Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Actual LOL here in Rangoon, Burma
Aw, couple of conspiracy nuts having a cuddle. Sweet!
It was a genuinely well-honed insult, I am paying respect to a fellow craftsman
Biting, funny, acid, all in 16 words, and accurate enough to be personally cutting - hence the explosive reaction
Which is not only infantile, but nowhere near as sharp and funny as @moonshine's insult, which was, for those who need their memory jogged:
"Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here"
The real crime of COVID in the UK was that the first instinct of senior ministers was to relax procurement processes so their unqualified cronies could cash in at the expense of the exchequer and public health.
Ridiculous. The pressure was on them to source the PPE any which way they could. It's a bit rich to then complain that they sourced the PPE any which way they could.
The real crime of Covid is that the government's first action was to repudiate the pandemic plan they had. And that the media were so irresponsibly one-sided.
I’m still interested in the adherence to the policy of one use disposable PPE.
In industrial settings - welding and painting, disposable is only used for light, occasional stuff. For working in carpentry shops, welding shops, paint shops, reusable PPE is standard. Lower overall costs & superior protection. Additionally, it is more comfortable to wear - which helps encourage protection discipline.
Cleaning is easy with modern chemical knowledge. Hearing and facial expression contact is easier.
Good question. I don't know why the disposable blue "good for 15 minutes against Covid" mask became the standard in the medical field - but it has, and the public recognises that, and so will naturally think "if it's good enough for surgeons in operating theatres it's good enough for me in Tesco".
I want to know where the bullshit about disposable real masks being impossible for the general public to operate came from.
Vast numbers are used in casual settings in the building trade. Where the users are not exactly intellectuals with PhDs.
You open the plastic bag is comes in. Open it a bit, put it on, pull the elastic over your ears. The mask fits to your face. The end.
The paper ones are performative dance, by comparison. Better than nothing, but in the hanky-over-your-face range of usefulness.
If you want to protect medics, use those.
Or better, the reusable ones with filter cartridges. Which can be carefully fitted to your face. Quite a few will take a 3D printed seal, which is made from a scan of your face for maximum comfort.
The elastic round the ears is a real nuisance if one wears hearing aids.
Then get the ones that have elastic round the back of the head.
The reusable masks generally come with a kit of options for wearing - over ear, back of head etc etc.
On the question of a Trump third term, if I were so minded, rather than trying to get the 22nd amendment repealed, which is a super high bar, I'd be looking for irregularities in the original ratification process that I could challenge judicially before a friendly Supreme Court.
Result: Dems nominate Obama, who wins a landslide.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
There is some Trump paranoia /derangement going on here. He's just one man. Sure, a demented one, but the constitution of the USA was designed with its checks and balances precisely for this.
I don't see, with the Dems holding essentially half the House and 45%+ of the Senate, plus many states, how any of these criteria pass.
I would have agreed with you, Casino, until the immunity decision. That drew a coach and horses through the constitution, greatly reinforcing the power if the Presidency at the expense if the other branches of government - particularly the judiciary itself.
Constitutional protections only work as far as constitutional law is respected, and can be enforced.
I still think it unlikely, but no longer impossible at all.
On the question of a Trump third term, if I were so minded, rather than trying to get the 22nd amendment repealed, which is a super high bar, I'd be looking for irregularities in the original ratification process that I could challenge judicially before a friendly Supreme Court.
Result: Dems nominate Obama, who wins a landslide.
1) make gold medals out of gold 2) make gold medals with thick, multi coat gold plating. 3) dip the medals in thin lacquer - you can create a nearly invisible layer that prevents oxidation.
I used spray-on engine block lacquer on a couple of mini steam engines I built. Copper mild steel and brass need polishing all the time, otherwise. Still look shiny, years later.
Anyway, I suspect Mr G is right - at 82, Trump will just be too old to run again. He is already clearly far less coherent and sharp than he was last time he was President and the decline is only going to accelerate.
Voters and client media seemed far more concerned by Biden's cognitive decline than Trump's. Jesse Watters, Hannity and Laura Ingraham can normally explain Trump gobbledegook into a rational narrative.
Two reasons. First, Trump's Biden-moments were vastly outnumbered by Biden's Biden-moments. Second, Trump's opponents kept crying wolf over things that were clearly jokes or schtick, like the shark/electrocution dilemma.
I don't think Trump does humour unless it is unpleasant "othering". The Shark episode was quite earnest as was his question to Fauci regarding injecting bleach.
Yes, Trump's humour is 100% of the snide and bullying variety.
Best type of humour.
Public school and RAF, right?
I'd have sank not swum.
'RAF' might be considered snide and bullying in this particular case.
Anyway, I suspect Mr G is right - at 82, Trump will just be too old to run again. He is already clearly far less coherent and sharp than he was last time he was President and the decline is only going to accelerate.
Voters and client media seemed far more concerned by Biden's cognitive decline than Trump's. Jesse Watters, Hannity and Laura Ingraham can normally explain Trump gobbledegook into a rational narrative.
Two reasons. First, Trump's Biden-moments were vastly outnumbered by Biden's Biden-moments. Second, Trump's opponents kept crying wolf over things that were clearly jokes or schtick, like the shark/electrocution dilemma.
I don't think Trump does humour unless it is unpleasant "othering". The Shark episode was quite earnest as was his question to Fauci regarding injecting bleach.
Yes, Trump's humour is 100% of the snide and bullying variety. People thinking he's a scream are revealing something about themselves.
No-one thinks Trump is a scream but it should be obvious say, that Trump at the inauguration was hamming up being unable to kiss Melania because her hat got in the way. You do not have to think it funny to realise it was also not a sign of dementia.
I don't see any dementia in Trump. He doesn't have that excuse.
On the question of a Trump third term, if I were so minded, rather than trying to get the 22nd amendment repealed, which is a super high bar, I'd be looking for irregularities in the original ratification process that I could challenge judicially before a friendly Supreme Court.
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
My partner and I decided last week to get married although we're both 74 (wish us luck!) - we haven't bothered to think whether people will think that appropriate or difficult. Age is one of the first things one learns about people, but that shouldn't make it the most important thing. I'd rather have a competent, reasonable 82-year-old POTUS than an eccentric, unpredictable figure of any age.
I'm surprised to see all the evidence that older people tend to be more right-wing. I'm chair of my CLP and as leftish as ever. What I do notice is a certain detachment from the longer term. Will Britain become a member of the EU in 30 years, for instance? I'm in favour, but accept that coming generations will do as they think fit. But certain things, such as ridiculous inequality of income and opportunity across the world, seem as burningly intolerable as ever.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
On the question of a Trump third term, if I were so minded, rather than trying to get the 22nd amendment repealed, which is a super high bar, I'd be looking for irregularities in the original ratification process that I could challenge judicially before a friendly Supreme Court.
Result: Dems nominate Obama, who wins a landslide.
I am not sure either of those statements is true
I can't be certain about anything in the future. But I think both of them are pretty likely. There's a reason the proposal in the House rules him out.
Anyway, I suspect Mr G is right - at 82, Trump will just be too old to run again. He is already clearly far less coherent and sharp than he was last time he was President and the decline is only going to accelerate.
Voters and client media seemed far more concerned by Biden's cognitive decline than Trump's. Jesse Watters, Hannity and Laura Ingraham can normally explain Trump gobbledegook into a rational narrative.
Two reasons. First, Trump's Biden-moments were vastly outnumbered by Biden's Biden-moments. Second, Trump's opponents kept crying wolf over things that were clearly jokes or schtick, like the shark/electrocution dilemma.
I don't think Trump does humour unless it is unpleasant "othering". The Shark episode was quite earnest as was his question to Fauci regarding injecting bleach.
Yes, Trump's humour is 100% of the snide and bullying variety.
Best type of humour.
Public school and RAF, right?
I'd have sank not swum.
'RAF' might be considered snide and bullying in this particular case.
This will be the new spin from the wet marketeers and zoonosis types
"Oh what does it matter where it came from, so yeah fuck it, so it came from the lab, I kinda believed that all along even though I banged on about the market all that time but anyway who cares, yawn, it only killed twenty million people and decimated the global economy, it's not like it's that important, let's talk about something - anything - else. Please. PLEASE"
Lab leaks have occurred many times through history - e.g. the last person to die from smallpox died after a lab leak. I never saw any good reason why some people were so aggressively opposed to the idea that should be regarded as a possibility.
Lab leaks do occur. However, smallpox is an existing disease, not a novel one, like COVID-19 was. What are the *origins* of smallpox? Did it originally arise from a lab leak? Well, no, it arose from zoonosis, crossing over from rodents to humans in Africa, maybe 16-68k years ago.
DJT is looking pretty fucking haggard. Hopefully he'll die before we get into the heart of the third term crossfire hurricane. I have 0% doubt that he'll try if he is still with us in 2028. Why the fuck wouldn't he?
Anyway, I suspect Mr G is right - at 82, Trump will just be too old to run again. He is already clearly far less coherent and sharp than he was last time he was President and the decline is only going to accelerate.
Voters and client media seemed far more concerned by Biden's cognitive decline than Trump's. Jesse Watters, Hannity and Laura Ingraham can normally explain Trump gobbledegook into a rational narrative.
Two reasons. First, Trump's Biden-moments were vastly outnumbered by Biden's Biden-moments. Second, Trump's opponents kept crying wolf over things that were clearly jokes or schtick, like the shark/electrocution dilemma.
I don't think Trump does humour unless it is unpleasant "othering". The Shark episode was quite earnest as was his question to Fauci regarding injecting bleach.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
“Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten (German: [ˈkʁɪs.ti̯an ˈdʁɔs.tn̩] ⓘ, born 1972) is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses (emergent viruses). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the illness in Germany”
This will be the new spin from the wet marketeers and zoonosis types
"Oh what does it matter where it came from, so yeah fuck it, so it came from the lab, I kinda believed that all along even though I banged on about the market all that time but anyway who cares, yawn, it only killed twenty million people and decimated the global economy, it's not like it's that important, let's talk about something - anything - else. Please. PLEASE"
Lab leaks have occurred many times through history - e.g. the last person to die from smallpox died after a lab leak. I never saw any good reason why some people were so aggressively opposed to the idea that should be regarded as a possibility.
Lab leaks do occur. However, smallpox is an existing disease, not a novel one, like COVID-19 was. What are the *origins* of smallpox? Did it originally arise from a lab leak? Well, no, it arose from zoonosis, crossing over from rodents to humans in Africa, maybe 16-68k years ago.
What you really need to do now is post one of your pompous inane little comments where you say Well Akshually Evryone AgreeS it Came form the Market, see Cell, volume 9, MArch edition, and “Why it came from the market say people desperate to believe it came from the market”, co-authors Antony Fauci. Kristian Andersen, Peter Daszak, Xi Jinping, The Batwoman of Wuhan, Your Stupid Middlebrow Butt, Worobey, et al
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
My partner and I decided last week to get married although we're both 74 (wish us luck!) - we haven't bothered to think whether people will think that appropriate or difficult. Age is one of the first things one learns about people, but that shouldn't make it the most important thing. I'd rather have a competent, reasonable 82-year-old POTUS than an eccentric, unpredictable figure of any age.
I'm surprised to see all the evidence that older people tend to be more right-wing. I'm chair of my CLP and as leftish as ever. What I do notice is a certain detachment from the longer term. Will Britain become a member of the EU in 30 years, for instance? I'm in favour, but accept that coming generations will do as they think fit. But certain things, such as ridiculous inequality of income and opportunity across the world, seem as burningly intolerable as ever.
Congratulations Nick. What lovely news!
Yes, wonderful news. Congratulations @NickPalmer to you both.
DJT is looking pretty fucking haggard. Hopefully he'll die before we get into the heart of the third term crossfire hurricane. I have 0% doubt that he'll try if he is still with us in 2028. Why the fuck wouldn't he?
He’s really not “looking pretty haggard” when you take into account his age
For a 78 year old he looks alarmingly good. i saw some footage of him climbing on Marine One with the Missus and I reflexively thought, Wow he looks quite spry and vigorous, open necked shirt, talking lucidly, no obvious impairment
The contrast with the Late Biden Look: recently exhumed waxwork, eyes sewn shut, pallor of one of those blind cave lizards they find in Romania, was striking
WRT to 2028 elephant, this sidelines the important 2028 question both for politics and betting.
Trump will not get a third term. As to being nominated, standing etc that is different. He won't serve term 3. DYOR but IMHO bet acordingly.
So the big question - politics and bettng - is who will be the GOP candidate 2028. He (it will be a he) will be Trump's vicar on earth, and the current plan is he will continue Trumpism, a movement loads bigger than Trump himself.
Trumpism has two internal contradictions: Ordinary people nationalist populism is to some extent in conflict with plutocratic gangster oligarchy. So the two poles of Trumpism may collide.
Secondly, along with conflicts in principle, there is also the realities of the greasy pole. Lots of the inner circle people are to be made rich and richer by Trumpism. But several will want to be Emperor of USA and Dominions as well. They won't all play nicely.
Also, a central conflict will be whether the GOP 2028 anointed is Trump family dynasty or Trumpian Gangster Plutocrat.
it won't be dull. bet accordingly. DYOR.
The usual answer is to have enough noisy performative nationalist populism to distract the proles from the plutocratic gangsterism that's going on quietly on an industrial scale.
Question is whether the MAGA movement has anyone apart from DJT with the combination of talents needed to make that work.
Yes it's a hell of a trick to pull off.
Much of Trumps success is that the outrage and pleasure centres of the brain are closely linked. Admit it didnt you wake up this morning wondering what batshit crazy thing Trump has done next, turned on the news and sure enough he wants to send the palestinians to egypt. Its a never ending show and people are hooked.
Donald Trump vs Barack Obama in 2028? Sounds like fun. Would demonstrate that American democracy has completely run out of road - the only possible candidates the only two viable parties could proffer are ones who needed a change of rules to be allowed to run.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
This will be the new spin from the wet marketeers and zoonosis types
"Oh what does it matter where it came from, so yeah fuck it, so it came from the lab, I kinda believed that all along even though I banged on about the market all that time but anyway who cares, yawn, it only killed twenty million people and decimated the global economy, it's not like it's that important, let's talk about something - anything - else. Please. PLEASE"
Lab leaks have occurred many times through history - e.g. the last person to die from smallpox died after a lab leak. I never saw any good reason why some people were so aggressively opposed to the idea that should be regarded as a possibility.
Lab leaks do occur. However, smallpox is an existing disease, not a novel one, like COVID-19 was. What are the *origins* of smallpox? Did it originally arise from a lab leak? Well, no, it arose from zoonosis, crossing over from rodents to humans in Africa, maybe 16-68k years ago.
It was more the 2nd sentence I was interested in highlighting.
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB): 143 (but isn't this RUB per USD? So a weaker RUB has a higher number?)
{Snip]
IANAE but I believe USD/RUB is meant to represent USD 'divided by' RUB, so a ruble goes into a dollar 97.79 times currently.
There is some Trump paranoia /derangement going on here. He's just one man. Sure, a demented one, but the constitution of the USA was designed with its checks and balances precisely for this.
I don't see, with the Dems holding essentially half the House and 45%+ of the Senate, plus many states, how any of these criteria pass.
I don’t think precise design is an accurate description of the US constitution, more a lash up with several ancient components not fit for modern purpose and subject to constant tinkering.
Ok, but am I wrong? How does Trump pass an amendment to it with these requirements and the political reality on the ground?
He doesn't need to pass an amendment, he just needs SCOTUS to rule that the 22nd Amendment only applies to consecutive terms.
I suspect he and the GOP will just run him (assume he has not shuffled off this mortal coil).
Assume he wins they will then just plough on with the certification etc etc. Vance is veep. So he certifies.
Whose gonna stop it?
This. The law, and law enforcement, and the supreme court. All will be owned by Trump. They learned the lesson of the first term, and are exclusively appointing foaming loyalists to every position and in every agency. Especially the ones who are clearly not up to the job. Their job isn't to be good, its to ensure the thing is loyal to Trump.
As I understand it the states have the ability to run general elections as they see fit. Some will likely see that Trump is a Bad Man. And find themselves removed from the process by the government. Remember that states rights only works when the state agrees with the centre (also cf Thatcher vs Livingstone) - if a groovy state decides that Trump can't be on the ballot, they won't be allowed to set the ballot. And imagine the fun should He be excluded in a state - they'd simply declare the state void and insert delegates for Trump.
The American system doesn't elect the president anyway, merely electors who are appointed by the state. A streamlined more modern process would be to simply have the state appoint electors - or should the state prove to be full of traitors have the local GOP do it. Far more democratic.
Seriously - who would stop him? The FBI? Run by Trump. State courts? Ignore them. Local police? ignore them. The Supreme Court? Owned by Trump.
If Trump is not dead or totally 'out of it' then 2028 will not remotely be a normal election.
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
I disagree. Trump wasn't very bright at 42, but someone like yourself as sharp as a tack at 82 could make appropriate policy. From the physicality point of view, so long as you can handle a Sharpie pen you could do just fine. Remember you would have lackies to do the actual and metaphorical heavy lifting.
Another year for me to achieve 82, but the physical effort day to day would make it impossible no matter how many helpers were available
That depends. I'm 82 this April. I'm going skiing this March. I think I'd cope with being President or PM, given the chance.
My Mum is 82 this year. Still active, still mentally all there. But I doubt she would trust herself to handle multiple immensely complicated issues simultaneously while having to make potentially life or death decisions about a few of them day after day after day.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
Yep. Anybody departing from this either way is grinding an axe.
I don't know. It could be either.
Which is the point: we need to ensure it never happens again, and therefore every possible way it could have developed needs to be addressed. This is the important thing.
Leon's certainty will lead to wet markets, massive pig farms, battery chicken megafactories and other such places being perfect zoonotic breeding grounds for the next killer virus. He doesn't care, because his certainty says otherwise. Despite all the pandemics throughout history that were 'naturally' caused.
And yes, we need to be careful about the sort of medical/viral/bacterial research that goes on, with much more emphasis on "Should we do this?" over "Can we do this?"
And much more openness about any disease outbreaks - whatever the cause.
Hmm. Focus on the cause is more significant because for a couple of years, discussion of one potential cause was verboten. It's understandable, therefore, that evidence that cause is more likely gets celebrated.
As for the next one, there are several things that need to be done:
Deal with the wet markets AND Deal with the labs' biosecurity AND Get a proper pandemic plan AND Not immediately junk it when the next pandemic hits AND, most critically of all Recognise the costs of government decisions as well as their benefits.
I agree with your last statement - in part at least. There needs to be several pandemic plans, for different types of pandemic. Or, perhaps more accurately, a toolkit of little plans that can be assembled to address the exact characteristics of what happened. And costs can be hard to calculate when you do not know the exact characteristics of the disease that's hitting you - as happened in March and April 2020. Remember all that hand-washing?
Where I disagree is: "discussion of one potential cause was verboten".
It was never verboten. What people were doing was saying, with CERTAINTY that it was a lab leak - often with a sly hint at it being a man-made virus that was deliberately released and attacks on the people who weighed the evidence up otherwise. See Leon on here. People who weighed up the options and addressed both sides of the argument were fine. It's those claiming it was *certain* where it came from that were, and are, a big problem.
Althiugh JJ's comment is also fair. The target was claims that Covid was definitely man-made and the "plandemic" was engineered. It was not, as Leon is misremembering, a blanket ban on suggesting that it might have been caused by a leak from a laboratory.
No. You were literally forbidden to say “it came from the lab”. Those remarks were deleted and could get you banned
But not saying that it might have. We're agreeing.
Same now actually. There's no ban here on proclaiming certainty about how the pandemic started but there is an effective one because all such commentary is discounted as axe grinding.
“Accountant” was the ideal job for you, wasn’t it?
I’m glad you found your vocation and your proper role. Something so quintessentially YOU
1) make gold medals out of gold 2) make gold medals with thick, multi coat gold plating. 3) dip the medals in thin lacquer - you can create a nearly invisible layer that prevents oxidation.
I used spray-on engine block lacquer on a couple of mini steam engines I built. Copper mild steel and brass need polishing all the time, otherwise. Still look shiny, years later.
The lacquer rubs off quite quickly surely. Ok maybe not on your steam engines but I imagine an olympic medal could get handled a lot more.
Given the cost of the olympics you'd think they'd stretch to option 1.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
DJT is looking pretty fucking haggard. Hopefully he'll die before we get into the heart of the third term crossfire hurricane. I have 0% doubt that he'll try if he is still with us in 2028. Why the fuck wouldn't he?
He’s really not “looking pretty haggard” when you take into account his age
For a 78 year old he looks alarmingly good. i saw some footage of him climbing on Marine One with the Missus and I reflexively thought, Wow he looks quite spry and vigorous, open necked shirt, talking lucidly, no obvious impairment
The contrast with the Late Biden Look: recently exhumed waxwork, eyes sewn shut, pallor of one of those blind cave lizards they find in Romania, was striking
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
Donald Trump vs Barack Obama in 2028? Sounds like fun. Would demonstrate that American democracy has completely run out of road - the only possible candidates the only two viable parties could proffer are ones who needed a change of rules to be allowed to run.
I don't think that's going to be a problem - or, at any rate, if it is then the American Republic is over. Constitutional change requires the assent of two-thirds supermajorities in both houses and three-quarters of the states. How even the very dodgy Supreme Court gets around this, short of declaring that Trump's immunity extends to the ability to legislate by diktat and he is therefore a King, is beyond me.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
Yep. Anybody departing from this either way is grinding an axe.
I don't know. It could be either.
Which is the point: we need to ensure it never happens again, and therefore every possible way it could have developed needs to be addressed. This is the important thing.
Leon's certainty will lead to wet markets, massive pig farms, battery chicken megafactories and other such places being perfect zoonotic breeding grounds for the next killer virus. He doesn't care, because his certainty says otherwise. Despite all the pandemics throughout history that were 'naturally' caused.
And yes, we need to be careful about the sort of medical/viral/bacterial research that goes on, with much more emphasis on "Should we do this?" over "Can we do this?"
And much more openness about any disease outbreaks - whatever the cause.
Hmm. Focus on the cause is more significant because for a couple of years, discussion of one potential cause was verboten. It's understandable, therefore, that evidence that cause is more likely gets celebrated.
As for the next one, there are several things that need to be done:
Deal with the wet markets AND Deal with the labs' biosecurity AND Get a proper pandemic plan AND Not immediately junk it when the next pandemic hits AND, most critically of all Recognise the costs of government decisions as well as their benefits.
I agree with your last statement - in part at least. There needs to be several pandemic plans, for different types of pandemic. Or, perhaps more accurately, a toolkit of little plans that can be assembled to address the exact characteristics of what happened. And costs can be hard to calculate when you do not know the exact characteristics of the disease that's hitting you - as happened in March and April 2020. Remember all that hand-washing?
Where I disagree is: "discussion of one potential cause was verboten".
It was never verboten. What people were doing was saying, with CERTAINTY that it was a lab leak - often with a sly hint at it being a man-made virus that was deliberately released and attacks on the people who weighed the evidence up otherwise. See Leon on here. People who weighed up the options and addressed both sides of the argument were fine. It's those claiming it was *certain* where it came from that were, and are, a big problem.
Althiugh JJ's comment is also fair. The target was claims that Covid was definitely man-made and the "plandemic" was engineered. It was not, as Leon is misremembering, a blanket ban on suggesting that it might have been caused by a leak from a laboratory.
No. You were literally forbidden to say “it came from the lab”. Those remarks were deleted and could get you banned
But not saying that it might have. We're agreeing.
Same now actually. There's no ban here on proclaiming certainty about how the pandemic started but there is an effective one because all such commentary is discounted as axe grinding.
“Accountant” was the ideal job for you, wasn’t it?
I’m glad you found your vocation and your proper role. Something so quintessentially YOU
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
My partner and I decided last week to get married although we're both 74 (wish us luck!) - we haven't bothered to think whether people will think that appropriate or difficult. Age is one of the first things one learns about people, but that shouldn't make it the most important thing. I'd rather have a competent, reasonable 82-year-old POTUS than an eccentric, unpredictable figure of any age.
I'm surprised to see all the evidence that older people tend to be more right-wing. I'm chair of my CLP and as leftish as ever. What I do notice is a certain detachment from the longer term. Will Britain become a member of the EU in 30 years, for instance? I'm in favour, but accept that coming generations will do as they think fit. But certain things, such as ridiculous inequality of income and opportunity across the world, seem as burningly intolerable as ever.
Congratulations Nick. What lovely news!
Yes, wonderful news. Congratulations @NickPalmer to you both.
Congratulations Nick!
As you may be aware I married four years ago at the age of 72. So far so good.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
DJT is looking pretty fucking haggard. Hopefully he'll die before we get into the heart of the third term crossfire hurricane. I have 0% doubt that he'll try if he is still with us in 2028. Why the fuck wouldn't he?
He’s really not “looking pretty haggard” when you take into account his age
For a 78 year old he looks alarmingly good. i saw some footage of him climbing on Marine One with the Missus and I reflexively thought, Wow he looks quite spry and vigorous, open necked shirt, talking lucidly, no obvious impairment
The contrast with the Late Biden Look: recently exhumed waxwork, eyes sewn shut, pallor of one of those blind cave lizards they find in Romania, was striking
Yeah he’s 78 - but for a 78 year old, doing OK
We better not get back onto muscular not fat.
How much fat is required to make vegan venison into bacon?
Reeves adamant she will not tweak or change the IHT for farms.
She'll be forced to u-turn eventually. Why spin this out?
Why would she be forced to? The government has a majority. The policy isn't noticeably popular but the election is a long way off. It is likely to be a flawed policy in terms of raising cash but it only negatively affects small numbers of people.
As with VAT on private schools, it may be a bad idea and it probably won't raise much net revenue but there's no reason to think it will be reversed.
She is going to have farmers protesting for the next four years and there's quite a few Lab rural seats these days.
It 'aint worth the candle.
Not sure a u turn is going to win her any votes, and would mean she has to cut spending/find some other tax to raise. And she believes (rightly in my view) that it's the right policy.
It doesn't raise any money though and all of the supermarkets have come out and said it will put long term food security at risk. I guarantee you that people are more likely to trust farmers, Tesco and Sainsbury's on food matters than the government. It's a such an odd policy hill to die on unless it's ideologically driven in which case Labour will get spanked at the ballot box because largely the British public supports farmers more than they support politicians.
The ineptitude of Reeves is that she's wasting time and political capital on things which raise/save trivial amounts of money - farmers inheritance, VAT on school fees, WFA.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
We've just hit 123 mm of rain for January down here in Sidmouth. We were over 1,000 mm for 2024. There is more on the way. I expect South West Water to have imposed a hosepipe ban by the start of August!
1) make gold medals out of gold 2) make gold medals with thick, multi coat gold plating. 3) dip the medals in thin lacquer - you can create a nearly invisible layer that prevents oxidation.
I used spray-on engine block lacquer on a couple of mini steam engines I built. Copper mild steel and brass need polishing all the time, otherwise. Still look shiny, years later.
The lacquer rubs off quite quickly surely. Ok maybe not on your steam engines but I imagine an olympic medal could get handled a lot more.
Given the cost of the olympics you'd think they'd stretch to option 1.
Some of the lacquers are hard wearing. Most Olympic medals end up in a presentation case on the wall.
Re lacquering is a pretty simple thing.
Option 1, is pretty simple, as you say. Option 2 is very cheap to do these days.
DJT is looking pretty fucking haggard. Hopefully he'll die before we get into the heart of the third term crossfire hurricane. I have 0% doubt that he'll try if he is still with us in 2028. Why the fuck wouldn't he?
He’s really not “looking pretty haggard” when you take into account his age
For a 78 year old he looks alarmingly good. i saw some footage of him climbing on Marine One with the Missus and I reflexively thought, Wow he looks quite spry and vigorous, open necked shirt, talking lucidly, no obvious impairment
The contrast with the Late Biden Look: recently exhumed waxwork, eyes sewn shut, pallor of one of those blind cave lizards they find in Romania, was striking
Yeah he’s 78 - but for a 78 year old, doing OK
We better not get back onto muscular not fat.
How much fat is required to make vegan venison into bacon?
There is some Trump paranoia /derangement going on here. He's just one man. Sure, a demented one, but the constitution of the USA was designed with its checks and balances precisely for this.
I don't see, with the Dems holding essentially half the House and 45%+ of the Senate, plus many states, how any of these criteria pass.
I don’t think precise design is an accurate description of the US constitution, more a lash up with several ancient components not fit for modern purpose and subject to constant tinkering.
Ok, but am I wrong? How does Trump pass an amendment to it with these requirements and the political reality on the ground?
He doesn't need to pass an amendment, he just needs SCOTUS to rule that the 22nd Amendment only applies to consecutive terms.
I suspect he and the GOP will just run him (assume he has not shuffled off this mortal coil).
Assume he wins they will then just plough on with the certification etc etc. Vance is veep. So he certifies.
Whose gonna stop it?
This. The law, and law enforcement, and the supreme court. All will be owned by Trump. They learned the lesson of the first term, and are exclusively appointing foaming loyalists to every position and in every agency. Especially the ones who are clearly not up to the job. Their job isn't to be good, its to ensure the thing is loyal to Trump.
As I understand it the states have the ability to run general elections as they see fit. Some will likely see that Trump is a Bad Man. And find themselves removed from the process by the government. Remember that states rights only works when the state agrees with the centre (also cf Thatcher vs Livingstone) - if a groovy state decides that Trump can't be on the ballot, they won't be allowed to set the ballot. And imagine the fun should He be excluded in a state - they'd simply declare the state void and insert delegates for Trump.
The American system doesn't elect the president anyway, merely electors who are appointed by the state. A streamlined more modern process would be to simply have the state appoint electors - or should the state prove to be full of traitors have the local GOP do it. Far more democratic.
Seriously - who would stop him? The FBI? Run by Trump. State courts? Ignore them. Local police? ignore them. The Supreme Court? Owned by Trump.
If Trump is not dead or totally 'out of it' then 2028 will not remotely be a normal election.
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
I disagree. Trump wasn't very bright at 42, but someone like yourself as sharp as a tack at 82 could make appropriate policy. From the physicality point of view, so long as you can handle a Sharpie pen you could do just fine. Remember you would have lackies to do the actual and metaphorical heavy lifting.
Another year for me to achieve 82, but the physical effort day to day would make it impossible no matter how many helpers were available
That depends. I'm 82 this April. I'm going skiing this March. I think I'd cope with being President or PM, given the chance.
My Mum is 82 this year. Still active, still mentally all there. But I doubt she would trust herself to handle multiple immensely complicated issues simultaneously while having to make potentially life or death decisions about a few of them day after day after day.
But, does she have hundreds of staff to do all the work and just leave her to say yes or no.
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
My partner and I decided last week to get married although we're both 74 (wish us luck!) - we haven't bothered to think whether people will think that appropriate or difficult. Age is one of the first things one learns about people, but that shouldn't make it the most important thing. I'd rather have a competent, reasonable 82-year-old POTUS than an eccentric, unpredictable figure of any age.
I'm surprised to see all the evidence that older people tend to be more right-wing. I'm chair of my CLP and as leftish as ever. What I do notice is a certain detachment from the longer term. Will Britain become a member of the EU in 30 years, for instance? I'm in favour, but accept that coming generations will do as they think fit. But certain things, such as ridiculous inequality of income and opportunity across the world, seem as burningly intolerable as ever.
Congratulations Nick. May your marriage always be more harmonious than Radiohead!
Anyway, I suspect Mr G is right - at 82, Trump will just be too old to run again. He is already clearly far less coherent and sharp than he was last time he was President and the decline is only going to accelerate.
Voters and client media seemed far more concerned by Biden's cognitive decline than Trump's. Jesse Watters, Hannity and Laura Ingraham can normally explain Trump gobbledegook into a rational narrative.
Two reasons. First, Trump's Biden-moments were vastly outnumbered by Biden's Biden-moments. Second, Trump's opponents kept crying wolf over things that were clearly jokes or schtick, like the shark/electrocution dilemma.
I don't think Trump does humour unless it is unpleasant "othering". The Shark episode was quite earnest as was his question to Fauci regarding injecting bleach.
Yes, Trump's humour is 100% of the snide and bullying variety.
Best type of humour.
Public school and RAF, right?
I'd have sank not swum.
'RAF' might be considered snide and bullying in this particular case.
Oh shit yes. Planes but RN, wasn't it.
Genuine mistake and too late to edit!
I’m sure DA will bear up manfully!
Hope so. Don't want that acid tongue dissolving me in a barrel. I already have Leon's barbs to cope with on a regular basis.
1) make gold medals out of gold 2) make gold medals with thick, multi coat gold plating. 3) dip the medals in thin lacquer - you can create a nearly invisible layer that prevents oxidation.
I used spray-on engine block lacquer on a couple of mini steam engines I built. Copper mild steel and brass need polishing all the time, otherwise. Still look shiny, years later.
The lacquer rubs off quite quickly surely. Ok maybe not on your steam engines but I imagine an olympic medal could get handled a lot more.
Given the cost of the olympics you'd think they'd stretch to option 1.
Not sure many of them will run around saying do you want to hold my medal, unless they are total wassocks. Most likely be in a box or mounted in a frame
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
Incidentally; we just bought a new device from a well-known manufacturer, and it is nice and gleaming.
However, the manual is absolute pants. It is written in poor, unclear English; repeats the same points several times, and uses CAPITALS in such a way that it might have been written by Trump on a bad day. Stylistically, it is all over the place.
Manuals often get poor attention from manufacturers, and are almost always an afterthought. And yes, I often don't RTFM. But I wish people would take a little bit more pride in them.
DJT is looking pretty fucking haggard. Hopefully he'll die before we get into the heart of the third term crossfire hurricane. I have 0% doubt that he'll try if he is still with us in 2028. Why the fuck wouldn't he?
He’s really not “looking pretty haggard” when you take into account his age
For a 78 year old he looks alarmingly good. i saw some footage of him climbing on Marine One with the Missus and I reflexively thought, Wow he looks quite spry and vigorous, open necked shirt, talking lucidly, no obvious impairment
The contrast with the Late Biden Look: recently exhumed waxwork, eyes sewn shut, pallor of one of those blind cave lizards they find in Romania, was striking
Yeah he’s 78 - but for a 78 year old, doing OK
We better not get back onto muscular not fat.
How much fat is required to make vegan venison into bacon?
Venison is probably best preserved as biltong, which is actually not that hard to do.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
An accidental leak and a deliberate cover up.
How it then flowed around the world with the deliberate tolerance of some countries and the idiotic tolerance of others is something worthy of more discussion.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
Reeves adamant she will not tweak or change the IHT for farms.
She'll be forced to u-turn eventually. Why spin this out?
Why would she be forced to? The government has a majority. The policy isn't noticeably popular but the election is a long way off. It is likely to be a flawed policy in terms of raising cash but it only negatively affects small numbers of people.
As with VAT on private schools, it may be a bad idea and it probably won't raise much net revenue but there's no reason to think it will be reversed.
She is going to have farmers protesting for the next four years and there's quite a few Lab rural seats these days.
It 'aint worth the candle.
Not sure a u turn is going to win her any votes, and would mean she has to cut spending/find some other tax to raise. And she believes (rightly in my view) that it's the right policy.
It doesn't raise any money though and all of the supermarkets have come out and said it will put long term food security at risk. I guarantee you that people are more likely to trust farmers, Tesco and Sainsbury's on food matters than the government. It's a such an odd policy hill to die on unless it's ideologically driven in which case Labour will get spanked at the ballot box because largely the British public supports farmers more than they support politicians.
The ineptitude of Reeves is that she's wasting time and political capital on things which raise/save trivial amounts of money - farmers inheritance, VAT on school fees, WFA.
That's not entirely true to be fair. The centrepiece of the budget - the National Insurance hike - raised a decent amount of revenue. The fact that it was yet another raid on earned incomes of the kind we had been promised would not happen, disguised so poorly as an alleged levy on businesses that Reeves herself openly admitted that the cost would be offloaded directly to workers through wage suppression, hardly speaks to competence. But we must not under any circumstances tax wealth properly, so hey-ho.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Incidentally; we just bought a new device from a well-known manufacturer, and it is nice and gleaming.
However, the manual is absolute pants. It is written in poor, unclear English; repeats the same points several times, and uses CAPITALS in such a way that it might have been written by Trump on a bad day. Stylistically, it is all over the place.
Manuals often get poor attention from manufacturers, and are almost always an afterthought. And yes, I often don't RTFM. But I wish people would take a little bit more pride in them.
(/rant mode)
I remember watching, decades ago, about a small manufacturer of build yourself planes in the USA.
Designing the assembly manual cost five times what it cost to design the plane.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
Yep. Anybody departing from this either way is grinding an axe.
I don't know. It could be either.
Which is the point: we need to ensure it never happens again, and therefore every possible way it could have developed needs to be addressed. This is the important thing.
Leon's certainty will lead to wet markets, massive pig farms, battery chicken megafactories and other such places being perfect zoonotic breeding grounds for the next killer virus. He doesn't care, because his certainty says otherwise. Despite all the pandemics throughout history that were 'naturally' caused.
And yes, we need to be careful about the sort of medical/viral/bacterial research that goes on, with much more emphasis on "Should we do this?" over "Can we do this?"
And much more openness about any disease outbreaks - whatever the cause.
Hmm. Focus on the cause is more significant because for a couple of years, discussion of one potential cause was verboten. It's understandable, therefore, that evidence that cause is more likely gets celebrated.
As for the next one, there are several things that need to be done:
Deal with the wet markets AND Deal with the labs' biosecurity AND Get a proper pandemic plan AND Not immediately junk it when the next pandemic hits AND, most critically of all Recognise the costs of government decisions as well as their benefits.
I agree with your last statement - in part at least. There needs to be several pandemic plans, for different types of pandemic. Or, perhaps more accurately, a toolkit of little plans that can be assembled to address the exact characteristics of what happened. And costs can be hard to calculate when you do not know the exact characteristics of the disease that's hitting you - as happened in March and April 2020. Remember all that hand-washing?
Where I disagree is: "discussion of one potential cause was verboten".
It was never verboten. What people were doing was saying, with CERTAINTY that it was a lab leak - often with a sly hint at it being a man-made virus that was deliberately released and attacks on the people who weighed the evidence up otherwise. See Leon on here. People who weighed up the options and addressed both sides of the argument were fine. It's those claiming it was *certain* where it came from that were, and are, a big problem.
Althiugh JJ's comment is also fair. The target was claims that Covid was definitely man-made and the "plandemic" was engineered. It was not, as Leon is misremembering, a blanket ban on suggesting that it might have been caused by a leak from a laboratory.
No. You were literally forbidden to say “it came from the lab”. Those remarks were deleted and could get you banned
But not saying that it might have. We're agreeing.
Same now actually. There's no ban here on proclaiming certainty about how the pandemic started but there is an effective one because all such commentary is discounted as axe grinding.
“Accountant” was the ideal job for you, wasn’t it?
I’m glad you found your vocation and your proper role. Something so quintessentially YOU
Not everyone is so fortunate in life
Indeed.
I mean, imagine being somebody whose fantasies are so set in stone that nothing ever shakes them.
That poor person. What jobs would be open? Flint knapper? Spectator columnist?
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
Yep. Anybody departing from this either way is grinding an axe.
I don't know. It could be either.
Which is the point: we need to ensure it never happens again, and therefore every possible way it could have developed needs to be addressed. This is the important thing.
Leon's certainty will lead to wet markets, massive pig farms, battery chicken megafactories and other such places being perfect zoonotic breeding grounds for the next killer virus. He doesn't care, because his certainty says otherwise. Despite all the pandemics throughout history that were 'naturally' caused.
And yes, we need to be careful about the sort of medical/viral/bacterial research that goes on, with much more emphasis on "Should we do this?" over "Can we do this?"
And much more openness about any disease outbreaks - whatever the cause.
Hmm. Focus on the cause is more significant because for a couple of years, discussion of one potential cause was verboten. It's understandable, therefore, that evidence that cause is more likely gets celebrated.
As for the next one, there are several things that need to be done:
Deal with the wet markets AND Deal with the labs' biosecurity AND Get a proper pandemic plan AND Not immediately junk it when the next pandemic hits AND, most critically of all Recognise the costs of government decisions as well as their benefits.
I agree with your last statement - in part at least. There needs to be several pandemic plans, for different types of pandemic. Or, perhaps more accurately, a toolkit of little plans that can be assembled to address the exact characteristics of what happened. And costs can be hard to calculate when you do not know the exact characteristics of the disease that's hitting you - as happened in March and April 2020. Remember all that hand-washing?
Where I disagree is: "discussion of one potential cause was verboten".
It was never verboten. What people were doing was saying, with CERTAINTY that it was a lab leak - often with a sly hint at it being a man-made virus that was deliberately released and attacks on the people who weighed the evidence up otherwise. See Leon on here. People who weighed up the options and addressed both sides of the argument were fine. It's those claiming it was *certain* where it came from that were, and are, a big problem.
Althiugh JJ's comment is also fair. The target was claims that Covid was definitely man-made and the "plandemic" was engineered. It was not, as Leon is misremembering, a blanket ban on suggesting that it might have been caused by a leak from a laboratory.
No. You were literally forbidden to say “it came from the lab”. Those remarks were deleted and could get you banned
But not saying that it might have. We're agreeing.
Same now actually. There's no ban here on proclaiming certainty about how the pandemic started but there is an effective one because all such commentary is discounted as axe grinding.
“Accountant” was the ideal job for you, wasn’t it?
I’m glad you found your vocation and your proper role. Something so quintessentially YOU
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
More evidence, if any were needed, that he is a vile c-nt and a deeply flawed human being comes to us the form of his old F430 which is up for auction.
It's Rosso Corsa with a TAN interior when, of course, it should be Rosso Corsa/Crema - the classic combo for V8 Ferraris. Tan looks stupid and wrong with Rosso Corsa even if the leather, in both shade and texture, matches the folds of his neck pussy.
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
I doubt there is much beyond the stupidity of these clowns, other than enacting policies that will actually achieve what they want and actually bring in money and not piss off the majority of the population. You could not make some of this stuff up.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
Yes but if it was an attack by China on western economies they wouldnt want a vaccine immediately for obvious reasons. What would be the point. They would want to let the fear and chaos do damage first.
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
Incidentally; we just bought a new device from a well-known manufacturer, and it is nice and gleaming.
However, the manual is absolute pants. It is written in poor, unclear English; repeats the same points several times, and uses CAPITALS in such a way that it might have been written by Trump on a bad day. Stylistically, it is all over the place.
Manuals often get poor attention from manufacturers, and are almost always an afterthought. And yes, I often don't RTFM. But I wish people would take a little bit more pride in them.
(/rant mode)
Bet it was made in China and manual written there as well.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
An engineered virus that accidentally leaked from the lab is my working theory with the research being done for benign reasons such as vaccine development rather than anything like biowarfare.
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
Death in service benefits to military personnel will potentially be chargeable to IHT after 2027. This may not have occurred to Rachel Reeves, when the changes were announced.
Donald Trump vs Barack Obama in 2028? Sounds like fun. Would demonstrate that American democracy has completely run out of road - the only possible candidates the only two viable parties could proffer are ones who needed a change of rules to be allowed to run.
More likely to be Vice President Vance v Buttigieg or Shapiro or O'Rourke in my view
1) make gold medals out of gold 2) make gold medals with thick, multi coat gold plating. 3) dip the medals in thin lacquer - you can create a nearly invisible layer that prevents oxidation.
I used spray-on engine block lacquer on a couple of mini steam engines I built. Copper mild steel and brass need polishing all the time, otherwise. Still look shiny, years later.
The lacquer rubs off quite quickly surely. Ok maybe not on your steam engines but I imagine an olympic medal could get handled a lot more.
Given the cost of the olympics you'd think they'd stretch to option 1.
Not sure many of them will run around saying do you want to hold my medal, unless they are total wassocks. Most likely be in a box or mounted in a frame
A few Olympians bring their medals along when doing a speech to a small audience. Had one chap, at the rowing club, do that so that the kids could see an Olympic medal up close.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
(Snip). We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
(Snip)
I worked for tech companies as an engineer, including one that did change the world in a minor way (though before I was there... ). I certainly was not the best engineer at those companies, but I doubt I would have survived years at any of them if I was 'really not very bright'. Ditto when I did contracting.
How that compares to your self-proclaimed brilliance is up to others to decide.
Reeves adamant she will not tweak or change the IHT for farms.
She'll be forced to u-turn eventually. Why spin this out?
Why would she be forced to? The government has a majority. The policy isn't noticeably popular but the election is a long way off. It is likely to be a flawed policy in terms of raising cash but it only negatively affects small numbers of people.
As with VAT on private schools, it may be a bad idea and it probably won't raise much net revenue but there's no reason to think it will be reversed.
She is going to have farmers protesting for the next four years and there's quite a few Lab rural seats these days.
It 'aint worth the candle.
Not sure a u turn is going to win her any votes, and would mean she has to cut spending/find some other tax to raise. And she believes (rightly in my view) that it's the right policy.
It doesn't raise any money though and all of the supermarkets have come out and said it will put long term food security at risk. I guarantee you that people are more likely to trust farmers, Tesco and Sainsbury's on food matters than the government. It's a such an odd policy hill to die on unless it's ideologically driven in which case Labour will get spanked at the ballot box because largely the British public supports farmers more than they support politicians.
The ineptitude of Reeves is that she's wasting time and political capital on things which raise/save trivial amounts of money - farmers inheritance, VAT on school fees, WFA.
She is just targeting those who mostly don't vote Labour ie farmers, pensioners, private school parents and business owners (who have been hit by the rise in employers NI too)
It’s incredible how low energy the left is now. If Trump were making changes like this in 2016 there’d be armies of blue-haired transgoblins burning down the country. But now their media is dead. Their tech CEOs bent the knee. They’ve got nothing now. Demoralized. Tired. Flaccid. 5:20 AM · Jan 26, 2025 · 55.2K Views
Just taken a quick skim through the past hour or so's posts:
@Leon: boring @Dura_Ace: brilliant @NickPalmer: many congrats @Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
WRT to 2028 elephant, this sidelines the important 2028 question both for politics and betting.
Trump will not get a third term. As to being nominated, standing etc that is different. He won't serve term 3. DYOR but IMHO bet acordingly.
So the big question - politics and bettng - is who will be the GOP candidate 2028. He (it will be a he) will be Trump's vicar on earth, and the current plan is he will continue Trumpism, a movement loads bigger than Trump himself.
Trumpism has two internal contradictions: Ordinary people nationalist populism is to some extent in conflict with plutocratic gangster oligarchy. So the two poles of Trumpism may collide.
Secondly, along with conflicts in principle, there is also the realities of the greasy pole. Lots of the inner circle people are to be made rich and richer by Trumpism. But several will want to be Emperor of USA and Dominions as well. They won't all play nicely.
Also, a central conflict will be whether the GOP 2028 anointed is Trump family dynasty or Trumpian Gangster Plutocrat.
it won't be dull. bet accordingly. DYOR.
The usual answer is to have enough noisy performative nationalist populism to distract the proles from the plutocratic gangsterism that's going on quietly on an industrial scale.
Question is whether the MAGA movement has anyone apart from DJT with the combination of talents needed to make that work.
Yes it's a hell of a trick to pull off.
Much of Trumps success is that the outrage and pleasure centres of the brain are closely linked. Admit it didnt you wake up this morning wondering what batshit crazy thing Trump has done next, turned on the news and sure enough he wants to send the palestinians to egypt. Its a never ending show and people are hooked.
No I didn't. It was the Aussie Open final.
I quite like discussing the Trump phenomenon (which it is) but I don't find what he says particularly interesting. To me it's quite dull hearing him ramble on. I'd rather listen to, say, Yvette Cooper.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
An engineered virus that accidentally leaked from the lab is my working theory with the research being done for benign reasons such as vaccine development rather than anything like biowarfare.
Yes, I'm with @another_richard - accidental release, deliberate cover-up. The cover-up is now 100% indisputable, I will reluctantly allow maybe 2% doubt on the origin (we shall probably never know 100%)
That said there were disquieting links between Chinese military and those labs, and Chinese intel and defence people were discussing "weaponised coronaviruses" for years before Covid. However, I am certain you could find similarly iffy links between the US military and US biolabs and similar discussions in US circles. This is what they do, these big hegemonic nations
Just taken a quick skim through the past hour or so's posts:
@Leon: boring @Dura_Ace: brilliant @NickPalmer: many congrats @Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
Cheers Ben and yes I agree. I don't think they should be ringfenced after the first inheritence. It just seems pretty callous to pay out compensation to someone who died serving their country and then take 40% of it away again with the other hand.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
(Snip). We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
(Snip)
I worked for tech companies as an engineer, including one that did change the world in a minor way (though before I was there... ). I certainly was not the best engineer at those companies, but I doubt I would have survived years at any of them if I was 'really not very bright'. Ditto when I did contracting.
How that compares to your self-proclaimed brilliance is up to others to decide.
Intelligence is like being “hard”, “coolness” or “funny”.
Anyone who bangs on about how much they have, has none.
It’s incredible how low energy the left is now. If Trump were making changes like this in 2016 there’d be armies of blue-haired transgoblins burning down the country. But now their media is dead. Their tech CEOs bent the knee. They’ve got nothing now. Demoralized. Tired. Flaccid. 5:20 AM · Jan 26, 2025 · 55.2K Views
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
Garland wasted so much time that Trump was able to run down the clock.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
Just taken a quick skim through the past hour or so's posts:
@Leon: boring @Dura_Ace: brilliant @NickPalmer: many congrats @Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
Cheers Ben and yes I agree. I don't think they should be ringfenced after the first inheritence. It just seems pretty callous to pay out compensation to someone who died serving their country and then take 40% of it away again with the other hand.
It seems just so egregiously callous that I cannot imagine it's the case. Then again, governments of all stripes occasionally veer into egregious callousness.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
Yes but if it was an attack by China on western economies they wouldnt want a vaccine immediately for obvious reasons. What would be the point. They would want to let the fear and chaos do damage first.
But they didn't have a vaccine ready to roll even for their own people, recall the awful scenes in Hubei. And there is no way China wanted to do three/four years of lockdown which nearly led to civil strife
It was probably a pathogenised virus (engineered for wellmeaning if dodgy Gain of Function vaccine-research reasons), it got out by accident, and shifted 300 years from the CDC to the wet market, which became the first superspreader event
The DEEP irony of all this, is that this exact theory - it was an engineered virus which accidentally escaped from the Wuhan CDC and then spread at the market - was the conclusion of the very first Chinese scientists to investigate Covid in early 2020. They pre-published their study. And then China "disappeared" them and tried to erase their paper from history
They were right all along. First thought, best thought - as is so often the case
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
Garland wasted so much time that Trump was able to run down the clock.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
Those two events look very connected - would Garland have done anything if Trump had delayed his presidential campaign a few more months ?
It then took until August 2023 for Trump to be indicted with a trial set to begin in March 2024.
It seemed fairly clear to me, that the lack of interest in prosecuting Trump was about the tradition of not prosecuting people once they are out of power. Many democratic countries drop cases after politicians return to private life.
The Trump investigation should have started on Jan 6th.
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB): 143 (but isn't this RUB per USD? So a weaker RUB has a higher number?)
{Snip]
IANAE but I believe USD/RUB is meant to represent USD 'divided by' RUB, so a ruble goes into a dollar 97.79 times currently.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
(Snip). We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
(Snip)
I worked for tech companies as an engineer, including one that did change the world in a minor way (though before I was there... ). I certainly was not the best engineer at those companies, but I doubt I would have survived years at any of them if I was 'really not very bright'. Ditto when I did contracting.
How that compares to your self-proclaimed brilliance is up to others to decide.
Brightness is ten a penny on here. What's more unusual is where there's a big gap between self-perception and reality on that score. This can cause turbulence.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
Yes but if it was an attack by China on western economies they wouldnt want a vaccine immediately for obvious reasons. What would be the point. They would want to let the fear and chaos do damage first.
But they didn't have a vaccine ready to roll even for their own people, recall the awful scenes in Hubei. And there is no way China wanted to do three/four years of lockdown which nearly led to civil strife
It was probably a pathogenised virus (engineered for wellmeaning if dodgy Gain of Function vaccine-research reasons), it got out by accident, and shifted 300 years from the CDC to the wet market, which became the first superspreader event
The DEEP irony of all this, is that this exact theory - it was an engineered virus which accidentally escaped from the Wuhan CDC and then spread at the market - was the conclusion of the very first Chinese scientists to investigate Covid in early 2020. They pre-published their study. And then China "disappeared" them and tried to erase their paper from history
They were right all along. First thought, best thought - as is so often the case
The flaw with all these labs and our own Pirbright is just as bad is that it only takes one loony, one Shipman in 1,000 good workers to release something ghastly. Most farmers still think that is what happend with the 2001 FMD at Pirbright. If it were proved to be true then the compensation due to those affected mega and minor would bankrupt DEFRA.
On COVID no one was treated more harshly and more unfairly for doing no more than voicing an unwelcome alternative analysis than Andrew Bridgen. Even if he was wrong his analysis deserved to be listened to and deserved to be aired on boards such as this.
For clarity in Andrew Bridgen now an un-un-person ?
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
Garland wasted so much time that Trump was able to run down the clock.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB): 143 (but isn't this RUB per USD? So a weaker RUB has a higher number?)
{Snip]
IANAE but I believe USD/RUB is meant to represent USD 'divided by' RUB, so a ruble goes into a dollar 97.79 times currently.
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB): 143 (but isn't this RUB per USD? So a weaker RUB has a higher number?)
{Snip]
IANAE but I believe USD/RUB is meant to represent USD 'divided by' RUB, so a ruble goes into a dollar 97.79 times currently.
Just taken a quick skim through the past hour or so's posts:
@Leon: boring @Dura_Ace: brilliant @NickPalmer: many congrats @Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
Cheers Ben and yes I agree. I don't think they should be ringfenced after the first inheritence. It just seems pretty callous to pay out compensation to someone who died serving their country and then take 40% of it away again with the other hand.
It seems just so egregiously callous that I cannot imagine it's the case. Then again, governments of all stripes occasionally veer into egregious callousness.
Why is it that I am certain that MPs have a life insurance scheme that pays no tax on payout?
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
More evidence, if any were needed, that he is a vile c-nt and a deeply flawed human being comes to us the form of his old F430 which is up for auction.
It's Rosso Corsa with a TAN interior when, of course, it should be Rosso Corsa/Crema - the classic combo for V8 Ferraris. Tan looks stupid and wrong with Rosso Corsa even if the leather, in both shade and texture, matches the folds of his neck pussy.
I'd pay money to see the fat **** get in and out of it.
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
Garland wasted so much time that Trump was able to run down the clock.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
Those two events look very connected - would Garland have done anything if Trump had delayed his presidential campaign a few more months ?
It then took until August 2023 for Trump to be indicted with a trial set to begin in March 2024.
It seemed fairly clear to me, that the lack of interest in prosecuting Trump was about the tradition of not prosecuting people once they are out of power. Many democratic countries drop cases after politicians return to private life.
The Trump investigation should have started on Jan 6th.
I have a problem with dropping cases when politicians return to private life. I am afraid it has been abused. Now suppose Reeves and Starmer stole £100 M while in office and put it in their own accounts, I guess there would be efforts to recover it. But if they cause £100 B damage to the nation's finances through arrogant malfeasance, as seems to be their goal and aspiration then they are let walk away with it. Is that really right ?
Comments
The reusable masks generally come with a kit of options for wearing - over ear, back of head etc etc.
The paper junk ones always use over ear.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
That drew a coach and horses through the constitution, greatly reinforcing the power if the Presidency at the expense if the other branches of government - particularly the judiciary itself.
Constitutional protections only work as far as constitutional law is respected, and can be enforced.
I still think it unlikely, but no longer impossible at all.
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
1) make gold medals out of gold
2) make gold medals with thick, multi coat gold plating.
3) dip the medals in thin lacquer - you can create a nearly invisible layer that prevents oxidation.
I used spray-on engine block lacquer on a couple of mini steam engines I built. Copper mild steel and brass need polishing all the time, otherwise. Still look shiny, years later.
Genuine mistake and too late to edit!
(Former and hopefully future PBer Alistair Meeks's Medium site is at https://alastair-meeks.medium.com/ )
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0eDaYt413g
“Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten (German: [ˈkʁɪs.ti̯an ˈdʁɔs.tn̩] ⓘ, born 1972) is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses (emergent viruses). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the illness in Germany”
Good enough?
For a 78 year old he looks alarmingly good. i saw some footage of him climbing on Marine One with the Missus and I reflexively thought, Wow he looks quite spry and vigorous, open necked shirt, talking lucidly, no obvious impairment
The contrast with the Late Biden Look: recently exhumed waxwork, eyes sewn shut, pallor of one of those blind cave lizards they find in Romania, was striking
Yeah he’s 78 - but for a 78 year old, doing OK
https://uk.investing.com/currencies/usd-rub
No one has offered up a rate of ~0.01 for the competition yet anyway ;-)
Given the cost of the olympics you'd think they'd stretch to option 1.
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
As you may be aware I married four years ago at the age of 72. So far so good.
Sure you'll both be fine.
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
Re lacquering is a pretty simple thing.
Option 1, is pretty simple, as you say.
Option 2 is very cheap to do these days.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
However, the manual is absolute pants. It is written in poor, unclear English; repeats the same points several times, and uses CAPITALS in such a way that it might have been written by Trump on a bad day. Stylistically, it is all over the place.
Manuals often get poor attention from manufacturers, and are almost always an afterthought. And yes, I often don't RTFM. But I wish people would take a little bit more pride in them.
(/rant mode)
How it then flowed around the world with the deliberate tolerance of some countries and the idiotic tolerance of others is something worthy of more discussion.
Designing the assembly manual cost five times what it cost to design the plane.
I mean, imagine being somebody whose fantasies are so set in stone that nothing ever shakes them.
That poor person. What jobs would be open? Flint knapper? Spectator columnist?
https://rockstarcarauction.com/view/trumps-2007-ferrari-f430-coupe/0f8ec2bb-609d-4f0f-e763-08dd29cbe8c6
It's Rosso Corsa with a TAN interior when, of course, it should be Rosso Corsa/Crema - the classic combo for V8 Ferraris. Tan looks stupid and wrong with Rosso Corsa even if the leather, in both shade and texture, matches the folds of his neck pussy.
You could not make some of this stuff up.
If this source is accurate then proposal is:
active duty: exempt
off duty: taxable
Active duty should definitely be exempt, not sure on off duty.
How that compares to your self-proclaimed brilliance is up to others to decide.
It’s incredible how low energy the left is now. If Trump were making changes like this in 2016 there’d be armies of blue-haired transgoblins burning down the country. But now their media is dead. Their tech CEOs bent the knee. They’ve got nothing now. Demoralized. Tired. Flaccid.
5:20 AM · Jan 26, 2025
·
55.2K
Views
https://x.com/MedGold_/status/1883384398512636313
@Leon: boring
@Dura_Ace: brilliant
@NickPalmer: many congrats
@Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
I quite like discussing the Trump phenomenon (which it is) but I don't find what he says particularly interesting. To me it's quite dull hearing him ramble on. I'd rather listen to, say, Yvette Cooper.
That said there were disquieting links between Chinese military and those labs, and Chinese intel and defence people were discussing "weaponised coronaviruses" for years before Covid. However, I am certain you could find similarly iffy links between the US military and US biolabs and similar discussions in US circles. This is what they do, these big hegemonic nations
Accidental leak; deliberate cover-up
Anyone who bangs on about how much they have, has none.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_special_counsel_investigation
Those two events look very connected - would Garland have done anything if Trump had delayed his presidential campaign a few more months ?
It then took until August 2023 for Trump to be indicted with a trial set to begin in March 2024.
It was probably a pathogenised virus (engineered for wellmeaning if dodgy Gain of Function vaccine-research reasons), it got out by accident, and shifted 300 years from the CDC to the wet market, which became the first superspreader event
The DEEP irony of all this, is that this exact theory - it was an engineered virus which accidentally escaped from the Wuhan CDC and then spread at the market - was the conclusion of the very first Chinese scientists to investigate Covid in early 2020. They pre-published their study. And then China "disappeared" them and tried to erase their paper from history
They were right all along. First thought, best thought - as is so often the case
The Trump investigation should have started on Jan 6th.
On COVID no one was treated more harshly and more unfairly for doing no more than voicing an unwelcome alternative analysis than Andrew Bridgen. Even if he was wrong his analysis deserved to be listened to and deserved to be aired on boards such as this.
For clarity in Andrew Bridgen now an un-un-person ?
Think of it as “How many rubles to buy a dollar?”