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What Brits think about the Big Mac eating surrender monkey's plans for Ukraine politicalbetting.com
What Brits think about the Big Mac eating surrender monkey's plans for Ukraine – politicalbetting.com
Do you think a peace treaty negotiated between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on the Ukraine conflict would be better for Ukraine or better for Russia?Better for Russia than Ukraine: 51%More of a compromise for both sides: 23%Better for Ukraine than Russia: 5%yougov.co.uk/topics/polit…
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That means Trump is going to announce 20-50% tariffs on the Uk on Sunday night
"It increasingly looks as if Lucy Letby’s conviction was unsafe
The case of a nurse jailed for killing babies exposes deep problems with British justice"
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/02/10/it-increasingly-looks-as-if-lucy-letbys-conviction-was-unsafe
But I’ve got some prepared threads ready to be deployed.
Sam Dumitriu
@Sam_Dumitriu
London's Metropolitan Police have objected to the opening of a new jazz bar in Covent Garden because criminals might target drunk jazz fans leaving at 1am.
(Don't mention the cocktail bar that is already in the same building open until 2am, or the gin parlour a few doors down already open until 1am.)
sending emails and posting on here
I am not close enough to the case to know one way or the other, but clearly Letby’s representatives have a right to argue that and to go through the judicial process to have the case reviewed. If the conviction is unsafe then she should be freed, obviously.
But there’s something in this whole saga I find deeply unedifying, with commentators enjoying loudly playing judge and jury in the centre of a deeply troubling situation which involves an awful lot of bereaved parents.
Citation please. The step from Corbyn fanboi to Putin fascist appears to be a short one.
Valentine’s Day, evening, Bangkok, tonight
What makes this temporary collection of roses, perfumes, love hearts, pink cuddly toys with I LOVE YOU embroidery is that it is right outside Nana Plaza, Bangkok’s largest complex of brothels
I must say I don't know what the answer is to that - or whether she really is innocent - but I've read enough about courts in general and this case in particular to get rather uncomfortable about any sort of trial with elaborate stats and no defence.
Did she have legal aid? In which case, no money for decent defence witnesses.
But the media have something to be blamed for, as it appears no specialists wanted to get the pediatrician/paedo treatment fromt he media (and, presumablyt, the local vigilantes).
https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r300
It isn't Brits dying to fight off the Russian invasion. It's not our job to "advise" Ukraine on what to do. It is to stand by them for as long as they wish to fight.
I also read Private Eye and was underwhelmed, not taking away their campaigns which are or can be I know super-effective.
Trump 2.0 is more like the end of a long culture war that has been comprehensibly lost by his opponents.
And a No Deal Hard Brexit didn’t happen and thank god for that.
She is fundamentally not suitable to hold the position she is in, in the same way as Boris Johnson was unsuitable to be PM.
Most Tory, Labour and LD voters also think Ukraine should not accept a deal which requires them to give up territory if it does not want to and continue providing military aid. Most Reform voters however think Ukraine should be encouraged to accept a deal and a plurality to cut off military aid if it doesn't.
Reform voters therefore very much in the Trump column
(Personally, I think this is Ukraine’s choice to make, and we should support whichever choice they make.)
Sometimes feels like I am a slave to the algorithm but other times it just clicks and things surge forward. I've also built up a bank of material for the coming weeks - next 2 weeks are mostly edited, the week after is shot, I've got a stack of other ideas to pull together and more road trips planned.
It's very much my secondary business activity, but of the 4 I have this is the most fun.
In which case, the UK isn't totally safe, but is in a safer place than the USA.
TBH there's something refreshing about that - if we're honest with ourselves many of us think we are more knowledgeable about some stuff than we actually are. Good at saying things that are plausible even if they aren't actual.
People expressing a view about how a Trump/Putin deal will be good for Putin. Perhaps. Perhaps not. We have no detail about what the deal might be. Not even any broad outlines of it. So all we're doing is letting our prejudices run wild and imagine what a deal might look like from two people we don't have a good opinion of. We are low information on this subject, no different to anyone else.
"Influenza levels in the United States are the highest they’ve been in 15 years as winter weather persists and the second wave of the virus causes more and more infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
The most recent CDC Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report shows that 7.8% of visits to a healthcare provider were for respiratory illness, the worst since the swine flu pandemic in late 2009. According to the report, most flu statistics in the U.S. are trending up, including the positive flu infections (31.6%), the patients admitted to hospitals with the flu this week (48,661), and the number of deaths attributed to the flu this week (2%)."
source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2025/02/11/flu-influenza-cases-increase-2025-symptoms-cdc/78412536007/
Fortunately we now have an HHS secretary — and president — who are uniquely qualified to respond to this outbreak. /sarc
The Ghost of Margaret Thtcher will be getting into that tank to see them off....
Even more so, when the solution is: "It's *their* fault, not yours!"
Elbow - The Fix followed by The Pogues - Bottle of Smoke.
(The third being The Galway Farmer by Show of Hands. Go on, treat yourself to a medley - although The Pogues are a bit sweary so may be NSFW...)
Is there a fourth?
I think the great danger about this case is that a lot of people have started taking an interest but without enough evidence. They were not in the court for the trial. They did not hear the witnesses. They are aware of previous failures on legal systems, such as the seemingly similar Dutch case. And so a lot of people are starting to question whether the outcome of the case was right.
I am always skeptical when statistics and juries meet. In general the great unwashed has little comprehension of statistics and is certainly not able to spot fallacies in the thinking. There was, allegedly, a chart showing that all the babies who died or were harmed happened when Letby was on duty. It has been alleged that other deaths happened when she was not there but were excluded from said chart. Some people suspect that the chart which seems so damning may in fact be an example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Others assert that it isn't.
Its surely only fair (to all concerned) to be robust in this.
Or JD Vance needs a good fisking.
* I'm very good at nearly finishing things.
Melania pitched her documentary idea to Bezos over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Amazon agreed to pay $40M—with more than 70% going to her. And her agent has been trying to sell "sponsorships" for the film—starting at $10M—to CEOs at the inauguration. Buyers would get thanked in the credits and be invited to the premiere...
https://x.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1890205838201045283
Say what you want about her - and everyone does. You knew what she stood for, and she wasn't frit.
It's clear that if Putin is appeased then he'll be back for more of Ukraine in a few years because that is what has already happened with the 2014 Crimea invasion.
Not yet anyway.
https://x.com/s8mb/status/1890417554604040435
Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party is winning over some disillusioned Labour voters by targeting regions that are struggling economically and by campaigning on local issues."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/world/europe/reform-uk-wales-farage.html
Now they have the world's richest man making arbitrary cuts to the very programmes intended to help the poorest make ends meet.
It's like the United States of Chickens elected the Fox again, and this time the Wolf has joined him for dinner.
The ones I really dislike are the worms like Bercow who moved from one obnoxious extreme to another.
Certainly, both fascism and communism succeeded in selling a lot of conspiracy theories to the public.
Ben Gartside @BenGartside
Scoop: The UK is bigoted, Brexit is bad and housing is too expensive.
Inside the Government's undisclosed social media campaign to potential Albanian migrants.
Featuring pictures of flytipping, graffiti and Norwich.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/uk-bigoted-brexit-bad-government-campaign-scare-migrants-3536102
https://youtu.be/aq2u1bmkKUQ?si=k9bQjSPTkVTfTdqM
Commentators have been declaiming on the innocence or guilt of people on appeal since appeals and newspapers were invented. It's part of the process of open justice.
There is a long and ugly history of "Don't comment on legal proceedings. Just trust the Law, the Police etc."
If you live in a gullible universe, then Nigel Farage, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are probably upstanding defenders of Liberal Democracy and their buddy Vlad Putin is only looking for a just and lasting peace with Ukraine.
In my universe, which is wary of wannabe demagogues and apologists for mass murderers of innocents, I like to describe Mr Farage and friends as fascist. Apologies if that offends your gullible sensibilities.
As there was an investigation somebody clearly did
She is silent on fake dentist appointments
I mean, for those of us watching from the outside and not invested in the result in the same way as the US electorate, it was obvious that he was going to learn his lesson and be more extreme second time around. But too many Americans are still poor and the Democrats chose a candidate who gave no signs at all of actually understanding the problems of the average working or middle class voter.
When you are not in that position it is easy to criticise their decisions but when you are drowning you will cling to any possible liferaft floating by, even if it turns out to be full of holes.
This in no way forgives Trump and his cabal, but I do think we are too harsh on the US voters from our nice, relatively well supported, lives in the UK.
She went to a Labour Party meeting
So indeed fake dentists