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.
It is not Roman Catholic as the Head of the C of E on earth is the monarch not the Pope
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
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.
Not everyone. High earners have no personal allowance.
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...
Hey man, nice shot, the song by Filter, alas is not about a hole in one of the golf course.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
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
It's nothing to do with secularism or liberalism. It's to do with an organisation that has, for hundreds of years, treated people with a contempt that goes against its very teachings.
I applaud the changes that Pope Francis has made; I have commented positively on him in the past. However, the changes do feel a little like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
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.
It is not Roman Catholic as the Head of the C of E on earth is the monarch not the Pope
You said Catholic, not RC. "[...] the Church of England is both 'catholic and reformed.'"
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!
Lol, quite right! I was a poor student at the time and definitely couldn't have afforded the bar bill. It was during a match against the club so I didn't have to face any of the membership again...
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?
That, I'm happy to report, is honoured more in the breach in these woke times. I had a flat white and bought my playing partner (who goes by "Tony") one too. Plus I high fived a couple of Japanese ladies on the terrace.
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.
You have to look at the intention. My understanding is that prior to 2005 people were quite legally knocking out fresh psilocybe cubensis, which is easy to cultivate, at street markets. The Act killed that stone dead. P semilanceata which is impossible to cultivate, and is so small you need 40-50 mushrooms to get anywhere, wasn't the principal target.
I read somewhere that if you buy dried shrooms on the street these days you have about equal chances of getting the real thing/supermarket mushrooms with some iffy chemicals added/ pure supermarket mushrooms.
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.
Very similar story to me. My wife, I and our 8yo tested positive. We think the 8yo was actually negative and they messed up the PCRs and it was the 3yo that was positive. So the 12yo and 8yo have spent over a week in a house with 3 of us with Covid and have tested negative throughout.
Like you we had nothing worse than a bad cold (plus loss of smell). If we were living in normal times all of us would have carried on as normal.
Even my 85yo father-in-law who caught it from one of us had had a bit of a runny nose and lost his smell. That is the vaccines doing their jobs.
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?
That, I'm happy to report, is honoured more in the breach in these woke times. I had a flat white and bought my playing partner (who goes by "Tony") one too. Plus I high fived a couple of Japanese ladies on the terrace.
Congratulations on this epic achievement/incredible fluke.
Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.
Time to legalise them instead.
I wouldn't have a problem with legalising drugs if the effect they have on people was confined to those choosing to take them. The problem is the evidence is they tend to have a negative effect on other people as well. Maybe the solution is to have special centres where people can take whatever drugs they like without bothering other people.
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.
I find it incredibly amusing that you're bemoaning inflation and negative equity in the same sentence.
Given the terribly high price to earning ratios in this country there are only realistically 2 options I see to resolve this. Either we have years with goods and wage inflation but not in houses (a reversal essentially of the past 20 years) thus gradually bringing ratios back under control ... Or we have a house price crash which results in mass negative equity.
If you're ruling out desiring either inflation or negative equity then what is your solution to being prices back down?
Or is your attitude simply I'm Alright Jack and who cares if we have high prices?
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!
I saved the ball and the tee and my wife is turning it into an ornament for the mantlepiece. Stick the tee in some green foam, mount the (suitably inscribed) ball on it, and encase in glass. We've agreed it will be my christmas present, along with the usual packet of walnut whips.
If I’ve got my maths right, wholesale gas is currently ~10p/kwh
I'm fixed at 4.08p/kwh with a standing charge of 26.77p/day for the next 2 years. At an estimated 12,447 kwh that's a £541.44 saving on wholesale cost.
No wonder SSE pulled their v8 tariff so quickly.
In view of this information I thought I would just check my own fix
On the 31st August I signed a 2 year fix with EDF following their takeover of Green Networks
Gas is at 3.467p/kwh + 26.60p per day and that was quite an increase on my previous fix
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.
You have to look at the intention. My understanding is that prior to 2005 people were quite legally knocking out fresh psilocybe cubensis, which is easy to cultivate, at street markets. The Act killed that stone dead. P semilanceata which is impossible to cultivate, and is so small you need 40-50 mushrooms to get anywhere, wasn't the principal target.
I read somewhere that if you buy dried shrooms on the street these days you have about equal chances of getting the real thing/supermarket mushrooms with some iffy chemicals added/ pure supermarket mushrooms.
I only had shrooms the once but the whole experience was rather lovely. That you can't legally buy them while you can buy, say, a bottle of vodka, is baffling to me. Truly baffling.
Building on the article. I might describe PB as an 'neo-Association' or as close as a pseudo-anonymous message board can be to one.
Maybe given time there will be badges, certificates and in very special cases orders of merit. A municipal WC could even be raised in the sprit of enlightenment values?
LOL. Someone recently sent me an article about electricity pylon research in the USA. Apparently, power distributors here have concluded that underground cable is not the solution to weather-related power outages, and so they are designing electricity pylons so that they break in predictable and easily-fixable ways.
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.
Could the apparent drop in vaccine effectiveness be as a result of the unvaccinated having higher rates of infection (And thus post infection immunity) dropping the apparent effectiveness of the vaccine as it's being measured against a population with some degree of immunity instead of against a naive population ?
Over time you'd expect apparent vaccine efficacy to drop even if the actual efficacy remains the same.
Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.
Time to legalise them instead.
I wouldn't have a problem with legalising drugs if the effect they have on people was confined to those choosing to take them. The problem is the evidence is they tend to have a negative effect on other people as well. Maybe the solution is to have special centres where people can take whatever drugs they like without bothering other people.
LOL. Someone recently sent me an article about electricity pylon research in the USA. Apparently, power distributors here have concluded that underground cable is not the solution to weather-related power outages, and so they are designing electricity pylons so that they break in predictable and easily-fixable ways.
I think you mean, that power distributors here have concluded that underground cable is not a *cost-effective* solution to weather-related power outages.
A PB thread on the Tory leadership candidates Sunak and Truss which has veered completely off piste onto golf, teleology, quantum physics, and Roman Catholic child abuse
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...
Cheers. Yes, quite a thought! Btw I remembered to slow myself right down after the thrill, just like the pros do, since I still had 6 holes to play, and it paid dividends, my drive off the next was ... trees and lost.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
There was a post on one of the online forums about someone's extensive efforts to prove that GW dice were biased to 1s. A lot of people were convinced by the suspect methodology to buy expensive casino dice as a result.
For various reasons I am sitting here reading Beppo, by Lord Byron, his comic verse about Venetian adultery which is actually all about a poet - him - trying to write a comic verse about Venetian adultery
It has made me laugh out loud several times, which is a really strange thing, when you consider it was written mor than 200 years ago. Is this the oldest English literature which is still genuinely funny? Perhaps Tristram Shandy, but that never made me laugh aloud, just smile at the wit and playfulness
And then there are verses, in Beppo, like this:
XLVII. "England! with all thy faults I love thee still," I said at Calais, and have not forgot it; I like to speak and lucubrate my fill; I like the government (but that is not it); I like the freedom of the press and quill; I like the Hapeas Corpus (when we've got it); I like a parliamentary debate, Particularly when 'tis not too late;
XLVIII. I like the taxes, when they're not too many; I like a seacoal fire, when not too dear; I like a beef-steak, too, as well as any; Have no objection to a pot of beer; I like the weather, when it is not rainy, That is, I like two months of every year, And so God save the Regent, Church, and King! Which means that I like all and everything.
XLIX. Our standing army, and disbanded seamen, Poor's rate, Reform, my own, the nation's debt, Our little riots just to show we are free men, Our trifling bankruptcies in the Gazette, Our cloudy climate, and our chilly women, All these I can forgive, and those forget, And greatly venerate our recent glories, And wish they were not owing to the Tories.
Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.
Time to legalise them instead.
I wouldn't have a problem with legalising drugs if the effect they have on people was confined to those choosing to take them. The problem is the evidence is they tend to have a negative effect on other people as well. Maybe the solution is to have special centres where people can take whatever drugs they like without bothering other people.
The drug that has (by far) the biggest negative effect on nonusers is alcohol.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
How did these societies emerge before the internet made it easier to find people with shared interests?
We do appear to love clubs if any kind.
I used to know a gent who collected old Strowger telephone exchange equipment, and made a phone network at a preserved railway. One day we went deep into bowels of the Derbyshire Council Offices in Matlock (*) and stripped out their old nuclear-proof phone exchange - apparently every major government establishment had old kit during the Cold War as it was less susceptible to EMP than modern kit. After the Cold War ended, it was deemed surplus to requirements, and he nabbed the best bits.
Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.
Time to legalise them instead.
I wouldn't have a problem with legalising drugs if the effect they have on people was confined to those choosing to take them. The problem is the evidence is they tend to have a negative effect on other people as well. Maybe the solution is to have special centres where people can take whatever drugs they like without bothering other people.
The drug that has (by far) the biggest negative effect on nonusers is alcohol.
How did these societies emerge before the internet made it easier to find people with shared interests?
We do appear to love clubs if any kind.
I think a normal means was to put a notice in the newspaper and then meet at a pub. Essentially how Association Football began, or the Oxford Dictionary was created, etc.
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.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
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.
One of the really noticeable things on our grand tour around England is how few are wearing masks compared with Scotland where Nicola has today confirmed that they are here to stay. It is a delight to be inside and not having to wear them, it really is. They are deeply unpleasant and annoying. Their efficacy also has to be open to question standing the trends both north and south of the border.
My daughter managed to have a positive test for Covid but the rest of us stayed negative throughout. She was a bit tired but that was it. I don't know if that was a result of the vaccines we had all had. Some of this remains mysterious.
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.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset.
But, since you mention knitting, it's very likely that my greatest knitting achievement is now in my past. It's hard to top knitting your wife's wedding dress.
When I get a bit melancholic it makes me wonder if it's worth continuing to knit at all. The desire to excel can be a bit self-destructive.
I hope you continue to enjoy your golf, despite the knowledge that you're very unlikely to ever play a better shot.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
There was a post on one of the online forums about someone's extensive efforts to prove that GW dice were biased to 1s. A lot of people were convinced by the suspect methodology to buy expensive casino dice as a result.
LOL!
The problem is selective bias. People will recall the times they rolled a 1 or double-1 and failed on something they should have easily passed.
They'll overlook all the times they rolled a 6 or double-6 and passed something they should have probably failed.
LOL. Someone recently sent me an article about electricity pylon research in the USA. Apparently, power distributors here have concluded that underground cable is not the solution to weather-related power outages, and so they are designing electricity pylons so that they break in predictable and easily-fixable ways.
I think you mean, that power distributors here have concluded that underground cable is not a *cost-effective* solution to weather-related power outages.
I think it's more than just cost effectiveness, but increased incidence of flooding causing a completely new set of safety and repair issues to buried high power lines.
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
So he has his misses as well as his hits in your view. This is good to hear.
But look, to be serious for a second, do you truly think it's a healthy thing for the PM to be trivializing everything the whole time?
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 don't think that's the full answer. Because while testing more will affect the baseline, it won't affect the direction of cases.
So, Spain (for example) might be doing half as much testing. But if their case rate was dropping sharply, then one would have to come to the conclusion that incidence was dropping.
I think @AlistairM's explanation is almost certainly correct: because the European countries were a couple of months behind us, they are currently at peak Pfizer effectiveness.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
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
So he has his misses as well as his hits in your view. This is good to hear.
But look, to be serious for a second, do you truly think it's a healthy thing for the PM to be trivializing everything the whole time?
I don't think it's that big a deal as long as in private he is more serious. The public prefer optimists to prophets of doom, so he knows what he is doing
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?
That, I'm happy to report, is honoured more in the breach in these woke times. I had a flat white and bought my playing partner (who goes by "Tony") one too. Plus I high fived a couple of Japanese ladies on the terrace.
"Plus I high fived a couple of Japanese ladies on the terrace."
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The Vatican is an independent sovereign state with its own courts and police force, it is perfectly able to resolve matters within its own borders itself
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
There was a post on one of the online forums about someone's extensive efforts to prove that GW dice were biased to 1s. A lot of people were convinced by the suspect methodology to buy expensive casino dice as a result.
LOL!
The problem is selective bias. People will recall the times they rolled a 1 or double-1 and failed on something they should have easily passed.
They'll overlook all the times they rolled a 6 or double-6 and passed something they should have probably failed.
It's hard to notice, objectively, that dice with numbers aren't fair.
But I have a board game from the 50s called Flutter, which has a numbered dice and a lettered dice. The lettered dice represents which one of six companies advances, and you buy shares in the companies. Long story short: E (Easygoing Engineering) always goes bankrupt first. A (Atomic Airways) and F (Fairfit Furniture) always do best. I've been playing this game for 40 years, and it is never not the case. It's still a good game though, because while you know E will lose in the long term you can still make money on it on the few occasions it does well in the short term - particularly because the other players also know E's unreliability.
Interesting that A and F do best - you'd have thought being on opposite sides it would be one or the other, but not both.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
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
So he has his misses as well as his hits in your view. This is good to hear.
But look, to be serious for a second, do you truly think it's a healthy thing for the PM to be trivializing everything the whole time?
Oh god yes. Save us from earnest politicians, for goodness sake.
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.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset.
But, since you mention knitting, it's very likely that my greatest knitting achievement is now in my past. It's hard to top knitting your wife's wedding dress.
When I get a bit melancholic it makes me wonder if it's worth continuing to knit at all. The desire to excel can be a bit self-destructive.
I hope you continue to enjoy your golf, despite the knowledge that you're very unlikely to ever play a better shot.
For me, the best and worst thing about golf is that you can never achieve the perfect game.
I don't mean a whole round of hole in ones or anything daft, but a round without something not quite going to plan. It doesn't matter how good you are, either, because being a better player just increases the standards to which you hold yourself. Even if you win a stroke play event, you could definitely have gone lower and shot that 65 you were aiming for (or whatever). A little too much like life, perhaps.
I much preferred matchplay. Beating your single opponent is the only goal, and how you do it is irrelevant. Grind them into the dust or steal it at the last - doesn't matter.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
There was a post on one of the online forums about someone's extensive efforts to prove that GW dice were biased to 1s. A lot of people were convinced by the suspect methodology to buy expensive casino dice as a result.
LOL!
The problem is selective bias. People will recall the times they rolled a 1 or double-1 and failed on something they should have easily passed.
They'll overlook all the times they rolled a 6 or double-6 and passed something they should have probably failed.
I had a choice of doing vs not doing 6 months of very unpleasant chemo a few years ago, for a 3% reduction in the odds of something very unpleasant happening to me. At first I thought naah, not wurf it, and then I thought: what's the odds of throwing double sixes? and the answer is 2.77%. So I thought, throwing double sixes - even in your only throw of the day - is not that unusual, and 3% is greater than 2.77%. So I had the chemo, which was correlated with a satisfactory outcome.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
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.
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.
One of the really noticeable things on our grand tour around England is how few are wearing masks compared with Scotland where Nicola has today confirmed that they are here to stay. It is a delight to be inside and not having to wear them, it really is. They are deeply unpleasant and annoying. Their efficacy also has to be open to question standing the trends both north and south of the border.
My daughter managed to have a positive test for Covid but the rest of us stayed negative throughout. She was a bit tired but that was it. I don't know if that was a result of the vaccines we had all had. Some of this remains mysterious.
Indeed, they are uncomfortable to look at and even more uncomfortable to wear, which gives the lie to those that argue they are a trivial mitigation. In fact, they are rather oppressive.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
There was a post on one of the online forums about someone's extensive efforts to prove that GW dice were biased to 1s. A lot of people were convinced by the suspect methodology to buy expensive casino dice as a result.
LOL!
The problem is selective bias. People will recall the times they rolled a 1 or double-1 and failed on something they should have easily passed.
They'll overlook all the times they rolled a 6 or double-6 and passed something they should have probably failed.
I had a choice of doing vs not doing 6 months of very unpleasant chemo a few years ago, for a 3% reduction in the odds of something very unpleasant happening to me. At first I thought naah, not wurf it, and then I thought: what's the odds of throwing double sixes? and the answer is 2.77%. So I thought, throwing double sixes - even in your only throw of the day - is not that unusual, and 3% is greater than 2.77%. So I had the chemo, which was correlated with a satisfactory outcome.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
If you are a Roman Catholic you believe the Pope is God's representative on earth so literally is the law on moral matters.
79% of Italians are Roman Catholics so there is a general respect for the independence of the Vatican City as an independent sovereign state
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
If you are a Roman Catholic you believe the Pope is God's representative on earth so literally is the law on moral matters.
79% of Italians are Roman Catholics so there is a general respect for the independence of the Vatican City as an independent sovereign state
I love it when you opine about what Catholics believe about the Pope, as if thousands of years of Popes and Catholics nominally seeing him that way and yet acting contrary to, ignoring or being hostile to, does not disprove your assertion.
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.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset.
But, since you mention knitting, it's very likely that my greatest knitting achievement is now in my past. It's hard to top knitting your wife's wedding dress.
When I get a bit melancholic it makes me wonder if it's worth continuing to knit at all. The desire to excel can be a bit self-destructive.
I hope you continue to enjoy your golf, despite the knowledge that you're very unlikely to ever play a better shot.
Cheers thanks. That achievement knocks mine into a (knitted) cocked one.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
Well - it's a state, which is usually seen as a trump card kinda thing. You could have a referendum to see if its inhabitants wanted to merge with Italy, I suppose.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
There was a post on one of the online forums about someone's extensive efforts to prove that GW dice were biased to 1s. A lot of people were convinced by the suspect methodology to buy expensive casino dice as a result.
LOL!
The problem is selective bias. People will recall the times they rolled a 1 or double-1 and failed on something they should have easily passed.
They'll overlook all the times they rolled a 6 or double-6 and passed something they should have probably failed.
I had a choice of doing vs not doing 6 months of very unpleasant chemo a few years ago, for a 3% reduction in the odds of something very unpleasant happening to me. At first I thought naah, not wurf it, and then I thought: what's the odds of throwing double sixes? and the answer is 2.77%. So I thought, throwing double sixes - even in your only throw of the day - is not that unusual, and 3% is greater than 2.77%. So I had the chemo, which was correlated with a satisfactory outcome.
Well said - and best wishes!
Thanks - this was long enough ago that I am no longer at higher risk than anyone else in my age group.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
Well - it's a state, which is usually seen as a trump card kinda thing. You could have a referendum to see if its inhabitants wanted to merge with Italy, I suppose.
Given most of its inhabitants are priests and Cardinals and the rest are employed by the Catholic Church and the Pope not much doubt of that outcome
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 hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
Are your Blood Bowl days over now then?
I haven't played it online in a few years (or in person this century), but I'll probably get the itch and start playing it again some point in the future.
The thing in the game that a lot of players screw up on is they'll do a lot of not very important but relatively safe actions first before doing the more important but less probable action (since any action failing ends your turn).
But doing six individually-probable actions in a row before you reach your most important action is like placing a six-fold acca betting on the favourite and not realising the odds of failure have shot up tremendously.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
If you are a Roman Catholic you believe the Pope is God's representative on earth so literally is the law on moral matters.
79% of Italians are Roman Catholics so there is a general respect for the independence of the Vatican City as an independent sovereign state
Only when he speaks ex cathedra. Which he doesn't do these days without years of discussion in committees of some of the brightest theologians and philosophers.
I will believe the Catholic Church is taking child abuse seriously when they fully accept legal accountability to authorities outside their own organization, including for crimes inside the Vatican.
I think the Vatican bit goes without saying. Considering who the sovereign is.
The existence of the Vatican is entirely so the Church can be above the law.
If you are a Roman Catholic you believe the Pope is God's representative on earth so literally is the law on moral matters.
79% of Italians are Roman Catholics so there is a general respect for the independence of the Vatican City as an independent sovereign state
Only when he speaks ex cathedra. Which he doesn't do these days without years of discussion in committees of some of the brightest theologians and philosophers.
Most recent pronouncements are 1854 and 1950, and only about 1% of people who know the expression in the 1854 one, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, understand what it means. The 1950 one was about the Assumption of Mary. So none of this stuff is really moral in the sense you mustn't do that/it's ok to do this.
I spent some time at the Lakeland motor museum recently. Awesome. I love these old cars. I love watching old tv shows like the sweeney, just for the cars.
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 don't think that's the full answer. Because while testing more will affect the baseline, it won't affect the direction of cases.
So, Spain (for example) might be doing half as much testing. But if their case rate was dropping sharply, then one would have to come to the conclusion that incidence was dropping.
I think @AlistairM's explanation is almost certainly correct: because the European countries were a couple of months behind us, they are currently at peak Pfizer effectiveness.
I remember seeing the calendar when it came out. There are some really good roundabouts these days. Artistic and aesthetic.
PB is getting positively Proustian these days. I looked in that website and the first thing I saw was that roundabout at Swindon - I've only ever seen it once and that was walking to the bus station from a night spent camping on the Ridgeway. Had completely forgotten it for more than four decades.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
Sadly this kind of thing is on the decline. Too many other distractions for oddballs these days?
I wouldn't regard even oak apple enthusiasts as oddballs. My biology teacher was a serious researcher into galls. Quite an insight into ecology for a teenager.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
Sadly this kind of thing is on the decline. Too many other distractions for oddballs these days?
Probably,the geekiest thing I have ever seen was an article in the Prisoner fan publication, Six of One, called ‘Clocking the Butler’ written by a chap who spent an age watching every episode of the prisoner and timing how long the Butler, played by Angelo Muscat, was on screen.
He wrote a further two articles called ‘Bossing the Butler’ and ‘Serving the Butler’.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
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.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset....
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
Although, of course, that pales in comparison to Walmart. Who does more than half a trillion dollars of revenue per year, and which puts it between Switzerland and Sweden.
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.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset....
Alastair Cook, I think ?
Interesting. I think Cook also said that being in great form isn't a completely happy experience, because you know you'll lose it, you don't know when, and you don't know if you'll ever get it back again when you do.
A final word: I would caution against comparing GDP and revenue. If a company buys a fish for $1.00 and sells it for $1.01, then that will count as $0.01 added to GDP, but $1.01 for the purposes of the company's revenues.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9mJ82x_l-E
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
I applaud the changes that Pope Francis has made; I have commented positively on him in the past. However, the changes do feel a little like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
https://www.churchofengland.org/news-and-media/media-centre/history-church-england
I read somewhere that if you buy dried shrooms on the street these days you have about equal chances of getting the real thing/supermarket mushrooms with some iffy chemicals added/ pure supermarket mushrooms.
Like you we had nothing worse than a bad cold (plus loss of smell). If we were living in normal times all of us would have carried on as normal.
Even my 85yo father-in-law who caught it from one of us had had a bit of a runny nose and lost his smell. That is the vaccines doing their jobs.
Given the terribly high price to earning ratios in this country there are only realistically 2 options I see to resolve this. Either we have years with goods and wage inflation but not in houses (a reversal essentially of the past 20 years) thus gradually bringing ratios back under control ... Or we have a house price crash which results in mass negative equity.
If you're ruling out desiring either inflation or negative equity then what is your solution to being prices back down?
Or is your attitude simply I'm Alright Jack and who cares if we have high prices?
A few years back I brought you the Pylon Appreciation Society, who collect information about everything electricity pylony.
https://pylons.org/
Now I give you the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society!
https://www.telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org/
We Brits are weird ...
On the 31st August I signed a 2 year fix with EDF following their takeover of Green Networks
Gas is at 3.467p/kwh + 26.60p per day and that was quite an increase on my previous fix
It looks a really good read in hindsight
Maybe given time there will be badges, certificates and in very special cases orders of merit. A municipal WC could even be raised in the sprit of enlightenment values?
Over time you'd expect apparent vaccine efficacy to drop even if the actual efficacy remains the same.
Bravo
We do appear to love clubs if any kind.
Will try one more time this weekend I think.
Gives an excuse to post this:
https://www.class37.co.uk/imagepage.aspx?strnumber=ar37671
It has made me laugh out loud several times, which is a really strange thing, when you consider it was written mor than 200 years ago. Is this the oldest English literature which is still genuinely funny? Perhaps Tristram Shandy, but that never made me laugh aloud, just smile at the wit and playfulness
And then there are verses, in Beppo, like this:
XLVII.
"England! with all thy faults I love thee still,"
I said at Calais, and have not forgot it;
I like to speak and lucubrate my fill;
I like the government (but that is not it);
I like the freedom of the press and quill;
I like the Hapeas Corpus (when we've got it);
I like a parliamentary debate,
Particularly when 'tis not too late;
XLVIII.
I like the taxes, when they're not too many;
I like a seacoal fire, when not too dear;
I like a beef-steak, too, as well as any;
Have no objection to a pot of beer;
I like the weather, when it is not rainy,
That is, I like two months of every year,
And so God save the Regent, Church, and King!
Which means that I like all and everything.
XLIX.
Our standing army, and disbanded seamen,
Poor's rate, Reform, my own, the nation's debt,
Our little riots just to show we are free men,
Our trifling bankruptcies in the Gazette,
Our cloudy climate, and our chilly women,
All these I can forgive, and those forget,
And greatly venerate our recent glories,
And wish they were not owing to the Tories.
He also went around photographing all the different types of phone boxes. And there's a group for them, too:https://www.facebook.com/groups/738186209531508/
(*) The magnificent Smedleys Hydro.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
http://www.allegroclubint.org.uk/
My daughter managed to have a positive test for Covid but the rest of us stayed negative throughout. She was a bit tired but that was it. I don't know if that was a result of the vaccines we had all had. Some of this remains mysterious.
But, since you mention knitting, it's very likely that my greatest knitting achievement is now in my past. It's hard to top knitting your wife's wedding dress.
When I get a bit melancholic it makes me wonder if it's worth continuing to knit at all. The desire to excel can be a bit self-destructive.
I hope you continue to enjoy your golf, despite the knowledge that you're very unlikely to ever play a better shot.
The problem is selective bias. People will recall the times they rolled a 1 or double-1 and failed on something they should have easily passed.
They'll overlook all the times they rolled a 6 or double-6 and passed something they should have probably failed.
But look, to be serious for a second, do you truly think it's a healthy thing for the PM to be trivializing everything the whole time?
So, Spain (for example) might be doing half as much testing. But if their case rate was dropping sharply, then one would have to come to the conclusion that incidence was dropping.
I think @AlistairM's explanation is almost certainly correct: because the European countries were a couple of months behind us, they are currently at peak Pfizer effectiveness.
Every time I log into PB I learn a new euphemism.
The Largest Autocracy on Earth
Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way.
By Adrienne LaFrance"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/facebook-authoritarian-hostile-foreign-power/620168/
https://live.staticflickr.com/7328/9401978564_b4f3798d66.jpg
But I have a board game from the 50s called Flutter, which has a numbered dice and a lettered dice. The lettered dice represents which one of six companies advances, and you buy shares in the companies. Long story short: E (Easygoing Engineering) always goes bankrupt first. A (Atomic Airways) and F (Fairfit Furniture) always do best. I've been playing this game for 40 years, and it is never not the case.
It's still a good game though, because while you know E will lose in the long term you can still make money on it on the few occasions it does well in the short term - particularly because the other players also know E's unreliability.
Interesting that A and F do best - you'd have thought being on opposite sides it would be one or the other, but not both.
I don't mean a whole round of hole in ones or anything daft, but a round without something not quite going to plan. It doesn't matter how good you are, either, because being a better player just increases the standards to which you hold yourself. Even if you win a stroke play event, you could definitely have gone lower and shot that 65 you were aiming for (or whatever). A little too much like life, perhaps.
I much preferred matchplay. Beating your single opponent is the only goal, and how you do it is irrelevant. Grind them into the dust or steal it at the last - doesn't matter.
http://www.roundaboutsofbritain.com/
79% of Italians are Roman Catholics so there is a general respect for the independence of the Vatican City as an independent sovereign state
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
That is excluding the online retailer and deliverer Amazon which is 4th
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-biggest-companies-in-the-world-in-2021/
The thing in the game that a lot of players screw up on is they'll do a lot of not very important but relatively safe actions first before doing the more important but less probable action (since any action failing ends your turn).
But doing six individually-probable actions in a row before you reach your most important action is like placing a six-fold acca betting on the favourite and not realising the odds of failure have shot up tremendously.
https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1445200620340842496
Which makes it bigger than the GDP of Italy, and twice as big as Mexico, and about five times the size of Nigeria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
One studies plant galls caused by wasps, which has a society, believe it or not...
https://www.britishplantgallsociety.org/
Sadly this kind of thing is on the decline. Too many other distractions for oddballs these days?
"Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual Plus people"
File me under "Questioning"
He wrote a further two articles called ‘Bossing the Butler’ and ‘Serving the Butler’.
Facebook products 'harm children, stoke division,' whistleblower says
Reuters"
https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-damage-will-haunt-generation-us-senator-says-2021-10-05/
(Apparently he once wrote a script for a sci-fi rock musical at Paul McCartney's request, which the inmate never used.)
I think we should add Incel in there as well. That would manage to piss everyone off.