Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
I was looking at a BYD Seal the other day. Looks pretty good value and style, its a whole new generation compared to my Kia e-niro which was EV of the year 5 years ago. The problem of used EV sales is not that the batterries are knackered etc but rather that the technology moves so fast that the market for them is spoiled by newer, longer range, better value ones.
Detecting alien life has very little indeed to do with UFOs. If we do confirm it, it's overwhelmingly likely to be by chemical signature on a planet many, many light years away. Which would be headline news, but wouldn't be much of a shock to anybody.
His own cousin, surely, unless his previous wife was his sister?
Similarly, he annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn before beheading her on the grounds he'd previously been shagging her sister Mary.
I wouldn't wish to upset His Majesty (especially that His Majesty) by suggesting he was being disingenuous, but that seems like the sort of thing he would have been aware of beforehand.
Can't be bothered to read the piece but cousin marriage is central to the clan culture in British Pakistani communities (see Matthew Syed). Among the white population it is very rare. So it is largely an issue about Muslims in the UK.
Yet another example of someone thinking they can make a clever argument to rebut a right wing talking point but instead make themselves look silly in the process. And you wonder why you are losing?
His own cousin, surely, unless his previous wife was his sister?
Similarly, he annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn before beheading her on the grounds he'd previously been shagging her sister Mary.
I wouldn't wish to upset His Majesty (especially that His Majesty) by suggesting he was being disingenuous, but seems like the sort of thing he would have been aware of beforehand.
He found it hard with lots of women, to remember whom he had been up with.
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Even Blair and Thatcher and Johnson fought hopeless seats before they got selected for a winnable one, you can't just expect to waltz into a safe seat automatically without any campaigning experience in a tougher seat or standing for local council. Several former PMs and party leaders, Major, May and Corbyn for example were elected as local councillors first and Farage has fought many seats he had little chance of winning.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
There's always been a chunk of that- see the shenanigans that led to Gyles Brandreth becoming MP for Chester. (Nothing shabby, but his path was also very smooth.)
But it's what glamour professions can do; break all the rules of fairness and decency. Because if you don't like it, there's plenty of others happy to endure it for their shot at the big time.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
His own cousin, surely, unless his previous wife was his sister?
Under English law at the time, if you were married to somebody you were legally considered that person for marital purposes.
When Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, he had to obtain a papal dispensation because she had been married to his brother.
He claimed, in the dispensation, that Catherine and Arthur had never consummated their marriage. When he wanted an annulment, he claimed she had misled him on this point.
Similarly, he annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn before beheading her on the grounds he'd previously been shagging her sister Mary.
That is the hope. A very large majority of Americans oppose this idiocy. The same isn't true, though, of the Republican Party itself.
This year will determine whether both US democracy and the western alliance have any future. It is that stark.
Unfortunately, whilst the USA is run by Mad King Donald, with the guardrails and check and balances destroyed, I'd say for Foreign Policy and most of Domestic Policy in the short term "a very large majority of Americans opposing the idiocy" are 90% irrelevant.
I think a fairly significant chunk of Trump support have an ideological commitment where they would see the USA as a blasted heath, or at least the prospect of it, aided and abetted by a cartoon perception of anything outside the borders, such that there will be a hell of a lot of damage to everything before they wind their necks in.
The series of fantasy claims and speeches, stuffed full of BS, by JD Vance, eg Munich in Feb 2025, are not exactly encouraging.
They are down their rabbit hole, head first, and they will not be coming out. I think it will need to collapse around their ears.
Miller gave another neofascist interview about the necessity of acquiring Greenland, yesterday.
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Even Blair and Thatcher and Johnson fought hopeless seats before they got selected for a winnable one, you can't just expect to waltz into a safe seat automatically without any campaigning experience in a tougher seat or standing for local council. Several former PMs and party leaders, Major, May and Corbyn for example were elected as local councillors first and Farage has fought many seats he had little chance of winning.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
There's always been a chunk of that- see the shenanigans that led to Gyles Brandreth becoming MP for Chester. (Nothing shabby, but his path was also very smooth.)
But it's what glamour professions can do; break all the rules of fairness and decency. Because if you don't like it, there's plenty of others happy to endure it for their shot at the big time.
Plenty of others are willing to do the hard slog ploughing through council planning committees and delivering leaflets and canvassing in seats they have next to no chance of winning in order to try for more winnable seats. It is a valuable experience not only of how politics works but also of campaigning effectively and being able to make an effective argument to voters. Gyles to be fair to him was a good constituency MP and great Commons performer helped by his Oxford Union and TV experience but he never tried to be party leader or PM.
Those who think they are above it all and should be given a safe seat on a plate because of their brilliance in another field, like Rishi or Sir Keir, often fall flat on their face with the voters soon enough once they reach the top
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Even Blair and Thatcher and Johnson fought hopeless seats before they got selected for a winnable one, you can't just expect to waltz into a safe seat automatically without any campaigning experience in a tougher seat or standing for local council. Several former PMs and party leaders, Major, May and Corbyn for example were elected as local councillors first and Farage has fought many seats he had little chance of winning.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
There's always been a chunk of that- see the shenanigans that led to Gyles Brandreth becoming MP for Chester. (Nothing shabby, but his path was also very smooth.)
But it's what glamour professions can do; break all the rules of fairness and decency. Because if you don't like it, there's plenty of others happy to endure it for their shot at the big time.
Plenty of others are willing to do the hard slog ploughing through council planning committees and delivering leaflets and canvassing in seats they have next to no chance of winning in order to try for more winnable seats. It is a valuable experience not only of how politics works but also of campaigning effectively and being able to make an effective argument to voters.
Those who think they are above it all and should be given a safe seat on a plate because of their brilliance in another field, like Rishi or Sir Keir, often fall flat on their face with the voters soon enough once they reach the top
It's hard to quantify, but I do wonder if in terms of parliamentary management people rising to the top so quickly means they lack the right...feel for things.
Of course, it's not as though people like May or Brown were great at it and they had plenty of such experience.
Can't be bothered to read the piece but cousin marriage is central to the clan culture in British Pakistani communities (see Matthew Syed). Among the white population it is very rare. So it is largely an issue about Muslims in the UK.
Yet another example of someone thinking they can make a clever argument to rebut a right wing talking point but instead make themselves look silly in the process. And you wonder why you are losing?
And known about for years:
In the UK and across Europe, cousin marriage is coming under increased scrutiny - particularly from doctors, who warn that children of first cousins are more likely to experience an array of health problems.
And there's now some new, potentially worrying data from Bradford to add into that mix.
Researchers at the city's university are entering their 18th year of the Born in Bradford study. It's one of the biggest medical trials of its kind: between 2007 and 2010, researchers recruited more than 13,000 babies in the city and then followed them closely from childhood into adolescence and now into early adulthood. More than one in six children in the study have parents who are first cousins, mostly from Bradford's Pakistani community, making it among the world's most valuable studies of the health impacts of cousin marriage.
And in data published in the last few months - and analysed in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 4's Born in Bradford series - the researchers found that first cousin-parentage may have wider consequences than previously thought.
The most obvious way that a pair of blood-related parents might increase health risks for a child is through a recessive disorder, like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease. According to the classic theory of genetics laid out by the biologist Gregor Mendel, if both parents carry a recessive gene then there's a one in four chance that their child will inherit the condition. And when parents are cousins, they're more likely to both be carriers. A child of first cousins carries a 6% chance of inheriting a recessive disorder, compared to 3% for the general population.
But the Bradford study took a much broader view - and sheds fresh light. The researchers weren't just looking at whether a child had been diagnosed with a specific recessive disorder. Instead they studied dozens of data points, observing everything from the children's speech and language development to their frequency of healthcare to their performance at school. Then they used a mathematical model to try to eliminate the impacts of poverty and parental education - so they could focus squarely on the impact on "consanguinity", the scientific word for having parents who are related.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
Countries are going to have to carefully balance the domestic effects vs price of Chinese cars, especially with regard to electric cars.
Farage is unburdened by thoughts of Net Zero targets, so can easily take the more protectionist route. The big one is the EU, which until recently has been pretty much self-sufficient in cars.
Until we have some serious policy around reindustrialising, tariffs on Chinese cars are not massively helpful.
And any serious reindustrialising* would have to be done in association with Europe.
*A concept so alien to us, after Mrs T, that spellcheck renders it as deindustrialising.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Most of the West is screwed by the debt of the past two decades, over 100% of GDP in many countries and leaving governments at the behest of bond markets with little room for action. Most new UK debt is now index-linked, so they can’t even inflate it away.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
It having been made legal by him surely has little to do with the variance in prevalence, or not, among the general population of today and supposedly among specific demographic groups.
If there is such a variance, then it doesn't matter what the history is, if there isn't, then he's making things up.
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Even Blair and Thatcher and Johnson fought hopeless seats before they got selected for a winnable one, you can't just expect to waltz into a safe seat automatically without any campaigning experience in a tougher seat or standing for local council. Several former PMs and party leaders, Major, May and Corbyn for example were elected as local councillors first and Farage has fought many seats he had little chance of winning.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
There's always been a chunk of that- see the shenanigans that led to Gyles Brandreth becoming MP for Chester. (Nothing shabby, but his path was also very smooth.)
But it's what glamour professions can do; break all the rules of fairness and decency. Because if you don't like it, there's plenty of others happy to endure it for their shot at the big time.
Plenty of others are willing to do the hard slog ploughing through council planning committees and delivering leaflets and canvassing in seats they have next to no chance of winning in order to try for more winnable seats. It is a valuable experience not only of how politics works but also of campaigning effectively and being able to make an effective argument to voters.
Those who think they are above it all and should be given a safe seat on a plate because of their brilliance in another field, like Rishi or Sir Keir, often fall flat on their face with the voters soon enough once they reach the top
It's hard to quantify, but I do wonder if in terms of parliamentary management people rising to the top so quickly means they lack the right...feel for things.
Of course, it's not as though people like May or Brown were great at it and they had plenty of such experience.
Brown got a hung parliament in 2010 when early polls suggested Cameron would win a landslide.
May did at least win most seats in a general election unlike Rishi and against Corbyn (who had plenty of campaigning experience too and had also started off as a local councillor). She also was never as unpopular as Starmer is now
Can't be bothered to read the piece but cousin marriage is central to the clan culture in British Pakistani communities (see Matthew Syed). Among the white population it is very rare. So it is largely an issue about Muslims in the UK.
Yet another example of someone thinking they can make a clever argument to rebut a right wing talking point but instead make themselves look silly in the process. And you wonder why you are losing?
And known about for years:
In the UK and across Europe, cousin marriage is coming under increased scrutiny - particularly from doctors, who warn that children of first cousins are more likely to experience an array of health problems.
And there's now some new, potentially worrying data from Bradford to add into that mix.
Researchers at the city's university are entering their 18th year of the Born in Bradford study. It's one of the biggest medical trials of its kind: between 2007 and 2010, researchers recruited more than 13,000 babies in the city and then followed them closely from childhood into adolescence and now into early adulthood. More than one in six children in the study have parents who are first cousins, mostly from Bradford's Pakistani community, making it among the world's most valuable studies of the health impacts of cousin marriage.
And in data published in the last few months - and analysed in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 4's Born in Bradford series - the researchers found that first cousin-parentage may have wider consequences than previously thought.
The most obvious way that a pair of blood-related parents might increase health risks for a child is through a recessive disorder, like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease. According to the classic theory of genetics laid out by the biologist Gregor Mendel, if both parents carry a recessive gene then there's a one in four chance that their child will inherit the condition. And when parents are cousins, they're more likely to both be carriers. A child of first cousins carries a 6% chance of inheriting a recessive disorder, compared to 3% for the general population.
But the Bradford study took a much broader view - and sheds fresh light. The researchers weren't just looking at whether a child had been diagnosed with a specific recessive disorder. Instead they studied dozens of data points, observing everything from the children's speech and language development to their frequency of healthcare to their performance at school. Then they used a mathematical model to try to eliminate the impacts of poverty and parental education - so they could focus squarely on the impact on "consanguinity", the scientific word for having parents who are related.
When it’s smoking or speed limits or climate change, Reform UK generally think that people’s liberty is more important than the health risks. But not here. Doesn’t seem very consistent.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Most of the West is screwed by the debt of the past two decades, over 100% of GDP in many countries and leaving governments at the behest of bond markets with little room for action. Most new UK debt is now index-linked, so they can’t even inflate it away.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
Can't be bothered to read the piece but cousin marriage is central to the clan culture in British Pakistani communities (see Matthew Syed). Among the white population it is very rare. So it is largely an issue about Muslims in the UK.
Yet another example of someone thinking they can make a clever argument to rebut a right wing talking point but instead make themselves look silly in the process. And you wonder why you are losing?
And known about for years:
In the UK and across Europe, cousin marriage is coming under increased scrutiny - particularly from doctors, who warn that children of first cousins are more likely to experience an array of health problems.
And there's now some new, potentially worrying data from Bradford to add into that mix.
Researchers at the city's university are entering their 18th year of the Born in Bradford study. It's one of the biggest medical trials of its kind: between 2007 and 2010, researchers recruited more than 13,000 babies in the city and then followed them closely from childhood into adolescence and now into early adulthood. More than one in six children in the study have parents who are first cousins, mostly from Bradford's Pakistani community, making it among the world's most valuable studies of the health impacts of cousin marriage.
And in data published in the last few months - and analysed in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 4's Born in Bradford series - the researchers found that first cousin-parentage may have wider consequences than previously thought.
The most obvious way that a pair of blood-related parents might increase health risks for a child is through a recessive disorder, like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease. According to the classic theory of genetics laid out by the biologist Gregor Mendel, if both parents carry a recessive gene then there's a one in four chance that their child will inherit the condition. And when parents are cousins, they're more likely to both be carriers. A child of first cousins carries a 6% chance of inheriting a recessive disorder, compared to 3% for the general population.
But the Bradford study took a much broader view - and sheds fresh light. The researchers weren't just looking at whether a child had been diagnosed with a specific recessive disorder. Instead they studied dozens of data points, observing everything from the children's speech and language development to their frequency of healthcare to their performance at school. Then they used a mathematical model to try to eliminate the impacts of poverty and parental education - so they could focus squarely on the impact on "consanguinity", the scientific word for having parents who are related.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
Last night one of my Tweets about Greenland went viral, I'd say about 40% of the replies are MAGA bullshit by Brits.
Any brit who defends and supports immigrants is a traitor.
Any brit who defends and supports immigrants is a traitor.
I'd forgotten you still had a Twitter account. Can't be fun, given that it is chock full of nutters. Have you thought of migrating to Bluesky and going on Matt Wardman's Political Betting starter pack?
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
Incredible.
No 4% do, the other 25% don't know
14.5% seems a little low to me. Recent polling (2023) by Savanta for a KCL study:
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed
conspiracy theories.
Well some people are easily fooled
eg.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
Talking about EVs - I’m looking for a new car and yesterday was offered a brand new Ford Explorer EV at 40% off the list price.
Got to say as a company purchase with all the tax breaks that having an EV offers it’s something I may well get
The correct answer, no matter what the discount to list price is, is almost certainly to lease instead. Used EV prices are just going to keep dropping and there are some great subsidised lease deals out there. Also, leasing will get you back 50% of the VAT regardless of level of personal use.
Got my first EV last year, first car I've put through the company books, and first time I've leased (top spec Enyaq at £270 pcm ex VAT, 10k miles pa, 12+23 FWIW). Looking for another for fellow director Mrs OR now...
Ian Leslie blocked me on Twitter for disagreeing with him in the mildest terms. Nevertheless, I have to say that his takedown of Sir Keir is absolutely brilliant. If I were a better writer I would have written this, which is a long winded way of saying “I couldn’t have put it better myself”
The idea that Starmer is a serious man unsuited to an age of raw populism is remarkably persistent. Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s amanuensis, blames the voters for Starmer’s deep unpopularity. He says that Britain may be becoming ungovernable. ‘Something is going on with the electorate.’
I don’t know, maybe the electorate is smarter than Baldwin thinks, or at least not as stupid as he imagines. Perhaps they can see that this is a Prime Minister who merely cosplays at seriousness; who changes his mind on everything because he didn’t know his own mind in the first place; who introduces a momentous change to the law on terminal care because a celebrity told him to; who makes a hard-hitting speech on immigration and then says he didn’t know what he was saying; who drops everything to call a press conference about a Netflix drama; who allows his Chancellor to hint at breaking a central campaign pledge and then take the hint back; who declares right before his party conference that ID cards will be the centrepiece of his reform programme before erasing all mentions of it from his speech.
As I say frequently to an uncomfortable silence, America don't owe it to Britain to elect someone we like. If we'd wanted to demonstrate some independence from the USA in this sort of situation, the time to look after that was over the last 7 decades when we gave ever more power to the US, allowed the US to gobble up key British companies, made our armed services and intelligence systems indivisible from theirs, and adopted an unecessarily servile approach compared to countries of similar size.
Truss gave an anecdote in her show of the Foreign Office changing her speech without asking her. When she demanded to know why, they told her it was because they'd checked it with the State Department. Why would the US State Department get a veto over the words of the British Foreign Secretary. That is toxic and totally against democracy.
Sadly, we're so demoralised (certainly PBers seem to be) that instead of being determined to do better, and to gradually reclaim our sovereignty, we think the best thing to do in this situation is to jump straight into bed with the EU, thus giving up even MORE independence to someone ELSE. As if Europe would never choose a leader we don't like. I mean get a grip PB for the love of God.
I dont want us to rejoin the EU but we need a security alliance with neighbouring, democratic nations to reduce risk of being bullied by US or threatened by Russia. We can't go it alone.
We need to be willing to fund strategic security.
Alliances need to have the means to back up their commitments.
We spend loads on our military. 5th or 6th in the world. To my mind though we spend loads on stuff that doesn't really help us, its more about tagging along with the Americans.
Considering the situation with Greenland, is Mike Johnson (yes, I know ) value in terms of being the next President? Presuming that Trump invading would be a step to far for the GOP and Trump gets impeached and convicted, are the EU and other US allies going to want to deal with Vance as President? For any kind of reset back to some variation of the status quo, surely the message from Macron, Merz etc. would be that Vance needs to be impeached and gone as well. Which means Johnson becomes President.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
Unfortunately, it's probably even more universal than that.
Most people who think about it recognise that Trump should be stopped, one way or another.
Nobody wants the pain of being the one who actually does this, and everyone can reasonably argue that it's someone else's problem.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
The motivation was a deeply misguided wish to avoid political rancour, I think. Biden was still pushing bipartisanship long after it became clear that was a hopeless effort. Dont forget that there was an enormous effort by Republicans to paint the investigation as political. I don't think it really had anything to do with wanting to preserve Trump as an opponent in 2024.
The DoJ started investigating Jan 6th as soon as Garland took office. But you're entirely correct it took them another year to start investigating Trump directly.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
I do love the reflex of 'blame SCOTUS'.
Garland took over 600 days to do anything.
Garland knew how long legal processes can take, Garland knew that Trump would try to delay things, Garland knew that there was a time limit.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
It doesn't matter if people thought that Trump wouldn't run again, although it was obvious that he would. Trump still needed to be brought to justice for the good of the US political system.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
Ian Leslie blocked me on Twitter for disagreeing with him in the mildest terms. Nevertheless, I have to say that his takedown of Sir Keir is absolutely brilliant. If I were a better writer I would have written this, which is a long winded way of saying “I couldn’t have put it better myself”
The idea that Starmer is a serious man unsuited to an age of raw populism is remarkably persistent. Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s amanuensis, blames the voters for Starmer’s deep unpopularity. He says that Britain may be becoming ungovernable. ‘Something is going on with the electorate.’
I don’t know, maybe the electorate is smarter than Baldwin thinks, or at least not as stupid as he imagines. Perhaps they can see that this is a Prime Minister who merely cosplays at seriousness; who changes his mind on everything because he didn’t know his own mind in the first place; who introduces a momentous change to the law on terminal care because a celebrity told him to; who makes a hard-hitting speech on immigration and then says he didn’t know what he was saying; who drops everything to call a press conference about a Netflix drama; who allows his Chancellor to hint at breaking a central campaign pledge and then take the hint back; who declares right before his party conference that ID cards will be the centrepiece of his reform programme before erasing all mentions of it from his speech.
Considering the situation with Greenland, is Mike Johnson (yes, I know ) value in terms of being the next President? Presuming that Trump invading would be a step to far for the GOP and Trump gets impeached and convicted, are the EU and other US allies going to want to deal with Vance as President? For any kind of reset back to some variation of the status quo, surely the message from Macron, Merz etc. would be that Vance needs to be impeached and gone as well. Which means Johnson becomes President.
He would only be acting President under the Presidential Succession Act. Would that count?
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
I do love the reflex of 'blame SCOTUS'.
Garland took over 600 days to do anything.
Garland knew how long legal processes can take, Garland knew that Trump would try to delay things, Garland knew that there was a time limit.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
It doesn't matter if people thought that Trump wouldn't run again, although it was obvious that he would. Trump still needed to be brought to justice for the good of the US political system.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
I freely admit I am not the fist to point out Merrick Garland's inaction:
Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Missteps
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Even Blair and Thatcher and Johnson fought hopeless seats before they got selected for a winnable one, you can't just expect to waltz into a safe seat automatically without any campaigning experience in a tougher seat or standing for local council. Several former PMs and party leaders, Major, May and Corbyn for example were elected as local councillors first and Farage has fought many seats he had little chance of winning.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
There's always been a chunk of that- see the shenanigans that led to Gyles Brandreth becoming MP for Chester. (Nothing shabby, but his path was also very smooth.)
But it's what glamour professions can do; break all the rules of fairness and decency. Because if you don't like it, there's plenty of others happy to endure it for their shot at the big time.
Plenty of others are willing to do the hard slog ploughing through council planning committees and delivering leaflets and canvassing in seats they have next to no chance of winning in order to try for more winnable seats. It is a valuable experience not only of how politics works but also of campaigning effectively and being able to make an effective argument to voters.
Those who think they are above it all and should be given a safe seat on a plate because of their brilliance in another field, like Rishi or Sir Keir, often fall flat on their face with the voters soon enough once they reach the top
It's hard to quantify, but I do wonder if in terms of parliamentary management people rising to the top so quickly means they lack the right...feel for things.
Of course, it's not as though people like May or Brown were great at it and they had plenty of such experience.
Brown got a hung parliament in 2010 when early polls suggested Cameron would win a landslide.
May did at least win most seats in a general election unlike Rishi and against Corbyn (who had plenty of campaigning experience too and had also started off as a local councillor). She also was never as unpopular as Starmer is now
May is going to be a former PM, like Major, that history will be kinder to than the present was when they were PM.
Considering the situation with Greenland, is Mike Johnson (yes, I know ) value in terms of being the next President? Presuming that Trump invading would be a step to far for the GOP and Trump gets impeached and convicted, are the EU and other US allies going to want to deal with Vance as President? For any kind of reset back to some variation of the status quo, surely the message from Macron, Merz etc. would be that Vance needs to be impeached and gone as well. Which means Johnson becomes President.
I can’t see that happening.
You make the assumption that US republicans would listen to anything the likes of Merz and Macron have to say. Marcon only has a year left and is termed out, and Merz can’t even sort out a war in his own back yard without begging for American help (in their opinion).
Johnson himself will of course likely be replaced after the mid-terms if the Dems win the House, and the GOP Senators aren’t likely to go along with anything that put a Dem in the White House. Also, in the middle of the process Vance could appoint a new VP, say Rubio, who would move up to be next in line.
The various permutations of how these things play out, is why POTUS and Veep are very rarely in the same place other than the White House, and never travel together.
I think he goes quiet on the Greenland issue, at least as far as sending the army there to take it by force, and moves on to something else next week.
Considering the situation with Greenland, is Mike Johnson (yes, I know ) value in terms of being the next President? Presuming that Trump invading would be a step to far for the GOP and Trump gets impeached and convicted, are the EU and other US allies going to want to deal with Vance as President? For any kind of reset back to some variation of the status quo, surely the message from Macron, Merz etc. would be that Vance needs to be impeached and gone as well. Which means Johnson becomes President.
He would only be acting President under the Presidential Succession Act. Would that count?
There's also the point that the House might appoint a different Speaker during any process which led to impeachment. Johnson would certainly not facilitate the attempt to impeach.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Most of the West is screwed by the debt of the past two decades, over 100% of GDP in many countries and leaving governments at the behest of bond markets with little room for action. Most new UK debt is now index-linked, so they can’t even inflate it away.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
The US? The country that has an increasing debt?
Isn’t that a problem for the people who have bought that debt, too?
That is the hope. A very large majority of Americans oppose this idiocy. The same isn't true, though, of the Republican Party itself.
This year will determine whether both US democracy and the western alliance have any future. It is that stark.
Unfortunately, whilst the USA is run by Mad King Donald, with the guardrails and check and balances destroyed, I'd say for Foreign Policy and most of Domestic Policy in the short term "a very large majority of Americans opposing the idiocy" are 90% irrelevant.
I think a fairly significant chunk of Trump support have an ideological commitment where they would see the USA as a blasted heath, or at least the prospect of it, aided and abetted by a cartoon perception of anything outside the borders, such that there will be a hell of a lot of damage to everything before they wind their necks in.
The series of fantasy claims and speeches, stuffed full of BS, by JD Vance, eg Munich in Feb 2025, are not exactly encouraging.
They are down their rabbit hole, head first, and they will not be coming out. I think it will need to collapse around their ears.
Miller gave another neofascist interview about the necessity of acquiring Greenland, yesterday.
Next up, the Falklands, as soon as they start pumping a significant amount of oil.
What will Miller be saying when the USA cannot defend it's own imperial outposts, which is a matter time?
I think we will see more analysis this year about impending decline of the USA. Do we have any firm data yet about just how far forward Trump's policies have pulled USA population decline?
Trump's DHS are claiming something like 500k deportations and 2.5 million others who have left at the moment.
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
Considering the situation with Greenland, is Mike Johnson (yes, I know ) value in terms of being the next President? Presuming that Trump invading would be a step to far for the GOP and Trump gets impeached and convicted, are the EU and other US allies going to want to deal with Vance as President? For any kind of reset back to some variation of the status quo, surely the message from Macron, Merz etc. would be that Vance needs to be impeached and gone as well. Which means Johnson becomes President.
Mike Johnson may well not be Speaker much longer. His grip on the House of Representatives is tentative. The Californian Representative who died recently will not be replaced until a Special ELection in August (the last date possible). The margin is now fingers on one hand. He is likely to incur the wrath of Republican Representatives if Trump invades Greenland. Even if he buys it, the umpty billions paid will face questions as to whether it could have been better spent on keeping a hospital open in East Bumfuck, Nowhere. Venting by removing the Speaker is an obvious move.
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
The motivation was a deeply misguided wish to avoid political rancour, I think. Biden was still pushing bipartisanship long after it became clear that was a hopeless effort. Dont forget that there was an enormous effort by Republicans to paint the investigation as political. I don't think it really had anything to do with wanting to preserve Trump as an opponent in 2024.
The DoJ started investigating Jan 6th as soon as Garland took office. But you're entirely correct it took them another year to start investigating Trump directly.
Yet it was very convenient that an ageing, exhausted, legally damaged Trump was the ideal candidate for Biden to face again in 2024.
Though I can accept that Biden was living in some senile dream world and that Garland was utterly useless. After all the senile and useless will so often do what they think will benefit themselves even if so obviously risks disaster.
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Most of the West is screwed by the debt of the past two decades, over 100% of GDP in many countries and leaving governments at the behest of bond markets with little room for action. Most new UK debt is now index-linked, so they can’t even inflate it away.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
Recent US growth is built on AI.
Where the A may hold far more weight in years to come than the I.
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
Perhaps in the medium to long term it's not such a bad thing to have a clear demonstration that we can't really trust the USA any more than we can trust Russia or China.
Can't be bothered to read the piece but cousin marriage is central to the clan culture in British Pakistani communities (see Matthew Syed). Among the white population it is very rare. So it is largely an issue about Muslims in the UK.
Yet another example of someone thinking they can make a clever argument to rebut a right wing talking point but instead make themselves look silly in the process. And you wonder why you are losing?
Not really, it's about double standards. This is just example of the framing, and xenophobia as a unifying value when they have little else.
When there were not any asylum hotels locally in Ashfield, Anderson invented one out of thin air and put it on his social media.
When ritual slaughter is discussed, it is about Halal not Kosher, despite 90% of Halal slaughter involving stunning, and Kosher not doing so.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
I do love the reflex of 'blame SCOTUS'.
Garland took over 600 days to do anything.
Garland knew how long legal processes can take, Garland knew that Trump would try to delay things, Garland knew that there was a time limit.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
It doesn't matter if people thought that Trump wouldn't run again, although it was obvious that he would. Trump still needed to be brought to justice for the good of the US political system.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
I freely admit I am not the fist to point out Merrick Garland's inaction:
Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Missteps
You only have to look at the older generation establishment Democrats in the Senate now. Half of them still don't get the urgency of opposing Trump.
Garland was originally nominated to the SC as a moderate who ought to attract bipartisan support. His appointment to the DoJ was no different.
Biden was trying to make everything go back to old days before Trump. It was misguided to pick someone who wouldn't go after Trump aggressively, but it's ridiculous to suggest it was some sort of calculation to preserve him as a candidate for 2024.
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
Incredible.
No 4% do, the other 25% don't know
14.5% seems a little low to me. Recent polling (2023) by Savanta for a KCL study:
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed
conspiracy theories.
Well some people are easily fooled
eg.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Most of the West is screwed by the debt of the past two decades, over 100% of GDP in many countries and leaving governments at the behest of bond markets with little room for action. Most new UK debt is now index-linked, so they can’t even inflate it away.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
Recent US growth is built on AI.
Where the A may hold far more weight in years to come than the I.
The AI bubble is totally crazy, and surely has to burst at some point. But it’s driving growth and the stock market almost all by itself, and there appears to still be massive FOMO of losing to the Chinese, so it’s like the Manhattan Project or the Cold War all over again.
The OpenAI lawsuit could be interesting to watch, there’s serious money to be made from taking out one of the players in the space.
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
I do love the reflex of 'blame SCOTUS'.
Garland took over 600 days to do anything.
Garland knew how long legal processes can take, Garland knew that Trump would try to delay things, Garland knew that there was a time limit.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
It doesn't matter if people thought that Trump wouldn't run again, although it was obvious that he would. Trump still needed to be brought to justice for the good of the US political system.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
Process State - indicting Trump on Jan 7th and having a trial before June wouldn’t have helped with the erectile disfunction among lawyers.
But it would have helped with convicting Trump of the crimes which he had committed.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Most of the West is screwed by the debt of the past two decades, over 100% of GDP in many countries and leaving governments at the behest of bond markets with little room for action. Most new UK debt is now index-linked, so they can’t even inflate it away.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
Recent US growth is built on AI.
Where the A may hold far more weight in years to come than the I.
The AI bubble is totally crazy, and surely has to burst at some point. But it’s driving growth and the stock market almost all by itself, and there appears to still be massive FOMO of losing to the Chinese, so it’s like the Manhattan Project or the Cold War all over again.
The OpenAI lawsuit could be interesting to watch, there’s serious money to be made from taking out one of the players in the space.
Which probably means there’s great value to be had within the 493 others in the S&P 500.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
In November 2022, days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, Garland appointed Jack Smith to serve as special counsel for the investigations of Trump.
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Your lack of imagination isn’t proof of your theory. There are multiple possible reasons why prosecutions went slowly.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
I do love the reflex of 'blame SCOTUS'.
Garland took over 600 days to do anything.
Garland knew how long legal processes can take, Garland knew that Trump would try to delay things, Garland knew that there was a time limit.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
It doesn't matter if people thought that Trump wouldn't run again, although it was obvious that he would. Trump still needed to be brought to justice for the good of the US political system.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
I freely admit I am not the fist to point out Merrick Garland's inaction:
Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Missteps
You only have to look at the older generation establishment Democrats in the Senate now. Half of them still don't get the urgency of opposing Trump.
Garland was originally nominated to the SC as a moderate who ought to attract bipartisan support. His appointment to the DoJ was no different.
Biden was trying to make everything go back to old days before Trump. It was misguided to pick someone who wouldn't go after Trump aggressively, but it's ridiculous to suggest it was some sort of calculation to preserve him as a candidate for 2024.
Garland knew from the first hand experience of his SCOTUS nomination that there was no GOP bipartisanship.
Biden knew from the Senate's failure to convict Trump that there was no GOP bipartisanship.
For that matter Biden had never been bipartisan himself.
If either Biden or Garland thought that not bringing Trump to justice would be reciprocated in bipartisanship then they were fools beyond my experience.
That's not mentioning that not bringing Trump to justice in expectation of bipartisanship would itself be a horrific denial of justice and damage to the US political system.
And yes, I still believe that Biden wanted an ageing, damaged Trump available as the GOP candidate in 2024. Likewise I'm now convinced that Biden always planned to go for a second term.
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
Why is that insane? Was what I'd have assumed was happening.
During the Yugoslav wars, it was suspected that one of the French intelligence agencies was passing information on recon overflights by *other countries* to the Serbs.
So the story goes, the US and French overflight data got swapped in the database. Which was then passed to the Serbs.
When a Serb militia decided to shoot down a US overflight…
I know that Donald Trump is behaving more like a power crazed Mafia Don than a deluded Florida pensioner right now, and its very serious that he is letting Ukraine and Iran down very badly while sadly ignoring what a better place the global Foreign picture would look in Europe and in the Middle East if Ukraine defeated Putin's Russia and the brutal Islamic regime in Iran finally fell.
But when it comes to the power crazed Trump rather than the US vs Europe hand bags at ten paces fight over Greenland while Trump as usual buggers off to Florida to play golf this weekend while we in Europe wring our hands at his latest outrageous antics this did make me laugh even if the last Ryder Cup result left the Americans sucking soor plooms...
I know that Donald Trump is behaving more like a power crazed Mafia Don than a deluded Florida pensioner right now, and its very serious that he is letting Ukraine and Iran down very badly while sadly ignoring what a better place the global Foreign picture would look in Europe and in the Middle East if Ukraine defeated Putin's Russia and the brutal Islamic regime in Iran finally fell.
But when it comes to the power crazed Trump rather than the US vs Europe hand bags at ten paces fight over Greenland while Trump as usual buggers off to Florida to play golf this weekend while we in Europe wring our hands at his latest outrageous antics this did make me laugh even if the last Ryder Cup result left the Americans sucking soor plooms...
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
Depending on where the numbers are reported from, Canadian tourist flights to the USA are down by between 10% and 30%.
They are going instead for Canada, Mexico, Spain/Portugal, Caribbean and Central America such as Belize.
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
When Europe cuts welfare to fund strategic security it will start to project strength.
This is a weird meme because, as a percentage of GDP and including social security contributions, the United States is the biggest spender on welfare in the world - 7ppts higher than the UK. Even if you restrict it to pure, direct government expenditure (which isn't a fair comparison because of the complexities of public/private systems across countries), the US isn't far behind the UK (20% v 23%).
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
We've had multiple recessions and financial crises in that time frame not caused by trade deficit. For me its obviously not a huge deal.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
We've had multiple recessions and financial crises in that time frame not caused by trade deficit. For me its obviously not a huge deal.
Recessions are part of the economic cycle, they are to be expected, planned for and dealt with.
Saying "we'd have been fine if it weren't for the recession" is like saying "we would have had enough food if it were not for winter".
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
Why would Trump even notice? He routinely lies about the economy - not just bar chart stuff, outright “the sky is green” stuff.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
We've had multiple recessions and financial crises in that time frame not caused by trade deficit. For me its obviously not a huge deal.
Recessions are part of the economic cycle, they are to be expected, planned for and dealt with.
Saying "we'd have been fine if it weren't for the recession" is like saying "we would have had enough food if it were not for winter".
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
I would value some practical advice on how to boycott US goods and services. HMG might start by no longer offering banking and consultancy work to the Wall Street and Boston institutions. There's no need for the Government to make a fuss about it - indeed, it would be better if they didn't. All they (and we) need to do is quietly give business to British, European and other companies.
I know that as a retail customer my ability to swerve US goods and services is limited - I can't go for 100% purity, but I am certainly not visiting the place, buying their food and wine or investing in US companies for the forseeable future.
Yes, my actions may be pointless, and I might be cutting off my nose to spite my face, but if all I can do is avoid US goods and services then I am going to do it.
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
Why would Trump even notice? He routinely lies about the economy - not just bar chart stuff, outright “the sky is green” stuff.
Is that not why blunt measures are necessary, in addition to all the "cope with, and circumvent, the deranged criminal who escaped from Rampton and is now sitting in our kitchen with a gun he found" stuff?
Trump, and his manipulators, declare that only hard power matters.
So that is what in the end it may have to be if they continue down their current trajectory.
But that is not something we know yet, and we still need to be able to go down a range of routes.
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
Why would Trump even notice? He routinely lies about the economy - not just bar chart stuff, outright “the sky is green” stuff.
Is that not why blunt measures are necessary, in addition to all the "cope with, and circumvent, the deranged criminal who escaped from Rampton and is now sitting in our kitchen with a gun he found" stuff?
Trump, and his manipulators, declare that only hard power matters.
So that is what in the end it may have to be if they continue down their current trajectory.
But that is not something we know yet, and we still need to be able to go down a range of routes.
If you want to influence Trump, mad performative demonstrations are the way to go.
Testing the largest nuclear weapon in history, on the Moon, for example. Time it so it lights up the dark moon over Washington. Stupid, ridiculous and performative. #EuropeStonk
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
When Europe cuts welfare to fund strategic security it will start to project strength.
This is a weird meme because, as a percentage of GDP and including social security contributions, the United States is the biggest spender on welfare in the world - 7ppts higher than the UK. Even if you restrict it to pure, direct government expenditure (which isn't a fair comparison because of the complexities of public/private systems across countries), the US isn't far behind the UK (20% v 23%).
Any time someone suggests reducing welfare you can expect someone else to say "country X is spending more on welfare therefore it shouldn't be reduced in this country".
Might I point out that the USA's deficit and debt is even worse than that of the UK.
Consumer boycotts are the best reply to Trump. As we've said before some aren't easy with the big tech companies being practical monopolies. What has been the impact with Canada over the last twelve months? I'd have thought avoiding holidays (vacations?) in the US would be the easiest win. The sort of thing people spend thousands on.
Why would Trump even notice? He routinely lies about the economy - not just bar chart stuff, outright “the sky is green” stuff.
Is that not why blunt measures are necessary, in addition to all the "cope with, and circumvent, the deranged criminal who escaped from Rampton and is now sitting in our kitchen with a gun he found" stuff?
Trump, and his manipulators, declare that only hard power matters.
So that is what in the end it may have to be if they continue down their current trajectory.
But that is not something we know yet, and we still need to be able to go down a range of routes.
If you want to influence Trump, mad performative demonstrations are the way to go.
Testing the largest nuclear weapon in history, on the Moon, for example. Time it so it lights up the dark moon over Washington. Stupid, ridiculous and performative. #EuropeStonk
I think it needs both.
Performative does not have to be mad; it can also be useful. His method is to push, and if nothing happens push a bit more, until he is made to stop.
And pressure does flow back to Trump and/or his advisers. He is still Mr TACO, and time is not on his side either biologically or strategically - some of his levers are being rendered gradually irrelevant.
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
When Europe cuts welfare to fund strategic security it will start to project strength.
This is a weird meme because, as a percentage of GDP and including social security contributions, the United States is the biggest spender on welfare in the world - 7ppts higher than the UK. Even if you restrict it to pure, direct government expenditure (which isn't a fair comparison because of the complexities of public/private systems across countries), the US isn't far behind the UK (20% v 23%).
Any time someone suggests reducing welfare you can expect someone else to say "country X is spending more on welfare therefore it shouldn't be reduced in this country".
Might I point out that the USA's deficit and debt is even worse than that of the UK.
What we need to do is Think Victorian on combining welfare and defence.
So remove the two child cap - but your children will be conscripted as drummers in the Army or powder monkeys in the Navy.
Everyone on benefits will be given a job on the front lines after 6 months on benefits.
Anyone up for crossing the Channel in a small boat is obviously the next Able Seamen Stains…
Comments
If we do confirm it, it's overwhelmingly likely to be by chemical signature on a planet many, many light years away.
Which would be headline news, but wouldn't be much of a shock to anybody.
Yet another example of someone thinking they can make a clever argument to rebut a right wing talking point but instead make themselves look silly in the process. And you wonder why you are losing?
But it's what glamour professions can do; break all the rules of fairness and decency. Because if you don't like it, there's plenty of others happy to endure it for their shot at the big time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland#United_States_attorney_general_(2021–2025)
Garland could and should have launched the investigation into Trump on his first day in office. Instead he took over 600.
Note that it took another eight months before they managed to indict Trump.
There's no doubt that the Biden administration deliberately went slow on bringing Trump to justice.
That they wanted an ageing, damaged, legally exhausted Trump as their opponent in 2024 makes sense to me.
Now perhaps there was some other idiocy behind their strategy but I cannot think of one.
Miller amid Greenland push: Nations not entitled to territories ‘they cannot defend’
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5694105-stephen-miller-greenland-acquisition-defense/amp/
Next up, the Falklands, as soon as they start pumping a significant amount of oil.
Those who think they are above it all and should be given a safe seat on a plate because of their brilliance in another field, like Rishi or Sir Keir, often fall flat on their face with the voters soon enough once they reach the top
Of course, it's not as though people like May or Brown were great at it and they had plenty of such experience.
In the UK and across Europe, cousin marriage is coming under increased scrutiny - particularly from doctors, who warn that children of first cousins are more likely to experience an array of health problems.
And there's now some new, potentially worrying data from Bradford to add into that mix.
Researchers at the city's university are entering their 18th year of the Born in Bradford study. It's one of the biggest medical trials of its kind: between 2007 and 2010, researchers recruited more than 13,000 babies in the city and then followed them closely from childhood into adolescence and now into early adulthood. More than one in six children in the study have parents who are first cousins, mostly from Bradford's Pakistani community, making it among the world's most valuable studies of the health impacts of cousin marriage.
And in data published in the last few months - and analysed in an upcoming episode of BBC Radio 4's Born in Bradford series - the researchers found that first cousin-parentage may have wider consequences than previously thought.
The most obvious way that a pair of blood-related parents might increase health risks for a child is through a recessive disorder, like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease. According to the classic theory of genetics laid out by the biologist Gregor Mendel, if both parents carry a recessive gene then there's a one in four chance that their child will inherit the condition. And when parents are cousins, they're more likely to both be carriers. A child of first cousins carries a 6% chance of inheriting a recessive disorder, compared to 3% for the general population.
But the Bradford study took a much broader view - and sheds fresh light. The researchers weren't just looking at whether a child had been diagnosed with a specific recessive disorder. Instead they studied dozens of data points, observing everything from the children's speech and language development to their frequency of healthcare to their performance at school. Then they used a mathematical model to try to eliminate the impacts of poverty and parental education - so they could focus squarely on the impact on "consanguinity", the scientific word for having parents who are related.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c241pn09qqjo
But apparently Lee Anderson is making it all up.
And any serious reindustrialising* would have to be done in association with Europe.
*A concept so alien to us, after Mrs T, that spellcheck renders it as deindustrialising.
These things take time. Some of the prosecutions were of an unprecedented nature and they wanted to make sure they got them right, not realising that Trump would be re-elected.
After the failure of Trump’s second indictment, many thought it best just to leave the whole thing in the past and not pursue Trump. He was yesterday’s man. The Republicans we’re going on about “lawfare” all the time and older heads remembered how the indictment of Clinton had boosted the Democrats’ popularity.
Some of the prosecutions got held up by a partisan Supreme Court. Others, there were genuine errors made that slowed things up.
I think the overriding problem wasn’t that the Dems wanted a damaged Trump as a candidate. It was that nobody (on either side of Congress) initially thought there was much urgency in the matter as surely Trump wouldn’t run and be selected again.
Which is why the next challenge is going to be getting the economy moving, about which most politicians don’t appear to have much of a clue at the moment. There are a few examples such as Poland as it has developed, and say it really quietly but the US.
If there is such a variance, then it doesn't matter what the history is, if there isn't, then he's making things up.
May did at least win most seats in a general election unlike Rishi and against Corbyn (who had plenty of campaigning experience too and had also started off as a local councillor). She also was never as unpopular as Starmer is now
https://x.com/TSEofPB/
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/mattwardman.bsky.social/3lfk4fvp5yv26
https://bsky.app/profile/mattwardman.bsky.social
Got my first EV last year, first car I've put through the company books, and first time I've leased (top spec Enyaq at £270 pcm ex VAT, 10k miles pa, 12+23 FWIW). Looking for another for fellow director Mrs OR now...
The idea that Starmer is a serious man unsuited to an age of raw populism is remarkably persistent. Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s amanuensis, blames the voters for Starmer’s deep unpopularity. He says that Britain may be becoming ungovernable. ‘Something is going on with the electorate.’
I don’t know, maybe the electorate is smarter than Baldwin thinks, or at least not as stupid as he imagines. Perhaps they can see that this is a Prime Minister who merely cosplays at seriousness; who changes his mind on everything because he didn’t know his own mind in the first place; who introduces a momentous change to the law on terminal care because a celebrity told him to; who makes a hard-hitting speech on immigration and then says he didn’t know what he was saying; who drops everything to call a press conference about a Netflix drama; who allows his Chancellor to hint at breaking a central campaign pledge and then take the hint back; who declares right before his party conference that ID cards will be the centrepiece of his reform programme before erasing all mentions of it from his speech.
https://spectator.com/article/keir-starmer-is-a-populist-who-is-bad-at-populism/
To my mind though we spend loads on stuff that doesn't really help us, its more about tagging along with the Americans.
Presuming that Trump invading would be a step to far for the GOP and Trump gets impeached and convicted, are the EU and other US allies going to want to deal with Vance as President? For any kind of reset back to some variation of the status quo, surely the message from Macron, Merz etc. would be that Vance needs to be impeached and gone as well.
Which means Johnson becomes President.
Most people who think about it recognise that Trump should be stopped, one way or another.
Nobody wants the pain of being the one who actually does this, and everyone can reasonably argue that it's someone else's problem.
So nobody does anything.
Dont forget that there was an enormous effort by Republicans to paint the investigation as political.
I don't think it really had anything to do with wanting to preserve Trump as an opponent in 2024.
The DoJ started investigating Jan 6th as soon as Garland took office. But you're entirely correct it took them another year to start investigating Trump directly.
Garland took over 600 days to do anything.
Garland knew how long legal processes can take, Garland knew that Trump would try to delay things, Garland knew that there was a time limit.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
It doesn't matter if people thought that Trump wouldn't run again, although it was obvious that he would. Trump still needed to be brought to justice for the good of the US political system.
Yet Garland still took over 600 days to do anything.
Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Missteps
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/07/trump-legal-failures-blame-column-00187945
Did Merrick Garland Blow It? Left-wingers Blame AG as Trump Charges Dropped
https://www.newsweek.com/merrick-garland-blame-donald-trump-jan6-case-dropped-1991694
You make the assumption that US republicans would listen to anything the likes of Merz and Macron have to say. Marcon only has a year left and is termed out, and Merz can’t even sort out a war in his own back yard without begging for American help (in their opinion).
Johnson himself will of course likely be replaced after the mid-terms if the Dems win the House, and the GOP Senators aren’t likely to go along with anything that put a Dem in the White House. Also, in the middle of the process Vance could appoint a new VP, say Rubio, who would move up to be next in line.
The various permutations of how these things play out, is why POTUS and Veep are very rarely in the same place other than the White House, and never travel together.
I think he goes quiet on the Greenland issue, at least as far as sending the army there to take it by force, and moves on to something else next week.
MLK traditionally granted free admission to National Parks. Trump has binned that, and changed the free day to his birthday.
Johnson would certainly not facilitate the attempt to impeach.
I think we will see more analysis this year about impending decline of the USA. Do we have any firm data yet about just how far forward Trump's policies have pulled USA population decline?
Trump's DHS are claiming something like 500k deportations and 2.5 million others who have left at the moment.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-population-could-shrink-in
Insane sounding story coming from France. Ukraine intelligence fed fake information to US to test them and said information showed up in russia! US intel is leaking Ukrainian secrets to russia!
https://bsky.app/profile/volberg.bsky.social/post/3mcp5rei6i22e
@atrupar.com
Bessent on Greenland: "Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we're the hottest country in the world, we're the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength."
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mcpddc2yu22p
Though I can accept that Biden was living in some senile dream world and that Garland was utterly useless. After all the senile and useless will so often do what they think will benefit themselves even if so obviously risks disaster.
Where the A may hold far more weight in years to come than the I.
BESSENT: I believe the Europeans will understand that the best outcome is for the US to receive control of Greenland
When there were not any asylum hotels locally in Ashfield, Anderson invented one out of thin air and put it on his social media.
When ritual slaughter is discussed, it is about Halal not Kosher, despite 90% of Halal slaughter involving stunning, and Kosher not doing so.
The practice is consistent.
You only have to look at the older generation establishment Democrats in the Senate now. Half of them still don't get the urgency of opposing Trump.
Garland was originally nominated to the SC as a moderate who ought to attract bipartisan support. His appointment to the DoJ was no different.
Biden was trying to make everything go back to old days before Trump. It was misguided to pick someone who wouldn't go after Trump aggressively, but it's ridiculous to suggest it was some sort of calculation to preserve him as a candidate for 2024.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Director_Tulsi_Gabbard_Official_Portrait.jpg
The OpenAI lawsuit could be interesting to watch, there’s serious money to be made from taking out one of the players in the space.
Nigel Farage films an upcoming broadcast on Walton-on-the-Naze Beach. 📸
https://x.com/reformparty_uk/status/2012861079118848346?s=20
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/business/companies/20260118/kcci-chair-expects-schengen-style-pact-between-korea-japan-to-add-2-bil-in-value
Even Jesus took three days.
Was what I'd have assumed was happening.
That really would rile the Ruskies.
But it would have helped with convicting Trump of the crimes which he had committed.
WELKER: What is the national emergency that justifies this new slate of tariffs?
WELKER: The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-ai-glasses-desert-aliens
Biden knew from the Senate's failure to convict Trump that there was no GOP bipartisanship.
For that matter Biden had never been bipartisan himself.
If either Biden or Garland thought that not bringing Trump to justice would be reciprocated in bipartisanship then they were fools beyond my experience.
That's not mentioning that not bringing Trump to justice in expectation of bipartisanship would itself be a horrific denial of justice and damage to the US political system.
And yes, I still believe that Biden wanted an ageing, damaged Trump available as the GOP candidate in 2024. Likewise I'm now convinced that Biden always planned to go for a second term.
When Europe cuts welfare to fund strategic security it will start to project strength.
The coldest country (well, autonomous nation within a kingdom) in the world is…Greenland.
So the story goes, the US and French overflight data got swapped in the database. Which was then passed to the Serbs.
When a Serb militia decided to shoot down a US overflight…
We can but fantasise about Trump one day being asked 'how's life?' and replying, 'Still serving it.'
But when it comes to the power crazed Trump rather than the US vs Europe hand bags at ten paces fight over Greenland while Trump as usual buggers off to Florida to play golf this weekend while we in Europe wring our hands at his latest outrageous antics this did make me laugh even if the last Ryder Cup result left the Americans sucking soor plooms...
X
Geoff Norcott@GeoffNorcott
If it is boiling down to USA vs Europe can we settle it via golf?
Just to even things up.
https://x.com/GeoffNorcott/status/2012831562362933479
Only a single entrant is allowed.
They are going instead for Canada, Mexico, Spain/Portugal, Caribbean and Central America such as Belize.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20251211-where-are-all-the-canadians-going
Saying "we'd have been fine if it weren't for the recession" is like saying "we would have had enough food if it were not for winter".
I know that as a retail customer my ability to swerve US goods and services is limited - I can't go for 100% purity, but I am certainly not visiting the place, buying their food and wine or investing in US companies for the forseeable future.
Yes, my actions may be pointless, and I might be cutting off my nose to spite my face, but if all I can do is avoid US goods and services then I am going to do it.
Trump, and his manipulators, declare that only hard power matters.
So that is what in the end it may have to be if they continue down their current trajectory.
But that is not something we know yet, and we still need to be able to go down a range of routes.
BRENNAN: Tell me about the officer, Jonathan Ross
KRISTI NOEM: Don't say his name! I mean, for heaven's sake, we shouldn't have people continue to dox law enforcement
BRENNAN: His name is public
NOEM: I know, but that doesn't mean it should continue to be said
https://bsky.app/profile/edacuk.bsky.social/post/3mcphwyima22v
Testing the largest nuclear weapon in history, on the Moon, for example. Time it so it lights up the dark moon over Washington. Stupid, ridiculous and performative. #EuropeStonk
Joshua Rozenberg: 'Well, the law is clear. There is a court order in place saying we cannot name Ryan Giggs as the holder of this superinjunction.'
Might I point out that the USA's deficit and debt is even worse than that of the UK.
Performative does not have to be mad; it can also be useful. His method is to push, and if nothing happens push a bit more, until he is made to stop.
And pressure does flow back to Trump and/or his advisers. He is still Mr TACO, and time is not on his side either biologically or strategically - some of his levers are being rendered gradually irrelevant.
So remove the two child cap - but your children will be conscripted as drummers in the Army or powder monkeys in the Navy.
Everyone on benefits will be given a job on the front lines after 6 months on benefits.
Anyone up for crossing the Channel in a small boat is obviously the next Able Seamen Stains…
And so on.