Serious electoral fraud is true but precisely how can someone transfer 83 votes from one Labour candidate to another?
If you mis-use your position of authority. Maybe they are just chatting shit, but the police will now be involved. Such stupidity from an MP, deserves to go just for that.
Fun fact, the Conservatives actually came fifth in Gorton and Denton at the last election, with the LibDems in 6th.
They were both beaten by Labour, Reform, the Greens and the Workers Party.
I'm not really sure what Labour would have to do to lose that seat, but it's nice that they are putting in the effort.
It will be an easy Reform pickup, I'd have thought, with Labour possibly falling to third behind the Greens.
Manchester isn't exactly ripe Reform territory, mind.
The population of Greater Manchester is diverse and non-uniform. The population of East Manchester including Gorton and Denton overwhelmingly has a working class WASP background. However, the constituency now includes Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage wards, which contain a much higher non-white population, particularly Asian, who are unlikely to vote Reform.
To the poster who reckoned SKS has had a few good days
NEW: Government approval is now at minus 48% 16% Approve 64% Disapprove
Keir Truss
Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Truss had an approval rating of −47 per cent according to an opinion poll by The Observer.
To the poster who reckoned SKS has had a few good days
NEW: Government approval is now at minus 48% 16% Approve 64% Disapprove
Keir Truss
Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Truss had an approval rating of −47 per cent according to an opinion poll by The Observer.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Serious electoral fraud is true but precisely how can someone transfer 83 votes from one Labour candidate to another?
If you mis-use your position of authority. Maybe they are just chatting shit, but the police will now be involved. Such stupidity from an MP, deserves to go just for that.
Fun fact, the Conservatives actually came fifth in Gorton and Denton at the last election, with the LibDems in 6th.
They were both beaten by Labour, Reform, the Greens and the Workers Party.
I'm not really sure what Labour would have to do to lose that seat, but it's nice that they are putting in the effort.
It will be an easy Reform pickup, I'd have thought, with Labour possibly falling to third behind the Greens.
Manchester isn't exactly ripe Reform territory, mind.
The population of Greater Manchester is diverse and non-uniform. The population of East Manchester including Gorton and Denton overwhelmingly has a working class WASP background. However, the constituency now includes Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage wards, which contain a much higher non-white population, particularly Asian, who are unlikely to vote Reform.
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
To the poster who reckoned SKS has had a few good days
NEW: Government approval is now at minus 48% 16% Approve 64% Disapprove
Keir Truss
Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Truss had an approval rating of −47 per cent according to an opinion poll by The Observer.
I think Starmer’s pretty crap, but I am quite surprised everyone hates the government as much as they seem to in the polling.
I’m not quite sure plumbing new depths of unpopularity is quite deserved by their actions so far, no matter that those haven’t been great by any means. I guess this is perhaps showing the disadvantages of the kind of opposition politics Starmer played .
I love how Mark Stone tries to make sense of the complete nonsense being spoken by Trump about the Middle East - "it's our job to square the circle of these apparently contradictory statements" 🥴😚
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so. SFAICS court orderd so far, which in the nature of things are temporary as there hasn't been time for any full and final hearings (these take months generally), and I think nothing has got to SCOTUS yet.
Google removed Pride and Black History Month from our calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Google Earth in the US
The USA isn't the only state Google indulges. It's also calling Turkey Turkiye, presumably at the behest of its government.
Bit of a tricky one really. Surely you need to have consistency of approach; otherwise you are making a political judgement call in accepting one change over another. I suspect the attitude of Google is to typically go to what the state in question dictates.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Serious electoral fraud is true but precisely how can someone transfer 83 votes from one Labour candidate to another?
If you mis-use your position of authority. Maybe they are just chatting shit, but the police will now be involved. Such stupidity from an MP, deserves to go just for that.
Fun fact, the Conservatives actually came fifth in Gorton and Denton at the last election, with the LibDems in 6th.
They were both beaten by Labour, Reform, the Greens and the Workers Party.
I'm not really sure what Labour would have to do to lose that seat, but it's nice that they are putting in the effort.
It will be an easy Reform pickup, I'd have thought, with Labour possibly falling to third behind the Greens.
Manchester isn't exactly ripe Reform territory, mind.
The population of Greater Manchester is diverse and non-uniform. The population of East Manchester including Gorton and Denton overwhelmingly has a working class WASP background. However, the constituency now includes Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage wards, which contain a much higher non-white population, particularly Asian, who are unlikely to vote Reform.
The old Denton and Reddish would probably have been a better prospect for Reform. They possibly could still win Gorton and Denton but think they would need a widely split vote e.g. Greens taking a big chunk in the Manchester wards
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so.
They have already simply and publicly overridden an unambiguous order of a lower court.
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so. SFAICS court orderd so far, which in the nature of things are temporary as there hasn't been time for any full and final hearings (these take months generally), and I think nothing has got to SCOTUS yet.
That's fair. I exaggerate the point as to where we are on the line. But I think the intent is clearly there. The idea is evidently to test the judiciary's resolve, and the enforceability of law.
Google removed Pride and Black History Month from our calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Google Earth in the US
The USA isn't the only state Google indulges. It's also calling Turkey Turkiye, presumably at the behest of its government.
Bit of a tricky one really. Surely you need to have consistency of approach; otherwise you are making a political judgement call in accepting one change over another. I suspect the attitude of Google is to typically go to what the state in question dictates.
I'm perfectly happy for the Turkish for Turkey to be Turkiye. But it's not in Turkey's gift to dictate what the English for Turkey is. Most countries have English names different from local names. I don't see why we should change this for Turkey. They're even trying to make us use a letter we don't have in English.
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
That's the question.
Two models of what's going on. One is that the Trump administration is trying awful stuff experimentally- that, given the right sort of pushback, they retreat. See the stuff on tariffs.
The other possibility is that they really don't care about any laws that constrain their actions. And nobody can stop them.
In the second case, America really is in the bad place. But the other possibilities (experimental awful and not knowing if the rule of law has broken down) are only a bit better.
To the poster who reckoned SKS has had a few good days
NEW: Government approval is now at minus 48% 16% Approve 64% Disapprove
Keir Truss
Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Truss had an approval rating of −47 per cent according to an opinion poll by The Observer.
I think Starmer’s pretty crap, but I am quite surprised everyone hates the government as much as they seem to in the polling.
I’m not quite sure plumbing new depths of unpopularity is quite deserved by their actions so far, no matter that those haven’t been great by any means. I guess this is perhaps showing the disadvantages of the kind of opposition politics Starmer played .
At a guess, I suppose this is an accumulation of disappointment (Government looks rudderless, not an obvious improvement for many people on what came before,) the outrage/antisocial media driven political environment, a pervasive air of gloom about the economy, and the winter fuel decision (leading to a constant drip feed of misery stories about granny being forced to skip meals, take on credit card debts, have the cat put down and such like.)
Of course, it's likely to get an awful lot worse, The next double whammy of an inflation spike and a fresh round of wage suppression is coming round the corner, and inflation also begets further hikes in the state pension which Reeves will end up having to raise taxes or cut spending to pay for. Both of those options will create new groups of screaming victims, and if the Government attempts to reimpose below inflation wage settlements on the public sector there'll be fresh rounds of very disruptive strikes.
The Government has played a poor hand badly, and already burned through much of the good will and political capital it had at the beginning of its term. If a Labour-led administration of some kind remains the most probable outcome of the next election, insofar as such prognostication means anything at this remove, it is only because the most obvious alternatives are more repellent.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
At the moment I'm just grateful I'm not a windmill.
Not the “normalize Indian hate” DOGE employee, the other one, Edward Coristine…
“Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched an image-sharing website in 2021 that featured custom “shitposting” web addresses that redirected to content hosted on his site. URLs that redirected to Coristine’s site referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Among the links were “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club,” according to web traffic tracked by BuiltWith.”
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so. SFAICS court orderd so far, which in the nature of things are temporary as there hasn't been time for any full and final hearings (these take months generally), and I think nothing has got to SCOTUS yet.
Serious electoral fraud is true but precisely how can someone transfer 83 votes from one Labour candidate to another?
If you mis-use your position of authority. Maybe they are just chatting shit, but the police will now be involved. Such stupidity from an MP, deserves to go just for that.
Fun fact, the Conservatives actually came fifth in Gorton and Denton at the last election, with the LibDems in 6th.
They were both beaten by Labour, Reform, the Greens and the Workers Party.
I'm not really sure what Labour would have to do to lose that seat, but it's nice that they are putting in the effort.
It will be an easy Reform pickup, I'd have thought, with Labour possibly falling to third behind the Greens.
Manchester isn't exactly ripe Reform territory, mind.
The population of Greater Manchester is diverse and non-uniform. The population of East Manchester including Gorton and Denton overwhelmingly has a working class WASP background. However, the constituency now includes Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage wards, which contain a much higher non-white population, particularly Asian, who are unlikely to vote Reform.
The old Denton and Reddish would probably have been a better prospect for Reform. They possibly could still win Gorton and Denton but think they would need a widely split vote e.g. Greens taking a big chunk in the Manchester wards
I think that is highly likely to happen: indeed, I'd expect Labour to be third behind the Greens and Reform.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Google removed Pride and Black History Month from our calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Google Earth in the US
The USA isn't the only state Google indulges. It's also calling Turkey Turkiye, presumably at the behest of its government.
Or, indeed, Tibet is shown differently to Google Maps users in China to those outside.
Personally, I think in Google settings you should be allowed to change how things are displayed.
With customs settings for fans of alternative history so you could have the whole of Eurasia as the USSR, or California as a colony of the Japanese Empire.
To the poster who reckoned SKS has had a few good days
NEW: Government approval is now at minus 48% 16% Approve 64% Disapprove
Keir Truss
Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Truss had an approval rating of −47 per cent according to an opinion poll by The Observer.
I think Starmer’s pretty crap, but I am quite surprised everyone hates the government as much as they seem to in the polling.
I’m not quite sure plumbing new depths of unpopularity is quite deserved by their actions so far, no matter that those haven’t been great by any means. I guess this is perhaps showing the disadvantages of the kind of opposition politics Starmer played .
At a guess, I suppose this is an accumulation of disappointment (Government looks rudderless, not an obvious improvement for many people on what came before,) the outrage/antisocial media driven political environment, a pervasive air of gloom about the economy, and the winter fuel decision (leading to a constant drip feed of misery stories about granny being forced to skip meals, take on credit card debts, have the cat put down and such like.)
Of course, it's likely to get an awful lot worse, The next double whammy of an inflation spike and a fresh round of wage suppression is coming round the corner, and inflation also begets further hikes in the state pension which Reeves will end up having to raise taxes or cut spending to pay for. Both of those options will create new groups of screaming victims, and if the Government attempts to reimpose below inflation wage settlements on the public sector there'll be fresh rounds of very disruptive strikes.
The Government has played a poor hand badly, and already burned through much of the good will and political capital it had at the beginning of its term. If a Labour-led administration of some kind remains the most probable outcome of the next election, insofar as such prognostication means anything at this remove, it is only because the most obvious alternatives are more repellent.
Those recent preferred PM polls across the 4 parties were interesting. Sufficiently more people have a preference for "either Labour/LD" over "either Tory/Reform" to point us towards the former being the constellation next time. The gamble will be, take two years of Thatcher or Cameron type heat, hope the economy rebounds.
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so. SFAICS court orderd so far, which in the nature of things are temporary as there hasn't been time for any full and final hearings (these take months generally), and I think nothing has got to SCOTUS yet.
That's fair. I exaggerate the point as to where we are on the line. But I think the intent is clearly there. The idea is evidently to test the judiciary's resolve, and the enforceability of law.
I agree the evidence of intent is clearly there, and the lines of attack are emerging: not only that courts can be overridden without comeback, but also that the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity can be argued (wrongly but so what) to be used as a springboard for extending executive power 'lawfully' by simply relying on his immunity to be a continuing putting right of any error in presidential edict. (IE if the president orders it, it has to be right because of his immunity; or 'the king can do no wrong'). For all I know SCOTUS would swallow it. But probs not.
In the end and if it goes far enough, things would be decided by popular uprising and/or the military. We are miles off that, that it would be unwise to put the chances at Zero.
In the end and if it goes far enough, things would be decided by popular uprising and/or the military. We are miles off that, that it would be unwise to put the chances at Zero.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
If Trump literally meant everything he said all the time and nothing was a negotiating position, then the tariffs on Canada and Mexico would not have been put off.
Gaza is a complete ruin that would impose immense costs on the United States if it tried to secure and redevelop it, even assuming that Trump could leave it to Netanyahu to do the required ethnic cleansing successfully first. I think it's at least a live possibility that this may all be a ruse to try to persuade/cajole/force the Arab neighbours to send in their own troops to put down Hamas, lest they end up seeing Gaza turned into a permanent American-Israeli colony, and having to house a vast, seething and radicalised diaspora of penniless refugees.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
I was going to post some incisive political commentary, but instead plumped for "mmm...'crotchfruit' is probably a contender for "ugliest word I've not heard before"".
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so. SFAICS court orderd so far, which in the nature of things are temporary as there hasn't been time for any full and final hearings (these take months generally), and I think nothing has got to SCOTUS yet.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
Trump has gone soft on sharks now. He wants plastic straws back, but he assures us they won't affect sharks much as they munch their way through the ocean.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
There is no such thing as humanity, only individual men and women. To adapt a phrase.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
There is no such thing as humanity, only individual men and women. To adapt a phrase.
Actually, it was a major part of his life. And in return it had considerable impact on the locals. Plus public engagement and activities. A lot more than you describe it as just "a grant to investigate the relevance ...".
Perfectly normal these days, because in the old days people like - oh, I don't know? maybe you can think of some - complained that there was no effort to bring the results to the public, ivory tower, blah blah.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
And yet a large number of those make perfect sense - soundscapes are a while area recently discovered with economic impacts as good ones encourage people to stay and revisit.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
He also changes his mind a lot, seemingly based on the last thing he heard/read, so sure, his approach cannot always be predicted, but reinterpreting what he says is not the way to go.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Google removed Pride and Black History Month from our calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Google Earth in the US
The USA isn't the only state Google indulges. It's also calling Turkey Turkiye, presumably at the behest of its government.
Bit of a tricky one really. Surely you need to have consistency of approach; otherwise you are making a political judgement call in accepting one change over another. I suspect the attitude of Google is to typically go to what the state in question dictates.
My Google maps has "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)."
It also has "Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf)" "Londonderry Derry"
Mostly it has English names of places, so it's sad to see Leghorn isn't used any more.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
I don't really get why, on rare occasions, people get precious about using or not using native nation names or job titles etc. Taoiseach is a classic example - no problem using it if we want, but if someone within the UK insisted we use it that would be odd, since no one insists we refer to the Bundeskanzler of Germany for example.
I don't really get why, on rare occasions, people get precious about using or not using native nation names or job titles etc. Taoiseach is a classic example - no problem using it if we want, but if someone within the UK insisted we use it that would be odd, since no one insists we refer to the Bundeskanzler of Germany for example.
It all started with Prince (artist formerly known as).
I wonder if Hamas announcement of ceasing in releasing hostages is because they don't actually have any to hand to release. Israel already believe that 8-9 of the 17 on the list are dead, and we know that it wasn't just Hamas who held these people, they were spread out among all the Islamist organisations / passed to civilian families to hold. With have already seen them swap around the people who were supposed to be released which could be that some aren't "available" for release.
Not the “normalize Indian hate” DOGE employee, the other one, Edward Coristine…
“Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched an image-sharing website in 2021 that featured custom “shitposting” web addresses that redirected to content hosted on his site. URLs that redirected to Coristine’s site referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Among the links were “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club,” according to web traffic tracked by BuiltWith.”
At 6 minutes long, and very recent, and simple, this briefly summarises the situation and possible futures WRT USA rule of law and conflict between executive and judiciary from the point of view of a lawyer experienced in litigation against the USA government. From MSNBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SLnRo3IFK4
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Not a sensible move by Trump given Vance leads his Cabinet which can remove him from office and put the VP in charge. None of the rest of the Trump family have the charisma and electoral reach he has had either.
By this interview Trump risks turning Vance into his Rishi
I wonder if Hamas announcement of ceasing in releasing hostages is because they don't actually have any to hand to release. Israel already believe that 8-9 of the 17 on the list are dead, and we know that it wasn't just Hamas who held these people, they were spread out among all the Islamist organisations / passed to civilian families to hold. With have already seen them swap around the people who were supposed to be released which could be that some aren't "available" for release.
And the ones they handed over seemed near to dead. So not a stretch to think some of this sad cohort did not last life being starved in a tunnel.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
I wonder if Hamas announcement of ceasing in releasing hostages is because they don't actually have any to hand to release. Israel already believe that 8-9 of the 17 on the list are dead, and we know that it wasn't just Hamas who held these people, they were spread out among all the Islamist organisations / passed to civilian families to hold. With have already seen them swap around the people who were supposed to be released which could be that some aren't "available" for release.
And the ones they handed over seemed near to dead. So not a stretch to think some of this sad cohort did not last life being starved in a tunnel.
There will be plenty who have been killed by Israeli strikes or their captours due to them becoming a burden. I also think that when this started most of the world thought Bibi was all talk and it would be a month or so and then the US would tell them to pack it in and then it would be back to the cycle of hostage for prisoners. If you were under that impression you probably weren't planning to have 100s of hostages to be kept alive for well over a year while also fighting the Israelis going full force.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
And quite a bit of that grant ends up as overhead - so a fair proportion of that is directly into the pockets of local people, techs, admin, cleaners, repair people ...
As a listener to BBC news output for over half a century, and a long term admirer of their output, I get the slight impression - does anyone share it - that they are trying hard to go a little easy on how Trump and his plutocratic gangster oligarchs are behaving constitutionally in internal USA matters.
Completely hypothetically I can well understand why it would suit the government not to have our public broadcaster going all guns blazing at the incipient rise of an unconstitutional and law breaking USA government.
Google removed Pride and Black History Month from our calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Google Earth in the US
The USA isn't the only state Google indulges. It's also calling Turkey Turkiye, presumably at the behest of its government.
Bit of a tricky one really. Surely you need to have consistency of approach; otherwise you are making a political judgement call in accepting one change over another. I suspect the attitude of Google is to typically go to what the state in question dictates.
I'm perfectly happy for the Turkish for Turkey to be Turkiye. But it's not in Turkey's gift to dictate what the English for Turkey is. Most countries have English names different from local names. I don't see why we should change this for Turkey. They're even trying to make us use a letter we don't have in English.
I don't really get why, on rare occasions, people get precious about using or not using native nation names or job titles etc. Taoiseach is a classic example - no problem using it if we want, but if someone within the UK insisted we use it that would be odd, since no one insists we refer to the Bundeskanzler of Germany for example.
The English language is Ireland's window on the world.
I looked up my guy, Bert Woodage, who was my connection to Sir Gordon Richards, and found this -
"1927 - 2000
Born on May 14, 1927, Bert Hamlen Woodage was apprenticed to George Todd at Manton. He was first seen on a racecourse at Salisbury on Saturday, July 24, 1943, riding a filly named Rose Sterling in the one-mile Apprentice Plate. Carrying just 6st 4lb, she finished last of the 17 runners.
Bert gradually gained race-riding experience and, in 1946, became leading jockey for half an hour when winning the first race of the season, the Apprentices’ Handicap at Lincoln, on the Todd-trained Stipend, the 4-1 favourite. Although he only rode one other winner from 19 mounts that year, a bright future was predicted.
He stayed with George Todd once he’d finished his apprenticeship but race-riding opportunities were scarce. He rode one winner form 16 mounts in 1949, three from 19 in 1950, all of them trained by Todd, then none at all for the next five years.
In 1956 Bert joined Sir Gordon Richards as a trial jockey with occasional rides on the Flat. Being able to ride at 7st, he partnered some of the stable’s lightweights and young horses who required racing experience. He rode his first winner for Sir Gordon on White Nun at Windsor in June 1956, one of 15 rides that year. He had the same number of rides in 1957, his sole success coming on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old Quel Diable in a Worcester maiden handicap. That would turn out to be his final winner. He came within a short-head of victory on 20-1 shot Desert Love at Bath in September 1958, losing out in the photo-finish to Jimmy Lindley on the 5-4 favourite Grey Topper.
He had his final ride on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old filly Sash of Honour at Bath on May 12, 1960, finishing second, beaten three lengths. Soon afterwards, he found himself under arrest.
On October 25, 1960, along with four other men, comprising three stable lads and a chemist’s dispenser, Bert Woodage appeared before the court at Gloucester Assizes charged with conspiracy to administer drugs to horses over a period of three years from 1958 to 1960. There was also a second count alleging conspiracy to defraud the owners and trainers of those horses and to injure their reputation. Each of the five defendants pleaded not guilty to the two charges.
The ‘hub’ in the conspiracy, it was alleged, was Bertie ‘Bandy’ Rogers, who had died by the time of the trial. It was he who had supposedly distributed the dope, in the form of powders containing caffeine, a banned stimulant, aimed at making horses run faster, rather than doping them to lose.
Woodage acknowledged that he had received powders from Rogers and, when interviewed by police earlier in the year, had admitted to giving one or two to stable lads, but said he did not know they were powders to make the horse win.
I looked up my guy, Bert Woodage, who was my connection to Sir Gordon Richards, and found this -
"1927 - 2000
Born on May 14, 1927, Bert Hamlen Woodage was apprenticed to George Todd at Manton. He was first seen on a racecourse at Salisbury on Saturday, July 24, 1943, riding a filly named Rose Sterling in the one-mile Apprentice Plate. Carrying just 6st 4lb, she finished last of the 17 runners.
Bert gradually gained race-riding experience and, in 1946, became leading jockey for half an hour when winning the first race of the season, the Apprentices’ Handicap at Lincoln, on the Todd-trained Stipend, the 4-1 favourite. Although he only rode one other winner from 19 mounts that year, a bright future was predicted.
He stayed with George Todd once he’d finished his apprenticeship but race-riding opportunities were scarce. He rode one winner form 16 mounts in 1949, three from 19 in 1950, all of them trained by Todd, then none at all for the next five years.
In 1956 Bert joined Sir Gordon Richards as a trial jockey with occasional rides on the Flat. Being able to ride at 7st, he partnered some of the stable’s lightweights and young horses who required racing experience. He rode his first winner for Sir Gordon on White Nun at Windsor in June 1956, one of 15 rides that year. He had the same number of rides in 1957, his sole success coming on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old Quel Diable in a Worcester maiden handicap. That would turn out to be his final winner. He came within a short-head of victory on 20-1 shot Desert Love at Bath in September 1958, losing out in the photo-finish to Jimmy Lindley on the 5-4 favourite Grey Topper.
He had his final ride on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old filly Sash of Honour at Bath on May 12, 1960, finishing second, beaten three lengths. Soon afterwards, he found himself under arrest.
On October 25, 1960, along with four other men, comprising three stable lads and a chemist’s dispenser, Bert Woodage appeared before the court at Gloucester Assizes charged with conspiracy to administer drugs to horses over a period of three years from 1958 to 1960. There was also a second count alleging conspiracy to defraud the owners and trainers of those horses and to injure their reputation. Each of the five defendants pleaded not guilty to the two charges.
The ‘hub’ in the conspiracy, it was alleged, was Bertie ‘Bandy’ Rogers, who had died by the time of the trial. It was he who had supposedly distributed the dope, in the form of powders containing caffeine, a banned stimulant, aimed at making horses run faster, rather than doping them to lose.
Woodage acknowledged that he had received powders from Rogers and, when interviewed by police earlier in the year, had admitted to giving one or two to stable lads, but said he did not know they were powders to make the horse win.
tbc
Sir Gordon Richards was called as a witness and confirmed he had employed Woodage as a stable lad and as a jockey since 1956. He was then asked about the horses he trained and the races in which they ran. He said that Woodage never had authority from him or on his behalf to go give any sort of drug or powder such as caffeine to any of the horses, adding that he had known nothing about it until the case came to light.
He described Woodage as “an absolutely first-class worker” and said that he was still working for him. He added that there was nothing to make him think that Woodage wanted to damage his employer’s reputation as a trainer.
On Monday, October 25, 1960, four of the men were found guilty of conspiracy to dope racehorses, one of the stable lads having been acquitted. Bert Woodage, aged 33, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, as was chemist’s assistant Harry Tuck. Sentences of six months and nine months respectively were imposed on stable lads Robert Mason and James Boyce. The Judge said that Woodage had given powders, either innocently or with fraudulent intent, on a bigger scale than Mason or Boyce, hence the longer sentence.
The jury formally returned a verdict of not guilty on the second charge, to defraud owners and trainers and to injure their reputation.
Sir Gordon had earlier in the day returned to the witness box and pleaded for leniency for Woodage. He said he had known him for 20 years and had ridden alongside him in public, adding he was “amazed when this thing happened.
“When this thing started,” Sir Gordon continued, “wages in stables were very bad. He had his own family to keep, and living with him were his father-in-law, who has not worked for years, and mother-in-law, who has been bedridden for over 15 years.
“I am sure he has learned his lesson,” he told the Judge. “He still has to keep them. He is the only one who can keep them – so I appeal to you to be as lenient with him as you can. While I am training horses, he has always got a job.”
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
There is no such thing as humanity, only individual men and women. To adapt a phrase.
I wonder if Hamas announcement of ceasing in releasing hostages is because they don't actually have any to hand to release. Israel already believe that 8-9 of the 17 on the list are dead, and we know that it wasn't just Hamas who held these people, they were spread out among all the Islamist organisations / passed to civilian families to hold. With have already seen them swap around the people who were supposed to be released which could be that some aren't "available" for release.
And the ones they handed over seemed near to dead. So not a stretch to think some of this sad cohort did not last life being starved in a tunnel.
Maybe if the Israelis had let more food into the Strip?
I looked up my guy, Bert Woodage, who was my connection to Sir Gordon Richards, and found this -
"1927 - 2000
Born on May 14, 1927, Bert Hamlen Woodage was apprenticed to George Todd at Manton. He was first seen on a racecourse at Salisbury on Saturday, July 24, 1943, riding a filly named Rose Sterling in the one-mile Apprentice Plate. Carrying just 6st 4lb, she finished last of the 17 runners.
Bert gradually gained race-riding experience and, in 1946, became leading jockey for half an hour when winning the first race of the season, the Apprentices’ Handicap at Lincoln, on the Todd-trained Stipend, the 4-1 favourite. Although he only rode one other winner from 19 mounts that year, a bright future was predicted.
He stayed with George Todd once he’d finished his apprenticeship but race-riding opportunities were scarce. He rode one winner form 16 mounts in 1949, three from 19 in 1950, all of them trained by Todd, then none at all for the next five years.
In 1956 Bert joined Sir Gordon Richards as a trial jockey with occasional rides on the Flat. Being able to ride at 7st, he partnered some of the stable’s lightweights and young horses who required racing experience. He rode his first winner for Sir Gordon on White Nun at Windsor in June 1956, one of 15 rides that year. He had the same number of rides in 1957, his sole success coming on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old Quel Diable in a Worcester maiden handicap. That would turn out to be his final winner. He came within a short-head of victory on 20-1 shot Desert Love at Bath in September 1958, losing out in the photo-finish to Jimmy Lindley on the 5-4 favourite Grey Topper.
He had his final ride on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old filly Sash of Honour at Bath on May 12, 1960, finishing second, beaten three lengths. Soon afterwards, he found himself under arrest.
On October 25, 1960, along with four other men, comprising three stable lads and a chemist’s dispenser, Bert Woodage appeared before the court at Gloucester Assizes charged with conspiracy to administer drugs to horses over a period of three years from 1958 to 1960. There was also a second count alleging conspiracy to defraud the owners and trainers of those horses and to injure their reputation. Each of the five defendants pleaded not guilty to the two charges.
The ‘hub’ in the conspiracy, it was alleged, was Bertie ‘Bandy’ Rogers, who had died by the time of the trial. It was he who had supposedly distributed the dope, in the form of powders containing caffeine, a banned stimulant, aimed at making horses run faster, rather than doping them to lose.
Woodage acknowledged that he had received powders from Rogers and, when interviewed by police earlier in the year, had admitted to giving one or two to stable lads, but said he did not know they were powders to make the horse win.
tbc
Sir Gordon Richards was called as a witness and confirmed he had employed Woodage as a stable lad and as a jockey since 1956. He was then asked about the horses he trained and the races in which they ran. He said that Woodage never had authority from him or on his behalf to go give any sort of drug or powder such as caffeine to any of the horses, adding that he had known nothing about it until the case came to light.
He described Woodage as “an absolutely first-class worker” and said that he was still working for him. He added that there was nothing to make him think that Woodage wanted to damage his employer’s reputation as a trainer.
On Monday, October 25, 1960, four of the men were found guilty of conspiracy to dope racehorses, one of the stable lads having been acquitted. Bert Woodage, aged 33, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, as was chemist’s assistant Harry Tuck. Sentences of six months and nine months respectively were imposed on stable lads Robert Mason and James Boyce. The Judge said that Woodage had given powders, either innocently or with fraudulent intent, on a bigger scale than Mason or Boyce, hence the longer sentence.
The jury formally returned a verdict of not guilty on the second charge, to defraud owners and trainers and to injure their reputation.
Sir Gordon had earlier in the day returned to the witness box and pleaded for leniency for Woodage. He said he had known him for 20 years and had ridden alongside him in public, adding he was “amazed when this thing happened.
“When this thing started,” Sir Gordon continued, “wages in stables were very bad. He had his own family to keep, and living with him were his father-in-law, who has not worked for years, and mother-in-law, who has been bedridden for over 15 years.
“I am sure he has learned his lesson,” he told the Judge. “He still has to keep them. He is the only one who can keep them – so I appeal to you to be as lenient with him as you can. While I am training horses, he has always got a job.”
tbc
Passing sentence, the Judge, Mr Justice Barry, said all four men were of excellent character and that it was “a disaster” that they had allowed themselves to become involved in a fraudulent scheme.
He observed: “It is a most painful thing to impose prison sentences on men such as you, but I have to uphold my duty to the public and I have to make it clear to all those who might be tempted to indulge in these sort of practices that they cannot go unpunished.”
It was a sad end to a career that at one time had promised a bright future.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Yes and no. That kind of sum is more in keeping with science/engineering grants employing post docs over a number of years. Without seeing the breakdown I suspect Michelle has secured a lot of holiday work in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.
For the Senate to turn Blue, you need four Democratic pickups. If Sherrod Brown were to stand again in Ohio, then I think would be just about possible.
So: Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Of the rest, Iowa is the most plausible gain: Joni Ernst only got 51% of the vote last time around.
And it's *possible* that Texas or Florida could come into play.
Trump doesn't care. The Senate is irrelevant.
When the rule of law breaks down and court orders are just ignored, what does it matter who controls the Senate or Congress? We've clearly passed that point already.
We may well get there, but we are not yet at the point where the rule of law in the conventional sense breaks down. WRT court orders this will arise finally when an unambiguous order of SCOTUS is simply and publicly overridden, especially if force is used or resisted to do so. SFAICS court orderd so far, which in the nature of things are temporary as there hasn't been time for any full and final hearings (these take months generally), and I think nothing has got to SCOTUS yet.
That's fair. I exaggerate the point as to where we are on the line. But I think the intent is clearly there. The idea is evidently to test the judiciary's resolve, and the enforceability of law.
I agree the evidence of intent is clearly there, and the lines of attack are emerging: not only that courts can be overridden without comeback, but also that the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity can be argued (wrongly but so what) to be used as a springboard for extending executive power 'lawfully' by simply relying on his immunity to be a continuing putting right of any error in presidential edict. (IE if the president orders it, it has to be right because of his immunity; or 'the king can do no wrong'). For all I know SCOTUS would swallow it. But probs not.
In the end and if it goes far enough, things would be decided by popular uprising and/or the military. We are miles off that, that it would be unwise to put the chances at Zero.
Agreed. There's also the influence of state legislatures.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
I wonder if Hamas announcement of ceasing in releasing hostages is because they don't actually have any to hand to release. Israel already believe that 8-9 of the 17 on the list are dead, and we know that it wasn't just Hamas who held these people, they were spread out among all the Islamist organisations / passed to civilian families to hold. With have already seen them swap around the people who were supposed to be released which could be that some aren't "available" for release.
And the ones they handed over seemed near to dead. So not a stretch to think some of this sad cohort did not last life being starved in a tunnel.
That was exactly what I thought. They’ve run out of alive ones the murdering scum.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Yes and no. That kind of sum is more in keeping with science/engineering grants employing post docs over a number of years. Without seeing the breakdown I suspect Michelle has secured a lot of holiday work in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.
Oh I'm not - I don't think it's that expensive for what it is covering. my point was simply that the headline figure was for a 3 year project...
Donald Trump plans to today sign an executive order that will require heads of US government departments and agencies to cooperate with the Elon Musk-chaired “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Reuters reports.
Citing a White House official, the president will also order agency heads to limit hiring to only essential staff. The order comes as Democrats warn that Trump is defying the law by allowing Musk and his staff to enter federal agencies and access secure systems, or shut them down altogether.
As a listener to BBC news output for over half a century, and a long term admirer of their output, I get the slight impression - does anyone share it - that they are trying hard to go a little easy on how Trump and his plutocratic gangster oligarchs are behaving constitutionally in internal USA matters.
Completely hypothetically I can well understand why it would suit the government not to have our public broadcaster going all guns blazing at the incipient rise of an unconstitutional and law breaking USA government.
Also, making Trump look bad may also, by association, make the BBC’s poster boy, Farage, look bad.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Comments
Ethnicity data for constituencies is available at:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-statistics-ethnicity/
Following the Conservative Party conference in October 2022, Truss had an approval rating of −47 per cent according to an opinion poll by The Observer.
What am I missing ?
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Tameside_Metropolitan_Borough_Council_election
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
I’m not quite sure plumbing new depths of unpopularity is quite deserved by their actions so far, no matter that those haven’t been great by any means. I guess this is perhaps showing the disadvantages of the kind of opposition politics Starmer played .
A starting point for keeping track is here:
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Why would SCOTUS be different?
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birleşik_Krallık
They're even trying to make us use a letter we don't have in English.
Two models of what's going on. One is that the Trump administration is trying awful stuff experimentally- that, given the right sort of pushback, they retreat. See the stuff on tariffs.
The other possibility is that they really don't care about any laws that constrain their actions. And nobody can stop them.
In the second case, America really is in the bad place. But the other possibilities (experimental awful and not knowing if the rule of law has broken down) are only a bit better.
Of course, it's likely to get an awful lot worse, The next double whammy of an inflation spike and a fresh round of wage suppression is coming round the corner, and inflation also begets further hikes in the state pension which Reeves will end up having to raise taxes or cut spending to pay for. Both of those options will create new groups of screaming victims, and if the Government attempts to reimpose below inflation wage settlements on the public sector there'll be fresh rounds of very disruptive strikes.
The Government has played a poor hand badly, and already burned through much of the good will and political capital it had at the beginning of its term. If a Labour-led administration of some kind remains the most probable outcome of the next election, insofar as such prognostication means anything at this remove, it is only because the most obvious alternatives are more repellent.
“Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched an image-sharing website in 2021 that featured custom “shitposting” web addresses that redirected to content hosted on his site. URLs that redirected to Coristine’s site referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Among the links were “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club,” according to web traffic tracked by BuiltWith.”
https://www.muskwatch.com/p/doge-teen-ran-image-sharing-site
Personally, I think in Google settings you should be allowed to change how things are displayed.
In the end and if it goes far enough, things would be decided by popular uprising and/or the military. We are miles off that, that it would be unwise to put the chances at Zero.
"An argument that didn't work for the guards at Nuremberg!"
NRA Accidentally Forgets To Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government
https://x.com/bee2216/status/1888056550050210242
Gaza is a complete ruin that would impose immense costs on the United States if it tried to secure and redevelop it, even assuming that Trump could leave it to Netanyahu to do the required ethnic cleansing successfully first. I think it's at least a live possibility that this may all be a ruse to try to persuade/cajole/force the Arab neighbours to send in their own troops to put down Hamas, lest they end up seeing Gaza turned into a permanent American-Israeli colony, and having to house a vast, seething and radicalised diaspora of penniless refugees.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
https://fortune.com/2025/02/11/federal-judge-trump-administration-unfreeze-funding-disobeyed-previous-order/
https://x.com/CharlotteCGill/status/1773300997038772364
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/11/trump-signs-executive-order-to-bring-back-plastic-straws/
To adapt a phrase.
Perfectly normal these days, because in the old days people like - oh, I don't know? maybe you can think of some - complained that there was no effort to bring the results to the public, ivory tower, blah blah.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
It also has "Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf)"
"Londonderry Derry"
Mostly it has English names of places, so it's sad to see Leghorn isn't used any more.
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
MSNBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SLnRo3IFK4
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
By this interview Trump risks turning Vance into his Rishi
Nigel Farage MP
@Nigel_Farage
The government spent £200,000 on studying the impact of Star Wars on the environment.
Our taxpayer money is being wasted on a simply enormous scale.
Britain needs its own DOGE! @WokeWaste
https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1889369446533284129
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
This did involve drunk physics students, liquid oxygen and a long pole (drunk not stupid)
Does that count?
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Or, indeed, the mitigation needed?
Completely hypothetically I can well understand why it would suit the government not to have our public broadcaster going all guns blazing at the incipient rise of an unconstitutional and law breaking USA government.
There's an interview here with Jonathan Lynn:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027kzv
"1927 - 2000
Born on May 14, 1927, Bert Hamlen Woodage was apprenticed to George Todd at Manton. He was first seen on a racecourse at Salisbury on Saturday, July 24, 1943, riding a filly named Rose Sterling in the one-mile Apprentice Plate. Carrying just 6st 4lb, she finished last of the 17 runners.
Bert gradually gained race-riding experience and, in 1946, became leading jockey for half an hour when winning the first race of the season, the Apprentices’ Handicap at Lincoln, on the Todd-trained Stipend, the 4-1 favourite. Although he only rode one other winner from 19 mounts that year, a bright future was predicted.
He stayed with George Todd once he’d finished his apprenticeship but race-riding opportunities were scarce. He rode one winner form 16 mounts in 1949, three from 19 in 1950, all of them trained by Todd, then none at all for the next five years.
In 1956 Bert joined Sir Gordon Richards as a trial jockey with occasional rides on the Flat. Being able to ride at 7st, he partnered some of the stable’s lightweights and young horses who required racing experience. He rode his first winner for Sir Gordon on White Nun at Windsor in June 1956, one of 15 rides that year. He had the same number of rides in 1957, his sole success coming on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old Quel Diable in a Worcester maiden handicap. That would turn out to be his final winner. He came within a short-head of victory on 20-1 shot Desert Love at Bath in September 1958, losing out in the photo-finish to Jimmy Lindley on the 5-4 favourite Grey Topper.
He had his final ride on Sir Gordon’s three-year-old filly Sash of Honour at Bath on May 12, 1960, finishing second, beaten three lengths. Soon afterwards, he found himself under arrest.
On October 25, 1960, along with four other men, comprising three stable lads and a chemist’s dispenser, Bert Woodage appeared before the court at Gloucester Assizes charged with conspiracy to administer drugs to horses over a period of three years from 1958 to 1960. There was also a second count alleging conspiracy to defraud the owners and trainers of those horses and to injure their reputation. Each of the five defendants pleaded not guilty to the two charges.
The ‘hub’ in the conspiracy, it was alleged, was Bertie ‘Bandy’ Rogers, who had died by the time of the trial. It was he who had supposedly distributed the dope, in the form of powders containing caffeine, a banned stimulant, aimed at making horses run faster, rather than doping them to lose.
Woodage acknowledged that he had received powders from Rogers and, when interviewed by police earlier in the year, had admitted to giving one or two to stable lads, but said he did not know they were powders to make the horse win.
tbc
He described Woodage as “an absolutely first-class worker” and said that he was still working for him. He added that there was nothing to make him think that Woodage wanted to damage his employer’s reputation as a trainer.
On Monday, October 25, 1960, four of the men were found guilty of conspiracy to dope racehorses, one of the stable lads having been acquitted. Bert Woodage, aged 33, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, as was chemist’s assistant Harry Tuck. Sentences of six months and nine months respectively were imposed on stable lads Robert Mason and James Boyce. The Judge said that Woodage had given powders, either innocently or with fraudulent intent, on a bigger scale than Mason or Boyce, hence the longer sentence.
The jury formally returned a verdict of not guilty on the second charge, to defraud owners and trainers and to injure their reputation.
Sir Gordon had earlier in the day returned to the witness box and pleaded for leniency for Woodage. He said he had known him for 20 years and had ridden alongside him in public, adding he was “amazed when this thing happened.
“When this thing started,” Sir Gordon continued, “wages in stables were very bad. He had his own family to keep, and living with him were his father-in-law, who has not worked for years, and mother-in-law, who has been bedridden for over 15 years.
“I am sure he has learned his lesson,” he told the Judge. “He still has to keep them. He is the only one who can keep them – so I appeal to you to be as lenient with him as you can. While I am training horses, he has always got a job.”
tbc
He observed: “It is a most painful thing to impose prison sentences on men such as you, but I have to uphold my duty to the public and I have to make it clear to all those who might be tempted to indulge in these sort of practices that they cannot go unpunished.”
It was a sad end to a career that at one time had promised a bright future.
Bert Woodage died in 2000, aged 73.
https://sites.google.com/view/jockeys-w/bert-woodage
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
holidaywork in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.Citing a White House official, the president will also order agency heads to limit hiring to only essential staff. The order comes as Democrats warn that Trump is defying the law by allowing Musk and his staff to enter federal agencies and access secure systems, or shut them down altogether.