found in kitchens. The clue is in the name.
Apparently these ideas are inherited in various departments, and re-presented at intervals. Indefinite detention without trial is a classic of the genre.
So if it is removed…
Project 2025 well under way- the thing is, though, quite a lot of it is not going to work or will bring unintended consequences.
I´m reminded of the late, great P J O´Rourke:
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”