I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Sorry but this is utter garbage.
According to.the ONS in September of 2021, amongst those who had received the Covid vaccine more than 21 days prior to death, covid only accounted for 0.8% of total deaths. Amongst the same cohort who had not received the covid vaccine, deaths from covid accounted for 37.4% of total deaths.
Vaccination worked. Anti vaxxers are ill informed morons.
Why not use overall death rates from the ONS? Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023 were only 20,000 less than 2020..🤔
I am trying to think of a reason why 2020 is a terrible baseline.
Oh yes, for the majority of 2020 most of us weren't interacting with anybody.
And there wasn’t much COVID around for a third of the year, or so!
Feeling that Richard's figures may have included an element of selection bias - those who were already suffering from covid were not vaccinated until they recovered - I queried it with AI. Publishing the response unedited:
The Flaw in the Raw Percentages The statistic you cited compares the proportion of COVID-19 deaths within two very different groups:
Unvaccinated Group: In mid-2021, this group was disproportionately younger and healthier (as the elderly and vulnerable were prioritized for vaccination). However, they lacked immune protection. Consequently, when they died, COVID-19 was a leading cause (37.4%), simply because they were dying of fewer other age-related causes at that specific time.
Vaccinated Group (21+ days post-dose): By September 2021, this group included almost the entire elderly and clinically vulnerable population. These individuals have a much higher baseline mortality rate from non-COVID causes (cancer, heart disease, old age). Therefore, even if the vaccine prevented many COVID deaths, the sheer volume of non-COVID deaths in this high-risk group mathematically dilutes the percentage of deaths attributed to COVID (dropping it to 0.8%).
ONS Clarification and Confounding Factors The ONS explicitly stated in their November 2021 analysis that these figures are not a measure of vaccine effectiveness due to several confounding factors:
Age and Health Status: The vaccinated population was significantly older and frailer than the unvaccinated population during the rollout. Comparing raw death counts or percentages without adjusting for age leads to misleading conclusions. Natural Immunity: By September 2021, a portion of the unvaccinated cohort had acquired natural immunity from prior infection, which may have influenced their risk profile, though the ONS noted that vaccination provided a more consistent and safer level of protection.
Risk vs. Proportion: The correct metric for efficacy is the age-standardized mortality rate (risk of dying per person), not the proportion of total deaths. When adjusted for age, the ONS data showed the risk of dying from COVID-19 was roughly 32 times higher in unvaccinated individuals compared to fully vaccinated individuals during that period.
Conclusion The statistic highlights a demographic reality: vaccinated people were dying of other causes because they were older, not because the vaccine failed. The unvaccinated group appeared to die more frequently of COVID-19 partly because they were less likely to die of other causes during that specific window, but their overall risk of catching and dying from the virus was substantially higher.
Apparently the ONS has specifically cautioned against using the statistics as proof of vaccine efficacy in the way Richard has attempted.
Perhaps we should be a little more cautious about describing peoples' posts as 'utter garbage' if we're going to abuse statistics in a way that the producers of those statistics specifically warn against.
Do you accept that there have been a large number of randomised controlled trials of the vaccines that provide direct evidence that they work?
I accept/accepted it enough to have two jabs. However, continuing to use and top up what is still a new medication should be carefully weighed with the risk from the disease itself.
I agree - after 3 jabs, each of which made me quite badly ill for 3 days, I decided the risk of covid no longer warranted a guaranteed 3 day illness.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
The quickest way to ensure equality on wealth is 100% inheritance tax and most people living in social housing but no party would ever get elected taking all the value of homeowners' properties and the inheritance for their heirs in tax
There is also a distinction between being “intelligent” and “good at study/exams”. I have loads of doctor friends in multiple disciplines and friends who are crazy high earning partners in law firms who are definitely not the smartest most intellectual people but they are very good at their focus and learning a lot of detail.
There is no superior type of intelligence really, often horses for courses - book smart v whip smart, analytical v gut.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Whereas the Conservatives are that 1% and want to keep it that way.
The pie is big enough to give everyone a slice.
That may have been the case last century it isn't so much now. Harris won the richest voters in 2024, as did Starmer and Macron in France in 2022 and Carney in 2025. Albeit Burnham's shift left might send a few of them back to the Tories
She may well be right but I cannot see what choice they had.
I don't think the initial lockdown was avoidable. It was shit, but we had no idea about the long-term consequences, no vaccines (or any idea when they might arrive), and no proper understanding of optimal treatment.
What followed, on the other hand, was a complete clusterfuck.
80% of the reduction in "R" could probably have been achieved with 20% of the restrictions. (Not *no* restrictions... but fewer restrictions, and with the most destructive and least effective removed. So, there should have been no restrictions whatsoever on meeting up outside for example.)
Yes they could have been but the govt was cowed by the press, TV pundits and the opposition.
Every day on the TV people like Piers Morgan would be demanding more and more restrictions.
Remember SKS labelling one version the ‘Johnson Variant’
They got some things wrong, beyond the delay in the initial lockdown. I was peeved that golf as a socially distanced sport was banned even for the second and third lockdowns.
But it wasn't all one way traffic. "Eat Out to Help Out" should never have seen the light of day and was frankly asking for trouble.
Someone was gasing on about the TNT equivalence of battery storage systems.
Well, the average petrol station has on its premises the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon’ worth of TNT - as measured in the raw energy equivalence.
It's bizarre that people are so afraid of batteries*, which have an extremely good safety record on the whole, and yet the same people wouldn't even blink about all sorts of chemicals used in industry, traffic pollution, fuel storage, flooding, and other things that are considerably more dangerous. It's like when a train crashes and people think "I'll drive instead" there's no understanding of the risk just emotions taking over.
* Battery storage systems don't even need to optimised for mass or volume, and so are free to use batteries that are even safer than the norm, like LFP batteries, and eventually we'll likely see solid state batteries take over, which will probably be about as safe a store of energy as we have got.
I have a concern about Lithium Ion batteries as, due to work I had to arrange to get spares shipped overseas, and it was drummed into us the risk involved in sending them.
Also my wife’s cousin, her lad had his house go up in flames due to a battery on his golf trolley of all things, for goodness sake.
So I’ll excercise caution.
Lithium batteries are banned as cargo on passenger aircraft, they have to go on cargo aircraft if not shipped by land/sea.
Most airlines now regulate the size of external battery packs allowed in passenger hand luggage to 10AH, which is relatively small pack these days.
With the exception of that Samsung phone from a few years ago, most fires are cheap Chinese batteries and cheap Chinese chargers.
Oh Très Stupide, I’m sure if you had a huge percentage of your skin burnt off so your face was unrecognisable and saw friends burn to death you would be totally ok with a high profile person being a dick about the ultimate cause of you having experienced that trauma.
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
The COVID vaccines crushed the death rates to nothing, as they did with serious illness & hospitalisation.
This is extremely clear, both from the medical trials and the data from actual usage.
The side effects of the vaccines have also been tracked, in detailed, published data and are in line with other vaccinations.
So away with your “question of faith” stuff.
I have not said anything about side effects.
Regarding the efficacy of vaccines, the studies there are based on modelling non-existent counterfactuals. We had the vaccines. We cannot know with any certainty what would have happened in a world where we didn't.
No. There were a large number of randomised controlled trials of the vaccines, which are the gold standard for demonstrating a causal relationship.
Although it’s hardly surprising that someone who denies climate change doesn’t understand science!
It was a significantly compressed timeline though compared to normal vaccine approval. For obvious reasons. So longer term effects were clearly not able to be understood at the time.
Still aren’t. We’re living through an extended trial.
Still needs must.
One of the main reasons for the compressed timeline was because the UK authorities made the decision to enbed themselvs in the labs to monitir development rather than following the normal course which is to wait for the developer to complete initial tests and they be sent allgthe data for review. It dramatically cut the approval time by removing all the 'dead; time that is normally involved in such a process.
Yes, I’m well aware thanks. I used to work in Biopharma supply of cleanroom consumables for vaccine production and worked with all of the main vaccine providers bar one.
The bigger issue was availability of parts and constrained supply. Especially after warp Drive.
There are also compressed timelines anyway for emergencies like this.
Still doesn’t change the point the long term effects are not known yet. I was happy to have the jab.
Pretty much every drug is approved after just a couple of years of testing, so that is going to be true of essentially pharmaceutical.
What we do know, and the evidence keeps growing every week, is that all causes mortality is much lower for people who got jabbed, than those who didn't.
More pertinently, the only difference between the vaccines, and other extremely widely used drugs (modern painkillers, for example) which subsequently turn out to have rare side effects, is that the vaccines got to be used by millions of people in a much shorter space of time, and were subject to much tighter post approval analysis, so the side effects were detected - and made public - relatively quickly.
Oh Très Stupide, I’m sure if you had a huge percentage of your skin burnt off so your face was unrecognisable and saw friends burn to death you would be totally ok with a high profile person being a dick about the ultimate cause of you having experienced that trauma.
i struggle to see what's being dick about the following comment, but knock yourself out on the outrage bus: "it’s not that long ago our two countries were at war, with the Falklands or Malvinas, even before that?"
Someone was gasing on about the TNT equivalence of battery storage systems.
Well, the average petrol station has on its premises the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon’ worth of TNT - as measured in the raw energy equivalence.
It's bizarre that people are so afraid of batteries*, which have an extremely good safety record on the whole, and yet the same people wouldn't even blink about all sorts of chemicals used in industry, traffic pollution, fuel storage, flooding, and other things that are considerably more dangerous. It's like when a train crashes and people think "I'll drive instead" there's no understanding of the risk just emotions taking over.
* Battery storage systems don't even need to optimised for mass or volume, and so are free to use batteries that are even safer than the norm, like LFP batteries, and eventually we'll likely see solid state batteries take over, which will probably be about as safe a store of energy as we have got.
I have a concern about Lithium Ion batteries as, due to work I had to arrange to get spares shipped overseas, and it was drummed into us the risk involved in sending them.
Also my wife’s cousin, her lad had his house go up in flames due to a battery on his golf trolley of all things, for goodness sake.
So I’ll excercise caution.
Lithium batteries are banned as cargo on passenger aircraft, they have to go on cargo aircraft if not shipped by land/sea.
Most airlines now regulate the size of external battery packs allowed in passenger hand luggage to 10AH, which is relatively small pack these days.
With the exception of that Samsung phone from a few years ago, most fires are cheap Chinese batteries and cheap Chinese chargers.
There’s also cheap Chinese chargers that are a problem. My Mother in Law knew someone who had a charger go up.
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Sorry but this is utter garbage.
According to.the ONS in September of 2021, amongst those who had received the Covid vaccine more than 21 days prior to death, covid only accounted for 0.8% of total deaths. Amongst the same cohort who had not received the covid vaccine, deaths from covid accounted for 37.4% of total deaths.
Vaccination worked. Anti vaxxers are ill informed morons.
Why not use overall death rates from the ONS? Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023 were only 20,000 less than 2020..🤔
I am trying to think of a reason why 2020 is a terrible baseline.
Oh yes, for the majority of 2020 most of us weren't interacting with anybody.
And there wasn’t much COVID around for a third of the year, or so!
Feeling that Richard's figures may have included an element of selection bias - those who were already suffering from covid were not vaccinated until they recovered - I queried it with AI. Publishing the response unedited:
The Flaw in the Raw Percentages The statistic you cited compares the proportion of COVID-19 deaths within two very different groups:
Unvaccinated Group: In mid-2021, this group was disproportionately younger and healthier (as the elderly and vulnerable were prioritized for vaccination). However, they lacked immune protection. Consequently, when they died, COVID-19 was a leading cause (37.4%), simply because they were dying of fewer other age-related causes at that specific time.
Vaccinated Group (21+ days post-dose): By September 2021, this group included almost the entire elderly and clinically vulnerable population. These individuals have a much higher baseline mortality rate from non-COVID causes (cancer, heart disease, old age). Therefore, even if the vaccine prevented many COVID deaths, the sheer volume of non-COVID deaths in this high-risk group mathematically dilutes the percentage of deaths attributed to COVID (dropping it to 0.8%).
ONS Clarification and Confounding Factors The ONS explicitly stated in their November 2021 analysis that these figures are not a measure of vaccine effectiveness due to several confounding factors:
Age and Health Status: The vaccinated population was significantly older and frailer than the unvaccinated population during the rollout. Comparing raw death counts or percentages without adjusting for age leads to misleading conclusions. Natural Immunity: By September 2021, a portion of the unvaccinated cohort had acquired natural immunity from prior infection, which may have influenced their risk profile, though the ONS noted that vaccination provided a more consistent and safer level of protection.
Risk vs. Proportion: The correct metric for efficacy is the age-standardized mortality rate (risk of dying per person), not the proportion of total deaths. When adjusted for age, the ONS data showed the risk of dying from COVID-19 was roughly 32 times higher in unvaccinated individuals compared to fully vaccinated individuals during that period.
Conclusion The statistic highlights a demographic reality: vaccinated people were dying of other causes because they were older, not because the vaccine failed. The unvaccinated group appeared to die more frequently of COVID-19 partly because they were less likely to die of other causes during that specific window, but their overall risk of catching and dying from the virus was substantially higher.
Apparently the ONS has specifically cautioned against using the statistics as proof of vaccine efficacy in the way Richard has attempted.
Perhaps we should be a little more cautious about describing peoples' posts as 'utter garbage' if we're going to abuse statistics in a way that the producers of those statistics specifically warn against.
Do you accept that there have been a large number of randomised controlled trials of the vaccines that provide direct evidence that they work?
I accept/accepted it enough to have two jabs. However, continuing to use and top up what is still a new medication should be carefully weighed with the risk from the disease itself.
So you withdraw your earlier comment that the only evidence involves modelling counterfactuals?
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Says the person who this very afternoon was lauding the notion of drawing conclusions from facts rather than just starting with a conclusion you happen to like or rejecting one you don't.
Chutzpah or what. You should get into populist right wing politics.
Oh, hang on.
You can't really accuse me of drawing a conclusion when I've been at pains to suggest we cannot draw one.
You are rejecting a conclusion that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence.
Why you would do that is a mystery. I don't know the reason and you obviously can't tell me.
Some people find scientific truth scary, and feel it dis-empowers them.
Staging a performance of the story The Cold Equations, as a play at university was fascinating in this respect.
Hm. This is the first time I've come across that story. But I'd say the critiques are bollocks. Space travel.is arse-clenchingly expensive and you don't carry any weight you don't need to. Adding extra contingency just in case some irresponsiboe idiot creeps aboard would cost millions. Those millions could be spent on keeping people alive. NICE has a formula for working out the monetary value of a human life. She knew it wasn't allowed but she did it anyway, guessing incorrectly that the sanction would be small. The high sanction is a way of making these space flights viable because you wouldn't expect anyone to be so idiotic to use it.
If Reform remain as unpopular with 60%+ of voters as they are now, the next election will be a tactical vote fest of significant proportions. So the figure to look at is not the current lead but the Reform number absolute - which continues fairly stable after its sustained drop from 34 or so but is not enough to cheer them up; and the other, less tangible measure is the degree to which the 60%+ want to make sure Reform lose. That is hard to measure except by feeling the zeitgeist.
If Reform remain as unpopular with 60%+ of voters as they are now, the next election will be a tactical vote fest of significant proportions. So the figure to look at is not the current lead but the Reform number absolute - which continues fairly stable after its sustained drop from 34 or so but is not enough to cheer them up; and the other, less tangible measure is the degree to which the 60%+ want to make sure Reform lose. That is hard to measure except by feeling the zeitgeist.
The flip side of that is if Reform are on 23 rather than 33 will people care enough to vote tactically against them.......
She may well be right but I cannot see what choice they had.
I don't think the initial lockdown was avoidable. It was shit, but we had no idea about the long-term consequences, no vaccines (or any idea when they might arrive), and no proper understanding of optimal treatment.
What followed, on the other hand, was a complete clusterfuck.
80% of the reduction in "R" could probably have been achieved with 20% of the restrictions. (Not *no* restrictions... but fewer restrictions, and with the most destructive and least effective removed. So, there should have been no restrictions whatsoever on meeting up outside for example.)
Yes they could have been but the govt was cowed by the press, TV pundits and the opposition.
Every day on the TV people like Piers Morgan would be demanding more and more restrictions.
Remember SKS labelling one version the ‘Johnson Variant’
One thing I found interesting from the COVID Inquiry is how clear it was that Johnson was *not* cowed by even his own advisers at times. I think it is a mistake to underestimate the government's autonomous decision making.
Actually on tonight's poll, I would have expected more of a negative effect for Reform and a bounce for labour with Burnham about to relieve Starmer of his duties
I may be wrong, but just how much attention are the public taking in politics at present
Certainly, I think the summer polls may well see little movement but once Parliament returns and the conference season gets into fill swing then those trends will be interesting
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
i guess for the record i should point out he's a war hero or something
Or you could engage your brain and understand why referring to the Malvinas would be something Simon Weston understandably would be upset about rather than bandying around “snowflake”.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Says the person who this very afternoon was lauding the notion of drawing conclusions from facts rather than just starting with a conclusion you happen to like or rejecting one you don't.
Chutzpah or what. You should get into populist right wing politics.
Oh, hang on.
You can't really accuse me of drawing a conclusion when I've been at pains to suggest we cannot draw one.
You are rejecting a conclusion that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence.
Why you would do that is a mystery. I don't know the reason and you obviously can't tell me.
Some people find scientific truth scary, and feel it dis-empowers them.
Staging a performance of the story The Cold Equations, as a play at university was fascinating in this respect.
Hm. This is the first time I've come across that story. But I'd say the critiques are bollocks. Space travel.is arse-clenchingly expensive and you don't carry any weight you don't need to. Adding extra contingency just in case some irresponsiboe idiot creeps aboard would cost millions. Those millions could be spent on keeping people alive. NICE has a formula for working out the monetary value of a human life. She knew it wasn't allowed but she did it anyway, guessing incorrectly that the sanction would be small. The high sanction is a way of making these space flights viable because you wouldn't expect anyone to be so idiotic to use it.
Sorry, but no. Fur a start you're pontificating about the expense of interstellar travel, which doesn't, and may never exist. So the critique that the situation is contrived, in a not dissimilar manner to the trolley problem, remains valid. Moreover, even accepting your accounting, why would you not devote a small proportion of that "arse-clenching expense" to better security ?
It's really a short parable of science being necessary, but not sufficient to good engineering.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
That's easy: someone who bet on Barack Obama in 2008, and Donald Trump in 2016.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
Shall we look at the leader of the free world to guide us?
Someone was gasing on about the TNT equivalence of battery storage systems.
Well, the average petrol station has on its premises the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon’ worth of TNT - as measured in the raw energy equivalence.
It's bizarre that people are so afraid of batteries*, which have an extremely good safety record on the whole, and yet the same people wouldn't even blink about all sorts of chemicals used in industry, traffic pollution, fuel storage, flooding, and other things that are considerably more dangerous. It's like when a train crashes and people think "I'll drive instead" there's no understanding of the risk just emotions taking over.
* Battery storage systems don't even need to optimised for mass or volume, and so are free to use batteries that are even safer than the norm, like LFP batteries, and eventually we'll likely see solid state batteries take over, which will probably be about as safe a store of energy as we have got.
I have a concern about Lithium Ion batteries as, due to work I had to arrange to get spares shipped overseas, and it was drummed into us the risk involved in sending them.
Also my wife’s cousin, her lad had his house go up in flames due to a battery on his golf trolley of all things, for goodness sake.
So I’ll excercise caution.
Lithium batteries are banned as cargo on passenger aircraft, they have to go on cargo aircraft if not shipped by land/sea.
Most airlines now regulate the size of external battery packs allowed in passenger hand luggage to 10AH, which is relatively small pack these days.
With the exception of that Samsung phone from a few years ago, most fires are cheap Chinese batteries and cheap Chinese chargers.
There’s also cheap Chinese chargers that are a problem. My Mother in Law knew someone who had a charger go up.
Fortunately they were there at the time,
Things not to buy on Amazon:
Chargers Lithium batteries
I keep my drone batteries in a metal box and usually charge phones on a non-flammable surface or within view. Paranoid? Maybe, maybe not...
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
Shall we look at the leader of the free world to guide us?
Well, compasses use magnetism, and that can work by attraction or repulsion...
Credit where credit is due; GB News is evidently not quite the same as Fox News. Can you imagine the latter being even half this honest in reporting an inconvenient piece of evidence ?
'We have to be honest and say the numbers are down... Part of me would accept some of this "Smash the Gangs" policy is having an effect.'
Someone was gasing on about the TNT equivalence of battery storage systems.
Well, the average petrol station has on its premises the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon’ worth of TNT - as measured in the raw energy equivalence.
It's bizarre that people are so afraid of batteries*, which have an extremely good safety record on the whole, and yet the same people wouldn't even blink about all sorts of chemicals used in industry, traffic pollution, fuel storage, flooding, and other things that are considerably more dangerous. It's like when a train crashes and people think "I'll drive instead" there's no understanding of the risk just emotions taking over.
* Battery storage systems don't even need to optimised for mass or volume, and so are free to use batteries that are even safer than the norm, like LFP batteries, and eventually we'll likely see solid state batteries take over, which will probably be about as safe a store of energy as we have got.
I have a concern about Lithium Ion batteries as, due to work I had to arrange to get spares shipped overseas, and it was drummed into us the risk involved in sending them.
Also my wife’s cousin, her lad had his house go up in flames due to a battery on his golf trolley of all things, for goodness sake.
So I’ll excercise caution.
Lithium batteries are banned as cargo on passenger aircraft, they have to go on cargo aircraft if not shipped by land/sea.
Most airlines now regulate the size of external battery packs allowed in passenger hand luggage to 10AH, which is relatively small pack these days.
With the exception of that Samsung phone from a few years ago, most fires are cheap Chinese batteries and cheap Chinese chargers.
There’s also cheap Chinese chargers that are a problem. My Mother in Law knew someone who had a charger go up.
Fortunately they were there at the time,
Things not to buy on Amazon:
Chargers Lithium batteries
I keep my drone batteries in a metal box and usually charge phones on a non-flammable surface or within view. Paranoid? Maybe, maybe not...
My wife bought some long lead iPhone chargers on Amazon
Sadly they got lost,within a week of turning up. She can’t remember where she left them !!!
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
Shall we look at the leader of the free world to guide us?
Well, compasses use magnetism, and that can work by attraction or repulsion...
Actually on tonight's poll, I would have expected more of a negative effect for Reform and a bounce for labour with Burnham about to relieve Starmer of his duties
I may be wrong, but just how much attention are the public taking in politics at present
Certainly, I think the summer polls may well see little movement but once Parliament returns and the conference season gets into fill swing then those trends will be interesting
Almost none judging from the world I live in. The average is made up for by PB posters and assorted lunatics on X and things but that makes no difference.
It will start up at some point, just as every two years my wife becomes vaguely aware that England have a football team and that on the whole she would rather they won than lost, and will watch the final if we are in it, just as I have watched precisely zero seconds of Wimbledon but have heard of Arthur Fery and would have watched the final had he been in it.
Credit where credit is due; GB News is evidently not quite the same as Fox News. Can you imagine the latter being even half this honest in reporting an inconvenient piece of evidence ?
'We have to be honest and say the numbers are down... Part of me would accept some of this "Smash the Gangs" policy is having an effect.'
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
Shall we look at the leader of the free world to guide us?
Well, compasses use magnetism, and that can work by attraction or repulsion...
Credit where credit is due; GB News is evidently not quite the same as Fox News. Can you imagine the latter being even half this honest in reporting an inconvenient piece of evidence ?
'We have to be honest and say the numbers are down... Part of me would accept some of this "Smash the Gangs" policy is having an effect.'
Someone was gasing on about the TNT equivalence of battery storage systems.
Well, the average petrol station has on its premises the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon’ worth of TNT - as measured in the raw energy equivalence.
It's bizarre that people are so afraid of batteries*, which have an extremely good safety record on the whole, and yet the same people wouldn't even blink about all sorts of chemicals used in industry, traffic pollution, fuel storage, flooding, and other things that are considerably more dangerous. It's like when a train crashes and people think "I'll drive instead" there's no understanding of the risk just emotions taking over.
* Battery storage systems don't even need to optimised for mass or volume, and so are free to use batteries that are even safer than the norm, like LFP batteries, and eventually we'll likely see solid state batteries take over, which will probably be about as safe a store of energy as we have got.
I have a concern about Lithium Ion batteries as, due to work I had to arrange to get spares shipped overseas, and it was drummed into us the risk involved in sending them.
Also my wife’s cousin, her lad had his house go up in flames due to a battery on his golf trolley of all things, for goodness sake.
So I’ll excercise caution.
Lithium batteries are banned as cargo on passenger aircraft, they have to go on cargo aircraft if not shipped by land/sea.
Most airlines now regulate the size of external battery packs allowed in passenger hand luggage to 10AH, which is relatively small pack these days.
With the exception of that Samsung phone from a few years ago, most fires are cheap Chinese batteries and cheap Chinese chargers.
There’s also cheap Chinese chargers that are a problem. My Mother in Law knew someone who had a charger go up.
Fortunately they were there at the time,
Things not to buy on Amazon:
Chargers Lithium batteries
I keep my drone batteries in a metal box and usually charge phones on a non-flammable surface or within view. Paranoid? Maybe, maybe not...
Anker, ugreen are safe brands - the rest they are cheap for a reason
Is this because she finally worked out she wasn't ?
Rachel Reeves has warned the incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, that he needs to be properly prepared to govern when he arrives in Downing Street in a little more than a week... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwykdvgv4d4o
Is this because she finally worked out she wasn't ?
Rachel Reeves has warned the incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, that he needs to be properly prepared to govern when he arrives in Downing Street in a little more than a week... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwykdvgv4d4o
She thinks Andy Burnham may keep her on as Chancellor because far too many people cannot stomach the idea of Ed Miliband as Chancellor.
Rachel Reeves has not given up on surviving as chancellor
She may have been the least popular chancellor in history, but the ‘Anyone But Ed Miliband’ gang has struggled to agree on an alternative
Still amuses me that his father was named Neville Neville.
It’s one of those stories you’d think would be BS but isn’t.
I used to know a Morgan Morgan
I’ve only ever known a Cpt Morgan.
IIrC Van Morrisons wife was Janet Planet.
The head of Art School at my old school was a fantastic man named Art (Arthur) Morgan which always gently amused me. His deputy was Larry Wolff, son of Professor Heinz Wolff - looked exactly like each other. Between them and the other art dons it was a great place to spend time.
Widdecombe has turned into yet another battleground of the bloody culture war.
How long before Net Zero is to blame for her death??
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 15m Allison, this is a murder case. The alleged perpetrator is still at large. You are not involved in the investigation. You are not a police officer. You do not have any of the relevant facts. Let the police do their job.
Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson Ann Widdecombe had several cameras on her property.
The police need to release the CCTV from Wednesday lunchtime/afternoon so the public can help them identify her alleged killer.
What’s the problem? He is dangerous and needs to be found.
One swallow doesn't make (or break) a summer. Greens did well after Polanski's election, harvesting discontents from the left bloc. This gave them good numbers and good results in May. Then as Zac came under inspection (TL:DR - he's an idiot) and concerns grew over antisemitism, it started to drop back down. When Starmer was defenestrated, that cemented the trend. But if Burnham fails to be the Infinite Leftist, then some numbers may creep back to Green. Plus there is always the weird Reform-to-Green transfers.
Whether this manifests in an election (people behave differently between elections than when they do during elections) is not known. Your guess is as good as mine.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Plenty of the highest paid people on the rich lists did jobs which don't need especially high IQs, business founders and entrepreneurs, Premier League footballers, F1 drivers, pop stars, Hollywood actors, stockbrokers. They need some ability and merit and hard work certainly but beyond a skill in their particular field they don't need a very high overall IQ.
Plenty with the highest IQs will become academics, a solid middle class job but not particularly highly paid. Some will be doctors and lawyers but beyond commercial and tax lawyers or Harley Street doctors with mainly private clients, a doctor or surgeon working mainly in the NHS isn't going to be very highly paid. Nor is a lawyer doing legal aid work or working for the CPS or in human rights going to be in the top 1% of earners, certainly not unless they make KC.
Comparing your first and second paragraphs, why should some of the most successful people in business and sport even bother about some who have the higher IQ as if it is some gold standard of success when in practical terms they are more successful
In terms of making money and their field yes, though if you want to win a Nobel Prize as your measure of success having the highest IQ will still help
Which points to the difficult, but ultimate, question- what is a successful life, anyway?
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
Central to 'After Virtue', an ethical masterpiece by Alasdair MacIntyre, is the thesis that we have forgotten our compass but had good ones until the enlightenment. They were the New Testament (obvs) and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. FWIW I think he's on the right lines though the objections are rather obvious. Worth a read.
BTW the idea that success in life is something to do with money is risible.
WASHINGTON—In a brutal defeat for Donald J. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell handily trounced him on a cognitive test administered to both men on Saturday.
According to an attending neurologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, “When asked the test questions, Senator McConnell was totally unresponsive, as opposed to President Trump, who got every one wrong.”
I have a feeling he will, they have gone a bit quiet even if that poll shows them gaining. But Andy needs to grab their attention quick so they think the direction has changed, even if it hasn't much - probably why he was talking about Israel the other day.
i guess for the record i should point out he's a war hero or something
Or you could engage your brain and understand why referring to the Malvinas would be something Simon Weston understandably would be upset about rather than bandying around “snowflake”.
if he wants to be a mouthpiece for a foreign owned news channel spreading bile all over the nation's airwaves he can tolerate some hurty words on the internet
I like the Norwegian supporter who refuses to participate, since the Viking used sails rather than oars.
I thought most longships used sails and oars? That was their great versatility and part of the reason they navigated the rivers of Europe all the way to Miklagard
She may well be right but I cannot see what choice they had.
I don't think the initial lockdown was avoidable. It was shit, but we had no idea about the long-term consequences, no vaccines (or any idea when they might arrive), and no proper understanding of optimal treatment.
What followed, on the other hand, was a complete clusterfuck.
80% of the reduction in "R" could probably have been achieved with 20% of the restrictions. (Not *no* restrictions... but fewer restrictions, and with the most destructive and least effective removed. So, there should have been no restrictions whatsoever on meeting up outside for example.)
Yes they could have been but the govt was cowed by the press, TV pundits and the opposition.
Every day on the TV people like Piers Morgan would be demanding more and more restrictions.
Remember SKS labelling one version the ‘Johnson Variant’
One thing I found interesting from the COVID Inquiry is how clear it was that Johnson was *not* cowed by even his own advisers at times. I think it is a mistake to underestimate the government's autonomous decision making.
Which is a good thing - whether some right decisions or wrong decisions were made, judgement calls needed to be made (it was not as simple as simply 'following the science', even when indeed making sure to assess the science properly), and political leaders need to be able to make judgement calls and not simply delegate their decision to someone else.
I like the Norwegian supporter who refuses to participate, since the Viking used sails rather than oars.
I thought most longships used sails and oars? That was their great versatility and part of the reason they navigated the rivers of Europe all the way to Miklagard
I like the Norwegian supporter who refuses to participate, since the Viking used sails rather than oars.
I thought most longships used sails and oars? That was their great versatility and part of the reason they navigated the rivers of Europe all the way to Miklagard
Typically, Swedes rowed, Norwegians sailed. But you are right that they could both do both, and did, depending on the situation.
Widdecombe has turned into yet another battleground of the bloody culture war.
How long before Net Zero is to blame for her death??
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 15m Allison, this is a murder case. The alleged perpetrator is still at large. You are not involved in the investigation. You are not a police officer. You do not have any of the relevant facts. Let the police do their job.
Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson Ann Widdecombe had several cameras on her property.
The police need to release the CCTV from Wednesday lunchtime/afternoon so the public can help them identify her alleged killer.
What’s the problem? He is dangerous and needs to be found.
Evidently the police do have CCTV footage of the perpetrator, because they have said that they are (still) looking for a white male. They think at the moment that they can nab him without sharing the information with the public. We shall see if that is right, or if he continues to evade them.
Trump will declare election result in November rigged and will impose MARTIAL LAW IN DEMOCRATIC WINNING STATES AND IMMEDIATELY MOVE TO INCARCERATE LEADING DEMOCRATIC MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AND SENATE.
South Korean situation repeated, he will not have a problem with his supplicant Republican representatives. The streets will almost certainly run with blood.
God help us all.
I don't know if that will be the exact situation, but I expect some increasingly obvious interference if he is truly concerned with the outcome. Both sides have been busy trying to gerrymander like crazy to help things out, and various other legal and operational hurdles have been tried in advance by the White House, so it seems implausible they wouldn't try something at the time.
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Says the person who this very afternoon was lauding the notion of drawing conclusions from facts rather than just starting with a conclusion you happen to like or rejecting one you don't.
Chutzpah or what. You should get into populist right wing politics.
Oh, hang on.
You can't really accuse me of drawing a conclusion when I've been at pains to suggest we cannot draw one.
You are rejecting a conclusion that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence.
Why you would do that is a mystery. I don't know the reason and you obviously can't tell me.
Some people find scientific truth scary, and feel it dis-empowers them.
Staging a performance of the story The Cold Equations, as a play at university was fascinating in this respect.
Hm. This is the first time I've come across that story. But I'd say the critiques are bollocks. Space travel.is arse-clenchingly expensive and you don't carry any weight you don't need to. Adding extra contingency just in case some irresponsiboe idiot creeps aboard would cost millions. Those millions could be spent on keeping people alive. NICE has a formula for working out the monetary value of a human life. She knew it wasn't allowed but she did it anyway, guessing incorrectly that the sanction would be small. The high sanction is a way of making these space flights viable because you wouldn't expect anyone to be so idiotic to use it.
To start with, interstellar flight doesn’t exist yet. So we have no way to talk about the limits of the technology. So complaining about the parameters of the problem is to miss the point.
We can take a moral problem in a future society and discuss it, though.
The critiques of the story often sound like desperate attempt to deny that the problem could ever be a valid issue. To avoid the point of the story - reality doesn’t care what you want. Which is distressing to many people.
I like the Norwegian supporter who refuses to participate, since the Viking used sails rather than oars.
I thought most longships used sails and oars? That was their great versatility and part of the reason they navigated the rivers of Europe all the way to Miklagard
Either way its just a poor imitation of the Icelandic thunderclap.
I like the Norwegian supporter who refuses to participate, since the Viking used sails rather than oars.
I thought most longships used sails and oars? That was their great versatility and part of the reason they navigated the rivers of Europe all the way to Miklagard
Either way its just a poor imitation of the Icelandic thunderclap.
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: The convicted fraudster George Cottrell had access to Nigel Farage’s emails, and covered party costs without the Electoral Commission knowing
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
Catch me if you can Cos I'm the England man And what you're looking at Is the master plan We ain't no hooligans This ain't a football song Three lions on my chest I know we can't go wrong!
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
Comments
There is no superior type of intelligence really, often horses for courses - book smart v whip smart, analytical v gut.
But it wasn't all one way traffic. "Eat Out to Help Out" should never have seen the light of day and was frankly asking for trouble.
Most airlines now regulate the size of external battery packs allowed in passenger hand luggage to 10AH, which is relatively small pack these days.
With the exception of that Samsung phone from a few years ago, most fires are cheap Chinese batteries and cheap Chinese chargers.
"it’s not that long ago our two countries were at war, with the Falklands or Malvinas, even before that?"
Fortunately they were there at the time,
The memory of those pictures lives long in Wales and certainly you should read the actual history of that day
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-61551116
But I agree about the impact on young people. They made great sacrifices. We should remember that and repay it.
Sadly it looks like we have no intention to do this because of voting demographics.
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2075965954828456255/video/1?s=61
Trump interfering in Bosnian politics so his friends and family can make money.
I’ll Give it a miss.
I may be wrong, but just how much attention are the public taking in politics at present
Certainly, I think the summer polls may well see little movement but once Parliament returns and the conference season gets into fill swing then those trends will be interesting
(Yes, really.)
In some fields, it's easy. But even in something like business, is it better to be detested but rich or loved and comfortable? Mr Potter or Mr Bailey? It's not black and white, but I'm not sure our society has a good compass to use to navigate.
Fur a start you're pontificating about the expense of interstellar travel, which doesn't, and may never exist. So the critique that the situation is contrived, in a not dissimilar manner to the trolley problem, remains valid.
Moreover, even accepting your accounting, why would you not devote a small proportion of that "arse-clenching expense" to better security ?
It's really a short parable of science being necessary, but not sufficient to good engineering.
Chargers
Lithium batteries
I keep my drone batteries in a metal box and usually charge phones on a non-flammable surface or within view. Paranoid? Maybe, maybe not...
Can you imagine the latter being even half this honest in reporting an inconvenient piece of evidence ?
'We have to be honest and say the numbers are down... Part of me would accept some of this "Smash the Gangs" policy is having an effect.'
Home and Security Editor @MarkWhiteTV gives his analysis of Labour's efforts to tackle small boat migrant crossings on the English Channel.
https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/2075525813475148283
Sadly they got lost,within a week of turning up. She can’t remember where she left them !!!
It will start up at some point, just as every two years my wife becomes vaguely aware that England have a football team and that on the whole she would rather they won than lost, and will watch the final if we are in it, just as I have watched precisely zero seconds of Wimbledon but have heard of Arthur Fery and would have watched the final had he been in it.
IIrC Van Morrisons wife was Janet Planet.
and a small outboard motorIs he blind or just insane?
Rachel Reeves has warned the incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, that he needs to be properly prepared to govern when he arrives in Downing Street in a little more than a week...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwykdvgv4d4o
Rachel Reeves has not given up on surviving as chancellor
She may have been the least popular chancellor in history, but the ‘Anyone But Ed Miliband’ gang has struggled to agree on an alternative
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rachel-reeves-chancellor-andy-burnham-cabinet-chances-vs5hjt7d9
Tuchel seems prepared to take more risks than Southgate.
How long before Net Zero is to blame for her death??
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
·
15m
Allison, this is a murder case. The alleged perpetrator is still at large. You are not involved in the investigation. You are not a police officer. You do not have any of the relevant facts. Let the police do their job.
Allison Pearson
@AllisonPearson
Ann Widdecombe had several cameras on her property.
The police need to release the CCTV from Wednesday lunchtime/afternoon so the public can help them identify her alleged killer.
What’s the problem? He is dangerous and needs to be found.
Whether this manifests in an election (people behave differently between elections than when they do during elections) is not known. Your guess is as good as mine.
BTW the idea that success in life is something to do with money is risible.
According to an attending neurologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, “When asked the test questions, Senator McConnell was totally unresponsive, as opposed to President Trump, who got every one wrong.”
We can take a moral problem in a future society and discuss it, though.
The critiques of the story often sound like desperate attempt to deny that the problem could ever be a valid issue. To avoid the point of the story - reality doesn’t care what you want. Which is distressing to many people.
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: The convicted fraudster George Cottrell had access to Nigel Farage’s emails, and covered party costs without the Electoral Commission knowing
https://x.com/thetimes/status/2076045113768219098?s=20
\
🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
https://x.com/Vikinghistory/status/2075974546440569029?s=20
Cos I'm the England man
And what you're looking at
Is the master plan
We ain't no hooligans
This ain't a football song
Three lions on my chest
I know we can't go wrong!
Have you never watched The Shawshank Redemption?
https://youtu.be/K9p9Yr1U2KA?is=UF9diELWZ_fWTLRF
Despite the irony that Farage himself is descended from Huguenot immigrants.