Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I'd like to know what the connection is between being a leftist and not believing the lab leak theory. I can't see it myself but there obviously must be one.
I don't think there is such a link. I'm not exactly a 'leftist', and I don't 'believe' the lab leak theory. I don't 'believe' the wet market theory either.
We're not dealing in faith; in certainties. We're dealing with probabilities, and the question is where you position that probability.
Although if I see a split on here, I'd say those who were more scientifically-based are more sceptical of the lab leak theory...
Yes I'd say it's more that. Albeit with exceptions.
Ferraris are red. That's the whole point. In fact, come to think of it, Ferraris are about the only car that is red, a colour that seems otherwise to have disappeared from our motorways.
My car is red. It makes it easy to find in car parks, and it's unlikely to be mistaken for a Ferrari.
Both our cars are red. Well, one of them is a sort of tomato orange-red.
My MGB Roadster is Brooklands Green. Also rarely mistaken for a Ferrari.
I just sharted in horror.
When they were teenagers, my brother bought my sister a lovely green MG Midget. It had a tiny bit of rust in the footwell, so he started to tackle it with his welder. The rust was everywhere, and in the end he patched out the vast majority of the bottom of the bodyshell.
When he came to do his own MG B, he just bought a new bodyshell...
In my misspent youth (ie when I was at RMAS) I had the second of my TR4A IRSs. The one I'd had before that was a wreck, or became one during my ownership. When I came to sell it the bloke told me, in terms he judged that I would understand, that "the top bit isn't attached to the bottom bit". The bodyshell was just staying on the rolling chassis by gravity alone.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
It’s one of the things that works really well in our country.
PMs and their governments give LOTOs and other party leaders/relevant spokesman security briefings on Privy Council terms and LOTOs can request them.
I know David Cameron invited Ed Miliband and Jim Murphy into a National Security Council meeting in 2011 ahead of the Libya intervention.
Jeremy Corbyn refused them, the one he attended was the Salisbury attack one, and every other party including the SNP were all in agreement that Russia was behind it and the evidence confirmed that but Corbyn was like nah.
Corbyn's suggestion was that we gave all our evidence from the security service over to Russia for them to investigate and invite Putin around for a nice cup of tea to compare notes....
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
She announced it live on air, detail will come out. I cannot see anyone wanting to leave long term employment voluntarily when redundancy pay offs may be in the offing.
I cannot see Sky News being missed. It is more and more irrelevant and there is not much hard hitting journalism either.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
It’s one of the things that works really well in our country.
PMs and their governments give LOTOs and other party leaders/relevant spokesman security briefings on Privy Council terms and LOTOs can request them.
I know David Cameron invited Ed Miliband and Jim Murphy into a National Security Council meeting in 2011 ahead of the Libya intervention.
Jeremy Corbyn refused them, the one he attended was the Salisbury attack one, and every other party including the SNP were all in agreement that Russia was behind it and the evidence confirmed that but Corbyn was like nah.
Corbyn's suggestion was that we gave all our evidence from the security service over to Russia for them to investigate and invite Putin around for a nice cup of tea to compare notes....
There was an article at the time which has a quote from an attendee ‘If we had invited Sinn Fein to that meeting then Sinn Finn would have accepted that Russia was behind it, but Corbyn was adamant they weren’t.’
It’s no coincidence that Corbyn’s rating went into the toilet and never recovered after that.
South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy have blocked access to DeepSeek, citing concerns over excessive user data collection. https://x.com/yejinjgim/status/1887110425931632804
This a country significantly more prepared to do business with China than is the US.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
She announced it live on air, detail will come out. I cannot see anyone wanting to leave long term employment voluntarily when redundancy pay offs may be in the offing.
I cannot see Sky News being missed. It is more and more irrelevant and there is not much hard hitting journalism either.
Been going downhill since the departure of the like of Marshall, Kiley, Jones, Randall.
Is it some super-sophisticated play to force someone to do something about something.
An Iranian (father = exile) friend of mine commented that he thinks it's a good idea, if that brings any cogent analysis to the issue.
Nah. He just wants to build more sea-front property.
On the cheap.
(Although, if built I suspect it would be a destination for terrorism tourism for many decades to come...)
The biggest Trump donor was not Elon Musk but the Adelsons who are very pro-Israel and who run casinos. I doubt it was their plan but you can imagine how this idea came to be floating around.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
Why couldn't a British Jewish MP claim Israel as "their land"? It is when they claim Gaza or the West Bank as "their land" that problems arise.
I think on balance I would prefer that if an MP stands up in the HoC (or tweets) and talks about "my land" that that land should be the country they are an MP in.
Also, it is to "refocus on the Western Hemisphere"...
News: The CIA is offering its entire workforce the same “deferred resignation” buyout made to civilian agencies last week, in a bid to make the spy agency more aligned with Trump. Ratcliffe personally asked WH to do the buyout. First known natsec agency to do so. https://x.com/dnvolz/status/1886956120360534308
The Davey-Starmer dialogue is very civilised and an answer is often elicited from the PM.
The shouty Badenoch -Starmer nonsense elicits nothing. Both were poor, but Badenoch missed all her own goals.
Isn't missing an own goal a good thing? Not a soccer fan but just saying.
Fair point.
Open, she scored an own goal when she didn't follow up on the £18b
Did she mock Starmer for having a voice coach and still sounding like Keir From HR? Or did she miss that very obvious goal too?
If the voice coach story has legs wouldn't a question have been helpful? The conflation of Chagos and Milliband's net zero policy seemed odd too. I can understand the relationship, but her statements were very clunky. Starmer was better prepared than Badenoch today. She should have aced him.
The thing I haven’t understood is why
1) Labour talked about a £22 billion Tory black hole then announced a £22 billion carbon capture plan
2) Why the Tories haven’t linked the two?
We are led by pygmies.
Isn't the black hole per year and the carbon capture over five years?
It is possible the combo of Chagos and Voice coach could bring down Starmer
Each on their own, unlikely. But the combination of him being a lying snake and mind blowing hypocrite at the same time as he tries to give away, to hostile foreigners, billions of pounds we don’t have is quite lethal
He looks insane
The voice coach story is dead in the water. No one cares. No one wants to bang on about the pandemic anymore. You yourself picked up on this when taking about the lack of literature of the Black Death and the Spanish Flu. I am struck by the Hundred years war being punctuated by the extreme horror of the Black Death but with the combatents seemingly carrying on as if nothing had happened. Crecy (1346) so two years before and then Poitiers (1356) six years later, as if nothing had happened.
I know that the downstream events of the Black Death in England took a generation or so to come to a head (Peasants Revolt etc) but you do wonder if people just shrugged and got on with stuff in 1350. A bit like now with Covid.
You are a scientist who until recently was adamant it came from the wet market. Now it has been universally accepted it came from the lab, “oh who cares let’s move on no one wants to think about all that”
Nonsense on a plate with gravy. There is no consensus on the origin of Covid let alone one that is universally accepted.
On the contrary, it remains generally accepted by scientists that the most likely source for Covid was the wet market.
There are many reasons to discount a lab leak, says Holmes, and many more pointing to a natural origin. “SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have natural transmission cycles in a region spanning Yunnan province [in China] and southwards into South-East Asia and were most likely imported into Wuhan via the wildlife trade,” he says. “All the scientific evidence points to this. There is no scientific evidence for any other hypothesis.”
“The lab leak theory remains completely unsupported and, worse, incoherent and inconsistent, frequently requiring complex conspiracies to be a viable hypothesis,” says David Robertson at the University of Glasgow, UK. “Indeed, it seems clear that there’s a political agenda behind much of the proponents of the lab leak theory.”
We probably won’t ever know for sure. “I honestly can’t see any other new evidence coming to light,” says Holmes. “Research on this matter in China is at a standstill as the official narrative is that the virus is not from China. Besides, it is now far too late to find any intermediate animal species that still has the virus or antibodies to it.”
Does it even matter at this point? Yes, says Robertson. “The lab leak theory has become part of a wider, anti-science disinformation landscape. This is all very unfortunate, as preparedness to virus threats requires strong international cooperation and evidence-based response.”
Wet market is favoured but there is a sizeable dissenting minority not all of whom (contrary to evidence on here) are crackpots.
Yes, the lab leak origin is certainly a possibility, but seems unlikely from what I've read. What I find a bit weird is the desperation for certainty by some people, and to have someone specific to blame. I suppose the human psyche is wired this way. People want to have reasons for events - preferably simple ones - and if none are immediately apparent, then they'll invent them. Hence religion and superstition.
And yet the “religious certainty” all came from the wet marketeers for the first year
Remember “lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory”.
Remember when just talking about it got you banned from Facebook and Twitter
You didn’t have a problem with “religious certainty” then, did you? Nor did @kinabalu when he was “99% wet market!!” You knew and you were CERTAIN
Now the overwhelming evidence points the opposite way and suddenly it’s “oh well we will never know” and “it’s too late anyway” and “who cares it’s all long ago only 20 million died let’s talk about Lucy Letby” - @turbotubbs
It’s putrid, it’s laughable, it’s wrong, it’s immoral - and worst of all it is intellectually feeble
I'll tell you whats intellectually feeble - picking the more dramatic answer and declaring 100% that it must be right. Not looking at other evidence, just trawling your socials and reddit feed. Why not look at papers proposing the wet market as the source and understand why they come to the conclusions they do?
The main type of people of who go 100% certainty tend to be religious fanatics. What's your excuse?
Immovable IQ advantage
To have a high IQ, you need to have a functioning brain, and you should concentrate on establishing that first base before you go making wild claims.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think on balance I would prefer that if an MP stands up in the HoC (or tweets) and talks about "my land" that that land should be the country they are an MP in.
Labour MPs like Leo Abse and Greville Janner were great advocates of Israeli sovereignty within the HoC.
On the other hand both had some peculiar crosses for others to bear.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think it comes back to something has been discussed on here, she thinks she’s right on everything.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
According the Guardian, Starmer's quip wasn't that she refused a briefing on Chagos rather,
"Starmer seemed to be alluding to a recent report saying Badenoch missed a recent national security briefing – although that was about the Southport killings"
The Canadian government has given its media a blow by blow account of the efforts it made to stave off the Trump tariffs, which is a useful background read:
Ferraris are red. That's the whole point. In fact, come to think of it, Ferraris are about the only car that is red, a colour that seems otherwise to have disappeared from our motorways.
My car is red. It makes it easy to find in car parks, and it's unlikely to be mistaken for a Ferrari.
Both our cars are red. Well, one of them is a sort of tomato orange-red.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
According the Guardian, Starmer's quip wasn't that she refused a briefing on Chagos rather,
"Starmer seemed to be alluding to a recent report saying Badenoch missed a recent national security briefing – although that was about the Southport killings"
That's believable. I'd be interested to actually know the answer, though.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
She has turned down a briefing, Starmer said she hasn't asked for one.
I think on balance I would prefer that if an MP stands up in the HoC (or tweets) and talks about "my land" that that land should be the country they are an MP in.
Labour MPs like Leo Abse and Greville Janner were great advocates of Israeli sovereignty within the HoC.
On the other hand both had some peculiar crosses for others to bear.
Absolutely - but would they have called Israel "my land". His land was Wales (again, wiki tells me).
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think it comes back to something has been discussed on here, she thinks she’s right on everything.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
As a defence for Kemi, I suspect she would have at least attended her own pre-Covid Cobra meetings were she PM.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
Why couldn't a British Jewish MP claim Israel as "their land"? It is when they claim Gaza or the West Bank as "their land" that problems arise.
Would we have been so phlegmatic if Joe Biden, in a public debate about Northern Ireland, had said “Northern Ireland is our land”?
He might have Irish ancestors and might feel very attached to Ireland but it wouldn’t really be appropriate for him, as a foreign politician, to be claiming other lands for other parties.
I say this despite accepting that Trump’s plan is bonkers and Gaza should be for the Palestinians and not for American Cruise passengers.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
Why couldn't a British Jewish MP claim Israel as "their land"? It is when they claim Gaza or the West Bank as "their land" that problems arise.
I have never heard, nor know of (not that I've been looking) any British Jewish MP claim "their land" to be anything other than the UK. If you have known/seen/heard different I would be interested to see.
I think on balance I would prefer that if an MP stands up in the HoC (or tweets) and talks about "my land" that that land should be the country they are an MP in.
Labour MPs like Leo Abse and Greville Janner were great advocates of Israeli sovereignty within the HoC.
On the other hand both had some peculiar crosses for others to bear.
Absolutely - but would they have called Israel "my land". His land was Wales (again, wiki tells me).
I wouldn't put it past either. And Cardiff doesn't want the ghost of Janner, he belongs to Leicestershire.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think it comes back to something has been discussed on here, she thinks she’s right on everything.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
So she is the Leon of the Conservative party. Trust your gut and repeat loudly and persistently.
He’s clearly read something about McKinley (hence one of his early orders was to restore the name of his mountain) and wants a similar legacy.
I was reading last night about the US-backed invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, when powerful business interests in the states (mainly from the south, looking for new places to introduce their slave labour) saw the Caribbean and Central America as their backyard, aspiring to become part of the US. Sadly for them, their successive incursions into Cuba failed to inspire the local populace to rise up in their favour, and many of the Americans were either shot in Cuba or transported to prison in Spain, and their new planted state in Nicaragua lasted less than a year.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
Ferraris are red. That's the whole point. In fact, come to think of it, Ferraris are about the only car that is red, a colour that seems otherwise to have disappeared from our motorways.
My car is red. It makes it easy to find in car parks, and it's unlikely to be mistaken for a Ferrari.
Both our cars are red. Well, one of them is a sort of tomato orange-red.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think it comes back to something has been discussed on here, she thinks she’s right on everything.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
So she is the Leon of the Conservative party. Trust your gut and repeat loudly and persistently.
To be fair to Leon he grinds us into submission through a process of attrition.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
She has turned down a briefing, Starmer said she hasn't asked for one.
Does Kemi even know security briefings are available to LotO or is this another consequence of hollowing out the top of the Conservative Party and CCHQ?
It is possible the combo of Chagos and Voice coach could bring down Starmer
Each on their own, unlikely. But the combination of him being a lying snake and mind blowing hypocrite at the same time as he tries to give away, to hostile foreigners, billions of pounds we don’t have is quite lethal
He looks insane
The voice coach story is dead in the water. No one cares. No one wants to bang on about the pandemic anymore. You yourself picked up on this when taking about the lack of literature of the Black Death and the Spanish Flu. I am struck by the Hundred years war being punctuated by the extreme horror of the Black Death but with the combatents seemingly carrying on as if nothing had happened. Crecy (1346) so two years before and then Poitiers (1356) six years later, as if nothing had happened.
I know that the downstream events of the Black Death in England took a generation or so to come to a head (Peasants Revolt etc) but you do wonder if people just shrugged and got on with stuff in 1350. A bit like now with Covid.
You are a scientist who until recently was adamant it came from the wet market. Now it has been universally accepted it came from the lab, “oh who cares let’s move on no one wants to think about all that”
Nonsense on a plate with gravy. There is no consensus on the origin of Covid let alone one that is universally accepted.
On the contrary, it remains generally accepted by scientists that the most likely source for Covid was the wet market.
There are many reasons to discount a lab leak, says Holmes, and many more pointing to a natural origin. “SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have natural transmission cycles in a region spanning Yunnan province [in China] and southwards into South-East Asia and were most likely imported into Wuhan via the wildlife trade,” he says. “All the scientific evidence points to this. There is no scientific evidence for any other hypothesis.”
“The lab leak theory remains completely unsupported and, worse, incoherent and inconsistent, frequently requiring complex conspiracies to be a viable hypothesis,” says David Robertson at the University of Glasgow, UK. “Indeed, it seems clear that there’s a political agenda behind much of the proponents of the lab leak theory.”
We probably won’t ever know for sure. “I honestly can’t see any other new evidence coming to light,” says Holmes. “Research on this matter in China is at a standstill as the official narrative is that the virus is not from China. Besides, it is now far too late to find any intermediate animal species that still has the virus or antibodies to it.”
Does it even matter at this point? Yes, says Robertson. “The lab leak theory has become part of a wider, anti-science disinformation landscape. This is all very unfortunate, as preparedness to virus threats requires strong international cooperation and evidence-based response.”
Wet market is favoured but there is a sizeable dissenting minority not all of whom (contrary to evidence on here) are crackpots.
Yes, the lab leak origin is certainly a possibility, but seems unlikely from what I've read. What I find a bit weird is the desperation for certainty by some people, and to have someone specific to blame. I suppose the human psyche is wired this way. People want to have reasons for events - preferably simple ones - and if none are immediately apparent, then they'll invent them. Hence religion and superstition.
And yet the “religious certainty” all came from the wet marketeers for the first year
Remember “lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory”.
Remember when just talking about it got you banned from Facebook and Twitter
You didn’t have a problem with “religious certainty” then, did you? Nor did @kinabalu when he was “99% wet market!!” You knew and you were CERTAIN
Now the overwhelming evidence points the opposite way and suddenly it’s “oh well we will never know” and “it’s too late anyway” and “who cares it’s all long ago only 20 million died let’s talk about Lucy Letby” - @turbotubbs
It’s putrid, it’s laughable, it’s wrong, it’s immoral - and worst of all it is intellectually feeble
I'll tell you whats intellectually feeble - picking the more dramatic answer and declaring 100% that it must be right. Not looking at other evidence, just trawling your socials and reddit feed. Why not look at papers proposing the wet market as the source and understand why they come to the conclusions they do?
The main type of people of who go 100% certainty tend to be religious fanatics. What's your excuse?
Immovable IQ advantage
To have a high IQ, you need to have a functioning brain, and you should concentrate on establishing that first base before you go making wild claims.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think it comes back to something has been discussed on here, she thinks she’s right on everything.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
So she is the Leon of the Conservative party. Trust your gut and repeat loudly and persistently.
To be fair to Leon he grinds us into submission through a process of attrition.
Sadly these two posts are not mutually exclusive. Also doesn't help if your gut is wrong most of the time.
Ferraris are red. That's the whole point. In fact, come to think of it, Ferraris are about the only car that is red, a colour that seems otherwise to have disappeared from our motorways.
My car is red. It makes it easy to find in car parks, and it's unlikely to be mistaken for a Ferrari.
Both our cars are red. Well, one of them is a sort of tomato orange-red.
Red paint is a fucking nightmare to correct. It's also the most liable to sun damage because red pigment has the largest molecules and therefore the most bonds to get broken down by UV. I wouldn’t have a red car as a long term ownership proposition. (Unless it were one of the Big 5 obvs.)
Also, it is to "refocus on the Western Hemisphere"...
News: The CIA is offering its entire workforce the same “deferred resignation” buyout made to civilian agencies last week, in a bid to make the spy agency more aligned with Trump. Ratcliffe personally asked WH to do the buyout. First known natsec agency to do so. https://x.com/dnvolz/status/1886956120360534308
Blimey. That must surely be the next u-turn – well, two, both redundancies and refocussing away from China.
If you're the Leader of the Opposition and you are offered security briefings, don't you take them?
Does rather play into the lazy meme.
It's really bizarre, especially for a Tory LOTO. You'd have thought she'd want to know.
I can't explain it, either, other than by her being either really stupid (which she doesn't seem to be), or just lazy.
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ? Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
I think it comes back to something has been discussed on here, she thinks she’s right on everything.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
So she is the Leon of the Conservative party. Trust your gut and repeat loudly and persistently.
She should listen to me, I told her to be more modest and self effacing.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
So in other words no. No British Jewish MP has ever referred to Israel as "my land".
At a country every 3 days we are only about 2 years from the first global Emperor.
If you reflect on his business background it’s perhaps not surprising. This is the behaviour of a property developer. In fact Gaza is nakedly so. It’s the playbook of developers since the year dot: you acquire some prime property, find ways to evict the troublesome local inhabitants, then build your exclusive development. If your hand is forced you might deign to include a few “affordable homes” on the edge of the development.
Trump is proposing the gentrification of Gaza. But unfortunately for him the local residents association carry automatic weapons.
One reason he may not see eye to eye with Britain on Chagos. Our past behaviour - evicting thousands of residents from Diego Garcia and not allowing them back - probably seems perfectly reasonable to him.
I'd like to know what the connection is between being a leftist and not believing the lab leak theory. I can't see it myself but there obviously must be one.
They think it's racist. They can only bring themselves to be critical of white westerners.
Zoonotic infections through wet markets can be avoided. China should do more to prevent such risks. The wet market explanation is critical of China.
Ferraris are red. That's the whole point. In fact, come to think of it, Ferraris are about the only car that is red, a colour that seems otherwise to have disappeared from our motorways.
My car is red. It makes it easy to find in car parks, and it's unlikely to be mistaken for a Ferrari.
Both our cars are red. Well, one of them is a sort of tomato orange-red.
Red paint is a fucking nightmare to correct. It's also the most liable to sun damage because red pigment has the largest molecules and therefore the most bonds to get broken down by UV. I wouldn’t have a red car as a long term ownership proposition. (Unless it were one of the Big 5 obvs.)
Plus you would lose too often at (urban mythical?) "motorway snooker".
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
So in other words no. No British Jewish MP has ever referred to Israel as "my land".
thx
So you agree with my point then. Good. Reflects well on you.
At a country every 3 days we are only about 2 years from the first global Emperor.
If you reflect on his business background it’s perhaps not surprising. This is the behaviour of a property developer. In fact Gaza is nakedly so. It’s the playbook of developers since the year dot: you acquire some prime property, find ways to evict the troublesome local inhabitants, then build your exclusive development. If your hand is forced you might deign to include a few “affordable homes” on the edge of the development.
Trump is proposing the gentrification of Gaza. But unfortunately for him the local residents association carry automatic weapons.
One reason he may not see eye to eye with Britain on Chagos. Our past behaviour - evicting thousands of residents from Diego Garcia and not allowing them back - probably seems perfectly reasonable to him.
Yes we are the daddies of this kind of stuff. Why, the old Sykes-Picot division is in many peoples' eyes the root cause of our problems today. Ahem, _their_ problems.
It is possible the combo of Chagos and Voice coach could bring down Starmer
Each on their own, unlikely. But the combination of him being a lying snake and mind blowing hypocrite at the same time as he tries to give away, to hostile foreigners, billions of pounds we don’t have is quite lethal
He looks insane
The voice coach story is dead in the water. No one cares. No one wants to bang on about the pandemic anymore. You yourself picked up on this when taking about the lack of literature of the Black Death and the Spanish Flu. I am struck by the Hundred years war being punctuated by the extreme horror of the Black Death but with the combatents seemingly carrying on as if nothing had happened. Crecy (1346) so two years before and then Poitiers (1356) six years later, as if nothing had happened.
I know that the downstream events of the Black Death in England took a generation or so to come to a head (Peasants Revolt etc) but you do wonder if people just shrugged and got on with stuff in 1350. A bit like now with Covid.
You are a scientist who until recently was adamant it came from the wet market. Now it has been universally accepted it came from the lab, “oh who cares let’s move on no one wants to think about all that”
Nonsense on a plate with gravy. There is no consensus on the origin of Covid let alone one that is universally accepted.
On the contrary, it remains generally accepted by scientists that the most likely source for Covid was the wet market.
There are many reasons to discount a lab leak, says Holmes, and many more pointing to a natural origin. “SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have natural transmission cycles in a region spanning Yunnan province [in China] and southwards into South-East Asia and were most likely imported into Wuhan via the wildlife trade,” he says. “All the scientific evidence points to this. There is no scientific evidence for any other hypothesis.”
“The lab leak theory remains completely unsupported and, worse, incoherent and inconsistent, frequently requiring complex conspiracies to be a viable hypothesis,” says David Robertson at the University of Glasgow, UK. “Indeed, it seems clear that there’s a political agenda behind much of the proponents of the lab leak theory.”
We probably won’t ever know for sure. “I honestly can’t see any other new evidence coming to light,” says Holmes. “Research on this matter in China is at a standstill as the official narrative is that the virus is not from China. Besides, it is now far too late to find any intermediate animal species that still has the virus or antibodies to it.”
Does it even matter at this point? Yes, says Robertson. “The lab leak theory has become part of a wider, anti-science disinformation landscape. This is all very unfortunate, as preparedness to virus threats requires strong international cooperation and evidence-based response.”
Wet market is favoured but there is a sizeable dissenting minority not all of whom (contrary to evidence on here) are crackpots.
I find anyone expressing certainty a bit suspect. There's also the 'both' angle - they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Someone gets infected at the lab (or carrying out duties elsewhere for the lab ) and then spreads it at the wet market.
It would be really fascinating to know, but unless it is lab, with a coverup (i.e. people do know) I doubt we'll ever get a definitive answer. Which suits the 'lab leak!' people fine as the evidence for it coming from somewhere else can probably, now, never be really conclusive.
The fact that China restricted access to the lab and prevented a search for a natural transmission chain does raise suapicion
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
So in other words no. No British Jewish MP has ever referred to Israel as "my land".
thx
I think it is quite normal for someone Jewish to refer to Israel as their homeland and why not, it means a lot to them, even if they don't live there. Similarly for Palestinians to refer to the areas they originate as their homeland and from Americans of Scottish or Irish decent to refer to their homeland, even if several generations ago, and celebrate with kilts, bagpipes etc, etc.
I think we are making too much of this. It is a perfectly reasonable statement to make of somewhere you don't live, but have strong connections to and I would think it particularly relevant to Jews with their history. I consider myself to be a Londoner, but I haven't lived there for 61 years and my wife thinks of Scotland as her homeland even though she left over 40 years ago.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
Does anyone, their ratings are poorer than that of Netflix, Youtube and some Freeview channels
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
You need to grow up
Sky has been in trouble for a considerable time and may change their format but they still provide reasonably balanced reporting
You have this weird opinion that I am some GB news - Guido fan when nothing could be further from the truth
Indeed I do not watch GB news and have never quoted anything reported by them
You may not have noticed but I use a wide number of sources including the Guardian and of course sometimes it's upsets you as we do not share the same politics
I am and remain a conservative and am content with Kemi
The NHS is not the 'lifeblood of our country', FFS.
It is a health service, not a religion.
If I were Nigel Farage and wanted to talk about the NHS (although I suspect he'd rather the issue went away) then I'd keep an eye on the Lucy Letby case and suggestions of a miscarriage of justice because the babies are still dead and if Letby did not kill them, it opens up the NHS to charges of negligence, and the criminal justice system to being not fit for purpose.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
So in other words no. No British Jewish MP has ever referred to Israel as "my land".
thx
I think it is quite normal for someone Jewish to refer to Israel as their homeland and why not, it means a lot to them, even if they don't live there. Similarly for Palestinians to refer to the areas they originate as their homeland and from Americans of Scottish or Irish decent to refer to their homeland, even if several generations ago, and celebrate with kilts, bagpipes etc, etc.
I think we are making too much of this. It is a perfectly reasonable statement to make of somewhere you don't live, but have strong connections to and I would think it particularly relevant to Jews with their history. I consider myself to be a Londoner, but I haven't lived there for 61 years and my wife thinks of Scotland as her homeland even though she left over 40 years ago.
Nope I don't think so. Moran was born in the UK (ok, Hammersmith). She is also an elected representative taking her seat in the House of Commons. By any metric when she talks or tweets or whatnot, "her land" is and imo should be the UK.
By all means talk about land of her fathers, ancestral homeland, or somesuch. But "her land" is Blighty.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
Does anyone, their ratings are poorer than that of Netflix, Youtube and some Freeview channels
They have all of The West Wing on catchup which you can get ad-free for £4 / month tho. Yes, it can be teeth-grindingly soft-left in it’s politics but it’s still a joy to watch.
(Niche audience, but I bet some on here are part of that subset of humanity.)
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
So in other words no. No British Jewish MP has ever referred to Israel as "my land".
thx
I think it is quite normal for someone Jewish to refer to Israel as their homeland and why not, it means a lot to them, even if they don't live there. Similarly for Palestinians to refer to the areas they originate as their homeland and from Americans of Scottish or Irish decent to refer to their homeland, even if several generations ago, and celebrate with kilts, bagpipes etc, etc.
I think we are making too much of this. It is a perfectly reasonable statement to make of somewhere you don't live, but have strong connections to and I would think it particularly relevant to Jews with their history. I consider myself to be a Londoner, but I haven't lived there for 61 years and my wife thinks of Scotland as her homeland even though she left over 40 years ago.
The very salient point here is that pretty much Layla’s entire family live in Gaza and the West Bank, at least one close relative has been killed in the war, and she has been one of the most articulate, inclusive and grown up commentators on the situation since it began, regularly working with Jewish MPs to put across a common point of view. She’s not some river to the sea flag waver.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
Does anyone, their ratings are poorer than that of Netflix, Youtube and some Freeview channels
I do not understand @Gardenwalker obsession with me to be honest
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Not really. C4 definitely views World affairs from a liberal perspective, but it isn't absurdly hostile to RefCon/ Trump, in the way GeeBeebies is to Lib/Lab/Green Dems.
Amazing. The Russians really thought they had bribed & gained compromat on him (supposedly) & he turns round and does this to them. People just don’t stay bought these days, do they?
Even if you want to reduce foreign aid, the way this is being done is so wasteful and unnecessarily destructive. So many people are going to die from this it's staggering.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
He reads the Daily Mail, and reacts with *surprise* on those occasions when the world as reported by the Mail doesn’t match up with the real world as it is beyond Llandudno.
Layla Moran says, “Gaza is our land.” If she’s speaking as a British politician then it’s imperialism and if she’s speaking as a Palestinian then it’s blood and soil nationalism.
I suspect she is speaking as a Gazan. Are you gaslighting?
Interesting. Would you expect Joy Morrissey to talk about "her land" when discussing, say, Greenland.
If you English were about to invade Wales I would talk about "my land".*
* And I was born in Solihull.
I have no doubt that were a British Jewish MP to talk about "their land" (leaving aside current geopolitics), all hell would break loose.
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
In the context of a plan to turf all Jews out of Israel, you mean?
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
So in other words no. No British Jewish MP has ever referred to Israel as "my land".
thx
I think it is quite normal for someone Jewish to refer to Israel as their homeland and why not, it means a lot to them, even if they don't live there. Similarly for Palestinians to refer to the areas they originate as their homeland and from Americans of Scottish or Irish decent to refer to their homeland, even if several generations ago, and celebrate with kilts, bagpipes etc, etc.
I think we are making too much of this. It is a perfectly reasonable statement to make of somewhere you don't live, but have strong connections to and I would think it particularly relevant to Jews with their history. I consider myself to be a Londoner, but I haven't lived there for 61 years and my wife thinks of Scotland as her homeland even though she left over 40 years ago.
Nope I don't think so. Moran was born in the UK (ok, Hammersmith). She is also an elected representative taking her seat in the House of Commons. By any metric when she talks or tweets or whatnot, "her land" is and imo should be the UK.
By all means talk about land of her fathers, ancestral homeland, or somesuch. But "her land" is Blighty.
“Our land”. Given her family situation I think that’s perfectly reasonable. Particularly when Donald Trump is cooking up plans yo turn it into docklands
At a country every 3 days we are only about 2 years from the first global Emperor.
No play for Clacton yet?
Rebrand to Clacvegas?
We could do with some new Betfair political markets. Next country to be claimed? Will he claim Scotland before or after Burns Night 2026? When will Donald J Trump be added to the 2028 election list?
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
Does anyone, their ratings are poorer than that of Netflix, Youtube and some Freeview channels
I do not understand @Gardenwalker obsession with me to be honest
Take it as a backhanded compliment. You are one of the grandees of PB.
Lesser posters are too forgettable to actually satirise.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
He reads the Daily Mail, and reacts with *surprise* on those occasions when the world as reported by the Mail doesn’t match up with the real world as it is beyond Llandudno.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia have poured cold water on the Trump’s “Lebensraum Del Mar” so that’s that, I guess.
China, France, Russia, Australia and the UK of course have also reiterated their support for a 2 state solution today. So far only Netanyahu's Israel unsurprisingly in favour of Trump's plan
It is possible the combo of Chagos and Voice coach could bring down Starmer
Each on their own, unlikely. But the combination of him being a lying snake and mind blowing hypocrite at the same time as he tries to give away, to hostile foreigners, billions of pounds we don’t have is quite lethal
He looks insane
The voice coach story is dead in the water. No one cares. No one wants to bang on about the pandemic anymore. You yourself picked up on this when taking about the lack of literature of the Black Death and the Spanish Flu. I am struck by the Hundred years war being punctuated by the extreme horror of the Black Death but with the combatents seemingly carrying on as if nothing had happened. Crecy (1346) so two years before and then Poitiers (1356) six years later, as if nothing had happened.
I know that the downstream events of the Black Death in England took a generation or so to come to a head (Peasants Revolt etc) but you do wonder if people just shrugged and got on with stuff in 1350. A bit like now with Covid.
You are a scientist who until recently was adamant it came from the wet market. Now it has been universally accepted it came from the lab, “oh who cares let’s move on no one wants to think about all that”
Nonsense on a plate with gravy. There is no consensus on the origin of Covid let alone one that is universally accepted.
On the contrary, it remains generally accepted by scientists that the most likely source for Covid was the wet market.
There are many reasons to discount a lab leak, says Holmes, and many more pointing to a natural origin. “SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have natural transmission cycles in a region spanning Yunnan province [in China] and southwards into South-East Asia and were most likely imported into Wuhan via the wildlife trade,” he says. “All the scientific evidence points to this. There is no scientific evidence for any other hypothesis.”
“The lab leak theory remains completely unsupported and, worse, incoherent and inconsistent, frequently requiring complex conspiracies to be a viable hypothesis,” says David Robertson at the University of Glasgow, UK. “Indeed, it seems clear that there’s a political agenda behind much of the proponents of the lab leak theory.”
We probably won’t ever know for sure. “I honestly can’t see any other new evidence coming to light,” says Holmes. “Research on this matter in China is at a standstill as the official narrative is that the virus is not from China. Besides, it is now far too late to find any intermediate animal species that still has the virus or antibodies to it.”
Does it even matter at this point? Yes, says Robertson. “The lab leak theory has become part of a wider, anti-science disinformation landscape. This is all very unfortunate, as preparedness to virus threats requires strong international cooperation and evidence-based response.”
Wet market is favoured but there is a sizeable dissenting minority not all of whom (contrary to evidence on here) are crackpots.
Yes, the lab leak origin is certainly a possibility, but seems unlikely from what I've read. What I find a bit weird is the desperation for certainty by some people, and to have someone specific to blame. I suppose the human psyche is wired this way. People want to have reasons for events - preferably simple ones - and if none are immediately apparent, then they'll invent them. Hence religion and superstition.
And yet the “religious certainty” all came from the wet marketeers for the first year
Remember “lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory”.
Remember when just talking about it got you banned from Facebook and Twitter
You didn’t have a problem with “religious certainty” then, did you? Nor did @kinabalu when he was “99% wet market!!” You knew and you were CERTAIN
Now the overwhelming evidence points the opposite way and suddenly it’s “oh well we will never know” and “it’s too late anyway” and “who cares it’s all long ago only 20 million died let’s talk about Lucy Letby” - @turbotubbs
It’s putrid, it’s laughable, it’s wrong, it’s immoral - and worst of all it is intellectually feeble
I'll tell you whats intellectually feeble - picking the more dramatic answer and declaring 100% that it must be right. Not looking at other evidence, just trawling your socials and reddit feed. Why not look at papers proposing the wet market as the source and understand why they come to the conclusions they do?
The main type of people of who go 100% certainty tend to be religious fanatics. What's your excuse?
Immovable IQ advantage
To have a high IQ, you need to have a functioning brain, and you should concentrate on establishing that first base before you go making wild claims.
Apologies for second pic - but it's quite apt.
The real questions to ask - when presented with Leon’s self-asserted claims of high IQ - is how come his alleged incisive intelligence always leads him to blindly advocate whatever ludicrous conspiracy is being advocated from the darker parts of the internet, regardless of the probability or the facts, and how is it that his self-claimed political insight always results in his aligning himself with the so many our rather lower-IQ compatriots who live in caravans and (im)mobile homes along the Essex coast?
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
He reads the Daily Mail, and reacts with *surprise* on those occasions when the world as reported by the Mail doesn’t match up with the real world as it is beyond Llandudno.
My raised-in-NY but lives-in-Texas colleague, who is ostensibly “liberal”, told me in the bar last night that he was fed up with all the trans garbage, and that Trump was “getting things done”.
He cited Mexico’s agreement to post 10,000 troops to the border as a win.
I demurred modestly, although I agreed that Trump was very entertaining.
Amazing. The Russians really thought they had bribed & gained compromat on him (supposedly) & he turns round and does this to them. People just don’t stay bought these days, do they?
Yes, on the face of it, this seems both surprising and good news for the west and for Ukraine.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia have poured cold water on the Trump’s “Lebensraum Del Mar” so that’s that, I guess.
China, France, Russia, Australia and the UK of course have also reiterated their support for a 2 state solution today. So far only Netanyahu's Israel unsurprisingly in favour of Trump's plan
Egypt and Saudi are more relevant because they’re the only states (along with Jordan) who might conceivably offer a home for 2M displaced Gazans.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
He reads the Daily Mail, and reacts with *surprise* on those occasions when the world as reported by the Mail doesn’t match up with the real world as it is beyond Llandudno.
Where did you get that from
Show me any link I have posted from the mail
Just last night you struggled to accept that the Mail’s reporting was spin and not fact. Anyone bothered to check can review last evening’s conversation on PB.
Kay Burley has announced, live on air, her departure from the increasingly irrelevant Sky News.
Retirement or heave-ho? Ian King has been given his P45 in the past week. Talk is plenty more of the high profile ones are going to be also out of a job due to loses of £100 million a year.
I believe the deal new owners struck with government to ensure Sky News exists runs out in 2-3 years.
BigG will be devastated. However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
Also Channel4 news and current affairs, a left wing version of GB news.
Does BigG watch Channel 4, though?
Does anyone, their ratings are poorer than that of Netflix, Youtube and some Freeview channels
I do not understand @Gardenwalker obsession with me to be honest
Take it as a backhanded compliment. You are one of the grandees of PB.
Lesser posters are too forgettable to actually satirise.
Well I must say I have never seen myself in that way
Mind you I didn't post yesterday as my wife and I decided to have lunch in Euston so took the morning Avanti service that took just 3 hours, had lunch, and came home on the 3.00pm service back to Colwyn Bay
And we thoroughly enjoyed it, maybe my wife and I are a wee bit eccentric !!
Comments
BBC News - Lib Dem MP: My family has nowhere to go in Gaza
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67139289
https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/60aa2714-2b6f-4052-ad2d-7d9c2cf79531?in=12:23:25
I cannot see Sky News being missed. It is more and more irrelevant and there is not much hard hitting journalism either.
Layla Moran: MP confirms death of family member in Gaza
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-67433621
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/19/jared-kushner-calls-gaza-property-valuable-00147817
And as to your point, I have had all the Wales I could possibly want from Brecon, and being attached to a Welsh regiment for that matter. If the English were about to invade I'd send money for shields and lances to the Welsh.
The pursuit for peace should be that of the Israelis and the Palestinians.
I thought we voted for America First.
We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers blood.
https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1887114985383367065
It’s no coincidence that Corbyn’s rating went into the toilet and never recovered after that.
https://x.com/yejinjgim/status/1887110425931632804
This a country significantly more prepared to do business with China than is the US.
News: The CIA is offering its entire workforce the same “deferred resignation” buyout made to civilian agencies last week, in a bid to make the spy agency more aligned with Trump. Ratcliffe personally asked WH to do the buyout. First known natsec agency to do so.
https://x.com/dnvolz/status/1886956120360534308
Canada
Greenland
Mexico
Panama/Panama Canal
Gaza/Palastine
And we're only 15 days in?
Why would a Tory opposition leader turn down such briefings ?
Corbyn, I get, as making an idiotic political point. But what point would she have to make with this ?
On the other hand both had some peculiar crosses for others to bear.
So her starting position is I am right and I don’t need any evidence, whereas Thatcher always went from the fully briefed approach, as did David Cameron, who was praised for always reading his red boxes.
"Starmer seemed to be alluding to a recent report saying Badenoch missed a recent national security briefing – although that was about the Southport killings"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/behind-the-scenes-trump-tariffs-washington-1.7450526
I'd be interested to actually know the answer, though.
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1886904855329169857
This could get fun!
He might have Irish ancestors and might feel very attached to Ireland but it wouldn’t really be appropriate for him, as a foreign politician, to be claiming other lands for other parties.
I say this despite accepting that Trump’s plan is bonkers and Gaza should be for the Palestinians and not for American Cruise passengers.
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/israel-sets-its-sights-gazas-offshore-gas
I bet they won't be lol.
I was reading last night about the US-backed invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, when powerful business interests in the states (mainly from the south, looking for new places to introduce their slave labour) saw the Caribbean and Central America as their backyard, aspiring to become part of the US. Sadly for them, their successive incursions into Cuba failed to inspire the local populace to rise up in their favour, and many of the Americans were either shot in Cuba or transported to prison in Spain, and their new planted state in Nicaragua lasted less than a year.
I'm sure they'd be some "our land" outrage amongst Jewish people in Britain in that case and rightly so.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/21078816/grey-uks-most-popular-car-colour-five-years/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/01/14/does-kemi-need-to-be-more-modest-and-self-effacing/
thx
Trump is proposing the gentrification of Gaza. But unfortunately for him the local residents association carry automatic weapons.
One reason he may not see eye to eye with Britain on Chagos. Our past behaviour - evicting thousands of residents from Diego Garcia and not allowing them back - probably seems perfectly reasonable to him.
However, he’ll still have GBN and Guido for an unbiased take on the news.
I think we are making too much of this. It is a perfectly reasonable statement to make of somewhere you don't live, but have strong connections to and I would think it particularly relevant to Jews with their history. I consider myself to be a Londoner, but I haven't lived there for 61 years and my wife thinks of Scotland as her homeland even though she left over 40 years ago.
If ICE can target Central Americans who should not be there, then why not pampered, privileged, former royals.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/why-prince-harry-s-visa-case-is-back-in-court-and-will-he-be-deported-from-trump-s-america/ar-AA1ys4G0?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=889f431abce547de9d842b02ca27ca05&ei=21
Sky has been in trouble for a considerable time and may change their format but they still provide reasonably balanced reporting
You have this weird opinion that I am some GB news - Guido fan when nothing could be further from the truth
Indeed I do not watch GB news and have never quoted anything reported by them
You may not have noticed but I use a wide number of sources including the Guardian and of course sometimes it's upsets you as we do not share the same politics
I am and remain a conservative and am content with Kemi
By all means talk about land of her fathers, ancestral homeland, or somesuch. But "her land" is Blighty.
(Niche audience, but I bet some on here are part of that subset of humanity.)
(Also, Derry Girls!)
Even if you want to reduce foreign aid, the way this is being done is so wasteful and unnecessarily destructive. So many people are going to die from this it's staggering.
Oh, and Musk has taken over the payment rails of the Federal Government. Which even if you’re a Trumpist ought to be concerning.
The next few years are going to be rough.
We could do with some new Betfair political markets. Next country to be claimed? Will he claim Scotland before or after Burns Night 2026? When will Donald J Trump be added to the 2028 election list?
You are one of the grandees of PB.
Lesser posters are too forgettable to actually satirise.
Show me any link I have posted from the mail
He cited Mexico’s agreement to post 10,000 troops to the border as a win.
I demurred modestly, although I agreed that Trump was very entertaining.
Mind you I didn't post yesterday as my wife and I decided to have lunch in Euston so took the morning Avanti service that took just 3 hours, had lunch, and came home on the 3.00pm service back to Colwyn Bay
And we thoroughly enjoyed it, maybe my wife and I are a wee bit eccentric !!