Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.
There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.
Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?
I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).
The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.
This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
There is work being done on both. It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
My guess is that CO2 extraction is next on the agenda.
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.
There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.
Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?
I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).
The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.
This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
There is work being done on both. It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
My guess is that CO2 extraction is next on the agenda.
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
The danger is we go too far the other way.
Removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere if we start doing that to scale would not be healthy either!
Average house price 1999 £75,995 Average house price 2021 £265,668
Inflation 1999-2021: 6.2% per annum.
I'm curious how our politics would have been different for the past few decades if people had been thinking of that 6.2% increase in prices per annum as "inflation".
It's worse than that when you consider a lot of people benefitted greatly from the slashing of interest rates c.2008-09.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
Bbc world service had a great interview with a French councillor who has been working with the victims. The way he described the French catholic denial of the problem, as other Anglo-Saxon catholic scandals emerged was heartbreaking.
They could and should have faced the music a couple of decades ago. They’ve compounded the misery of the many victims. It’s the old “protect the institution” thing that we see over and over again.
Btw, it’s not just churches. It’s institutions. The logic is similar in all power structures.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
Organised religion offers an incredibly attractive environment for monsters and sadists of every sort. And as far as organised religion goes, you don't get much more organised than the Church of Rome.
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.
There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.
Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?
I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).
The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.
This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
There is work being done on both. It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
My guess is that CO2 extraction is next on the agenda.
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
That is not a bad idea. But to do really useful stuff with CO2 in climate terms, you need a lot of surplus renewable energy.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
Bbc world service had a great interview with a French councillor who has been working with the victims. The way he described the French catholic denial of the problem, as other Anglo-Saxon catholic scandals emerged was heartbreaking.
They could and should have faced the music a couple of decades ago. They’ve compounded the misery of the many victims. It’s the old “protect the institution” thing that we see over and over again.
A friend of mine committed suicide a few years back. He had been abused at a Catholic school in Australia. Sadly, although he had often had low periods, what seemed to push him over the edge was the death of his cat, and an interview he had with investigators researching for a trial in Australia.
I'm not blaming them, but I'm unsure talking about it did much good. He never talked to me much about it (he did with Mrs J, though).
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
Organised religion offers an incredibly attractive environment for monsters and sadists of every sort. And as far as organised religion goes, you don't get much more organised than the Church of Rome.
So do schools, especially boarding schools, the Scouts, even youth shows on the BBC and football youth squads.
None of them have been immune from abuse cases either
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.
There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.
Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?
I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).
The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.
This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
There is work being done on both. It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
My guess is that CO2 extraction is next on the agenda.
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
The danger is we go too far the other way.
Removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere if we start doing that to scale would not be healthy either!
The good news is we are actually really good at emitting CO2 so we already know how to put more back into the atmosphere.
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.
There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.
Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?
I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).
The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.
This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
There is work being done on both. It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
My guess is that CO2 extraction is next on the agenda.
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
The danger is we go too far the other way.
Removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere if we start doing that to scale would not be healthy either!
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
What a sick and out of touch inhumane response.
216,000 abuse victims by priests in France alone. So for every two Catholic priests worldwide you'd find a victim abused by a priest in France alone.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
You just want congratulations for the hole-in-one, don’t you?
Hope you got your name on the board in the clubhouse, and hope the bar bill didn’t do too much damage to your credit card!
- It is something you burst to share. Surprised I managed nearly 2 weeks before posting on here about it.
No board but mentioned on the website. And that "buy drinks for all" thing wasn't, thank god, enforced.
They have 5 or 6 in a typical year, I think, but usually it's the crack types who pepper the pin rather than the likes of me.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
Too fucking late.
They knew this was going on; they condoned it. When the evidence against a priestgot too much, they just moved him to another diocese, where he could continue to abuse.
The Catholic Church is up to its neck in this. And BTW, those figures for this latest scandal are from France alone.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
How come the Magnificent Muscly Man is so low in these ratings? Is he not loved by his own?
Yes, I thought the same. We're always told, with some justification, that Boris's lovable rogue persona tickles the fancy of vast swathes of the country. And yet the most ardent Tories in this poll seem not to be as enamoured as the voters. I can only guess that the Tories polled are skewed to the fiscally dry, traditional values branch of the party.
They must have no sense of humour. I mean, how can anybody resist this sort of thing? -
So fortunate we are in these challenging times to have this man at the helm.
He spends a few seconds making a terrible build back batter pun . . . and leftwingers ensure its viewed millions of times sharing his build back better message.
How productive were those few seconds? No wonder he's Prime Minister.
I know exactly why he's Prime Minister. It's for the same reason Benny Hill got to number one with "Ernie".
Just heard on Classic FMs 3pm news that Boris has branded Insulate Rebellion “Irresponsible Crusties” - Brilliant
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.
There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.
Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?
I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).
The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.
This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
There is work being done on both. It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
My guess is that CO2 extraction is next on the agenda.
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
That is not a bad idea. But to do really useful stuff with CO2 in climate terms, you need a lot of surplus renewable energy.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
Too fucking late.
They knew this was going on; they condoned it. When the evidence against a priestgot too much, they just moved him to another diocese, where he could continue to abuse.
The Catholic Church is up to its neck in this. And BTW, those figures for this latest scandal are from France alone.
No, Pope Francis has taken the appropriate response to deal with such problems in the future.
I am sure our PM, now a Catholic, supports that action. As does Jacob Rees-Mogg who may well be a future Tory leader and is also a Catholic.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an ‘average’ amateur golfer in the USA, 12,500-1
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
A sort of sporting exposition of the theory of complex adaptive systems – that there is no such thing as a closed network and every interaction one makes with anyone via any medium changes their life and the way they do things in some smaller or greater way.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
What a sick and out of touch inhumane response.
216,000 abuse victims by priests in France alone. So for every two Catholic priests worldwide you'd find a victim abused by a priest in France alone.
Sickening, utterly sickening.
You could probably find similar statistics for boys boarding schools in the 1970s or indeed the BBC light entertainment department or boys football clubs at the same time. Unfortunately the nature of the institution and easy access to youth attracted those with dubious motives.
However now all those institutions have introduced appropriate safeguarding procedures as a result of the recent inquiries as has the Catholic Church
When you put it next to £15bn spent inflating the housing market, and all those billions stuffing the mouths of HS2 nimbys with gold, it will cost them any chance of my vote.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
You just want congratulations for the hole-in-one, don’t you?
Hope you got your name on the board in the clubhouse, and hope the bar bill didn’t do too much damage to your credit card!
I have never hit a hole in one, but have always assumed that the convention that you have to stand a round for everyone who is sat in the clubhouse when you complete your round is dutifully observed.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Some secular and atheist liberals of course are not interested in resolving the problem so much as destroying the Catholic Church, there is a distinction between the 2.
I am not Catholic I am Anglican but I am a conservative Christian so will obviously not support allowing them to do so
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
Too fucking late.
They knew this was going on; they condoned it. When the evidence against a priestgot too much, they just moved him to another diocese, where he could continue to abuse.
The Catholic Church is up to its neck in this. And BTW, those figures for this latest scandal are from France alone.
Not long ago I got some abuse from Irish friends when I pointed out what the "dark, unmentionable secrets" that Queen Mary I tried to hide, probably were.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Some secular and atheist liberals of course are not interested in resolving the problem so much as destroying the Catholic church, there is a distinction between the 2.
I not Catholic I am Anglican but I am a conservative Christian so will obviously not support allowing them to do so
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
Too fucking late.
They knew this was going on; they condoned it. When the evidence against a priestgot too much, they just moved him to another diocese, where he could continue to abuse.
The Catholic Church is up to its neck in this. And BTW, those figures for this latest scandal are from France alone.
Not long ago I got some abuse from Irish friends when I pointed out what the "dark, unmentionable secrets" that Queen Mary I tried to hide, probably were.
I've not heard about that quote from her. Any details?
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
You just want congratulations for the hole-in-one, don’t you?
Hope you got your name on the board in the clubhouse, and hope the bar bill didn’t do too much damage to your credit card!
I have never hit a hole in one, but have always assumed that the convention that you have to stand a round for everyone who is sat in the clubhouse when you complete your round is dutifully observed.
Is it?
It’s been a couple of decades since I worked at a golf club, but yes. To the point that golfer’s insurance would cover the bar bill, alongside smashing windows in the car park, and having your clubs stolen from outside the 19th hole.
A lot of clubs have a board recording holes-in-one, certainly in competitions, so you’re not going to keep it to yourself!
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
But the figure for protecting from infection as always low. What was the initial study values again?
It was the protection against hospitalisation and death that was extraordinarily high, for all the vaccines that worked.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
I'd argue one of the reasons they are seeing fewer cases is that they are not looking as hard. We are up there with the most tested countries, and are finding many asymptomatic cases (especially among the young). We are also happily* letting covid rip through the unvaccinated (children and refusers) now to reach the elusive 'herd immunity', so we are not really trying to suppress spread that much. At the current rate all schoolkids will have had it by Christmas, and will thus be protected. Whether the waning of the vaccine strength against infection is playing a role is hard to say, and will be skewed by our age based roll-out of the vaccines. I'm not sure what other countries have done in this repsect.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
Bbc world service had a great interview with a French councillor who has been working with the victims. The way he described the French catholic denial of the problem, as other Anglo-Saxon catholic scandals emerged was heartbreaking.
They could and should have faced the music a couple of decades ago. They’ve compounded the misery of the many victims. It’s the old “protect the institution” thing that we see over and over again.
Btw, it’s not just churches. It’s institutions. The logic is similar in all power structures.
It is. Churches and other religions offer a particularly powerful method of control and evasion though, and their purpose being moralising just adds more to it.
The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!
The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.
Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.
Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.
FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
As I recall, the legal position used to be that you could pick the mushroom, but “processing” them into any other form (i,.e. drying, cooking etc) would turn you into someone possessing or selling class A drugs.
Which led at one point to plod trying to prosecute someone for selling class A drugs on the grounds that putting mushrooms into a plastic bag counted as “processing”. IIRC they lost that particular case.
(I have no idea whether this is still the legal position!)
AIUI fresh magic mushrooms are now also illegal – but how on earth would you secure a conviction for someone picking them in a common or garden English woodland? The suspect could presumably plead ignorance, which would seem to be a strong defence in this case. I mean, there must be scores of old ladies who have unwittingly picked Class A drugs while foraging for their batch cooking. How would you ever make such a charge stick? Are there any examples of it happening?
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
Ah but were you just playing out a predetermined act in the play that is Kinabalu?
Exactly so! It's all fate but because you don't (and can't) know this it may as well not be, and to all intents and purposes isn't. Thus the necessary (for a sane and productive life) illusion of free will and control is retained. I find this a nice thought. Interestingly, if the shot hadn't dropped it would have ran 15 feet by and I'd have 3 putted for a bogey 4. Then no deep thoughts would have ensued. I'd just have been pissed off.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
“I mean, it’s a good job we’ve got a last desperate million-to-one chance to rely on, or we’d really be in trouble!”
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
What a sick and out of touch inhumane response.
216,000 abuse victims by priests in France alone. So for every two Catholic priests worldwide you'd find a victim abused by a priest in France alone.
Sickening, utterly sickening.
You could probably find similar statistics for boys boarding schools in the 1970s or indeed the BBC light entertainment department or boys football clubs at the same time. Unfortunately the nature of the institution and easy access to youth attracted those with dubious motives.
However now all those institutions have introduced appropriate safeguarding procedures as a result of the recent inquiries as has the Catholic Church
Hooray. Let's praise them for doing the bare minimum that should be acceptable, after resisting it fiercely for absolutely bloody ages.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!
Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.
The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
I wat freedom You want excess liberty He has been given 30 days
Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
Why would you want a load of scrap steel from an old German submarine?
I think he just proved his point about criticality...
Funnily enough, in the past you might have needed scrap steel from an old German submarine (or any other large ship built before 1945) for radiation monitoring purposes. It was the only source of steel without trace elements from the atmospheric atomic tests.
Since the test ban has been in place for a while now it has become less necessary to recycle.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an ‘average’ amateur golfer in the USA, 12,500-1
If you play 100 rounds a year for 50 years, evens.
One of my former partners (in a law firm) achieved this feat. He had a certificate to prove it which was prominent in his office in the way that others put up their professional qualifications. It proved an excellent talking point when other solicitors came to visit!
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
But the figure for protecting from infection as always low. What was the initial study values again?
It was the protection against hospitalisation and death that was extraordinarily high, for all the vaccines that worked.
Yes. And this still isn't widely understood – it's partly the fault of presentation.
There was an axiomatic obsession with positive tests in the early days and people have long memories.
Even now, people glare at me when I say that a double-vaxxed person having a couple of grotty days with covid is good news. The vaccines turn a lethal bug into an inconvenience.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Plus, in essence 'it was a few bad apples'.
Some things there should be zero instances, and certainly not protection of abusers. You dont get brownie points for most priests not being molesters.
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!
Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.
The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
I wat freedom You want excess liberty He has been given 30 days
Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
Why would you want a load of scrap steel from an old German submarine?
I think he just proved his point about criticality...
Funnily enough, in the past you might have needed scrap steel from an old German submarine (or any other large ship built before 1945) for radiation monitoring purposes. It was the only source of steel without trace elements from the atmospheric atomic tests.
Since the test ban has been in place for a while now it has become less necessary to recycle.
My aunt used to use a vault thing built out of armour plate from the German fleet at Scapa Flow - a zero background for doing whole body measurements on people potentially exposed to radioactive material.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
Yes there are the ex-post chances. What were the chances, yesterday, that I would write this post on PB
Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.
Time to legalise them instead.
Cannabis at most, certainly not hard drugs like heroin
Definitely legalise heroin. It’s not difficult to be a functional heroin addict, with a good quality product and treatment options - yet it’s the most likely drug to be cut with all sorts of crap by the black market, and turns lives upside-down because of the dependency on the dealers.
If you legalise anything more people will do it and try it. That means more people will try harder drugs like heroin and cocaine just because they can.
You can still keep the treatment options for those who are heroin addicts now
Both legalisation and criminalisation are terrible policies, but one is likely to be worse than the other. There is no good policy available in a free society. I think decriminalisation would be worth a try.
A third variant, never yet tried, is to make possession and use the really big offence, not dealing. There will always be career criminals to run the big operations, and there will always be replacements available. So arguably the sane option is to attack demand. Most new users are idiots rather than career criminals. How much demand would there be if possession and use alone carried a very long prison sentence?
I would actually focus treatment on users and toughen sentences for dealers and suppliers of hard drugs ie tackle the problem at source
The sentences for the big dealers are already extraordinarily long. It appears to make no difference. This is because there is always a supply of career criminals, though small in number (huge in impact of course). But how many new users would start if the threat was a very long sentence just for possession of individual quantities?
Society is entitled to make these sorts of judgements as to how serious actions are, and to change its mind.
I don't really want to live in a society where a young person gets a custodial sentence for trying a puff on a spliff thanks.
Quite. Nor do I. It's one of the various options, none of which we want to live with because all have intolerable aspects. That's why it is hard.
But if you actually want to minimise something you will have more success aiming at a large group of people who are not career criminals than by only aiming at the career criminals.
Societies can differ radically. In the UK possessing a firearm will often mean along time in prison. In much of the US it will get you street cred among Republicans.
With drugs, if there isn't demand there won't be supply. So attack demand. Similar with theft. if there are no handlers of stolen goods there won't be much theft. Which may be why handling sentences are high.
Seems to me there's quite a few more consumers than dealers or producers. If you are going down this road surely the rate determining step is the flow of drugs across the borders? Unless of course were going for full employment via police numbers.
Yes, of course if it worked. It hasn't yet and I don't think it ever will. Directing the fire at consumers not dealers has never been seriously tried. dealers are career criminals. Consumers are are large number of people nearly all of whom don't want to risk a long prison term.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Plus, in essence 'it was a few bad apples'.
Some things there should be zero instances, and certainly not protection of abusers. You dont get brownie points for most prrests not being molesters.
In the 1970s and early 1980s we now know over 10% of Liberal MPs were child abusers ie Cyril Smith and Clement Freud.
Does that mean the entire Liberal party should be smeared? Of course not. It does mean the LDs needed to learn safeguarding lessons just as the Catholic Church has and other big organisations and schools have had to
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
My understanding - and it is several years since I read up on this - is that current thinking is that even with perfect knowledge you can't predict everything. Quantum uncertainty operates on a very small scale but will have real world effects that will multiply over time.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
Yes there are the ex-post chances. What were the chances, yesterday, that I would write this post on PB
I remember Terry Pratchett explaining, in Guards, Guards, IIRC, that the long odds really had to be a million to one in which case some immutable law of the Universe would inevitably make it happen. Less than that and it was a lot less likely.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an ‘average’ amateur golfer in the USA, 12,500-1
If you play 100 rounds a year for 50 years, evens.
One of my former partners (in a law firm) achieved this feat. He had a certificate to prove it which was prominent in his office in the way that others put up their professional qualifications. It proved an excellent talking point when other solicitors came to visit!
Didn't someone win a lot of money betting on holes-in-one in golf tournaments? In a professional tournament it is actually about 50/50 as to whether someone in the field will achieve the feat.
When he asked in the average bookie they gave him far longer odds than that - at least, until they cottoned on to what was happening.
I had one on the 9th at Woburn but sadly it was on a winter green and not the proper hole, so it didn't really count.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
Possibly - but here in Spain boosters are being started for the elderly and vulnerable - I should be due one around January.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
“I mean, it’s a good job we’ve got a last desperate million-to-one chance to rely on, or we’d really be in trouble!”
What are the chances of a million-to-one chance being caught on camera?
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
I'd argue one of the reasons they are seeing fewer cases is that they are not looking as hard. We are up there with the most tested countries, and are finding many asymptomatic cases (especially among the young). We are also happily* letting covid rip through the unvaccinated (children and refusers) now to reach the elusive 'herd immunity', so we are not really trying to suppress spread that much. At the current rate all schoolkids will have had it by Christmas, and will thus be protected. Whether the waning of the vaccine strength against infection is playing a role is hard to say, and will be skewed by our age based roll-out of the vaccines. I'm not sure what other countries have done in this repsect.
It is very clear we are looking much harder than most other countries.
I think we are definitely trying to let it rip through school populations now to get them out the way. We are hopefully building a good level of immunity when combined with the booster vaccinations.
I note that when case numbers increased when kids went back to school that there weren't demands for lockdowns again. Hopefully they are well behind us now!
At some point isolation even for those with Covid will have to end. In the same way we don't force isolation on those with flu.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an ‘average’ amateur golfer in the USA, 12,500-1
If you play 100 rounds a year for 50 years, evens.
One of my former partners (in a law firm) achieved this feat. He had a certificate to prove it which was prominent in his office in the way that others put up their professional qualifications. It proved an excellent talking point when other solicitors came to visit!
Didn't someone win a lot of money betting on holes-in-one in golf tournaments? In a professional tournament it is actually about 50/50 as to whether someone in the field will achieve the feat.
When he asked in the average bookie they gave him far longer odds than that - at least, until they cottoned on to what was happening.
I had one on the 9th at Woburn but sadly it was on a winter green and not the proper hole, so it didn't really count.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
Too fucking late.
They knew this was going on; they condoned it. When the evidence against a priestgot too much, they just moved him to another diocese, where he could continue to abuse.
The Catholic Church is up to its neck in this. And BTW, those figures for this latest scandal are from France alone.
No, Pope Francis has taken the appropriate response to deal with such problems in the future.
I am sure our PM, now a Catholic, supports that action. As does Jacob Rees-Mogg who may well be a future Tory leader and is also a Catholic.
I don't know where you've been for the last 40 years or so, but that's how long we've been hearing about serial child abuse in the Catholic Church. To say that Popes and bishops etc. have been bloody slow to act is to put it mildly.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
Yes there are the ex-post chances. What were the chances, yesterday, that I would write this post on PB
Exactly the same as they are now. But in this case, unlike the trillions of other possibles, the bet came off. An actual outcome is of course in one sense always a 100% chance. But it is in fact the actual outcome of all the infinite possibles, and mathematically has no more chance of being true than all the others.
If the Tories win the election in 2023/24 that will be 100% true. It will still be true then that the probability today is less than 100%. (More like 45%!).
The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!
The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.
Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.
Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.
FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
As I recall, the legal position used to be that you could pick the mushroom, but “processing” them into any other form (i,.e. drying, cooking etc) would turn you into someone possessing or selling class A drugs.
Which led at one point to plod trying to prosecute someone for selling class A drugs on the grounds that putting mushrooms into a plastic bag counted as “processing”. IIRC they lost that particular case.
(I have no idea whether this is still the legal position!)
AIUI fresh magic mushrooms are now also illegal – but how on earth would you secure a conviction for someone picking them in a common or garden English woodland? The suspect could presumably plead ignorance, which would seem to be a strong defence in this case. I mean, there must be scores of old ladies who have unwittingly picked Class A drugs while foraging for their batch cooking. How would you ever make such a charge stick? Are there any examples of it happening?
There's a thriving Internet subculture all about it, natch, and lots of anecdotes of rozzers confiscating and trashing peoples' finds. Liberty caps don't look much like anything you'd want culinarily; on the plus side, and this is not advice, the various lookalikes aren't likely to do you any serious harm.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
I forgot to ask - is a hole in one a noteworthy thing ?
How come the Magnificent Muscly Man is so low in these ratings? Is he not loved by his own?
Yes, I thought the same. We're always told, with some justification, that Boris's lovable rogue persona tickles the fancy of vast swathes of the country. And yet the most ardent Tories in this poll seem not to be as enamoured as the voters. I can only guess that the Tories polled are skewed to the fiscally dry, traditional values branch of the party.
They must have no sense of humour. I mean, how can anybody resist this sort of thing? -
So fortunate we are in these challenging times to have this man at the helm.
He spends a few seconds making a terrible build back batter pun . . . and leftwingers ensure its viewed millions of times sharing his build back better message.
How productive were those few seconds? No wonder he's Prime Minister.
I know exactly why he's Prime Minister. It's for the same reason Benny Hill got to number one with "Ernie".
Just heard on Classic FMs 3pm news that Boris has branded Insulate Rebellion “Irresponsible Crusties” - Brilliant
Mind you the "Build Back Better" play on words clips are not funny at all
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
I'd argue one of the reasons they are seeing fewer cases is that they are not looking as hard. We are up there with the most tested countries, and are finding many asymptomatic cases (especially among the young). We are also happily* letting covid rip through the unvaccinated (children and refusers) now to reach the elusive 'herd immunity', so we are not really trying to suppress spread that much. At the current rate all schoolkids will have had it by Christmas, and will thus be protected. Whether the waning of the vaccine strength against infection is playing a role is hard to say, and will be skewed by our age based roll-out of the vaccines. I'm not sure what other countries have done in this repsect.
It is very clear we are looking much harder than most other countries.
I think we are definitely trying to let it rip through school populations now to get them out the way. We are hopefully building a good level of immunity when combined with the booster vaccinations.
I note that when case numbers increased when kids went back to school that there weren't demands for lockdowns again. Hopefully they are well behind us now!
At some point isolation even for those with Covid will have to end. In the same way we don't force isolation on those with flu.
I've believed this for a while. The silence from SAGE etc has been striking. Of course they have not wanted to come on TV and say that we want all the refusers to catch Covid (or at least enough) but that is the plan. The JCVI have not helped by prevaricating on U18 vaccination.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
But the figure for protecting from infection as always low. What was the initial study values again?
It was the protection against hospitalisation and death that was extraordinarily high, for all the vaccines that worked.
Yes. And this still isn't widely understood – it's partly the fault of presentation.
There was an axiomatic obsession with positive tests in the early days and people have long memories.
Even now, people glare at me when I say that a double-vaxxed person having a couple of grotty days with covid is good news. The vaccines turn a lethal bug into an inconvenience.
Now that I have got my head around it I am genuinely surprised that it is so high. The distinct impression I have had in recent months is that, certainly since Delta came along, we were all pretty much certain to get the virus at some point. If near 50% of those double vaxxed don't that is a remarkable result. I wonder if these samples were before Delta became so dominant.
As you say, the object of the vaccine in recent times has been to massively reduce the risk of serious illness and death and there is no doubt that it achieves that.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
Possibly - but here in Spain boosters are being started for the elderly and vulnerable - I should be due one around January.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an ‘average’ amateur golfer in the USA, 12,500-1
If you play 100 rounds a year for 50 years, evens.
One of my former partners (in a law firm) achieved this feat. He had a certificate to prove it which was prominent in his office in the way that others put up their professional qualifications. It proved an excellent talking point when other solicitors came to visit!
Didn't someone win a lot of money betting on holes-in-one in golf tournaments? In a professional tournament it is actually about 50/50 as to whether someone in the field will achieve the feat.
When he asked in the average bookie they gave him far longer odds than that - at least, until they cottoned on to what was happening.
I had one on the 9th at Woburn but sadly it was on a winter green and not the proper hole, so it didn't really count.
Winter greens don’t count, especially not at championship courses with several hundred thirsty people sitting in the clubhouse!
That site linked above suggested 2,500/1 for a pro golfer - 200 pros playing an average of three rounds with four par-3 holes, comes out at 2,400 across the tournament. As you say, pretty much evens.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
Ah but were you just playing out a predetermined act in the play that is Kinabalu?
Exactly so! It's all fate but because you don't (and can't) know this it may as well not be, and to all intents and purposes isn't. Thus the necessary (for a sane and productive life) illusion of free will and control is retained. I find this a nice thought. Interestingly, if the shot hadn't dropped it would have ran 15 feet by and I'd have 3 putted for a bogey 4. Then no deep thoughts would have ensued. I'd just have been pissed off.
You know you'll be haunted by your hole in one for the rest of your life, don't you? You'll dream about it. You'll replay it in your head when trying to get to sleep. When you're listening to a politician's speech, your mind will drift to that hole in one. It will never let you go. (My equivalent is a perfect cover drive I played in 1981). But congratulations, anyway.
If I’ve got my maths right, wholesale gas is currently ~10p/kwh
That's more than 50% higher than the rate my tariff is going up to at the start of November, which itself is an increase of 31.6% on the current price.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I heard about this guy when I was listening to Magic this morning. Won the Illinois lottery twice with the same numbers. And in a victory for nominative determinism, his surname is Gambles.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
My understanding - and it is several years since I read up on this - is that current thinking is that even with perfect knowledge you can't predict everything. Quantum uncertainty operates on a very small scale but will have real world effects that will multiply over time.
Yes. If you can't say whether the cat is dead or alive how can you predict what it will want for its dinner?
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
I forgot to ask - is a hole in one a noteworthy thing ?
If so, congratulations.
@Kinabalu Your musings on your hole in one are basically the fundamentals of Normal Accident Theory, that came out of the Three Mile Island accident. Given their sensitivity to initial conditions, complex adaptive systems can fail catastrophically with only very small variances from everyday, normal conditions that one would expect to result in nothing remarkable.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For an 'average' player as kinbalu claims to be (I am sure he is really Jack Nicklaus but too modest to say) it is roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 40,000. Not vanishingly unlikely, but a sort of one in a lifetime event.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
EDIT: anyway, of course, 1 in 75 million chances come up all the time. It's just that most of them are too mundane to notice (what are the chances that first three people in my senior school class alphabetically had the surname Baldwin, Bentley and Bickley? Millions to one. Yet it happened. Not a particularly interesting or significant millions-to-one chance, but unlikely nonetheless.)
Yes there are the ex-post chances. What were the chances, yesterday, that I would write this post on PB
I remember Terry Pratchett explaining, in Guards, Guards, IIRC, that the long odds really had to be a million to one in which case some immutable law of the Universe would inevitably make it happen. Less than that and it was a lot less likely.
Wan't it Corporal Nobby who pointed out that if the mad shit they were about to try was only a 1 in 999,999.......
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.
Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56
Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?
We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
This was a property I bought in London in 2000, sold in 2007, the profit alone allowed me to buy a mansion oop North.
I can imagine that.
I'd be curious without wanting to pry too much if you were to check something like Zoopla and see what percentage change there has been in that property between 2000 and to-date.
Has there really been no inflation?
Housing costs are the largest element of a household's budget nowadays, larger even than food, and yet we define it as not part of the basket of goods and therefore magically there's no inflation.
Pure ostrich-in-sand to say there's no inflation.
Eh? CPI does now (a recent change, admittedly). Or so I read this:
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
For my standard of play about 10,000 to 1. So, playing 10 rounds a year, 40 annual attempts at a par 3, I could expect to play for about 200 years before I got one.
Can you imagine playing golf for 200 years and then - finally! - one drops? The scenes.
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
That's a poor figure for infection. But how many of those infections lead to hospitalisations and death? I.e. are the infections as bad as they were before vaccination?
But the figure for protecting from infection as always low. What was the initial study values again?
It was the protection against hospitalisation and death that was extraordinarily high, for all the vaccines that worked.
Yes. And this still isn't widely understood – it's partly the fault of presentation.
There was an axiomatic obsession with positive tests in the early days and people have long memories.
Even now, people glare at me when I say that a double-vaxxed person having a couple of grotty days with covid is good news. The vaccines turn a lethal bug into an inconvenience.
Now that I have got my head around it I am genuinely surprised that it is so high. The distinct impression I have had in recent months is that, certainly since Delta came along, we were all pretty much certain to get the virus at some point. If near 50% of those double vaxxed don't that is a remarkable result. I wonder if these samples were before Delta became so dominant.
As you say, the object of the vaccine in recent times has been to massively reduce the risk of serious illness and death and there is no doubt that it achieves that.
Anecdata - I came down with covid last week. I had a couple of grotty days, and took a day and a half off sick, but it didn't come in the top ten worst colds I've had this century. I was fine by the weekend - I spent six hours on Sunday jetwashing the drive and the patio. Haven't left the curtilage of the house for over a week, but that's just following the rules rather than necessity. My middle daughter had it at the same time (which was nice, as it meant I had somebody I could hug while healthy family members gave me a suitably wide berth), as have much of her class - she had a bit of a headache for a couple of days, but at no point was she so ill that in the normal course of things she'd have been kept off school. She's back at school now after her ten days out - that class now has herd immunity, at least. Oddly, wife and other two daughters tested continuously negative - though both other daughters also had colds.
Trafford public health have been sticking their oar in, and increased the extent to which family members now also have to isolate, and have also reintroduced facemasking at my oldest daughter's senior school - I'm fairly sure they're acting way beyond their powers here.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Some secular and atheist liberals of course are not interested in resolving the problem so much as destroying the Catholic Church, there is a distinction between the 2.
I am not Catholic I am Anglican but I am a conservative Christian so will obviously not support allowing them to do so
You wouldn't have dared to say that 490 yrs ago sunshine.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
My understanding - and it is several years since I read up on this - is that current thinking is that even with perfect knowledge you can't predict everything. Quantum uncertainty operates on a very small scale but will have real world effects that will multiply over time.
It's not just quantum uncertainty, but also systems effects/mathematics. Both chaotic systems and complex adaptive systems are 'sensitive to initial conditions', making them unpredictable as a whole.
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.
The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.
Maybe he'll get away with it.
I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.
Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
Inflation is the policy. I said this was the case when Sunak froze the income tax thresholds for five years.
If we get an average of 5% inflation per annum for five years then that puts £13,888 of their income into the higher rate tax bracket, and they'll be paying an extra £2,777 in income tax as a result. And then child benefit withdrawal too.
Similar effect on lower earners who will see the personal allowance inflated away.
And that's quite apart from all the problems that could arise if inflation gets out of control. Freezing the income tax thresholds for five years is a bigger tax increase than the National Insurance increase by far.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I hope the bar bill wasn't too high, and most importantly, someone else was there to witness it. My old club used to have a 'hole in one fund' which you had to contribute to as part of every competition fee, which was essentially an insurance policy, except you had to hope that someone else hasn't scooped it the previous week.
On your train of thought, you have to extend that back 3 billion years. Every single one of your ancestors had to survive for you to get to the golf club on Wednesday. They survived every pandemic, ice ages, asteroid strikes, snowball earth, massive atmospheric "pollution" (oxygen) and all the rest. That whole chain can now rest peacefully knowing that its work was not in vain.
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.
The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.
Maybe he'll get away with it.
This time last year I expressed concern on here as to increases in money supply being inflationary, and with that comes interest rate rises, mortgage defaults and negative equity.
But it's OK. @Philip_Thompson assures me my textbook economics from the 1980s no longer applies, and anyway any inflationary pressure will only be good inflation, not like 1980s inflation.
It would seem Mr Johnson shares that view. So nothing to worry about.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?
Yep. Way above my paygrade but the general point is kind of the one I'm driving at. The notion that if you know everything you can predict everything, ie it's only because you don't that you can't. Or is it only because you can't that you can't? (which is different). I suppose Musk and Bezos have sussed all this, or think they have.
My understanding - and it is several years since I read up on this - is that current thinking is that even with perfect knowledge you can't predict everything. Quantum uncertainty operates on a very small scale but will have real world effects that will multiply over time.
It's not just quantum uncertainty, but also systems effects/mathematics. Both chaotic systems and complex adaptive systems are 'sensitive to initial conditions', making them unpredictable as a whole.
And of course how many PBers are telling us today they didn't get a hole in one? There's an anthropic fallacy/retrospective sample selection right there.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I hope the bar bill wasn't too high, and most importantly, someone else was there to witness it. My old club used to have a 'hole in one fund' which you had to contribute to as part of every competition fee, which was essentially an insurance policy, except you had to hope that someone else hasn't scooped it the previous week.
On your train of thought, you have to extend that back 3 billion years. Every single one of your ancestors had to survive for you to get to the golf club on Wednesday. They survived every pandemic, ice ages, asteroid strikes, snowball earth, massive atmospheric "pollution" (oxygen) and all the rest. That whole chain can now rest peacefully knowing that its work was not in vain.
PS Nice shot...
Not to mention the fish which came out of the water and invented legs, or the ape which first adopted bipedality.
All needed for your golf stance. And that magnificent shot. Amazing teleology.
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Some secular and atheist liberals of course are not interested in resolving the problem so much as destroying the Catholic Church, there is a distinction between the 2.
I am not Catholic I am Anglican but I am a conservative Christian so will obviously not support allowing them to do so
You wouldn't have dared to say that 490 yrs ago sunshine.
Especially denying thatr the C of E is Catholic. Heresy right there.
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.
The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.
Maybe he'll get away with it.
I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.
Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
Inflation is the policy. I said this was the case when Sunak froze the income tax thresholds for five years.
If we get an average of 5% inflation per annum for five years then that puts £13,888 of their income into the higher rate tax bracket, and they'll be paying an extra £2,777 in income tax as a result. And then child benefit withdrawal too.
Similar effect on lower earners who will see the personal allowance inflated away.
And that's quite apart from all the problems that could arise if inflation gets out of control. Freezing the income tax thresholds for five years is a bigger tax increase than the National Insurance increase by far.
The personal allowance inflated away isn't just lower earners it's all of us.
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.
The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.
Maybe he'll get away with it.
I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.
Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
Inflation is the policy. I said this was the case when Sunak froze the income tax thresholds for five years.
If we get an average of 5% inflation per annum for five years then that puts £13,888 of their income into the higher rate tax bracket, and they'll be paying an extra £2,777 in income tax as a result. And then child benefit withdrawal too.
Similar effect on lower earners who will see the personal allowance inflated away.
And that's quite apart from all the problems that could arise if inflation gets out of control. Freezing the income tax thresholds for five years is a bigger tax increase than the National Insurance increase by far.
Makes me feel a little less bad about working in the public sector (no pay rises anytime soon).
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.
Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56
Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?
We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
This was a property I bought in London in 2000, sold in 2007, the profit alone allowed me to buy a mansion oop North.
I can imagine that.
I'd be curious without wanting to pry too much if you were to check something like Zoopla and see what percentage change there has been in that property between 2000 and to-date.
Has there really been no inflation?
Housing costs are the largest element of a household's budget nowadays, larger even than food, and yet we define it as not part of the basket of goods and therefore magically there's no inflation.
Pure ostrich-in-sand to say there's no inflation.
Eh? CPI does now (a recent change, admittedly). Or so I read this:
I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.
(And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
There are 1.3 billion Catholics and over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, the vast majority of them are not abusers.
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
It’s the same tape played over and over again. You’re better than this, @HYUFD
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
Some secular and atheist liberals of course are not interested in resolving the problem so much as destroying the Catholic Church, there is a distinction between the 2.
I am not Catholic I am Anglican but I am a conservative Christian so will obviously not support allowing them to do so
You wouldn't have dared to say that 490 yrs ago sunshine.
Pre Reformation I would certainly have been a Catholic yes, many of our Anglican churches in the British Isles were originally Catholic churches after all.
We then went to the other extreme post Reformation from 1559 when Catholics were unable to practice their religion until the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1779.
Now Catholics are as free to practice their religion as anyone else and indeed not practice their religion as the case may be.
In 2001 the Tories elected their first ever Catholic leader in IDS, something which would have been unthinkable centuries ago, the current PM is a Catholic and JRM, a potential future Tory leader, is a Catholic too.
Indeed Boris even won the Catholic vote in 2019, Catholics traditionally leaning left and being Labour voters (see also President Biden who is a Catholic)
The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!
The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.
Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.
Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.
FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
As I recall, the legal position used to be that you could pick the mushroom, but “processing” them into any other form (i,.e. drying, cooking etc) would turn you into someone possessing or selling class A drugs.
Which led at one point to plod trying to prosecute someone for selling class A drugs on the grounds that putting mushrooms into a plastic bag counted as “processing”. IIRC they lost that particular case.
(I have no idea whether this is still the legal position!)
AIUI fresh magic mushrooms are now also illegal – but how on earth would you secure a conviction for someone picking them in a common or garden English woodland? The suspect could presumably plead ignorance, which would seem to be a strong defence in this case. I mean, there must be scores of old ladies who have unwittingly picked Class A drugs while foraging for their batch cooking. How would you ever make such a charge stick? Are there any examples of it happening?
There's a thriving Internet subculture all about it, natch, and lots of anecdotes of rozzers confiscating and trashing peoples' finds. Liberty caps don't look much like anything you'd want culinarily; on the plus side, and this is not advice, the various lookalikes aren't likely to do you any serious harm.
Confiscation is one thing, but arrests? Charges? I suspect that very few cases have come to court since the 2005 law change. I'd venture it must be as near you can get to an unenforceable law.
Comments
Or is this more Shapps bloviating?
One interesting side effect of running compressed air power storage is almost accidentally catching CO2 - it is quite hard to stop decompressing big volumes of air quickly turning into a cryogenic thing....
Or is this more Shapps bloviating?
Removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere if we start doing that to scale would not be healthy either!
They could and should have faced the music a couple of decades ago. They’ve compounded the misery of the many victims. It’s the old “protect the institution” thing that we see over and over again.
Btw, it’s not just churches. It’s institutions. The logic is similar in all power structures.
But to do really useful stuff with CO2 in climate terms, you need a lot of surplus renewable energy.
Infrastructure wise all the big current plans Shapps is talking about (Midlands Hub, Northern Powerrail) are based on the HS2 eastern leg being built.
details at https://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/travel/fury-after-minister-signals-hs2-eastern-leg-could-be-scrapped/ar-AAP9quA?ocid=uxbndlbing
Plus the Pope has now changed the law of the Roman Catholic church so that sexual abuse is explicitly criminalised rather than treated as a breach of chastity laws as in the past
I'm not blaming them, but I'm unsure talking about it did much good. He never talked to me much about it (he did with Mrs J, though).
These traumas can have long-term effects.
None of them have been immune from abuse cases either
Your fear of smearing the good catholic name is defacto denial of the problem.
“Things have now changed, anyway”
Plus ca change
216,000 abuse victims by priests in France alone. So for every two Catholic priests worldwide you'd find a victim abused by a priest in France alone.
Sickening, utterly sickening.
No board but mentioned on the website. And that "buy drinks for all" thing wasn't, thank god, enforced.
They have 5 or 6 in a typical year, I think, but usually it's the crack types who pepper the pin rather than the likes of me.
They knew this was going on; they condoned it. When the evidence against a priestgot too much, they just moved him to another diocese, where he could continue to abuse.
The Catholic Church is up to its neck in this. And BTW, those figures for this latest scandal are from France alone.
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I am sure our PM, now a Catholic, supports that action. As does Jacob Rees-Mogg who may well be a future Tory leader and is also a Catholic.
COVID-19: Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine effectiveness wanes to 47% against infection after six months
Could Europe being about 2 months behind us in vaccine rollout be why they have lower cases than us? If so then it is good we are doing boosters but Europe could see rising cases soon.
For a professional, of course, the chances are much greater.
https://www.liveabout.com/odds-of-making-hole-in-one-1563324
If you play 100 rounds a year for 50 years, evens.
However now all those institutions have introduced appropriate safeguarding procedures as a result of the recent inquiries as has the Catholic Church
Just new ones
Is it?
I am not Catholic I am Anglican but I am a conservative Christian so will obviously not support allowing them to do so
A lot of clubs have a board recording holes-in-one, certainly in competitions, so you’re not going to keep it to yourself!
It was the protection against hospitalisation and death that was extraordinarily high, for all the vaccines that worked.
Whether the waning of the vaccine strength against infection is playing a role is hard to say, and will be skewed by our age based roll-out of the vaccines. I'm not sure what other countries have done in this repsect.
Since the test ban has been in place for a while now it has become less necessary to recycle.
There was an axiomatic obsession with positive tests in the early days and people have long memories.
Even now, people glare at me when I say that a double-vaxxed person having a couple of grotty days with covid is good news. The vaccines turn a lethal bug into an inconvenience.
Some things there should be zero instances, and certainly not protection of abusers. You dont get brownie points for most priests not being molesters.
See the career of this chap...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Cox
Does that mean the entire Liberal party should be smeared? Of course not. It does mean the LDs needed to learn safeguarding lessons just as the Catholic Church has and other big organisations and schools have had to
When he asked in the average bookie they gave him far longer odds than that - at least, until they cottoned on to what was happening.
I had one on the 9th at Woburn but sadly it was on a winter green and not the proper hole, so it didn't really count.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-australia-58712739
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=2021-06-04..latest&facet=none&Metric=Tests&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~AUS~ITA~CAN~DEU~GBR~FRA~BEL~NLD
I think we are definitely trying to let it rip through school populations now to get them out the way. We are hopefully building a good level of immunity when combined with the booster vaccinations.
I note that when case numbers increased when kids went back to school that there weren't demands for lockdowns again. Hopefully they are well behind us now!
At some point isolation even for those with Covid will have to end. In the same way we don't force isolation on those with flu.
If the Tories win the election in 2023/24 that will be 100% true. It will still be true then that the probability today is less than 100%. (More like 45%!).
If so, congratulations.
Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, who hails from Alabama. “Politics is about addition, and vengeance is not consistent with addition.”
HOW TO PUT OUT DEMOCRACY’S DUMPSTER FIRE
Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy that profits from disinformation, polarization, and rage. Here’s how to fix that.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-awful/618079/
As you say, the object of the vaccine in recent times has been to massively reduce the risk of serious illness and death and there is no doubt that it achieves that.
That site linked above suggested 2,500/1 for a pro golfer - 200 pros playing an average of three rounds with four par-3 holes, comes out at 2,400 across the tournament. As you say, pretty much evens.
Absolutely insane.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/US/lucky-illinois-man-named-gambles-won-lottery-numbers/story?id=40112757
So there is some representation of housing costs in the basket. Though unrealistically little as an average, as you say.
Can you imagine playing golf for 200 years and then - finally! - one drops? The scenes.
Oddly, wife and other two daughters tested continuously negative - though both other daughters also had colds.
Trafford public health have been sticking their oar in, and increased the extent to which family members now also have to isolate, and have also reintroduced facemasking at my oldest daughter's senior school - I'm fairly sure they're acting way beyond their powers here.
If we get an average of 5% inflation per annum for five years then that puts £13,888 of their income into the higher rate tax bracket, and they'll be paying an extra £2,777 in income tax as a result. And then child benefit withdrawal too.
Similar effect on lower earners who will see the personal allowance inflated away.
And that's quite apart from all the problems that could arise if inflation gets out of control. Freezing the income tax thresholds for five years is a bigger tax increase than the National Insurance increase by far.
On your train of thought, you have to extend that back 3 billion years. Every single one of your ancestors had to survive for you to get to the golf club on Wednesday. They survived every pandemic, ice ages, asteroid strikes, snowball earth, massive atmospheric "pollution" (oxygen) and all the rest. That whole chain can now rest peacefully knowing that its work was not in vain.
PS Nice shot...
But it's OK. @Philip_Thompson assures me my textbook economics from the 1980s no longer applies, and anyway any inflationary pressure will only be good inflation, not like 1980s inflation.
It would seem Mr Johnson shares that view. So nothing to worry about.
All needed for your golf stance. And that magnificent shot. Amazing teleology.
If you locked in the upfront price of your house in (say) 2000 and your mortgage is gently being paid off, 16% might be about right or even too high.
If you are paying 2021 prices, as a renter or a new buyer, you are in a totally different and much worse position.
We then went to the other extreme post Reformation from 1559 when Catholics were unable to practice their religion until the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1779.
Now Catholics are as free to practice their religion as anyone else and indeed not practice their religion as the case may be.
In 2001 the Tories elected their first ever Catholic leader in IDS, something which would have been unthinkable centuries ago, the current PM is a Catholic and JRM, a potential future Tory leader, is a Catholic too.
Indeed Boris even won the Catholic vote in 2019, Catholics traditionally leaning left and being Labour voters (see also President Biden who is a Catholic)