What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Don't you also have to ban home schooling?
Not to mention private tutors and the m/c 'Comprehensives'. Also the notion that the 'chumocracy' is exclusive to one political party - the Benn's, Kinnocks, Corbyns, say hello!
Why is elevated testosterone ok for 200m but not 400m? In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,.00s.....far too many athletes were juiced to the gills with such things.
Michael Johnson said it's because the drugs people could only prove to the court of arbitration for sport that it makes a difference for 400m to 1500m.
I recall a somewhat remarkable 100m with Ben Johnson and sundry others that might have been indicative of a benefit....
All atheletes in that infamous final eventually were popped, other than Carl Lewis, for legal reasons we will say that he never officially failed a drugs test.
Not 100 % sure that's true.
Not the actual final, but at some point during their careers, i believe it is correct.
OK, 4th and 6th, as I understand it, were never linked to PEDs.
Why is elevated testosterone ok for 200m but not 400m? In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,.00s.....far too many athletes were juiced to the gills with such things.
Michael Johnson said it's because the drugs people could only prove to the court of arbitration for sport that it makes a difference for 400m to 1500m.
I recall a somewhat remarkable 100m with Ben Johnson and sundry others that might have been indicative of a benefit....
There is a very good podcast "Cheat" - written and presented by Alzo Slade (whom I could listen to read the phone book) and their latest episode covered Marion Jones and the cheating legacy.
I had forgotten that Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson and our very own Linford all tested positive in that one race in 1988.
I listened to a great interview with the guy behind Balco Labs, Victor Conte. Basically he went though all the warning signs that an athlete is juice, i don't just mean physically, but things like how many missed tests, where do they hold training camps ask yourself why therr, and many of the ways they play the system.
He basically said in this day and age, missed tests massive red flags, strange uncommon medical conditions that in most people mean declined performance, red flags, any talk of they took some supplement or medication that they didn't know contained trace of x, massive red flag, training camps on remote locations where very hard for a tester to get to / everybody knows if they are incoming, massive red flag.
Basically clean atheletes are anal about they where abouts locator info, they don't put anything in their body that hasn't been signed off by official doctors, etc.
Where are training camps is another great point on the Jamaican success story. If you're on a small island, or deep in the Rift valley, it's rather difficult for WADA to get anywhere near you without you getting a 12 hour warning. Alaways made me laugh when certain prominant athletes said they wanted to go to Kenya for the best training facilities.
And we know Jamaican drug testing isn't exactly world class.....
Five of Jamaica’s Olympic track and field medallists at London 2012 were not drug-tested outside competition by the IAAF or their own anti-doping authority in the six months leading up to the Games, Sportsmail can reveal.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Don't you also have to ban home schooling?
Not to mention private tutors and the m/c 'Comprehensives'. Also the notion that the 'chumocracy' is exclusive to one political party - the Benn's, Kinnocks, Corbyns, say hello!
Plus grammar schools and church schools and free schools, can't have any parental choice at all can we.
Though in reality of course it would still be selection, just by house price and catchment area
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Don't you also have to ban home schooling?
No. In fact you don't have to ban private schools either. Just heavily disincentivize - eg end the tax breaks and bring back uni grants but only for state school pupils - and allow time to work its magic.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
Indeed, sugar slavery is all about endurance, not sprinting. Leon's thesis falls at the first hurdle.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
Except that is pretty much what happened according to the relevant minister, Chloe Smith, in her answer.
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
And fitness in an athletic sense covers a multitude of forms. Metabolically greatXgrandfather who survived the rigours of the middle passage might tend towards the sparer middle-long distance type. Anyway, Leon is right on one thing, it is a tragic and distasteful subject.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
Indeed, sugar slavery is all about endurance, not sprinting. Leon's thesis falls at the first hurdle.
Even if it was about sprinting, the basic problem with the hypothesis is that it has a conflicting prediction at its core, as TUD noted: it predicts intense prior selection for the inability to run fast (i.e. being caught by the slavers in the first place).
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
And fitness in an athletic sense covers a multitude of forms. Metabolically greatXgrandfather who survived the rigours of the middle passage might tend towards the sparer middle-long distance type. Anyway, Leon is right on one thing, it is a tragic and distasteful subject.
Indeed. That paper I posted was quite interesting on the wider theme.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Don't you also have to ban home schooling?
Not to mention private tutors and the m/c 'Comprehensives'. Also the notion that the 'chumocracy' is exclusive to one political party - the Benn's, Kinnocks, Corbyns, say hello!
Plus grammar schools and church schools and free schools, can't have any parental choice at all can we.
Though in reality of course it would still be selection, just by house price and catchment area
Exactly. Abolishing private schools benefits mainly liberal middle class parents who won't send their kids to private school for various reasons but quite happily get the extra tutors, pay the extra for the house in the right catchment area etc that give their kids an advantange.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
My step-mum's nephew joined the army as a teenager and, thanks in part to having a good war in Iraq and Afghan, has risen through the ranks, been commissioned and is now a captain. As a result his two daughters now have their fees for a private school subsidised.
My dad, who views Stalin as suspiciously centrist, isn't particularly happy about it. He views it as a betrayal of the family's working-class roots.
And, in some way, it is.
But I don't blame my step-cousin (is that a thing?) I think he would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to give his kids the huge advantage of private education. I've seen first hand that self-confidence they inculcate that most kids, from 'normal' schools, generally don't have.
I wish we lived in a world with no private education, but I can understand why, in the world as it is rather than I would like it to be, parents who can send their kids private, do so.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
Indeed, sugar slavery is all about endurance, not sprinting. Leon's thesis falls at the first hurdle.
Even if it was about sprinting, the basic problem with the hypothesis is that it has a conflicting prediction at its core, as TUD noted: it predicts intense prior selection for the inability to run fast (i.e. being caught by the slavers in the first place).
Unless the slavers had the fiendish ingenuity to adopt an encircling manoeuvre.
Why is elevated testosterone ok for 200m but not 400m? In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,.00s.....far too many athletes were juiced to the gills with such things.
Michael Johnson said it's because the drugs people could only prove to the court of arbitration for sport that it makes a difference for 400m to 1500m.
I recall a somewhat remarkable 100m with Ben Johnson and sundry others that might have been indicative of a benefit....
There is a very good podcast "Cheat" - written and presented by Alzo Slade (whom I could listen to read the phone book) and their latest episode covered Marion Jones and the cheating legacy.
I had forgotten that Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson and our very own Linford all tested positive in that one race in 1988.
I think that Linford still holds the British record. Hmm...
Loads of British athletic records are still from a decade plus ago. Either they were all doping back then (possible) or we have just lost our edge since.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Why not go the whole hog? Ban better off parents for having better food than those on free school meals. Perhaps nationalise family holidays as well. No Maldives "eco" trips for you well off lefties. Everyone must go to Butlins at Skegness, and if it is full, wait until next year!
One thing, just one thing, stops me wanting a Labour government at the moment, and that is the chippy attitude of lefties to independent schools. Is it because I went to one? No, I went to a really shitty bog standard comp. Thankfully through good fortune made enough money to send my kids to independent day schools. Best money I have ever spent.
In 1998, Mitchell was banned by International Association of Athletics Federations for two years after a test showed high levels of testosterone. They did not accept his defense of "five bottles of beer and sex with his wife at least four times... it was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat."
Why is elevated testosterone ok for 200m but not 400m? In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,.00s.....far too many athletes were juiced to the gills with such things.
Michael Johnson said it's because the drugs people could only prove to the court of arbitration for sport that it makes a difference for 400m to 1500m.
I recall a somewhat remarkable 100m with Ben Johnson and sundry others that might have been indicative of a benefit....
There is a very good podcast "Cheat" - written and presented by Alzo Slade (whom I could listen to read the phone book) and their latest episode covered Marion Jones and the cheating legacy.
I had forgotten that Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson and our very own Linford all tested positive in that one race in 1988.
I think that Linford still holds the British record. Hmm...
Loads of British athletic records are still from a decade plus ago. Either they were all doping back then (possible) or we have just lost our edge since.
The big disincentive specifically for Team GB athletes to get involved in doping is if you get caught and all your lottery funding is not only gone forever, they will try and claw it all back. Dwayne Chambers was basically bankrupted and forced into running all round the world to pay the bills.
I am sure there are more than Chambers who have not been clean, but it does tip the scales somewhat. If you can get to world #1, escape the testing and you can make the big bucks, but fail to do that, you are going to be in financial trouble and effectively finished from that sport.
Where as we know the Russians and Chinese have state sponsored cheating, and Team USA, you get caught, do your time and then you are welcomed back into the fold.
Those worrying about long term effects of the vaccines (very likely nil) should also consider long term effects of even mild Covid, and the possibility (nb only a possibility) that an impaired sense of smell might correlate with neurodegenerative disease later in like.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Don't you also have to ban home schooling?
Not to mention private tutors and the m/c 'Comprehensives'. Also the notion that the 'chumocracy' is exclusive to one political party - the Benn's, Kinnocks, Corbyns, say hello!
Plus grammar schools and church schools and free schools, can't have any parental choice at all can we.
Though in reality of course it would still be selection, just by house price and catchment area
Exactly. Abolishing private schools benefits mainly liberal middle class parents who won't send their kids to private school for various reasons but quite happily get the extra tutors, pay the extra for the house in the right catchment area etc that give their kids an advantange.
It is so they can spend their spare cash on trips to the Maldives, and look down on folk that don't.
A real shame the gymnastics jus then wasn't in front of a full house, men's gymnastics is kind of the Japanese home sport and the high bar is the most spectacular of the lot. And that was something special by Hashimoto.
It might be argued that certain martial arts are the Japanese home sport.
And Sumo Wrestling, which should obviously be in the same arena as gymnastics.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Why not go the whole hog? Ban better off parents for having better food than those on free school meals. Perhaps nationalise family holidays as well. No Maldives "eco" trips for you well off lefties. Everyone must go to Butlins at Skegness, and if it is full, wait until next year!
One thing, just one thing, stops me wanting a Labour government at the moment, and that is the chippy attitude of lefties to independent schools. Is it because I went to one? No, I went to a really shitty bog standard comp. Thankfully through good fortune made enough money to send my kids to independent day schools. Best money I have ever spent.
The politics of envy writ large and the people they'd damage most are the aspirational parents prepared to sacrifice for their children's futures by denying them the option. Meanwhile they lord it up themselves like the pigs in Animal Farm. Happened in pretty much every place where the socialist experiment has been tried. North Korea is where Kinabalu and his ilk should be.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Don't you also have to ban home schooling?
No. In fact you don't have to ban private schools either. Just heavily disincentivize - eg end the tax breaks and bring back uni grants but only for state school pupils - and allow time to work its magic.
Doesn't that just make it even more exclusive?
Yes and no. Yes in the micro but no in the macro. It would dwindle away to become the choice of eccentrics only. It would no longer be a rocket booster to inequality, hardcoding it into society, propagating it down through the generations. We're talking a rupture. Painful but necessary if we want to make a big dent in elitism.
And certainly not necessary if we don't. If we don't want to do that - or if it's just not a high enough priority cf other things - then much better to leave things be. Because the affluent classes are very VERY attached to their private schools in this country. And to the general notion that parents know best when it comes to their children's education. There would be blood if this was tampered with.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Why not go the whole hog? Ban better off parents for having better food than those on free school meals. Perhaps nationalise family holidays as well. No Maldives "eco" trips for you well off lefties. Everyone must go to Butlins at Skegness, and if it is full, wait until next year!
One thing, just one thing, stops me wanting a Labour government at the moment, and that is the chippy attitude of lefties to independent schools. Is it because I went to one? No, I went to a really shitty bog standard comp. Thankfully through good fortune made enough money to send my kids to independent day schools. Best money I have ever spent.
Why is elevated testosterone ok for 200m but not 400m? In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,.00s.....far too many athletes were juiced to the gills with such things.
Michael Johnson said it's because the drugs people could only prove to the court of arbitration for sport that it makes a difference for 400m to 1500m.
I recall a somewhat remarkable 100m with Ben Johnson and sundry others that might have been indicative of a benefit....
There is a very good podcast "Cheat" - written and presented by Alzo Slade (whom I could listen to read the phone book) and their latest episode covered Marion Jones and the cheating legacy.
I had forgotten that Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson and our very own Linford all tested positive in that one race in 1988.
I think that Linford still holds the British record. Hmm...
Loads of British athletic records are still from a decade plus ago. Either they were all doping back then (possible) or we have just lost our edge since.
The big disincentive specifically for Team GB athletes to get involved in doping is if you get caught and all your lottery funding is not only gone forever, they will try and claw it all back. Dwayne Chambers was basically bankrupted and forced into running all round the world to pay the bills.
I am sure there are more than Chambers who have not been clean, but it does tip the scales somewhat. If you can get to world #1, escape the testing and you can make the big bucks, but fail to do that, you are going to be in financial trouble and effectively finished from that sport.
Where as we know the Russians and Chinese have state sponsored cheating, and Team USA, you get caught, do your time and then you are welcomed back into the fold.
I think it's a credit to British Athletics that they've had rows with various arbitration bodies (CAS I think) for being too harsh on drugs cheats. CAS strikes me as far too soft on drugs, a very naive court that thinks leopards will change their spots.
I'm old enough to remember when governments were obsessed with optics.
I have some sympathy on this, having recently thought long and hard about buying an electric car but ultimately opting for a Ulez-compliant diesel. If she was after a seven seater car like I was then her only option would have been the Tesla Model X (around £50k second hand). I hope my next car will be electric though, I have high hopes for the Model Y. On street charging needs to be improved significantly too. If I was a climate spokesperson I might have just sucked it up and gone electric (although there are plenty of green issues with electric cars too).
Yep. Strange criticism and a strange explanation.
Me - I'm waiting for a credible electric that can tow 2 tons, and take a decent load.
Model X has 2,300kg braked towing capacity.
Thanks
I don't think £82k is a very credible price for a car, especially with insurance group 50.
And Model X may mean I have to enlarge by gate, and it has a small boot.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Why not go the whole hog? Ban better off parents for having better food than those on free school meals. Perhaps nationalise family holidays as well. No Maldives "eco" trips for you well off lefties. Everyone must go to Butlins at Skegness, and if it is full, wait until next year!
One thing, just one thing, stops me wanting a Labour government at the moment, and that is the chippy attitude of lefties to independent schools. Is it because I went to one? No, I went to a really shitty bog standard comp. Thankfully through good fortune made enough money to send my kids to independent day schools. Best money I have ever spent.
Ban M & S and Waitrose and Sainsburys and force them to shop in Tescos or Aldi or Asda with the rest of us.
Ban BMWs and Mercedes and Rolls Royce too, a Nissan or Ford will do fine
A real shame the gymnastics jus then wasn't in front of a full house, men's gymnastics is kind of the Japanese home sport and the high bar is the most spectacular of the lot. And that was something special by Hashimoto.
It might be argued that certain martial arts are the Japanese home sport.
And Sumo Wrestling, which should obviously be in the same arena as gymnastics.
Judo had no weight divisions before it became an Olympic sport. Which was kind of the whole point of it.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
My step-mum's nephew joined the army as a teenager and, thanks in part to having a good war in Iraq and Afghan, has risen through the ranks, been commissioned and is now a captain. As a result his two daughters now have their fees for a private school subsidised.
My dad, who views Stalin as suspiciously centrist, isn't particularly happy about it. He views it as a betrayal of the family's working-class roots.
And, in some way, it is.
But I don't blame my step-cousin (is that a thing?) I think he would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to give his kids the huge advantage of private education. I've seen first hand that self-confidence they inculcate that most kids, from 'normal' schools, generally don't have.
I wish we lived in a world with no private education, but I can understand why, in the world as it is rather than I would like it to be, parents who can send their kids private, do so.
But if I were world king, they'd be gone.
Yes, I must be clear here. I see the overall impact as malign but I don't for a second blame anybody for sending their kids private.
They caution that most of the people favoring secession are probably doing so for partisan signaling reasons, eg "I'm a proud Southerner and I hate Joe Biden!", and would likely balk at the idea if it were truly on the table in a concrete sense...
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
I agree he should have been more bolshie. The focus groups were telling him the public didn't want to see 'politics' in such a crisis but I think this should have been ignored. Like the Tories did so successfully with the Financial Crisis. Build a narrative that damages the government. 'Lazy reckless callous Johnson cost thousands of lives' etc.
But on the May Deal, this notion that Corbyn and Labour should have voted it through, it wasn't a practical option. The party (MPs and members) wouldn't have stood for it. Saving a Tory PM plus enabling Brexit - No.
It continues to be my view that the people who scuppered May's deal were the Cons rebels which gave Lab the cover to say "well if their own party doesn't support it why should we".
Problem was, for the national interest (according to their stated views on Brexit), it would have been the right thing although I appreciate that not possible for the reasons you suggest.
Thing is, with 20/20 hindsight, first, they have now sacrificed their polling position for the national interest, and secondly, how much worse could it be than now, mid-term and 5-10 pts behind the govt?
It's hard to say anything new about Brexit, but Rafael Behr gets to the issue of May's Deal:
May failed because she tried to get Brexit done in some meaningful, technical sense. Johnson triumphed by getting it done in the realm of pure imagination and carrying with him a lot of people who couldn’t conceive of voting Tory under anyone else.
Brexiteers deal only in fantasy and Remainers despise the reality. There was no middle ground. By a paradox, May's Deal becomes the fantasy and Johnson's fantasy the reality
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think that is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Elitism can be reduced but not eradicated. In fact you shouldn't even try to eradicate it. That leads to totalitarianism and - yes - elites. Worse ones. I'm just thinking about what's realistic in England 2021. This could be possible one day. But not this day, I'm fully aware of that. It's electoral poison. People who can't afford this privilege still support it. Until this changes, no chance of reform, I'll be talking to the hand.
They caution that most of the people favoring secession are probably doing so for partisan signaling reasons, eg "I'm a proud Southerner and I hate Joe Biden!", and would likely balk at the idea if it were truly on the table in a concrete sense...
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
The South tried to secede before, if the Democrats stay in power for a long time I could see it gaining traction again with southern Republicans. Though the Federal structure of the US should contain it.
The Deep South of the US is a totally different culture from New England, New York and the West coast.
It would have some advantages for non southern Democrats too as they would likely never have to worry about a future President Trump again, if the GOP did elect another President in a US minus the South they would look a lot more like Mitt Romney and a lot less like Donald Trump
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think that is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Elitism can be reduced but not eradicated. In fact you shouldn't even try to eradicate it. That leads to totalitarianism and - yes - elites. Worse ones. I'm just thinking about what's realistic in England 2021. This could be possible one day. But not this day, I'm fully aware of that. It's electoral poison. People who can't afford this privilege still support it. Until this changes, no chance of reform, I'll be talking to the hand.
If we have to have an elite, why not aim for an enormous one?
I think Sky News were totally unfair in their interview with Emily Campbell, asking all about Laurel Hubbard and being "plus sized".
Poor women, self funds herself to the Olympics, wins a surprise Silver medal, and clearly isn't a high profile experienced media trained athlete and half the bloody interview they wanted to ask her about a woman who didn't even have a single successful lift and how she (Emily) "doesn't look like a typical athlete".
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think that is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Elitism can be reduced but not eradicated. In fact you shouldn't even try to eradicate it. That leads to totalitarianism and - yes - elites. Worse ones. I'm just thinking about what's realistic in England 2021. This could be possible one day. But not this day, I'm fully aware of that. It's electoral poison. People who can't afford this privilege still support it. Until this changes, no chance of reform, I'll be talking to the hand.
I can promise you there's also people who can and do afford it who'd be secretly not wholly disgruntled if the option were denied them, and they had to spend the money on horses and yachts instead, dammit.
They caution that most of the people favoring secession are probably doing so for partisan signaling reasons, eg "I'm a proud Southerner and I hate Joe Biden!", and would likely balk at the idea if it were truly on the table in a concrete sense...
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
The South tried to secede before, if the Democrats stay in power for a long time I could see it gaining traction again with southern Republicans. Though the Federal structure of the US should contain it.
The Deep South of the US is a totally different culture from New England, New York and the West coast.
It would have some advantages for non southern Democrats too as they would likely never have to worry about a future President Trump again, if the GOP did elect another President in a US minus the South they would look a lot more like Mitt Romney and a lot less like Donald Trump
When Texas goes blue, it will put a stop to any such nonsense.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
Why is elevated testosterone ok for 200m but not 400m? In the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,.00s.....far too many athletes were juiced to the gills with such things.
Michael Johnson said it's because the drugs people could only prove to the court of arbitration for sport that it makes a difference for 400m to 1500m.
I recall a somewhat remarkable 100m with Ben Johnson and sundry others that might have been indicative of a benefit....
There is a very good podcast "Cheat" - written and presented by Alzo Slade (whom I could listen to read the phone book) and their latest episode covered Marion Jones and the cheating legacy.
I had forgotten that Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson and our very own Linford all tested positive in that one race in 1988.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
Hmm, depends on what you mean by a boatload. Didn't matter in the appalling economics of the time if one lost some of one's slaves by packing them in at twice or thrice the density so long as one ended up with more profit.
They caution that most of the people favoring secession are probably doing so for partisan signaling reasons, eg "I'm a proud Southerner and I hate Joe Biden!", and would likely balk at the idea if it were truly on the table in a concrete sense...
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
The South tried to secede before, if the Democrats stay in power for a long time I could see it gaining traction again with southern Republicans. Though the Federal structure of the US should contain it.
The Deep South of the US is a totally different culture from New England, New York and the West coast.
It would have some advantages for non southern Democrats too as they would likely never have to worry about a future President Trump again, if the GOP did elect another President in a US minus the South they would look a lot more like Mitt Romney and a lot less like Donald Trump
When Texas goes blue, it will put a stop to any such nonsense.
Thing is, Jimmy Carter won in 1976 with Texas but not California
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
The germs were common to the Old World, actually (and yellow fever killed a lot of Europeans in the West African ports). So that isn't an issue, surely.
Edit: was an issue for native Americans, of course.
Yesterday Mike Smithson wrote an interesting post about his local MP, Mohamed Yasin, who had successfully defended the most marginal Labour seat in the country at the last election. I am not a Labour supporter, and live in an adjacent (conservative held) constituency, but have met Mr Yasin on a number of occasions. He is an extraordinary man, highly intelligent, articulate, friendly and diligent, and with an interesting back-story. I would love to be able to put a bet on him (at suitably long odds) as being the next Labour Prime Minister. Regardless of betting, and as above, I am not a natural Labour voter, watch out for him.
I think Sky News were totally unfair in their interview with Emily Campbell, asking all about Laurel Hubbard and being "plus sized".
Poor women, self funds herself to the Olympics, wins a surprise Silver medal, and clearly isn't a high profile experienced media trained athlete and half the bloody interview they wanted to ask her about a woman who didn't even have a single successful lift and how she (Emily) "doesn't look like a typical athlete".
Having read about Laurel Hubbard's 120kg snatch, I'm intrigued to know what the rest of her looks like.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
Quite
Slaves were regarded as livestock. An order for slaves was an order for kine
"Please go to Africa and bring me 100 head of cattle. I don't particularly mind if they all die on the way over to America. Use that shipper who is known for losing 100% of his cargo every time"
It was accepted that some slaves would die on a dangerous voyage in bad conditions. Just as it was accepted that some naval sailors would die crossing the Atlantic in not-quite-as-bad-conditions
The idea was to get as many living, healthy slaves to America as possible, for as little money as possible, so they packed them tight and fed them pretty poor rations, but they certainly did not want them to die, or even get ill. A sick slave would fetch less money in Charleston or New Orleans.
They used to give slaves exercise for this reason, as it was known that perpetually locking them below decks was bad for their health. They were brought up to the air and ordered to jump and run. It was called "dancing the slaves"
It was a filthy evil business, but it was a business, and the best business was delivering fit young slaves in good condition
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
Your rather glib calculation ignores the obvious point that overcrowding the ship - as was common practice - led to very high death rates, but a net benefit from the point of view of the slavers. As evidenced by the fact that mortality rates dropped from around 25% to 10% only after British legislation which limited the numbers permitted on a given ship.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
How does that compare to the death rate among the Irish when they went to America in the mid 19th C ?
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
The germs were common to the Old World, actually (and yellow fever killed a lot of Europeans in the West African ports). So that isn't an issue, surely.
Edit: was an issue for native Americans, of course.
Not sure about that. It's handy to classify them as old world when discussing their effect in the new, but your own example shows that Europeans weren't immune to African nasties, so why wouldn't the reverse be true? We know precious little about what contemporary W Africans die of, never mind 200 years back.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think that is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Elitism can be reduced but not eradicated. In fact you shouldn't even try to eradicate it. That leads to totalitarianism and - yes - elites. Worse ones. I'm just thinking about what's realistic in England 2021. This could be possible one day. But not this day, I'm fully aware of that. It's electoral poison. People who can't afford this privilege still support it. Until this changes, no chance of reform, I'll be talking to the hand.
If we have to have an elite, why not aim for an enormous one?
PS isn't that our HE policy?
What I'm really talking about is reducing the impact of birth circumstances on life prospects. Who your parents are and what their bank balance is will always be influential but let's make it LESS influential. That's the essence of it.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
How does that compare to the death rate among the Irish when they went to America in the mid 19th C ?
No idea. It's contentious whether they were much better than, or treated better than, slaves, of course.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
The germs were common to the Old World, actually (and yellow fever killed a lot of Europeans in the West African ports). So that isn't an issue, surely.
Edit: was an issue for native Americans, of course.
Not sure about that. It's handy to classify them as old world when discussing their effect in the new, but your own example shows that Europeans weren't immune to African nasties, so why wouldn't the reverse be true? We know precious little about what contemporary W Africans die of, never mind 200 years back.
That's true, but the yellow fever was because the mosquitoes couldn't usually survive in Europe. And there had been quite a lot of trade by that sort of period. I did have a think about it and I couldn't think of anything likely to feed the other way - possibly TB which is a rather sort of northern peasants huddled with their cattle thing. But I don't recall it discussed in that particular context.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
Your rather glib calculation ignores the obvious point that overcrowding the ship - as was common practice - led to very high death rates, but a net benefit from the point of view of the slavers. As evidenced by the fact that mortality rates dropped from around 25% to 10% only after British legislation which limited the numbers permitted on a given ship.
It's not glib calculation, it is cold basic logic, the kind these bastard slavers would use
A dead slave is worth nothing. Pack the slaves too tight, they sicken and die. Pack them too loose, you're losing profit. They would try and pack as many in as they could while keeping deaths to "an acceptable minimum"
And they really did not want disease on the boat, as that could kill everyone, including the crew
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
Your rather glib calculation ignores the obvious point that overcrowding the ship - as was common practice - led to very high death rates, but a net benefit from the point of view of the slavers. As evidenced by the fact that mortality rates dropped from around 25% to 10% only after British legislation which limited the numbers permitted on a given ship.
It's not glib calculation, it is cold basic logic, the kind these bastard slavers would use
A dead slave is worth nothing. Pack the slaves too tight, they sicken and die. Pack them too loose, you're losing profit. They would try and pack as many in as they could while keeping deaths to "an acceptable minimum"
And they really did not want disease on the boat, as that could kill everyone, including the crew
The Zong case was particularly nasty, of course: the slavers ran out of supplies and threw some of the slaves overboard to save water for the rest, and to claim on the insurance (which did not normally, however, cover normal disease and death of the slaves AIUI).
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
And yet the estimated death rate was still 15%, despite the obvious financial incentive.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think that is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Elitism can be reduced but not eradicated. In fact you shouldn't even try to eradicate it. That leads to totalitarianism and - yes - elites. Worse ones. I'm just thinking about what's realistic in England 2021. This could be possible one day. But not this day, I'm fully aware of that. It's electoral poison. People who can't afford this privilege still support it. Until this changes, no chance of reform, I'll be talking to the hand.
I can promise you there's also people who can and do afford it who'd be secretly not wholly disgruntled if the option were denied them, and they had to spend the money on horses and yachts instead, dammit.
For sure. It's kind of a tax cut for the rich. In fact that's how I'd sell it in the drawing rooms and boardrooms of England.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
The germs were common to the Old World, actually (and yellow fever killed a lot of Europeans in the West African ports). So that isn't an issue, surely.
Edit: was an issue for native Americans, of course.
Not sure about that. It's handy to classify them as old world when discussing their effect in the new, but your own example shows that Europeans weren't immune to African nasties, so why wouldn't the reverse be true? We know precious little about what contemporary W Africans die of, never mind 200 years back.
I am almost certain you are right. A lot of slaves came from deep in the African interior, captured by other Africans of course (they were snatched as children, as "criminals", often as prisoners of war). The coastal kings went inland where white men had never been, they did not prey on their own people
So it is highly likely these remoter tribes, brought to the sea and to the company of Europeans, would then be exposed to European pathogens they had never previously encountered
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
And yet the estimated death rate was still 15%, despite the obvious financial incentive.
And (if one even wanted to think that way) a much higher percentage reduction of the net profits for captain and shareholders.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
And yet the reality of the Atlantic Slave Trade was not one where the slaves were kept in tip-top condition was it?
It was pile them in as tightly as possible and hope for the best - leading to high death rates.
And it's not obvious that the physical traits that would lead to sprinting success would be the same that would aid survival of that environment.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
And yet the estimated death rate was still 15%, despite the obvious financial incentive.
I am not for a moment making light of the Middle Passage. A shameful episode for all humanity. An especially indelible stain on European history
However, as someone else has said, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries was dangerous for anyone. It would be interesting to know the death rate for early Irish migrants to America
I know that Cornishmen sailing to Mexico to mine tin in the mid 19th century died in their droves on the boats - of a disease called "the black vomit". Not sure what it was
What an extraordinary coincidence that the best person to be on the anti-sleaze watchdog just happened to be an old chum of Johnsons from his Bullingdon Club days.
However, I remember some Corbyn fans on here defending McDonnell employing Corbyn's son in a taxpayer-funded role. By an astonishing coincidence, the son of his best bud was the best candidate for the job.
(Hint, he wasn't.)
If we want to stop people hiring friends, family and chums to roles, especially to taxpayer-funded roles, then it needs to apply equally to all.
I don't think I have ever defended cronyism in the Labour Party either.
The nepotism and Chumocracy does show how illusory "taking back control" was.
Jobs for the sons and daughters of friends is as old as jobs themselves. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's not the best way of hiring someone but sometimes it can work. Rather depends on how how up the chain the job is.
That's the Indy. And there seems to be not a shred of actual evidence of malpractice.
Has anyone provided any evidence that Johnson had a corrupt role in the process, or how the process worked such that Johnson could manipulate it? Or that the member appointed is unfit to be on the Committee or is corrupt?
Or is this just Hoof-in-Mouth Rayner howling at the moon because it is Tuesday and she still does not have anything to say?
"You were in a student club with him 35 years ago" is some way beyond farfetched.
The only possible chink I can see is if the PM is supplied with say 50 names, from which he then gets to choose who he wants, and that would still require a lot more evidence that we have.
It's quite a dangerous argument to make because it shrinks the pool of acceptable candidates - 'No, you went to the same school when you were six!" - and undermines the expectation of personal integrity.
At this level it looks bad, though. However, I agree that we've not seen evidence that, for example, Johnson looked at the shortlist and said 'He's the one. Know him. Good chap' or similar. Nor have we seen any suggestion, AFAIK, that a selection committee produced three names in order of preference, and the Good Chap was third.
I think what we may get here at some time is similar to what happened to selection of Bishops, where the process was that the PM got 2 names and a theoretical convention that they could choose either - which has only been used once in 100-200 appointments.
That has now been replaced with the second name being a "reserve" if eg the first one dies.
Quite concerning, though, is the dire quality of opposition a reliance on painting this stuff in poster paints indicates.
Despite your archaeology you haven’t really found a good reason why Boris should be picking an old school friend to head the Boris-monitoring committee, have you?
I don't need one.
I was pointing out that this particular outrage bus is fuelled by BS and hot air.
Yes. What we need is a tape with Johnson saying, "Ah, Fergie! He was in the old Bullers with me. Sound as a pound. Hired."
Short of that, as Charles would stress, nothing to see and unfair to insinuate.
And the Lord that drew up the shortlist was enabled by David Cameron, who was in the same dissolute dining club.
It's almost like a self replicating oligarchy.
Gets my goat it really does. Private schools have to go. It's the only way imo.
Cutting the head off a hydra, mate. Everywhere has oligarchies, nowhere else has public schools (except in the sense of actually public actual schools). If you strike them down, they will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think that is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Elitism can be reduced but not eradicated. In fact you shouldn't even try to eradicate it. That leads to totalitarianism and - yes - elites. Worse ones. I'm just thinking about what's realistic in England 2021. This could be possible one day. But not this day, I'm fully aware of that. It's electoral poison. People who can't afford this privilege still support it. Until this changes, no chance of reform, I'll be talking to the hand.
I can promise you there's also people who can and do afford it who'd be secretly not wholly disgruntled if the option were denied them, and they had to spend the money on horses and yachts instead, dammit.
For sure. It's kind of a tax cut for the rich. In fact that's how I'd sell it in the drawing rooms and boardrooms of England.
They are still not going to send their kids to the average or below average local comp.
They will make sure they live in the most expensive postcodes and thus the locals schools their kids attend will still be those mainly attended by the offspring of the wealthy.
So you would have to ban expensive detached houses too and make everyone live in a 2 bed semi or council flat
They caution that most of the people favoring secession are probably doing so for partisan signaling reasons, eg "I'm a proud Southerner and I hate Joe Biden!", and would likely balk at the idea if it were truly on the table in a concrete sense...
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
The South tried to secede before, if the Democrats stay in power for a long time I could see it gaining traction again with southern Republicans. Though the Federal structure of the US should contain it.
The Deep South of the US is a totally different culture from New England, New York and the West coast.
It would have some advantages for non southern Democrats too as they would likely never have to worry about a future President Trump again, if the GOP did elect another President in a US minus the South they would look a lot more like Mitt Romney and a lot less like Donald Trump
When Texas goes blue, it will put a stop to any such nonsense.
Thing is, Jimmy Carter won in 1976 with Texas but not California
Only because Carter was a social conservative evangelical southerner and Ford was a pro choice, social liberal fiscal conservative
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
And yet the estimated death rate was still 15%, despite the obvious financial incentive.
I am not for a moment making light of the Middle Passage. A shameful episode for all humanity. An especially indelible stain on European history
However, as someone else has said, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries was dangerous for anyone. It would be interesting to know the death rate for early Irish migrants to America
I know that Cornishmen sailing to Mexico to mine tin in the mid 19th century died in their droves on the boats - of a disease called "the black vomit". Not sure what it was
Yellow fever.
Or at least that's one common synonym. What is odd is that you would need mosquitoes of the tropical species involved to carry the virus. Maybe they came on board on the first port of call in the Windies?
They caution that most of the people favoring secession are probably doing so for partisan signaling reasons, eg "I'm a proud Southerner and I hate Joe Biden!", and would likely balk at the idea if it were truly on the table in a concrete sense...
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
The South tried to secede before, if the Democrats stay in power for a long time I could see it gaining traction again with southern Republicans. Though the Federal structure of the US should contain it.
The Deep South of the US is a totally different culture from New England, New York and the West coast.
It would have some advantages for non southern Democrats too as they would likely never have to worry about a future President Trump again, if the GOP did elect another President in a US minus the South they would look a lot more like Mitt Romney and a lot less like Donald Trump
When Texas goes blue, it will put a stop to any such nonsense.
Thing is, Jimmy Carter won in 1976 with Texas but not California
Only because Carter was a social conservative evangelical southerner and Ford was a pro choice, social liberal fiscal conservative
It's a completely different looking path to victory for Carter than Biden/Obama. Carter won most of the southern/eastern states but none of the west coast states.
Kennedy in 1960 didn't win Califiornia/Oregon/Washington but did win Texas (LBJ won most states)
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
And yet the estimated death rate was still 15%, despite the obvious financial incentive.
I am not for a moment making light of the Middle Passage. A shameful episode for all humanity. An especially indelible stain on European history
However, as someone else has said, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries was dangerous for anyone. It would be interesting to know the death rate for early Irish migrants to America
I know that Cornishmen sailing to Mexico to mine tin in the mid 19th century died in their droves on the boats - of a disease called "the black vomit". Not sure what it was
Slavers didn't care about high death rates, if the supply of slaves was cheap and plentiful.
In Haiti, life expectancy for newly-arrived slaves was about 3 years on average. The slave population was naturally decreasing, but as far as the slavers were concerned, they could be worked till they dropped, because there was an endless supply of fresh slaves, sold cheaply.
It's only if the supply of fresh slaves dries up that slavers have an incentive to treat their slaves more "humanely".
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
This is such nonsense. The slaves were the cargo. If you lost a lot of them, you didn't get much more business
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
And yet the estimated death rate was still 15%, despite the obvious financial incentive.
I am not for a moment making light of the Middle Passage. A shameful episode for all humanity. An especially indelible stain on European history
However, as someone else has said, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries was dangerous for anyone. It would be interesting to know the death rate for early Irish migrants to America
I know that Cornishmen sailing to Mexico to mine tin in the mid 19th century died in their droves on the boats - of a disease called "the black vomit". Not sure what it was
That's a GB number way out of date because Scotland is not competant enough to update regularly. England only data shows a significant fall started 9 days ago
Only 150k total jabs in todays figures. I really don't understand why we aren't using all the spare capacity to get cracking with booster shots or if kids want it they can.
Some of the oldest, weakest, most vulnerable had their jabs 6 months ago now, why not get them jabbed up again.
It is not that long since such a poll would have induced blind panic in Unionists.
They’ve now moved on to stage 4.
Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance
Acceptance yes that Sturgeon completely failed to play the hand Brexit gave her such that in a 62% Remain country only 48% want independence after Brexit.
Acceptance too that the Nationalists are about to enter a bitter civil war between Sturgeon and Salmond supporters as the UK government continues to refuse indyref2. Sturgeon then continues to refuse to hold a wildcat referendum or declare UDI and SNP supporters start to defect to Alba in ever greater numbers
It is not that long since such a poll would have induced blind panic in Unionists.
They’ve now moved on to stage 4.
Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance
Whereas the Nats are still at Stage 1 from 2014....though in fairness, some are edging into Stage 2 (although that may be a permanent state for some of them...)
Hospital data also blows up any twitter crank theories about the case fall being driven by testing numbers (and equally shows Zoe should have held their nerve).
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
And yet the reality of the Atlantic Slave Trade was not one where the slaves were kept in tip-top condition was it?
It was pile them in as tightly as possible and hope for the best - leading to high death rates.
And it's not obvious that the physical traits that would lead to sprinting success would be the same that would aid survival of that environment.
You can't just wave percentages about in a vacuum like that, you'd want to know - at least - what rate the sailors on the ships, and a comparable cohort of Africans which stayed in Africa, were dying at.
The passage itself is only one of a number of selection gates. There is conscious selection by captor - natural selection surviving march from point of capture to slave port - conscious selection by buyers and sellers at port - natural selection surviving sea passage - conscious selection by purchasers at destination - natural selection surviving rigours of slave work - ongoing conscious selection in breeding and selling.
Hospital data also blows up any twitter crank theories about the case fall being driven by testing numbers (and equally shows Zoe should have held their nerve).
That loud scraping noise you can hear is iSAGE shifting the goalposts again.
Only 150k total jabs in todays figures. I really don't understand why we aren't using all the spare capacity to get cracking with booster shots or if kids want it they can.
Some of the oldest, weakest, most vulnerable had their jabs 6 months ago now, why not get them jabbed up again.
I believe we will be soon. A lot of pharmacies are being added to the jabbing network.
Only 150k total jabs in todays figures. I really don't understand why we aren't using all the spare capacity to get cracking with booster shots or if kids want it they can.
Some of the oldest, weakest, most vulnerable had their jabs 6 months ago now, why not get them jabbed up again.
Sounds like 16 and 17 year olds are getting the call shortly.
It's funny how Jamaican women are dominating the sprints yet they might not get a single man to either the 100 or 200 metre final this olympics. Still absurdly strong at sprinting for a ~ 3 million population nation.
What is amazing is how weak the actual West African countries are at sprinting compared to their disapora.
A contrast to how the East African countries dominate the long distance events.
There is a cruel Darwinian explanation for this
The slaves that survived the Middle Passage - and the brutalities of slavery itself - were thus selected over generations for their fitness, speed, strength. The Africans who remained in Africa did not undergo this savage evolutionary pressure
Another example of white supremacy racism shaping the world we live in?
Eh? I thought it was selection for salt retention leading to high blood pressure today?! Not much sprinting on a slave ship.
In any case the HBP = slave ancestors theory has been frowned on of late:
I think it much more prosaic. West Africans play a lot of football, and are well represented in our Football Leagues, which require a lot of speed and stamina. In the West Indies they do a lot of athletics at school, so are well represented internationally.
It is more nurture than nature as far as I can see.
The slave theory does sound a bit lurid.
You find it lurid because you are hyper-sensitive to anything involving race
It's a perfectly valid hypothesis - it seems highly likely that the intense pressures of slavery would have selected for certain factors over time. Only the toughest would have made it to the New World in the first place. There, only the fittest would have been allowed to breed.
Revolting to us, but that is exactly what happened.
There are similar theories as to why Ashkenazi Jews have such high IQs compared to others (about 15 points higher on average). It was the persecution of the Jews over many centuries that meant only the really clever Jews escaped, also the Jews encouraged scholars and rabbis to have many babies - a kind of soft eugenicism, to preserve the Jewish faith and people
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding?
'Fitness' has a specific meaning in Darwinian terminology: the collective sum total of differential survival and differential reproduction. It certainly does not mean the Olympic/athletic 'fitness' - consider, for instance, the many organisms which save energy and resources and do very well by quite literally being non-athletic.
I know what fitness means in a Darwinian sense. I use it in that sense, you prannock
But fitness in the Darwinian sense will incorporate fitness in the athletic sense
Not necessarily. Having a lot of calorie-consuming muscle mass would probably be a disadvantage when trying to survive starvation.
You don't buy slaves to starve them, duh. You feed them.
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
Deaths on the passage across the Atlantic were at incredibly high rates. Seems like they did buy slaves with little care for their survival, or the condition they would be in at the other end of the journey.
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
Quite
Slaves were regarded as livestock. An order for slaves was an order for kine
"Please go to Africa and bring me 100 head of cattle. I don't particularly mind if they all die on the way over to America. Use that shipper who is known for losing 100% of his cargo every time"
It was accepted that some slaves would die on a dangerous voyage in bad conditions. Just as it was accepted that some naval sailors would die crossing the Atlantic in not-quite-as-bad-conditions
The idea was to get as many living, healthy slaves to America as possible, for as little money as possible, so they packed them tight and fed them pretty poor rations, but they certainly did not want them to die, or even get ill. A sick slave would fetch less money in Charleston or New Orleans.
They used to give slaves exercise for this reason, as it was known that perpetually locking them below decks was bad for their health. They were brought up to the air and ordered to jump and run. It was called "dancing the slaves"
It was a filthy evil business, but it was a business, and the best business was delivering fit young slaves in good condition
"Flash for Freedom" deals with the economics of slave-trading in some detail. Captain Spring, for example, does make every effort to keep losses on the voyage to a minimum, in order to maximise profits for his bosses. He's also well known for providing good quality stock at high prices.
But, there are other captains who are operating at the bottom of the market, who have no qualms about high rates of attrition or selling sick slaves. They're just piling high, and selling cheap.
It is not that long since such a poll would have induced blind panic in Unionists.
They’ve now moved on to stage 4.
Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance
Whereas the Nats are still at Stage 1 from 2014....though in fairness, some are edging into Stage 2 (although that may be a permanent state for some of them...)
I genuinely believe Sturgeon would lose a bid for Indyref2 at anytime in the near future and maybe some Independence supporters may take a 'wee while' to reflect that they may just have been counting their chickens for a while too long
Comments
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.irishtimes.com/sport/other-sports/sha-carri-richardson-s-image-sullied-by-doping-shadow-of-dennis-mitchell-1.4601242?mode=amp
Or do you mean 4th on the day? Just checked you are right, that 4th on the day never popped, i stand corrected.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/oct/23/jamaica-olympics-threat-exclusion-drug-tests
Five of Jamaica’s Olympic track and field medallists at London 2012 were not drug-tested outside competition by the IAAF or their own anti-doping authority in the six months leading up to the Games, Sportsmail can reveal.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-2465442/Jamaica-WADA-extraordinary-audit-Five-London-2012-medallists-tested.html
And Kenya very suss as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/feb/14/kenyan-athletics-drug-tests-wada
Though in reality of course it would still be selection, just by house price and catchment area
Footnote for the Pollyannas who think how wonderful our Brave Boys in the RN were, because the W Africa Squadron: what the RN was up to when Bligh had his unfortunate contretemps was attempting off its own bat to facilitate the plantations by establishing breadfruit in the W Indies to feed the slaves on.
My dad, who views Stalin as suspiciously centrist, isn't particularly happy about it. He views it as a betrayal of the family's working-class roots.
And, in some way, it is.
But I don't blame my step-cousin (is that a thing?) I think he would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to give his kids the huge advantage of private education. I've seen first hand that self-confidence they inculcate that most kids, from 'normal' schools, generally don't have.
I wish we lived in a world with no private education, but I can understand why, in the world as it is rather than I would like it to be, parents who can send their kids private, do so.
But if I were world king, they'd be gone.
Level -1?
Keely Hodgkinson is GBs number one and is the future PB 1.55.88 O.85 faster than Muir and is only a teenager
One thing, just one thing, stops me wanting a Labour government at the moment, and that is the chippy attitude of lefties to independent schools. Is it because I went to one? No, I went to a really shitty bog standard comp. Thankfully through good fortune made enough money to send my kids to independent day schools. Best money I have ever spent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Mitchell#Doping_history
In 1998, Mitchell was banned by International Association of Athletics Federations for two years after a test showed high levels of testosterone. They did not accept his defense of "five bottles of beer and sex with his wife at least four times... it was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat."
I am sure there are more than Chambers who have not been clean, but it does tip the scales somewhat. If you can get to world #1, escape the testing and you can make the big bucks, but fail to do that, you are going to be in financial trouble and effectively finished from that sport.
Where as we know the Russians and Chinese have state sponsored cheating, and Team USA, you get caught, do your time and then you are welcomed back into the fold.
t is true that inflammation may be the lead cause of CNS damage. However, there is also evidence of viral infection can happen within the CNS. https://rupress.org/jem/article/218/3/e20202135/211674/Neuroinvasion-of-SARS-CoV-2-in-human-and-mouse…
Here is a good summary on the various ways in which COVID can damage the brain....
https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1421624268635377669
And Sumo Wrestling, which should obviously be in the same arena as gymnastics.
https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1415352953909649409?s=20
And certainly not necessary if we don't. If we don't want to do that - or if it's just not a high enough priority cf other things - then much better to leave things be. Because the affluent classes are very VERY attached to their private schools in this country. And to the general notion that parents know best when it comes to their children's education. There would be blood if this was tampered with.
CAS strikes me as far too soft on drugs, a very naive court that thinks leopards will change their spots.
I don't think £82k is a very credible price for a car, especially with insurance group 50.
And Model X may mean I have to enlarge by gate, and it has a small boot.
Ban BMWs and Mercedes and Rolls Royce too, a Nissan or Ford will do fine
She got covid a couple weeks ago. First laughingly dismissed it as ‘a sniffle’
Then endured ten long days, poleaxed by very nasty illness
She’s STILL anti vax
Which was kind of the whole point of it.
Nigel_Foremain. In case you thought that.
Either that, or all these secessionists (of whichever party) are just a bunch of traitors.
May failed because she tried to get Brexit done in some meaningful, technical sense. Johnson triumphed by getting it done in the realm of pure imagination and carrying with him a lot of people who couldn’t conceive of voting Tory under anyone else.
Brexiteers deal only in fantasy and Remainers despise the reality. There was no middle ground. By a paradox, May's Deal becomes the fantasy and Johnson's fantasy the reality
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/28/boris-effect-britain-political-prime-minister-voters
The Deep South of the US is a totally different culture from New England, New York and the West coast.
It would have some advantages for non southern Democrats too as they would likely never have to worry about a future President Trump again, if the GOP did elect another President in a US minus the South they would look a lot more like Mitt Romney and a lot less like Donald Trump
PS isn't that our HE policy?
Redfield & Wilton Strategies
@RedfieldWilton
Is the UK Government currently taking the right measures to address the coronavirus pandemic? (2 Aug)
Yes: 40% (+11)
No: 42% (-11)
Don’t know: 18% (–)
Changes +/- 25 July
And this from the same poll
NEW: At this moment, which of the following individuals do you think would be the better Prime Minister for the United Kingdom? (2 Aug):
Boris Johnson: 45% (+2)
Andy Burnham: 23% (-6)
Changes +/- 25 July
Poor women, self funds herself to the Olympics, wins a surprise Silver medal, and clearly isn't a high profile experienced media trained athlete and half the bloody interview they wanted to ask her about a woman who didn't even have a single successful lift and how she (Emily) "doesn't look like a typical athlete".
A slaver who could bring almost an entire boat-load, alive, would prosper
the British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and to other countries."
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/pdf/britain-and-the-trade.pdf
13% attrition rate among people naive to all the nasty eurasian germs carried by the crew. That's pretty good. And your claim makes well below zero sense; who on earth ships an expensive cargo halfway round the world without taking steps to ensure it is saleable at the destination?
Edit: was an issue for native Americans, of course.
I am not a Labour supporter, and live in an adjacent (conservative held) constituency, but have met Mr Yasin on a number of occasions. He is an extraordinary man, highly intelligent, articulate, friendly and diligent, and with an interesting back-story.
I would love to be able to put a bet on him (at suitably long odds) as being the next Labour Prime Minister. Regardless of betting, and as above, I am not a natural Labour voter, watch out for him.
Slaves were regarded as livestock. An order for slaves was an order for kine
"Please go to Africa and bring me 100 head of cattle. I don't particularly mind if they all die on the way over to America. Use that shipper who is known for losing 100% of his cargo every time"
It was accepted that some slaves would die on a dangerous voyage in bad conditions. Just as it was accepted that some naval sailors would die crossing the Atlantic in not-quite-as-bad-conditions
The idea was to get as many living, healthy slaves to America as possible, for as little money as possible, so they packed them tight and fed them pretty poor rations, but they certainly did not want them to die, or even get ill. A sick slave would fetch less money in Charleston or New Orleans.
They used to give slaves exercise for this reason, as it was known that perpetually locking them below decks was bad for their health. They were brought up to the air and ordered to jump and run. It was called "dancing the slaves"
It was a filthy evil business, but it was a business, and the best business was delivering fit young slaves in good condition
As evidenced by the fact that mortality rates dropped from around 25% to 10% only after British legislation which limited the numbers permitted on a given ship.
A dead slave is worth nothing. Pack the slaves too tight, they sicken and die. Pack them too loose, you're losing profit. They would try and pack as many in as they could while keeping deaths to "an acceptable minimum"
And they really did not want disease on the boat, as that could kill everyone, including the crew
So it is highly likely these remoter tribes, brought to the sea and to the company of Europeans, would then be exposed to European pathogens they had never previously encountered
It was pile them in as tightly as possible and hope for the best - leading to high death rates.
And it's not obvious that the physical traits that would lead to sprinting success would be the same that would aid survival of that environment.
However, as someone else has said, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries was dangerous for anyone. It would be interesting to know the death rate for early Irish migrants to America
I know that Cornishmen sailing to Mexico to mine tin in the mid 19th century died in their droves on the boats - of a disease called "the black vomit". Not sure what it was
Because i presume come September, the rugrats go back to school and it will rise again, then the uni students...
They will make sure they live in the most expensive postcodes and thus the locals schools their kids attend will still be those mainly attended by the offspring of the wealthy.
So you would have to ban expensive detached houses too and make everyone live in a 2 bed semi or council flat
Or at least that's one common synonym. What is odd is that you would need mosquitoes of the tropical species involved to carry the virus. Maybe they came on board on the first port of call in the Windies?
England COVID admissions drop again. Sunday’s figure was 645 - 23% down on the previous week (836).
The seven-day average falls again to 717, down from 744 yesterday and 780 a week earlier (-8%).
5,116 beds occupied vs 5,309 yesterday.
Figures from @PHE_uk dashboard.
https://twitter.com/fact_covid/status/1422573483268231172?s=20
Kennedy in 1960 didn't win Califiornia/Oregon/Washington but did win Texas (LBJ won most states)
In Haiti, life expectancy for newly-arrived slaves was about 3 years on average. The slave population was naturally decreasing, but as far as the slavers were concerned, they could be worked till they dropped, because there was an endless supply of fresh slaves, sold cheaply.
It's only if the supply of fresh slaves dries up that slavers have an incentive to treat their slaves more "humanely".
https://academic.oup.com/jhmas/article-abstract/XVI/1/76/799819?redirectedFrom=PDF
I did wonder about typhus as it can be a symptom, but the name is pretty specific to yellow fever in that area.
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Some of the oldest, weakest, most vulnerable had their jabs 6 months ago now, why not get them jabbed up again.
Acceptance too that the Nationalists are about to enter a bitter civil war between Sturgeon and Salmond supporters as the UK government continues to refuse indyref2. Sturgeon then continues to refuse to hold a wildcat referendum or declare UDI and SNP supporters start to defect to Alba in ever greater numbers
The passage itself is only one of a number of selection gates. There is conscious selection by captor - natural selection surviving march from point of capture to slave port - conscious selection by buyers and sellers at port - natural selection surviving sea passage - conscious selection by purchasers at destination - natural selection surviving rigours of slave work - ongoing conscious selection in breeding and selling.
Looks like it may be time for some quiet reflection and maybe less media hype of them
But, there are other captains who are operating at the bottom of the market, who have no qualms about high rates of attrition or selling sick slaves. They're just piling high, and selling cheap.