Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
The pandemic showed just how few people understand data/statistics.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
I think one can count on the fingers of one hand, the number of politicians who would present statistics in an honest fashion.
Outright lying is always rare, in this country, but selective presentation is ubiquitous.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
A tenth of British Farmland to be repurposed for net zero
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’ Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”. “Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.” The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
Farmers getting 90% of their income from subsidies is totally disgusting.
Any other industry, and they'd have been shut down decades ago by the Thatcher government.
Well apart from the public sector which also gets its funding from the government.
Which is effectively what managing unprofitable land use is in this country.
The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.
Whether having Upper Swaledale so covered is a good idea is open for debate.
“The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.”
I’m getting more sheep, and it’s not for benefit of tourists, but the UK food chain because I believe in eat local. We don’t get any tourists driving past taking pictures of sheep.
Nor is for the love of sheep - though maybe I should phrase it different than that. Sheep are boring. They are also weird and stupid, like they give birth and stand there stunned sometimes doing nothing like they didn’t even know they were pregnant or a clue what’s happening or want any part in parenting. 🐑🤦♀️
I'm going to try and calculate what proportion of UK calorie consumption is British lamb & mutton. I'd guess 0.5%.
That's a marketing issue. Sheep are excellent food, especially considering the amount of grass in their diet.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
A tenth of British Farmland to be repurposed for net zero
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’ Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”. “Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.” The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
Farmers getting 90% of their income from subsidies is totally disgusting.
Any other industry, and they'd have been shut down decades ago by the Thatcher government.
Well apart from the public sector which also gets its funding from the government.
Which is effectively what managing unprofitable land use is in this country.
The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.
Whether having Upper Swaledale so covered is a good idea is open for debate.
“The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.”
I’m getting more sheep, and it’s not for benefit of tourists, but the UK food chain because I believe in eat local. We don’t get any tourists driving past taking pictures of sheep.
Nor is for the love of sheep - though maybe I should phrase it different than that. Sheep are boring. They are also weird and stupid, like they give birth and stand there stunned sometimes doing nothing like they didn’t even know they were pregnant or a clue what’s happening or want any part in parenting. 🐑🤦♀️
I'm going to try and calculate what proportion of UK calorie consumption is British lamb & mutton. I'd guess 0.5%.
That's a marketing issue. Sheep are excellent food, especially considering the amount of grass in their diet.
Sheep are also ideal for rearing on land unsuitable for arable or dairy.
This is the trouble with sheep. They take up a very large proportion of the UK's agricultural land, depend on large subsidies, and contribute little to overall calorie consumption. That compares with grains, which take up a remarkably small proportion of land and provide over 100% of the UK's demand for them.
If you were restart our agricultural policy from scratch, wiping centuries of custom and tradition, there is no way any government would set up a system like the one we have at the moment.
They contributed a fair bit to my calories consumption last night. Their meat is fine, their cheese is great.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
The pandemic showed just how few people understand data/statistics.
The pandemic showed just how many people want data/statistics to say what they *feel*
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
What the actual f***?
Can’t they just set up a recruitment centre in Manila? There would be a queue around the block for UK visas for care workers, most of whom would be qualified nurses and could work towards UK certification.
Charge £10k/year/dependent for visas.
They do recruit from Manila.
When my wife was in HR for the NHS she went, with a team, to the Phillipines to recruit nurses.
There was a queue round the block. People travelled for days from outer areas to get there.
Awesome! Something like 80% of the nurses in the sandpit are Filipinas, lovely people.
They're great. They also recruit from India. The nurses have to commit to 3 years in the region. Problem it a fair few of the Indian ones then move off to Leicester, Brum, London and other places with a large diaspora. The Filipino's tend to put down roots and stay. The Phillipines trains more nurses than they need and get paid a fee for the ones we take.
Works brilliantly and they are fantastic workers.
"The Philippines trains more nurses than they need" - hmmm. We have a shortage of training places for people who graduate with medical degrees.
Perhaps we could do a deal.
I have just said that. We do. Well South Tyneside and Sunderland Trust do.
Probably something other trusts could do as well.
I meant sending UK graduates to train in the Philippines. We have the bizarre situation that with a growing population, and growing NHS, we have a cap on the number of university places for medical studies. Based on having places for the graduates to train, afterwards.
Ah, got you, yes, why not. It would make sense and give the graduates a great life experience to boot.
Alternatively, stop nursing being a graduate level training, and go back to what it was in the good old days.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
Dependents can only be your partner and your children under 18 living with you at home. That doesn't mean a dependent visa will be issued, only that they are eligible.
So this guy claims applicants on average get visas for 9 of their own children under 18, with half of these having more than 9 children.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
Dependents can only be your partner and your children under 18 living with you at home. That doesn't mean a dependent visa will be issued, only that they are eligible.
So this guy claims applicants on average get visas for 9 of their own children under 18, with half of these having more than 9 children.
A tenth of British Farmland to be repurposed for net zero
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’ Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”. “Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.” The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
Farmers getting 90% of their income from subsidies is totally disgusting.
Any other industry, and they'd have been shut down decades ago by the Thatcher government.
Well apart from the public sector which also gets its funding from the government.
Which is effectively what managing unprofitable land use is in this country.
The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.
Whether having Upper Swaledale so covered is a good idea is open for debate.
“The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.”
I’m getting more sheep, and it’s not for benefit of tourists, but the UK food chain because I believe in eat local. We don’t get any tourists driving past taking pictures of sheep.
Nor is for the love of sheep - though maybe I should phrase it different than that. Sheep are boring. They are also weird and stupid, like they give birth and stand there stunned sometimes doing nothing like they didn’t even know they were pregnant or a clue what’s happening or want any part in parenting. 🐑🤦♀️
I'm going to try and calculate what proportion of UK calorie consumption is British lamb & mutton. I'd guess 0.5%.
Why is it so hard to buy mutton or hogget these days? They are even more tasty than lamb, if cooked correctly.
I have to go to Jesmond Dene market they hold on a bridge over the Dene to get it. It’s smashing. Not even the local farm shops stock it.
They were being quite rude about that one on Ukraine the Latest, presumably yesterday.
Along the lines of "the mind boggles".
If this happens then Putin will have plucked an unlikely victory from the jaws of geopolitical defeat.
A war of aggression should not be rewarded with territorial concessions, but it’s understandable that if people really want it to stop, they may have to accept the status quo for a while. But the status quo also includes Russia being locked out of Western energy markets.
Utterly brain dead to suggest doing something that will simply fund military rebuilding and hasten the next Russian invasion in Eastern Europe.
It is, however, worth remembering that Nord Stream no longer exists.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
Question is- is there any degree of right-wingness that would cause current Conservatives to think "no, that's too right wing for me"?
Forced choice.
Starmer or Farage? Starmer or Robinson, C? Starmer or Robinson, T? Starmer or the reanimated remains of General Franco?
They were being quite rude about that one on Ukraine the Latest, presumably yesterday.
Along the lines of "the mind boggles".
If this happens then Putin will have plucked an unlikely victory from the jaws of geopolitical defeat.
A war of aggression should not be rewarded with territorial concessions, but it’s understandable that if people really want it to stop, they may have to accept the status quo for a while. But the status quo also includes Russia being locked out of Western energy markets.
Utterly brain dead to suggest doing something that will simply fund military rebuilding and hasten the next Russian invasion in Eastern Europe.
It is, however, worth remembering that Nord Stream no longer exists.
Denmark's energy agency on Tuesday said it had granted Nord Stream 2 AG, a unit of Russia's Gazprom permission to conduct preservation work on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, which was damaged in a series of blasts in 2022.
A tenth of British Farmland to be repurposed for net zero
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’ Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”. “Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.” The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
Farmers getting 90% of their income from subsidies is totally disgusting.
Any other industry, and they'd have been shut down decades ago by the Thatcher government.
Well apart from the public sector which also gets its funding from the government.
Which is effectively what managing unprofitable land use is in this country.
The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.
Whether having Upper Swaledale so covered is a good idea is open for debate.
“The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.”
I’m getting more sheep, and it’s not for benefit of tourists, but the UK food chain because I believe in eat local. We don’t get any tourists driving past taking pictures of sheep.
Nor is for the love of sheep - though maybe I should phrase it different than that. Sheep are boring. They are also weird and stupid, like they give birth and stand there stunned sometimes doing nothing like they didn’t even know they were pregnant or a clue what’s happening or want any part in parenting. 🐑🤦♀️
I'm going to try and calculate what proportion of UK calorie consumption is British lamb & mutton. I'd guess 0.5%.
That's a marketing issue. Sheep are excellent food, especially considering the amount of grass in their diet.
Sheep are also ideal for rearing on land unsuitable for arable or dairy.
This is the trouble with sheep. They take up a very large proportion of the UK's agricultural land, depend on large subsidies, and contribute little to overall calorie consumption. That compares with cereals, which take up a remarkably small proportion of land and provide over 100% of the UK's demand for them.
If you were restart our agricultural policy from scratch, wiping centuries of custom and tradition, there is no way any government would set up a system like the one we have at the moment.
Sheep are really a default way of keeping land tidy. Von Neumann machines applied to lawn mowing.
Also they will live almost any where in the UK. Try growing cash crops in the Dales or Lakes before you dismiss their contributions.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
The Tories have obviously concluded that they can't out-Farage Farage on immigration, and if they even attempt to they end up looking ridiculous because the BorisWave is always mentioned. So they may as well spin it that the BorisWave was all fine and dandy and quite a nice achievement. There's probably no other way they can go.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependents. That's 10 dependents for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringing dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
Statistics are a lot like bikinis, what they reveal is interesting, what they hide is much more fascinating.
"I love rumours! Facts can be so misleading, where rumours, true or false, are often revealing.”
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
Dependents can only be your partner and your children under 18 living with you at home. That doesn't mean a dependent visa will be issued, only that they are eligible.
So this guy claims applicants on average get visas for 9 of their own children under 18, with half of these having more than 9 children.
Yes, you'd have to be gullible and ignorant in the extreme to take the claim at face value. No doubt it's going down a storm among the target audience.
They were being quite rude about that one on Ukraine the Latest, presumably yesterday.
Along the lines of "the mind boggles".
If this happens then Putin will have plucked an unlikely victory from the jaws of geopolitical defeat.
A war of aggression should not be rewarded with territorial concessions, but it’s understandable that if people really want it to stop, they may have to accept the status quo for a while. But the status quo also includes Russia being locked out of Western energy markets.
Utterly brain dead to suggest doing something that will simply fund military rebuilding and hasten the next Russian invasion in Eastern Europe.
It is, however, worth remembering that Nord Stream no longer exists.
Denmark's energy agency on Tuesday said it had granted Nord Stream 2 AG, a unit of Russia's Gazprom permission to conduct preservation work on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, which was damaged in a series of blasts in 2022.
Looks like it's our turn to start dragging some anchors
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
The weird thing about the last government is how many of the pratfalls were voluntary acts of incompetence/corruption, rather than errors that were forced.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
Case in point - Richard Murphy.
A former manager of mine who I still see crop up on LinkedIn, used to be a normal guy, seems to be a real devotee of MMT and constantly quoting the likes of Richard Murphy.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
Dependents can only be your partner and your children under 18 living with you at home. That doesn't mean a dependent visa will be issued, only that they are eligible.
So this guy claims applicants on average get visas for 9 of their own children under 18, with half of these having more than 9 children.
Pedantically, the misleading figure is a mean not a median, so all but one of the applicants could have had only one child (and partner) if the other one had 8545 and a partner
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
The weird thing about the last government is how many of the pratfalls were voluntary acts of incompetence/corruption, rather than errors that were forced.
Is it that weird?
One of the dynamics of the revolt on the right was second division right wingers taking power from first division right wingers.
You can't do that without a certain reduction in quality.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Surely there's a more obvious leader for the pro BORIS wave faction?
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
The Tories have obviously concluded that they can't out-Farage Farage on immigration, and if they even attempt to they end up looking ridiculous because the BorisWave is always mentioned. So they may as well spin it that the BorisWave was all fine and dandy and quite a nice achievement. There's probably no other way they can go.
Rishi cut non EU immigration before he left office with tighter visa and wage requirements
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
The pandemic showed just how few people understand data/statistics.
People may despise the man, but they shouldn't think him stupid. He absolutely knew this info going into the press conference, and couldn't resist jumping the gun, which wasn't appropriate, but now he looks 'prescient', and those yelling at him have massive egg on their face.
He was not right and he doesn't now look prescient. The issue was his unseemly haste to politicise this tragedy with speculative pigeon-speak ramblings as to what caused it. It showed (as if it needed more showing) his unfitness for the presidency.
He sticks to the facts, but it looks very much like most of the blame lies with the helicopter pilot or with the protocols in place. The helicopter pilot twice confirmed that he had the plane in sight, and was further told by ATC to pass behind the plane when they appeared to be on a possible collision course. I'm not sure what more ATC could have done in this situation.
It seems he was talking about the wrong plane, so ATC could have tried to confirm it.
If there were two nearly planes, and ATC could see all three aircraft on radar, then it’s a communication failure.
“The conflict aircraft is at your 10 o’clock not your 2 o’clock” does the trick.
Would ATC have known which way the helicopter was facing? In the video, the helicopter appears to be manoevring in various directions before apparently ascending into the path of the plane.
That would make sense. Planes have right of way over helicopters, and the heli’s blind spot would be looking up. Theres a low altitude helicopter path that crosses the final approach to Reagan (a bizarre arrangement, reflecting the congested airspace thereabouts given the amount of traffic and the restricted areas over all the government sites), and reports indicate that the helicopter was above the required altitude.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
I recommend my default assumption for any assertion or piece of data that supports a right wing populist sentiment. It's wrong or grossly misleading.
Right wing populists use statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support not illumination.
I don't think that's limited to right wing populists, to be fair.
People with limited grasp of data (or morals) will misuse figures in a way that suits their agenda, whatever their political inclination.
Case in point - Richard Murphy.
A former manager of mine who I still see crop up on LinkedIn, used to be a normal guy, seems to be a real devotee of MMT and constantly quoting the likes of Richard Murphy.
Call Prevent. He'll be applauding Pier Corbyn before the year is out.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
So each mimunim wage worker brings an average of 1.7 dependents with them?
The old folk can wipe their own bums I guess.
More than 80% of the "bum wipers" are of UK origin.
Precisely. That's why the UK has made the collective decision to pay the costs associated with the 20% who aren't rather than paying all of them more to attract more UK workers to the sector. You can say it's a rather cynical strategy, even short sighted perhaps, but we all know the accute fiscal pressures associated with an ageing society. The one thing we shouldn't do is act like these people are some kind of hostile invasion force. We have asked them to come here, to do jobs we won't pay much for, and we are lucky they said yes.
Correct. But if they have, on average, 0.7 dependent children (annual schooling cost £7500 * 0.7) wouldn't it be better just to start paying properly? It would be interesting to see the sums.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Surely there's a more obvious leader for the pro BORIS wave faction?
That's it! You've solved the central riddle of British politics in 2025: who can stop Nigel Farage? It has to be him, doesn't it?
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thought there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
A few maybe but even they would go LD over Labour even if they couldn't go full Reform
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
I prefer fascist adjacent. I have no doubt that Farage would happily ‘work with’ AfD, Le Pen and whatever other horrors pop up on the political horizon. These people getting palsied fingers on the levers of power would be seen as a positive not a negative by him.
Maybe we need make gradations, far right, far far right, extreme right, nazi? For example Marine Le Pen apparently thinks AfD is to far right.
I think the final straw was when the AfD said the SS weren't that bad really
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
I prefer fascist adjacent. I have no doubt that Farage would happily ‘work with’ AfD, Le Pen and whatever other horrors pop up on the political horizon. These people getting palsied fingers on the levers of power would be seen as a positive not a negative by him.
Maybe we need make gradations, far right, far far right, extreme right, nazi? For example Marine Le Pen apparently thinks AfD is to far right.
I think the final straw was when the AfD said the SS weren't that bad really
Fake news. The guy said that you have to assess guilt individually in response to a leading question:
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thought there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
A few maybe but even they would go LD over Labour even if they couldn't go full Reform
You have read too many Trafalgar polls and are seemingly basing your analysis on a sample of one.
I wasn't suggesting they were planning to vote Labour, although I suspect a number might on the premise of better the Devil you know than a snake oil salesman you don't.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
The Tories have obviously concluded that they can't out-Farage Farage on immigration, and if they even attempt to they end up looking ridiculous because the BorisWave is always mentioned. So they may as well spin it that the BorisWave was all fine and dandy and quite a nice achievement. There's probably no other way they can go.
I will use today’s picture allowance to post the net migration figures for the UK, the end of the Brexit transition period being early 2021, for those that can’t work out where it was from the data:
A tenth of British Farmland to be repurposed for net zero
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’ Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”. “Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.” The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
Farmers getting 90% of their income from subsidies is totally disgusting.
Any other industry, and they'd have been shut down decades ago by the Thatcher government.
Well apart from the public sector which also gets its funding from the government.
Which is effectively what managing unprofitable land use is in this country.
The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.
Whether having Upper Swaledale so covered is a good idea is open for debate.
“The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.”
I’m getting more sheep, and it’s not for benefit of tourists, but the UK food chain because I believe in eat local. We don’t get any tourists driving past taking pictures of sheep.
Nor is for the love of sheep - though maybe I should phrase it different than that. Sheep are boring. They are also weird and stupid, like they give birth and stand there stunned sometimes doing nothing like they didn’t even know they were pregnant or a clue what’s happening or want any part in parenting. 🐑🤦♀️
I'm going to try and calculate what proportion of UK calorie consumption is British lamb & mutton. I'd guess 0.5%.
That's a marketing issue. Sheep are excellent food, especially considering the amount of grass in their diet.
Sheep are also ideal for rearing on land unsuitable for arable or dairy.
This is the trouble with sheep. They take up a very large proportion of the UK's agricultural land, depend on large subsidies, and contribute little to overall calorie consumption. That compares with grains, which take up a remarkably small proportion of land and provide over 100% of the UK's demand for them.
If you were restart our agricultural policy from scratch, wiping centuries of custom and tradition, there is no way any government would set up a system like the one we have at the moment.
They would be extremely stupid to set one up with no grazing animals and coast to coast arable farms - it would be bad for the soil, bad for the long term viability of farming on the land, and the national diet. You should read 'We want real food' by Graham Harvey - he writes very much from your side of the debate, but emphasises the importance of rotation in farming.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
It's an important distinction. Here is the list of points used on The Rest is Politics the other day as a template to apply to Trump's politics. It is from a poster that was on sale in the shop U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as "'Early Warning Signs Of Fascism'.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.
I make Trump well on the way to 12-14 out of 14. Farage & Friends are more interesting, and are on a smaller scale with a number of fairly obvious trends (eg 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12) but we have more protective bulwarks.
Thanks for the list, which is useful. My own view FWIW is that Trumpism is well down the track, but Reform (for which I would not vote and don't support) is nowhere close on any of these fascism criteria. Which does not mean it may not be there as a hidden agenda, or may not emerge in time. Reform, in its actual policies as documented is much closer to 1950s social democrat Labour than it is to the Nazis.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
People may despise the man, but they shouldn't think him stupid. He absolutely knew this info going into the press conference, and couldn't resist jumping the gun, which wasn't appropriate, but now he looks 'prescient', and those yelling at him have massive egg on their face.
He was not right and he doesn't now look prescient. The issue was his unseemly haste to politicise this tragedy with speculative pigeon-speak ramblings as to what caused it. It showed (as if it needed more showing) his unfitness for the presidency.
He sticks to the facts, but it looks very much like most of the blame lies with the helicopter pilot or with the protocols in place. The helicopter pilot twice confirmed that he had the plane in sight, and was further told by ATC to pass behind the plane when they appeared to be on a possible collision course. I'm not sure what more ATC could have done in this situation.
It seems he was talking about the wrong plane, so ATC could have tried to confirm it.
If there were two nearly planes, and ATC could see all three aircraft on radar, then it’s a communication failure.
“The conflict aircraft is at your 10 o’clock not your 2 o’clock” does the trick.
Would ATC have known which way the helicopter was facing? In the video, the helicopter appears to be manoevring in various directions before apparently ascending into the path of the plane.
That would make sense. Planes have right of way over helicopters, and the heli’s blind spot would be looking up. Theres a low altitude helicopter path that crosses the final approach to Reagan (a bizarre arrangement, reflecting the congested airspace thereabouts given the amount of traffic and the restricted areas over all the government sites), and reports indicate that the helicopter was above the required altitude.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Was he looking at the wrong plane? ISTR there were two approaching at the time.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
I prefer fascist adjacent. I have no doubt that Farage would happily ‘work with’ AfD, Le Pen and whatever other horrors pop up on the political horizon. These people getting palsied fingers on the levers of power would be seen as a positive not a negative by him.
Maybe we need make gradations, far right, far far right, extreme right, nazi? For example Marine Le Pen apparently thinks AfD is to far right.
I think the final straw was when the AfD said the SS weren't that bad really
Fake news. The guy said that you have to assess guilt individually in response to a leading question:
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
By the way, for anyone whose travel plans involve a fair few hotel bookings, as do mine, Quidco has one day a year when it offers 20% cashback using Hotels.com and 18% from Expedia. It will take a year to payout - I’ve just had the best part of a £1000 back from last year’s bookings - but that magic day is always 31 January.
A tenth of British Farmland to be repurposed for net zero
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’ Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”. “Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.” The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
Farmers getting 90% of their income from subsidies is totally disgusting.
Any other industry, and they'd have been shut down decades ago by the Thatcher government.
Well apart from the public sector which also gets its funding from the government.
Which is effectively what managing unprofitable land use is in this country.
The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.
Whether having Upper Swaledale so covered is a good idea is open for debate.
“The farmers are being funded so that tourists can see sheep in fields surrounded by dry stone walls.”
I’m getting more sheep, and it’s not for benefit of tourists, but the UK food chain because I believe in eat local. We don’t get any tourists driving past taking pictures of sheep.
Nor is for the love of sheep - though maybe I should phrase it different than that. Sheep are boring. They are also weird and stupid, like they give birth and stand there stunned sometimes doing nothing like they didn’t even know they were pregnant or a clue what’s happening or want any part in parenting. 🐑🤦♀️
I'm going to try and calculate what proportion of UK calorie consumption is British lamb & mutton. I'd guess 0.5%.
That's a marketing issue. Sheep are excellent food, especially considering the amount of grass in their diet.
Sheep are also ideal for rearing on land unsuitable for arable or dairy.
This is the trouble with sheep. They take up a very large proportion of the UK's agricultural land, depend on large subsidies, and contribute little to overall calorie consumption. That compares with cereals, which take up a remarkably small proportion of land and provide over 100% of the UK's demand for them.
If you were restart our agricultural policy from scratch, wiping centuries of custom and tradition, there is no way any government would set up a system like the one we have at the moment.
Sheep are really a default way of keeping land tidy. Von Neumann machines applied to lawn mowing.
Also they will live almost any where in the UK. Try growing cash crops in the Dales or Lakes before you dismiss their contributions.
And they shouldn't need much in the way of imported grains to eat (ideally none, but maybe they get some in winter these days?). Just homegrown hay and silage and swedes in winter.
*wearing a woolly pully** and looking forward to mutton and turnip stew for dinner*
**Biodegradable. Actually a bit too much so - we have moths.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
It's an important distinction. Here is the list of points used on The Rest is Politics the other day as a template to apply to Trump's politics. It is from a poster that was on sale in the shop U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as "'Early Warning Signs Of Fascism'.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.
I make Trump well on the way to 12-14 out of 14. Farage & Friends are more interesting, and are on a smaller scale with a number of fairly obvious trends (eg 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12) but we have more protective bulwarks.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
I prefer fascist adjacent. I have no doubt that Farage would happily ‘work with’ AfD, Le Pen and whatever other horrors pop up on the political horizon. These people getting palsied fingers on the levers of power would be seen as a positive not a negative by him.
Maybe we need make gradations, far right, far far right, extreme right, nazi? For example Marine Le Pen apparently thinks AfD is to far right.
I think the final straw was when the AfD said the SS weren't that bad really
Fake news. The guy said that you have to assess guilt individually in response to a leading question:
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
Would you have joined the Waffen SS, William?
He might have been conscripted into it. AIUI 'joining' wasn't necessarily a voluntary act.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
I prefer fascist adjacent. I have no doubt that Farage would happily ‘work with’ AfD, Le Pen and whatever other horrors pop up on the political horizon. These people getting palsied fingers on the levers of power would be seen as a positive not a negative by him.
Maybe we need make gradations, far right, far far right, extreme right, nazi? For example Marine Le Pen apparently thinks AfD is to far right.
I think the final straw was when the AfD said the SS weren't that bad really
Fake news. The guy said that you have to assess guilt individually in response to a leading question:
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
Would you have joined the Waffen SS, William?
Did people have a choice, especially as the war dragged on. I went to a war cemetery for German troops in a place called Mertzwiller on the French German border when I was working out there. It surprised me how many of the troops who were killed in the later battles were 14, 15 and 16 years old.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
It's an important distinction. Here is the list of points used on The Rest is Politics the other day as a template to apply to Trump's politics. It is from a poster that was on sale in the shop U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as "'Early Warning Signs Of Fascism'.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.
I make Trump well on the way to 12-14 out of 14. Farage & Friends are more interesting, and are on a smaller scale with a number of fairly obvious trends (eg 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12) but we have more protective bulwarks.
Thanks for the list, which is useful. My own view FWIW is that Trumpism is well down the track, but Reform (for which I would not vote and don't support) is nowhere close on any of these fascism criteria. Which does not mean it may not be there as a hidden agenda, or may not emerge in time. Reform, in its actual policies as documented is much closer to 1950s social democrat Labour than it is to the Nazis.
You can’t really compare the takeover of a party that commands half the US electorate and a guy whose been elected president once before, with a UK start up that has so far elected just five MPs to Parliament.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
A policy to unite our resident nuclear and basalt enthusiasts (you know who you are).
Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06623 Confronting the escalating threat of climate change requires innovative and large-scale interventions. This paper presents a bold proposal to employ a buried nuclear explosion in a remote basaltic seabed for pulverizing basalt, thereby accelerating carbon sequestration through Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW). By precisely locating the explosion beneath the seabed, we aim to confine debris, radiation, and energy while ensuring rapid rock weathering at a scale substantial enough to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric carbon levels. Our analysis outlines the parameters essential for efficient carbon capture and minimal collateral effects, emphasizing that a yield on the order of gigatons is critical for global climate impact. Although this approach may appear radical, we illustrate its feasibility by examining safety factors, preservation of local ecosystems, political considerations, and financial viability. This work argues for reimagining nuclear technology not merely as a destructive force but as a potential catalyst for decarbonization, thereby inviting further exploration of pioneering solutions in the fight against climate change...
By the way, for anyone whose travel plans involve a fair few hotel bookings, as do mine, Quidco has one day a year when it offers 20% cashback using Hotels.com and 18% from Expedia. It will take a year to payout - I’ve just had the best part of a £1000 back from last year’s bookings - but that magic day is always 31 January.
Sadly, like many, I am forbidden from taking advantage of any loyalty scheme with hotels or transport in case it corrupts me. So I don’t benefit and my employer pays ludicrous rates “negotiated” by the travel agent it entered into a long term contract with, and has freed from any type of competition.
One of the biggest rackets going, corporate travel agencies.
This looks interesting... "Simple Solutions to Wicked Problems: cultivating true believers of anti-vaccine conspiracies during the COVID-19 pandemic" by Baker, S.A. , McLaughlin, E. & Rojek, C. (2023). doi: 10.1177/13675494231173536
The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers’ being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Drawing on qualitative analysis of two leading figures of the anti-vaccination movement – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola – we demonstrate how these influencers establish authority by staging indignation against a corrupt scientific establishment and positioning themselves as Truthers offering simple solutions to complex (wicked) problems. By conceptualising what we refer to as the Truther Playbook, we examine how anti-vaccine Truthers capitalise on existing grievances and conditions of low institutional trust to further solidify people’s troubled relationship with institutional expertise while drawing attention to the structural conditions and social inequalities that facilitate belief in conspiracy theories. We contend that conspiracy theories offer not only offer alternative facts and narratives but are predicated on identification and in-group membership, highlighting the limits of debunking as a strategy to tackle disinformation.
People may despise the man, but they shouldn't think him stupid. He absolutely knew this info going into the press conference, and couldn't resist jumping the gun, which wasn't appropriate, but now he looks 'prescient', and those yelling at him have massive egg on their face.
He was not right and he doesn't now look prescient. The issue was his unseemly haste to politicise this tragedy with speculative pigeon-speak ramblings as to what caused it. It showed (as if it needed more showing) his unfitness for the presidency.
He sticks to the facts, but it looks very much like most of the blame lies with the helicopter pilot or with the protocols in place. The helicopter pilot twice confirmed that he had the plane in sight, and was further told by ATC to pass behind the plane when they appeared to be on a possible collision course. I'm not sure what more ATC could have done in this situation.
It seems he was talking about the wrong plane, so ATC could have tried to confirm it.
If there were two nearly planes, and ATC could see all three aircraft on radar, then it’s a communication failure.
“The conflict aircraft is at your 10 o’clock not your 2 o’clock” does the trick.
Would ATC have known which way the helicopter was facing? In the video, the helicopter appears to be manoevring in various directions before apparently ascending into the path of the plane.
That would make sense. Planes have right of way over helicopters, and the heli’s blind spot would be looking up. Theres a low altitude helicopter path that crosses the final approach to Reagan (a bizarre arrangement, reflecting the congested airspace thereabouts given the amount of traffic and the restricted areas over all the government sites), and reports indicate that the helicopter was above the required altitude.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Was he looking at the wrong plane? ISTR there were two approaching at the time.
The ATC recording I have heard was imprecise, and it’s possible the heli pilot thought the ATC was telling him about the plane already well down final approach to the principal runway, which would have been clearly in sight. But that doesn’t excuse the heli from being above the required altitude for the transit path across final approach to the secondary runway.
My guess is that the military pilots - who were on a training exercise but apparently are usually employed flying senior politicos here and there about DC - knew that the second (even shorter) runway at Reagan was rarely used and hence didn’t pay much attention to the altitude requirement for its approach, but unfortunately the incoming plane had requested a late change of runway to come in just that way.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
Which is basically what Davey's LDs are anyway. The Tories are now a soft Brexit party but they won't ever be pro rejoin the EU
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
So the ultimate f*** business, pro Brexit comedy act is going to win over the electorate on a pro business, pro EU agenda.
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Surely there's a more obvious leader for the pro BORIS wave faction?
That's it! You've solved the central riddle of British politics in 2025: who can stop Nigel Farage? It has to be him, doesn't it?
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Surely there's a more obvious leader for the pro BORIS wave faction?
That's it! You've solved the central riddle of British politics in 2025: who can stop Nigel Farage? It has to be him, doesn't it?
As a Labour supporter this excites me.
The problem is that Labour will be left trailing as the two titans battle it out. Boris vs Farage wouldn't leave much room for Starmer.
People may despise the man, but they shouldn't think him stupid. He absolutely knew this info going into the press conference, and couldn't resist jumping the gun, which wasn't appropriate, but now he looks 'prescient', and those yelling at him have massive egg on their face.
He was not right and he doesn't now look prescient. The issue was his unseemly haste to politicise this tragedy with speculative pigeon-speak ramblings as to what caused it. It showed (as if it needed more showing) his unfitness for the presidency.
He sticks to the facts, but it looks very much like most of the blame lies with the helicopter pilot or with the protocols in place. The helicopter pilot twice confirmed that he had the plane in sight, and was further told by ATC to pass behind the plane when they appeared to be on a possible collision course. I'm not sure what more ATC could have done in this situation.
It seems he was talking about the wrong plane, so ATC could have tried to confirm it.
If there were two nearly planes, and ATC could see all three aircraft on radar, then it’s a communication failure.
“The conflict aircraft is at your 10 o’clock not your 2 o’clock” does the trick.
Would ATC have known which way the helicopter was facing? In the video, the helicopter appears to be manoevring in various directions before apparently ascending into the path of the plane.
That would make sense. Planes have right of way over helicopters, and the heli’s blind spot would be looking up. Theres a low altitude helicopter path that crosses the final approach to Reagan (a bizarre arrangement, reflecting the congested airspace thereabouts given the amount of traffic and the restricted areas over all the government sites), and reports indicate that the helicopter was above the required altitude.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Was he looking at the wrong plane? ISTR there were two approaching at the time.
The ATC recording I have heard was imprecise, and it’s possible the heli pilot thought the ATC was telling him about the plane already well down final approach to the principal runway, which would have been clearly in sight. (Snip)
Surely to the helicopter, the planes would just have been lights in the sky until the last moment. Lights with lots of other lights around. At night, how can they easily differentiate between one plane and another?
(Would the red and green navigation lights on the wings be of any use?)
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
Which is basically what Davey's LDs are anyway. The Tories are now a soft Brexit party but they won't ever be pro rejoin the EU
Wasn’t it grandfather HY who predicted that Disraeli would never abandon his support for the Corn Laws…..
Based on some subsample of folk asked while heading to the weekly market in town.
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Surely there's a more obvious leader for the pro BORIS wave faction?
That's it! You've solved the central riddle of British politics in 2025: who can stop Nigel Farage? It has to be him, doesn't it?
As a Labour supporter this excites me.
The problem is that Labour will be left trailing as the two titans battle it out. Boris vs Farage wouldn't leave much room for Starmer.
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
"ANYWONG"?
Should I slap a flag on that for stereotypical racism, or are you pissed already?
I don’t think there’s been sufficient discussion of the Patel intervention.
Is it now Tory policy that the Boriswave was one of their proudest achievements? If so, we can really dispense with the idea that the Tories have any viable electoral future.
RIP Tories, 1834-202?
We're moving from Brexit being the defining issue to the Boriswave being the defining issue.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
Surely there's a more obvious leader for the pro BORIS wave faction?
That's it! You've solved the central riddle of British politics in 2025: who can stop Nigel Farage? It has to be him, doesn't it?
As a Labour supporter this excites me.
The problem is that Labour will be left trailing as the two titans battle it out. Boris vs Farage wouldn't leave much room for Starmer.
The Right Wing press would love it, sure, but those of us in the 50% or so who would look at those two and go 'don't much care' will still be voting for somebody else. Labour's chance among that constituency is probably improved by Johnson as Tory leader rather than someone vaguely competent.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
So the ultimate f*** business, pro Brexit comedy act is going to win over the electorate on a pro business, pro EU agenda.
Well Trump won so I suppose anything is possible.
To be fair to Boris (why?) he was never very keen on the EU was he?
At some stage, it is true, voices will start to clamour for the return of Boris.
And yes, I would expect Boris to return as “pro-EU”. Not a rejoiner of course, but with a position that Labour are failing to take the opportunity of greater integration.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
So the ultimate f*** business, pro Brexit comedy act is going to win over the electorate on a pro business, pro EU agenda.
Well Trump won so I suppose anything is possible.
To be fair to Boris (why?) he was never very keen on the EU was he?
Indeed, he busted the straight bananas and pink sausages scandals.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
I prefer fascist adjacent. I have no doubt that Farage would happily ‘work with’ AfD, Le Pen and whatever other horrors pop up on the political horizon. These people getting palsied fingers on the levers of power would be seen as a positive not a negative by him.
Maybe we need make gradations, far right, far far right, extreme right, nazi? For example Marine Le Pen apparently thinks AfD is to far right.
I think the final straw was when the AfD said the SS weren't that bad really
Fake news. The guy said that you have to assess guilt individually in response to a leading question:
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
Would you have joined the Waffen SS, William?
Did people have a choice, especially as the war dragged on. I went to a war cemetery for German troops in a place called Mertzwiller on the French German border when I was working out there. It surprised me how many of the troops who were killed in the later battles were 14, 15 and 16 years old.
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
Son's video calls from Bangkok suggest the ideal climate ATM. Rather like Essex in a good June!
By the way, for anyone whose travel plans involve a fair few hotel bookings, as do mine, Quidco has one day a year when it offers 20% cashback using Hotels.com and 18% from Expedia. It will take a year to payout - I’ve just had the best part of a £1000 back from last year’s bookings - but that magic day is always 31 January.
That's interesting, and part of my evening spoken for.
I am due a holiday, and need to top up the Amex Plat 12 month memberships too before I kill the card.
People may despise the man, but they shouldn't think him stupid. He absolutely knew this info going into the press conference, and couldn't resist jumping the gun, which wasn't appropriate, but now he looks 'prescient', and those yelling at him have massive egg on their face.
He was not right and he doesn't now look prescient. The issue was his unseemly haste to politicise this tragedy with speculative pigeon-speak ramblings as to what caused it. It showed (as if it needed more showing) his unfitness for the presidency.
He sticks to the facts, but it looks very much like most of the blame lies with the helicopter pilot or with the protocols in place. The helicopter pilot twice confirmed that he had the plane in sight, and was further told by ATC to pass behind the plane when they appeared to be on a possible collision course. I'm not sure what more ATC could have done in this situation.
It seems he was talking about the wrong plane, so ATC could have tried to confirm it.
If there were two nearly planes, and ATC could see all three aircraft on radar, then it’s a communication failure.
“The conflict aircraft is at your 10 o’clock not your 2 o’clock” does the trick.
Would ATC have known which way the helicopter was facing? In the video, the helicopter appears to be manoevring in various directions before apparently ascending into the path of the plane.
That would make sense. Planes have right of way over helicopters, and the heli’s blind spot would be looking up. Theres a low altitude helicopter path that crosses the final approach to Reagan (a bizarre arrangement, reflecting the congested airspace thereabouts given the amount of traffic and the restricted areas over all the government sites), and reports indicate that the helicopter was above the required altitude.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Was he looking at the wrong plane? ISTR there were two approaching at the time.
The ATC recording I have heard was imprecise, and it’s possible the heli pilot thought the ATC was telling him about the plane already well down final approach to the principal runway, which would have been clearly in sight. But that doesn’t excuse the heli from being above the required altitude for the transit path across final approach to the secondary runway.
My guess is that the military pilots - who were on a training exercise but apparently are usually employed flying senior politicos here and there about DC - knew that the second (even shorter) runway at Reagan was rarely used and hence didn’t pay much attention to the altitude requirement for its approach, but unfortunately the incoming plane had requested a late change of runway to come in just that way.
The flying sub-Reddit has done its own analysis of the accident, based on listening to the ATC comms and syncing it up with the positions of the aircraft, and the general view is that (while ATC could have been better), the mistake is principally on the pilots of the helicopter.
They had been warned of the plane, and called in that they had a visual on it, but it appears they were looking at the wrong aircraft - almost certainly because they missed the ATC call about the plane using the less common shorter runway. In addition to which, they were flying above their designated altitude.
Can I just point out the CDU leader Merz is an idiot. Widely seen as arrogant, out of touch, thin-skinned and clumsy, he's also just rubbish at politics.
In the middle of a general election campaign, he's decided to pull a massive political stunt by putting forward rushed, unworkable legislation that has zero chance of becoming law any time soon. But it doesn't even make any sense as a political stunt, as all it achieves is to boost the AfD (unless that is his aim - I'm beginning to wonder), make the job of making a coalition after the election much more difficult, and upset lots of people in his own party.
Aiming for a coalition with the AfD rather than with more centrist parties would be the suspicion. He must have bunked off history lessons.
There's no chance of a coalition with the AfD after the next election. I've no idea what goes on in Merz's brain, but the CDU wouldn't allow it, it's a non-starter.
I get the impression that the "normal" politicians in Germany are flailing around, a bit, as here. They don't know what to do. Which is ripe for stupid decisions.
The AfD is considerably worse than Reform, I think.
Thoughts?
The AfD are composed of the people Farage is trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep out of Reform.
But while performing the complicated manoeuvre of having them still vote for him.
Agreed, but that might still be better than having them vote for something else. To my mind there is a clear divide between Farage and fascists. We need to be genuinely vigilant against the latter and call them out because they are genuinely dangerous and on the march, and it doesn't help that effort to try to tar rightwingers like Farage with the same brush.
It's an important distinction. Here is the list of points used on The Rest is Politics the other day as a template to apply to Trump's politics. It is from a poster that was on sale in the shop U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as "'Early Warning Signs Of Fascism'.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/ avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.
I make Trump well on the way to 12-14 out of 14. Farage & Friends are more interesting, and are on a smaller scale with a number of fairly obvious trends (eg 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12) but we have more protective bulwarks.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
So the ultimate f*** business, pro Brexit comedy act is going to win over the electorate on a pro business, pro EU agenda.
Well Trump won so I suppose anything is possible.
To be fair to Boris (why?) he was never very keen on the EU was he?
Indeed, he busted the straight bananas and pink sausages scandals.
Suspect Reform will be jumping on stuff like this as it is just not sustainable. Should say that the figures don't correlate, as the dependant could be from previous year, but it is the picture it paints. Figures from Home Office visa tables.
Karl Williams @MalvernianKarl · 17h Apropos of nothing, in the first six months of 2024, we gave out 1,063 health & care visas to workers from Zimbabwe. They brought with them 10,670 dependants. That's 10 dependants for every (likely minimum wage) social care worker.
They certainly should be all over this. All to save a few quid an hour. 10 dependents per person. What a crock. Absolute insanity. Well done Tory Party you deserve to be out of power for a long term. How much will these dependents cost the taxpayer.
What sort of system allows someone to bring in 10 dependents ?!?
I'd love to see the source for this, because I very much doubt the numbers are as presented.
He posts the link in the twitter thread. It is on a dataset on a govt website. I cannot link to it at work. Perhaps someone else can ?
My guess is the dependents are mostly linked to workers who came earlier, presumably in greater numbers. It's not credible that these 1000 workers all had 10 dependents, as is claimed here. Or perhaps the dependents are related to a bigger group, eg all visa holders from Zimbabwe. AIUI it's generally quite hard to bringin dependents other than spouses and children, and it seems unlikely that these workers had 9 children on average. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Right, I have looked at the data. It's pretty obvious the dependents are arriving with a delay of a few months or quarters, as you might expect. The number of workers arriving has fallen from 6,494 in Q1 2023 to 451 in Q3 2024. The number of dependents only peaked in Q1 2024 at 8,475 and since then has fallen to 1,772. Over the 2023 to 2024 period as a whole there were 20,238 workers and 37,341 dependents, a ratio of less than 2:1 and a much more plausible looking number. Don't believe everything you read on X.
So each mimunim wage worker brings an average of 1.7 dependents with them?
The old folk can wipe their own bums I guess.
More than 80% of the "bum wipers" are of UK origin.
Precisely. That's why the UK has made the collective decision to pay the costs associated with the 20% who aren't rather than paying all of them more to attract more UK workers to the sector. You can say it's a rather cynical strategy, even short sighted perhaps, but we all know the accute fiscal pressures associated with an ageing society. The one thing we shouldn't do is act like these people are some kind of hostile invasion force. We have asked them to come here, to do jobs we won't pay much for, and we are lucky they said yes.
Correct. But if they have, on average, 0.7 dependent children (annual schooling cost £7500 * 0.7) wouldn't it be better just to start paying properly? It would be interesting to see the sums.
Minimum wage is a £24k annual salary. Assume unit supply elasticity so pay 25% more to get 25% more domestic workers, that's £6k for every care worker vs 20%x0.7x£7.5k=£1k for extra schooling per care worker. People have done these calculations I'm sure. Immigration is not a conspiracy, it's a reasonable response to an ageing society that's struggling to pay its bills.
A policy to unite our resident nuclear and basalt enthusiasts (you know who you are).
Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06623 Confronting the escalating threat of climate change requires innovative and large-scale interventions. This paper presents a bold proposal to employ a buried nuclear explosion in a remote basaltic seabed for pulverizing basalt, thereby accelerating carbon sequestration through Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW). By precisely locating the explosion beneath the seabed, we aim to confine debris, radiation, and energy while ensuring rapid rock weathering at a scale substantial enough to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric carbon levels. Our analysis outlines the parameters essential for efficient carbon capture and minimal collateral effects, emphasizing that a yield on the order of gigatons is critical for global climate impact. Although this approach may appear radical, we illustrate its feasibility by examining safety factors, preservation of local ecosystems, political considerations, and financial viability. This work argues for reimagining nuclear technology not merely as a destructive force but as a potential catalyst for decarbonization, thereby inviting further exploration of pioneering solutions in the fight against climate change...
(edit) 80GT is perhaps a tad excessive.
The Tsar Bomba was the largest bomb ever detonated at 58 Megatons. The top of the mushroom cloud was above the stratosphere at 42 miles. 80 Gigatons ????????????
At some stage, it is true, voices will start to clamour for the return of Boris.
And yes, I would expect Boris to return as “pro-EU”. Not a rejoiner of course, but with a position that Labour are failing to take the opportunity of greater integration.
Actually, I don't think that's true. I think the Conservative Party under Boris will talk of "better relations", but I think it's unlikely they would propose anything that could be painted as more integration with Brussels.
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
"ANYWONG"?
Should I slap a flag on that for stereotypical racism, or are you pissed already?
I was just trying to find a variation on Anyhoo, but I note that someone “liked” your post. It’s fucking desperate and hilarious. People are so hysterically keen to discern racism they see it in the syllable “wong”
This is why the Woke Left is now in historic retreat
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
Son's video calls from Bangkok suggest the ideal climate ATM. Rather like Essex in a good June!
It is perfect. Some annoying pollution from farmers burning stubble that drifts over the city but otherwise: chef’s kiss
And it so adorably languid, sensual, hedonistic
There is nothing and nowhere like Bangkok at this time of year
People may despise the man, but they shouldn't think him stupid. He absolutely knew this info going into the press conference, and couldn't resist jumping the gun, which wasn't appropriate, but now he looks 'prescient', and those yelling at him have massive egg on their face.
He was not right and he doesn't now look prescient. The issue was his unseemly haste to politicise this tragedy with speculative pigeon-speak ramblings as to what caused it. It showed (as if it needed more showing) his unfitness for the presidency.
He sticks to the facts, but it looks very much like most of the blame lies with the helicopter pilot or with the protocols in place. The helicopter pilot twice confirmed that he had the plane in sight, and was further told by ATC to pass behind the plane when they appeared to be on a possible collision course. I'm not sure what more ATC could have done in this situation.
It seems he was talking about the wrong plane, so ATC could have tried to confirm it.
If there were two nearly planes, and ATC could see all three aircraft on radar, then it’s a communication failure.
“The conflict aircraft is at your 10 o’clock not your 2 o’clock” does the trick.
Would ATC have known which way the helicopter was facing? In the video, the helicopter appears to be manoevring in various directions before apparently ascending into the path of the plane.
That would make sense. Planes have right of way over helicopters, and the heli’s blind spot would be looking up. Theres a low altitude helicopter path that crosses the final approach to Reagan (a bizarre arrangement, reflecting the congested airspace thereabouts given the amount of traffic and the restricted areas over all the government sites), and reports indicate that the helicopter was above the required altitude.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Was he looking at the wrong plane? ISTR there were two approaching at the time.
The ATC recording I have heard was imprecise, and it’s possible the heli pilot thought the ATC was telling him about the plane already well down final approach to the principal runway, which would have been clearly in sight. But that doesn’t excuse the heli from being above the required altitude for the transit path across final approach to the secondary runway.
My guess is that the military pilots - who were on a training exercise but apparently are usually employed flying senior politicos here and there about DC - knew that the second (even shorter) runway at Reagan was rarely used and hence didn’t pay much attention to the altitude requirement for its approach, but unfortunately the incoming plane had requested a late change of runway to come in just that way.
The flying sub-Reddit has done its own analysis of the accident, based on listening to the ATC comms and syncing it up with the positions of the aircraft, and the general view is that (while ATC could have been better), the mistake is principally on the pilots of the helicopter.
They had been warned of the plane, and called in that they had a visual on it, but it appears they were looking at the wrong aircraft - almost certainly because they missed the ATC call about the plane using the less common shorter runway. In addition to which, they were flying above their designated altitude.
Which I will take as essentially a ‘yes’.
Being ultra familiar with the usual flying patterns around DC, the military appear to have cut a corner when transiting the approach to the secondary runway.
Which is odd, because my experience of flight training in the US is that it starts from the position of zero tolerance to any corner cutting, in a way that seems overly pedantic to those of us brought up in the British ‘90% is surely good enough?’ culture.
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
"ANYWONG"?
Should I slap a flag on that for stereotypical racism, or are you pissed already?
I was just trying to find a variation on Anyhoo, but I note that someone “liked” your post. It’s fucking desperate and hilarious. People are so hysterically keen to discern racism they see it in the syllable “wong”
This is why the Woke Left is now in historic retreat
So pissed then? In that case I am glad I didn't give you a flag.
This looks interesting... "Simple Solutions to Wicked Problems: cultivating true believers of anti-vaccine conspiracies during the COVID-19 pandemic" by Baker, S.A. , McLaughlin, E. & Rojek, C. (2023). doi: 10.1177/13675494231173536
The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers’ being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Drawing on qualitative analysis of two leading figures of the anti-vaccination movement – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola – we demonstrate how these influencers establish authority by staging indignation against a corrupt scientific establishment and positioning themselves as Truthers offering simple solutions to complex (wicked) problems. By conceptualising what we refer to as the Truther Playbook, we examine how anti-vaccine Truthers capitalise on existing grievances and conditions of low institutional trust to further solidify people’s troubled relationship with institutional expertise while drawing attention to the structural conditions and social inequalities that facilitate belief in conspiracy theories. We contend that conspiracy theories offer not only offer alternative facts and narratives but are predicated on identification and in-group membership, highlighting the limits of debunking as a strategy to tackle disinformation.
It's a great paper. It's like looking inside Leon's head. (I realise that doesn't make it sound enticing...)
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
Son's video calls from Bangkok suggest the ideal climate ATM. Rather like Essex in a good June!
It is perfect. Some annoying pollution from farmers burning stubble that drifts over the city but otherwise: chef’s kiss
And it so adorably languid, sensual, hedonistic
There is nothing and nowhere like Bangkok at this time of year
A few years ago we spent Jan & Feb in Bangkok. As you say, very pleasant indeed.
We flew back to UK just in time for the Beast From the East!
Watching CNN in Bangkok after very pleasant drinks in soi 8. Det 5. Seriously guys you have to come out here. Bangkok is BLISSFUL in January-February - who would be anywhere else??
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
Son's video calls from Bangkok suggest the ideal climate ATM. Rather like Essex in a good June!
It is perfect. Some annoying pollution from farmers burning stubble that drifts over the city but otherwise: chef’s kiss
And it so adorably languid, sensual, hedonistic
There is nothing and nowhere like Bangkok at this time of year
Now that Epstein is no longer throwing his parties, make the most of it…
Will somebody please explain to me why Richard Murphy is bad? Preferably using short words and a moderate tone? People tried the other day but it was basically "he smells of poo".
I know MMT won't work (because fiat currency depends on consensus confidence), but are there other arguments against him? I think (for example) that his statement that the BoE are engineering a recession thru quantitative tightening is correct. So which of his arguments are wrong and why? Which of his underlying assumptions are wrong?
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
The Conservatives are never going to beat Reform when half the party seems happy for Reform to win. They have to fight them!
No most Conservatives want to get rid of Starmer's useless government above all.
They don't disagree with Reform anywhere near as much as they do with Labour on most issues, other than Tories are a bit more soft Brexit and Reform a bit more hard Brexit
I suspect you are channelling almost exclusively your own thoughts there. I know traditional Tory voters who utterly despise Farage and Reform, and far more than they do Starmer Labour. The Trump/ Musk connection has supercharged this view. One Nation Tories know extremist traitors when they see them.
*waves*
***Waves***
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
Would you bring back Boris as leader if it's what it would take to see off the risk of Farage as PM?
How might bringing that clown back see off Farage? More than likely it would kill the Tories stone dead.
He's a proven winner, and he has the flexibility needed to reposition the Tories as an unabashed pro-business and even pro-EU party.
Comments
Outright lying is always rare, in this country, but selective presentation is ubiquitous.
I overpaid my income tax by £8,000 last year, and my payment on account has been cut by £7,000.
See Prof. Pesto FRS, DipSHit
So this guy claims applicants on average get visas for 9 of their own children under 18, with half of these having more than 9 children.
The leader of the anti-Boriswave faction is obviously Farage, with Starmer and Jenrick trying hard to follow in his wake.
Who will be the leader of the pro-Boriswave faction? Perhaps Patel senses an opportunity to be Britain's Kamala Harris, representing the liberal conscience of the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_The
Forced choice.
Starmer or Farage?
Starmer or Robinson, C?
Starmer or Robinson, T?
Starmer or the reanimated remains of General Franco?
You get the idea.
Denmark's energy agency on Tuesday said it had granted Nord Stream 2 AG, a unit of Russia's Gazprom permission to conduct preservation work on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, which was damaged in a series of blasts in 2022.
No doubt it's going down a storm among the target audience.
Feedback ends for consultation on the Single Market 2025 strategy.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14475-Single-market-strategy-2025_en
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1885285360814494133
One of the dynamics of the revolt on the right was second division right wingers taking power from first division right wingers.
You can't do that without a certain reduction in quality.
When I was being trained to fly the VFR route across the top of LAX, the instructor said they were red hot on the required altitude and you had to make sure the altimeter was bang on the line. Maybe the DC military aren’t quite so punctilious?
Is Reeves abandoning the North East.
Need to share the growth around with tangible results to neuter Reform
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvm17dwv1vo
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/31/tired-mood-changed-ukrainian-army-desertion-crisis
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx88nwy934go
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
Farage’s comments about Ukraine pre-election were a disgrace, he cannot be anywhere near the levers of power.
I wasn't suggesting they were planning to vote Labour, although I suspect a number might on the premise of better the Devil you know than a snake oil salesman you don't.
*wearing a woolly pully** and looking forward to mutton and turnip stew for dinner*
**Biodegradable. Actually a bit too much so - we have moths.
1 - Lab 34, Con 29, Ref 32, LD 19
2 - Lab 23, Con 17, Ref 16, LD 10
3 - 6
4 - 0
5 - 3
6 - 3
7 - 135
8 - 2.3%
9 - £128.4
10 - 1.2%
11 - 2.5%
12 - 0.4%
13 - 103 USD/RUB
14 - 1-3 (Eng 1, Oz 3, Drawn 1)
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/01/07/classification/
Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06623
Confronting the escalating threat of climate change requires innovative and large-scale interventions. This paper presents a bold proposal to employ a buried nuclear explosion in a remote basaltic seabed for pulverizing basalt, thereby accelerating carbon sequestration through Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW). By precisely locating the explosion beneath the seabed, we aim to confine debris, radiation, and energy while ensuring rapid rock weathering at a scale substantial enough to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric carbon levels. Our analysis outlines the parameters essential for efficient carbon capture and minimal collateral effects, emphasizing that a yield on the order of gigatons is critical for global climate impact. Although this approach may appear radical, we illustrate its feasibility by examining safety factors, preservation of local ecosystems, political considerations, and financial viability. This work argues for reimagining nuclear technology not merely as a destructive force but as a potential catalyst for decarbonization, thereby inviting further exploration of pioneering solutions in the fight against climate change...
(edit) 80GT is perhaps a tad excessive.
One of the biggest rackets going, corporate travel agencies.
The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers’ being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Drawing on qualitative analysis of two leading figures of the anti-vaccination movement – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola – we demonstrate how these influencers establish authority by staging indignation against a corrupt scientific establishment and positioning themselves as Truthers offering simple solutions to complex (wicked) problems. By conceptualising what we refer to as the Truther Playbook, we examine how anti-vaccine Truthers capitalise on existing grievances and conditions of low institutional trust to further solidify people’s troubled relationship with institutional expertise while drawing attention to the structural conditions and social inequalities that facilitate belief in conspiracy theories. We contend that conspiracy theories offer not only offer alternative facts and narratives but are predicated on identification and in-group membership, highlighting the limits of debunking as a strategy to tackle disinformation.
My guess is that the military pilots - who were on a training exercise but apparently are usually employed flying senior politicos here and there about DC - knew that the second (even shorter) runway at Reagan was rarely used and hence didn’t pay much attention to the altitude requirement for its approach, but unfortunately the incoming plane had requested a late change of runway to come in just that way.
Well Trump won so I suppose anything is possible.
(Would the red and green navigation lights on the wings be of any use?)
Based on some subsample of folk asked while heading to the weekly market in town.
ANYWONG, watching CNN right now is fascinating, because you are basically watching the lefty Woke worldview collapse in real time. I do not believe it will return
Should I slap a flag on that for stereotypical racism, or are you pissed already?
And yes, I would expect Boris to return as “pro-EU”. Not a rejoiner of course, but with a position that Labour are failing to take the opportunity of greater integration.
I am due a holiday, and need to top up the Amex Plat 12 month memberships too before I kill the card.
They had been warned of the plane, and called in that they had a visual on it, but it appears they were looking at the wrong aircraft - almost certainly because they missed the ATC call about the plane using the less common shorter runway. In addition to which, they were flying above their designated altitude.
People have done these calculations I'm sure. Immigration is not a conspiracy, it's a reasonable response to an ageing society that's struggling to pay its bills.
80 Gigatons ????????????
This is why the Woke Left is now in historic retreat
And it so adorably languid, sensual, hedonistic
There is nothing and nowhere like Bangkok at this time of year
Being ultra familiar with the usual flying patterns around DC, the military appear to have cut a corner when transiting the approach to the secondary runway.
Which is odd, because my experience of flight training in the US is that it starts from the position of zero tolerance to any corner cutting, in a way that seems overly pedantic to those of us brought up in the British ‘90% is surely good enough?’ culture.
We flew back to UK just in time for the Beast From the East!
I know MMT won't work (because fiat currency depends on consensus confidence), but are there other arguments against him? I think (for example) that his statement that the BoE are engineering a recession thru quantitative tightening is correct. So which of his arguments are wrong and why? Which of his underlying assumptions are wrong?