Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Which constituency is Wookey Hole in?
Which reminds me, Chewy knew Jimmy Savile was a nonce.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
There is no such thing as humanity, only individual men and women. To adapt a phrase.
That's not very inclusive of you.
I may have been characterising ‘a’ view rather than mine.
As a listener to BBC news output for over half a century, and a long term admirer of their output, I get the slight impression - does anyone share it - that they are trying hard to go a little easy on how Trump and his plutocratic gangster oligarchs are behaving constitutionally in internal USA matters.
Completely hypothetically I can well understand why it would suit the government not to have our public broadcaster going all guns blazing at the incipient rise of an unconstitutional and law breaking USA government.
They might be going easy, but boy are they all over it. My podcast list of a morning is just wall-to-wall Trump now.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
There is no such thing as humanity, only individual men and women. To adapt a phrase.
That's not very inclusive of you.
I may have been characterising ‘a’ view rather than mine.
I wouldn't want WG to be teaching primary school arithmetic. He's basically denying the concept of numbers greater than one, never mind set theory.
While I am sure £800,000 could be better spent, Stevenson is worth any amount of attention. Occasionally dull to the point of distraction, but in Treasure Island he produced an entire mythology out of whole cloth and a book to live with for a lifetime, opening chapters to die for, and is unlike any other book I have ever read.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Which constituency is Wookey Hole in?
If it was Nookey Hole, Boris may be interested in standing.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Yes and no. That kind of sum is more in keeping with science/engineering grants employing post docs over a number of years. Without seeing the breakdown I suspect Michelle has secured a lot of holiday work in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.
Oh I'm not - I don't think it's that expensive for what it is covering. my point was simply that the headline figure was for a 3 year project...
Doesn't matter- it's like that multi-passenger vehicle that reflected light at a wavelength of about 700 nm that caused a stir in early summer 2016. It's a quantity of money that sounds huge (even if only by Parkinson's bikeshed law of meetings) on a thing that sounds superficially stupid. And any attempt at debunking either bit of that (in the grand scheme of things, it's that nobbly bit at the bottom of a peanut where the root would have been, and the details of the project probably are interesting and useful) will probably make matters worse not better.
Once you have a culture where a) vibes are all that matters and b) we are continually scrambling round for a bit more furniture to bung on the fire, this is the natural staging post.
While I am sure £800,000 could be better spent, Stevenson is worth any amount of attention. Occasionally dull to the point of distraction, but in Treasure Island he produced an entire mythology out of whole cloth and a book to live with for a lifetime, opening chapters to die for, and is unlike any other book I have ever read.
Cheap at the price.
Quite, re TI. Reminds me I need to reread Weir of Hermiston.
No wonder Bernard Cornwell was aggrieved at being beaten by his fosterfather for reading TI as a child (Peculiar People as quoted earlier on the thread).
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
There is no such thing as humanity, only individual men and women. To adapt a phrase.
That's not very inclusive of you.
I may have been characterising ‘a’ view rather than mine.
Nevertheless, you shouldn't have excluded those members of humanity that are non-binary.
Off topic but I think it's here that someone keeps going on about the Ngorongoro Crater - just planning annual trip to Southern Africa and considering it - is it really that great?
Google removed Pride and Black History Month from our calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America on Google Earth in the US
The USA isn't the only state Google indulges. It's also calling Turkey Turkiye, presumably at the behest of its government.
Bit of a tricky one really. Surely you need to have consistency of approach; otherwise you are making a political judgement call in accepting one change over another. I suspect the attitude of Google is to typically go to what the state in question dictates.
I'm perfectly happy for the Turkish for Turkey to be Turkiye. But it's not in Turkey's gift to dictate what the English for Turkey is. Most countries have English names different from local names. I don't see why we should change this for Turkey. They're even trying to make us use a letter we don't have in English.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Which constituency is Wookey Hole in?
If it was Nookey Hole, Boris may be interested in standing.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Which constituency is Wookey Hole in?
[Chewbacca and RCS-D2 are playing space chess, Han Sunil and TSE-PO are looking on]
Chewbacca: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh!"
TSE-PO: "He made a fair move. Screaming about it can't help you!"
Han Sunil: "Let him have it. It's not wise to upset a Wookiee."
TSE-PO: "But, sir! Nobody worries about upsetting a Lawyer-Droid!"
Han Sunil: "That's because Lawyer-Droids aren't known for pulling people's arms out of their sockets when they lose!"
TSE-PO: "I see your point, sir!" [to RCS-D2] "I suggest a new strategy, RCS: let the Wookiee win!"
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
Reform are going to struggle with the Jedi vote now.
Which constituency is Wookey Hole in?
Extremely ginger and hairy.
In fact, I've been there and had forgotten that the Hole is in (a) a cleft and (b) pink.
Donald Trump plans to today sign an executive order that will require heads of US government departments and agencies to cooperate with the Elon Musk-chaired “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Reuters reports.
Citing a White House official, the president will also order agency heads to limit hiring to only essential staff. The order comes as Democrats warn that Trump is defying the law by allowing Musk and his staff to enter federal agencies and access secure systems, or shut them down altogether.
Maybe he could create a new position of Prime Minister and appoint Musk.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Giles Brandreth...
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
Donald Trump plans to today sign an executive order that will require heads of US government departments and agencies to cooperate with the Elon Musk-chaired “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Reuters reports.
Citing a White House official, the president will also order agency heads to limit hiring to only essential staff. The order comes as Democrats warn that Trump is defying the law by allowing Musk and his staff to enter federal agencies and access secure systems, or shut them down altogether.
Maybe he could create a new position of Prime Minister and appoint Musk.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
Given that Star Wars was filmed in the UK as were many of the very recent spinoffs - spending peanuts to investigate the impact of it seems rather sensible actually.
Remember there are more Star Wars films due to hit production soon and they are likely to bring say £300m to the UK in production costs alone...
“Britain on Tuesday refused to join the EU in threatening a trade fight with the US over steel tariffs and followed Washington in declining to sign a global accord on artificial intelligence, in a sign of Sir Keir Starmer setting a new foreign policy in the era of President Donald Trump.
Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the US, told the Financial Times that Britain had to embrace “any opportunities opening up as a result of Brexit” and earn a living in the world by being “not Europe”.”
“It’s funny that it’s a Labour government that has discovered the benefits of Brexit,” remarked one veteran diplomat.“”
Only because unlike Germany for instance we have barely any steel industry left to export and be hit by these tariffs anyway!
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Giles Brandreth...
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
Edgar Wallace stood for election in Blackpool in 1931 as a Lloyd George Liberal.
He lost to a candidate who, it was said, had it all over him when it came to chilling the electors' blood with far-fetched stories,
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Giles Brandreth...
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
Also Dennis Potter - "VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, for Nigel Barton" was based on his experience of standing as an MP as I remember.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
“Britain on Tuesday refused to join the EU in threatening a trade fight with the US over steel tariffs and followed Washington in declining to sign a global accord on artificial intelligence, in a sign of Sir Keir Starmer setting a new foreign policy in the era of President Donald Trump.
Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the US, told the Financial Times that Britain had to embrace “any opportunities opening up as a result of Brexit” and earn a living in the world by being “not Europe”.”
“It’s funny that it’s a Labour government that has discovered the benefits of Brexit,” remarked one veteran diplomat.“”
Only because unlike Germany for instance we have barely any steel industry left to export and be hit by these tariffs anyway!
Yes, we don't make a lot of steel and aluminium because energy costs are prohibitively high, in the EU we would have had to go along with retaliatory tariffs that hurt our economy to protect Germany and France. Out of the EU we don't need to sacrifice our economy and jobs for the benefit of Germany and France. Solidarity can do one.
“Britain on Tuesday refused to join the EU in threatening a trade fight with the US over steel tariffs and followed Washington in declining to sign a global accord on artificial intelligence, in a sign of Sir Keir Starmer setting a new foreign policy in the era of President Donald Trump.
Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the US, told the Financial Times that Britain had to embrace “any opportunities opening up as a result of Brexit” and earn a living in the world by being “not Europe”.”
“It’s funny that it’s a Labour government that has discovered the benefits of Brexit,” remarked one veteran diplomat.“”
Only because unlike Germany for instance we have barely any steel industry left to export and be hit by these tariffs anyway!
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
As he finds more intellectual and theological grounding in Catholicism I suspect.
Though the Pope disagrees with him on immigration, they do agree on abortion even if Vance is on the more conservative wing of Roman Catholicism that far preferred Benedict and John Paul II to Francis
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
I'm sure it's very good.
Wasn't Master Storytelling Archer's career after standing down as an MP? I think Not A Penny More... was theraputic wish-fulfilment after being scammed by some dodgy Canadians.
Meanwhile, the legend about Newton is that he really had minimal impact as an MP. I don't know if the story that his one spoken intervention was to ask for a window in the chamber to be closed is true or not, but I don't think I care.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
I'm sure it's very good.
Wasn't Master Storytelling Archer's career after standing down as an MP? I think Not A Penny More... was theraputic wish-fulfilment after being scammed by some dodgy Canadians.
Meanwhile, the legend about Newton is that he really had minimal impact as an MP. I don't know if the story that his one spoken intervention was to ask for a window in the chamber to be closed is true or not, but I don't think I care.
You are correct:
He went bust, and that forced him out the Commons, whence he became a novelist.
Daughter just popped round. She said: "There's nothing on the news except fucking Trump. I'm sick of it. It's doing my head in". I sympathised, while upbraiding her for the sweary language.
There is also still far too much commentary around the idea that what Donald Trump says isn’t what he means, he’s not serious, it’s all a ploy-bargaining tactic, etc etc.
We know enough about the man and his behaviour now that I think we can be quite sure that when he says something, he’s deadly serious. That doesn’t mean he isn’t constrained in some situations, potentially brought round or bargained with in others, but I have no doubt in my mind that when he comes out with these ideas/goals/proposals, no matter how ludicrous, he genuinely means it.
Trump on Gaza: "We're gonna have it. And we're gonna keep it ... nobody is gonna question it ... we'll have lots of good things built there, including hotels."
Ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. We have bombed countries for similar.
Can something be a crime against humanity if there is no crime committed against any individuals?
What are you on about? Individuals are the ones who get ethnically cleansed.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Giles Brandreth...
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
And Trollope's fictional MP Phineas Finn is wonderful - the sequence of novels is sometimes overlooked but they are a delight, except the last which doesn't quite shine.
if we count Lords who wrote, C. P Snow (Lord Snow) is on the list. Most of his novels are dating a bit, but The Masters is unforgettably top stuff in any company, drawing attention to a very fine college (though not as fine as its neighbour) in a quite good university often neglected in literature; and The Light and the Dark isn't bad too.
I don't really get why, on rare occasions, people get precious about using or not using native nation names or job titles etc. Taoiseach is a classic example - no problem using it if we want, but if someone within the UK insisted we use it that would be odd, since no one insists we refer to the Bundeskanzler of Germany for example.
Taoiseach is different to Bundeskanzler because Taoiseach is the official title in English (and English is an official language in Ireland). Bundeskanzler is German, which in English is federal chancellor. We could also say 'the prime minister of Germany' but we usually don't. On the other hand nobody calls Meloni 'president' in English even though in Italian she is 'presidente' (del consiglio). It would get confused with the president of the republic I suppose.
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
But surely the ballot papers include candidates' names (and wards)? Did he take the other parties' count agents out to the pub while this was going on? And the winning margin was 82 votes so if 83 were fraudulently misallocated, well, it all looks like numerology to me.
You could also see a more innocent explanation that the baseline "request" for finding votes was an early sample estimate, and "find more votes" just meant make another estimate.
But I've never been at a count so am basing this on television coverage and the Stand Up Maths video from the last general election:-
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
I'm sure it's very good.
Wasn't Master Storytelling Archer's career after standing down as an MP? I think Not A Penny More... was theraputic wish-fulfilment after being scammed by some dodgy Canadians.
Meanwhile, the legend about Newton is that he really had minimal impact as an MP. I don't know if the story that his one spoken intervention was to ask for a window in the chamber to be closed is true or not, but I don't think I care.
His rise as a novelist was in-between losing his seat and then being made party chairman. A unique talent, in many ways.
Daughter just popped round. She said: "There's nothing on the news except fucking Trump. I'm sick of it. It's doing my head in". I sympathised, while upbraiding her for the sweary language.
‘How fucking dare you utter the name Trump in this house!’
“Britain on Tuesday refused to join the EU in threatening a trade fight with the US over steel tariffs and followed Washington in declining to sign a global accord on artificial intelligence, in a sign of Sir Keir Starmer setting a new foreign policy in the era of President Donald Trump.
Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the US, told the Financial Times that Britain had to embrace “any opportunities opening up as a result of Brexit” and earn a living in the world by being “not Europe”.”
“It’s funny that it’s a Labour government that has discovered the benefits of Brexit,” remarked one veteran diplomat.“”
Only because unlike Germany for instance we have barely any steel industry left to export and be hit by these tariffs anyway!
Yes, we don't make a lot of steel and aluminium because energy costs are prohibitively high, in the EU we would have had to go along with retaliatory tariffs that hurt our economy to protect Germany and France. Out of the EU we don't need to sacrifice our economy and jobs for the benefit of Germany and France. Solidarity can do one.
Unfortunately Ed Miliband seems OK with walloping industry with energy costs anyway, Brexit or no Brexit
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
I'm sure it's very good.
Wasn't Master Storytelling Archer's career after standing down as an MP? I think Not A Penny More... was theraputic wish-fulfilment after being scammed by some dodgy Canadians.
Meanwhile, the legend about Newton is that he really had minimal impact as an MP. I don't know if the story that his one spoken intervention was to ask for a window in the chamber to be closed is true or not, but I don't think I care.
You are correct:
He went bust, and that forced him out the Commons, whence he became a novelist.
My bad.
While Archer went on to write groundbreaking work in maths and physics.
“Britain on Tuesday refused to join the EU in threatening a trade fight with the US over steel tariffs and followed Washington in declining to sign a global accord on artificial intelligence, in a sign of Sir Keir Starmer setting a new foreign policy in the era of President Donald Trump.
Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the US, told the Financial Times that Britain had to embrace “any opportunities opening up as a result of Brexit” and earn a living in the world by being “not Europe”.”
“It’s funny that it’s a Labour government that has discovered the benefits of Brexit,” remarked one veteran diplomat.“”
Only because unlike Germany for instance we have barely any steel industry left to export and be hit by these tariffs anyway!
Yes, we don't make a lot of steel and aluminium because energy costs are prohibitively high, in the EU we would have had to go along with retaliatory tariffs that hurt our economy to protect Germany and France. Out of the EU we don't need to sacrifice our economy and jobs for the benefit of Germany and France. Solidarity can do one.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
They bought what they thought was a money printing machine, and haven't worked out why it isn't printing money...
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
I'm sure it's very good.
Wasn't Master Storytelling Archer's career after standing down as an MP? I think Not A Penny More... was theraputic wish-fulfilment after being scammed by some dodgy Canadians.
Meanwhile, the legend about Newton is that he really had minimal impact as an MP. I don't know if the story that his one spoken intervention was to ask for a window in the chamber to be closed is true or not, but I don't think I care.
His rise as a novelist was in-between losing his seat and then being made party chairman. A unique talent, in many ways.
One of those people who defines "charismatic". Spend some time in a room with him, and you can understand how he has been able to bounce back so many times. A bit alarming really.
(And a case study in my theory that one of the keys to a good life is knowing when to stop. Had he become the prep school games master he trained to be, he might actually have got a lifetime of unquestioning adulation and retired to something like the closing sequence of Goodbye Mr Chips. Perhaps writing thrillers during the Long Vac under an assumed name but never quite confirming or denying it when boys asked him.)
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
Daughter just popped round. She said: "There's nothing on the news except fucking Trump. I'm sick of it. It's doing my head in". I sympathised, while upbraiding her for the sweary language.
Shouldn't you rather upbraid her for deciding, even faute de mieux, to fuck Trump?
Daughter just popped round. She said: "There's nothing on the news except fucking Trump. I'm sick of it. It's doing my head in". I sympathised, while upbraiding her for the sweary language.
‘How fucking dare you utter the name Trump in this house!’
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
Marvel's store of characters and scenarios is enormous: they've only scratched the surface. I'm really looking forward to Captain America:Brave New World, which I may watch twice just to pwn the MAGA, and Thunderbolts* (the asterisk's meaning is undivulged, but my head canon says they're going to rename it to "The Dark Avengers", just like they did with TFATWS)
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Don't forget Jeffrey Archer. Kane and Abel was published during one of his interregnum as I remember.
I'm sure it's very good.
I've not read any Archer for a long long time, but I remember liking it well enough.
Given he seems to still be releasing books it seems like his political career was a complete distraction from a successful career.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Giles Brandreth...
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
And Trollope's fictional MP Phineas Finn is wonderful - the sequence of novels is sometimes overlooked but they are a delight, except the last which doesn't quite shine.
if we count Lords who wrote, C. P Snow (Lord Snow) is on the list. Most of his novels are dating a bit, but The Masters is unforgettably top stuff in any company, drawing attention to a very fine college (though not as fine as its neighbour) in a quite good university often neglected in literature; and The Light and the Dark isn't bad too.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Yes and no. That kind of sum is more in keeping with science/engineering grants employing post docs over a number of years. Without seeing the breakdown I suspect Michelle has secured a lot of holiday work in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.
Oh I'm not - I don't think it's that expensive for what it is covering. my point was simply that the headline figure was for a 3 year project...
It’s still rather expensive for what it is. I’d suspect she’s got her salary paid out of it so the 7ni can get someone else in while she’s on holiday work overseas (must stop doing that…). Plus lots of travel costs and accommodation. It’s a big whack for a humanities project where you don’t have much in the way of consumables.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
They bought what they thought was a money printing machine, and haven't worked out why it isn't printing money...
I think it could have worked - there's enough side material and fandom to sustain a decent amount of yearly releases - but they released too much of it too fast, and taking a hostile approach to negative reactions does not seem to have worked out when the quality is variable at best, resulting in apathy even from those who do not hate the new stuff. Marvel was an absolute juggernaut that had to end sometime, and so will still be able to crank out some successes but not at the same level, and they don't seem to have realised that despite it being obvious.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
The "Thunderbolts*" Superb Owl trailer was great.
A good trailer can be made out of every film though. If the trailer makers cannot make something look good it is either truly terrible or extremely unique.
"We were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office."
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Yes and no. That kind of sum is more in keeping with science/engineering grants employing post docs over a number of years. Without seeing the breakdown I suspect Michelle has secured a lot of holiday work in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.
Oh I'm not - I don't think it's that expensive for what it is covering. my point was simply that the headline figure was for a 3 year project...
It’s still rather expensive for what it is. I’d suspect she’s got her salary paid out of it so the 7ni can get someone else in while she’s on holiday work overseas (must stop doing that…). Plus lots of travel costs and accommodation. It’s a big whack for a humanities project where you don’t have much in the way of consumables.
Doesn't it include public activities? There'd be expenses there of various kinds. Venue hire, graphic designers, printing, website ... Hence the apaprent anomaly.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
The "Thunderbolts*" Superb Owl trailer was great.
They're going to kill off Ghost or Taskmaster, which makes sense. I think they'll nerf John Walker which is a pity. Bob from Top Gun is a great choice for The Sentry. All in all it's well cast and I think they've hit the right tone.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
Marvel's store of characters and scenarios is enormous: they've only scratched the surface. I'm really looking forward to Captain America:Brave New World, which I may watch twice just to pwn the MAGA, and Thunderbolts* (the asterisk's meaning is undivulged, but my head canon says they're going to rename it to "The Dark Avengers", just like they did with TFATWS)
Who not deep in comics had heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy prior to the films, among the most successful of the lot? Many had never heard of Iron Man - if they can restore a bit of quality control and reset expectations (3 hit movies a year plus an endless sludge of tv one offs is no longer sustainable) then they can still be very successful, as they have endless material to utillise and adapt.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
Marvel's store of characters and scenarios is enormous: they've only scratched the surface. I'm really looking forward to Captain America:Brave New World, which I may watch twice just to pwn the MAGA, and Thunderbolts* (the asterisk's meaning is undivulged, but my head canon says they're going to rename it to "The Dark Avengers", just like they did with TFATWS)
I suppose it rather depends whether there's an infinite capacity for this stuff or the public eventually gets bored of it. Especially after all the principal characters have been re-used about 72 times and they're onto the barrel scraping.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
They bought what they thought was a money printing machine, and haven't worked out why it isn't printing money...
I think it could have worked - there's enough side material and fandom to sustain a decent amount of yearly releases - but they released too much of it too fast, and taking a hostile approach to negative reactions does not seem to have worked out when the quality is variable at best, resulting in apathy even from those who do not hate the new stuff. Marvel was an absolute juggernaut that had to end sometime, and so will still be able to crank out some successes but not at the same level, and they don't seem to have realised that despite it being obvious.
The biggest mistake (I think) was rewriting Rise of Skywalker after 'fan' reaction to Last Jedi
They chased a declining demographic, and didn't even manage to please them
"We were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office."
The man loves displays of power even on petty things. Especially in fact I suspect - has any President loved the trappings of office more?
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
But surely the ballot papers include candidates' names (and wards)? Did he take the other parties' count agents out to the pub while this was going on? And the winning margin was 82 votes so if 83 were fraudulently misallocated, well, it all looks like numerology to me.
You could also see a more innocent explanation that the baseline "request" for finding votes was an early sample estimate, and "find more votes" just meant make another estimate.
But I've never been at a count so am basing this on television coverage and the Stand Up Maths video from the last general election:-
I've been scratching my head. For the parliamentary counts you see on TV this sounds ridiculous, but I'm not sure in what ways local counts differ, are there decent numbers of observers milling about, are verbal declarations made or do the numbers merely get posted, do the councillor candidates typically attend? Is a bundle swap between two trestle tables at a certain point in the count actually possible?
You still have enough people there doing the actual counting, I imagine, though are those council employees whose ears could be bent? I cannot imagine this switch being possible without a number of people knowing, so I am sceptical whether this did actually happen in reality rather than just on the page of their dumb WhatsApp group.
Still, 11 councillors suspended - 9 Tameside, reducing the nominal Labour majority to eleventy hundred, and 2 Stockport, whose loss may have a numerical effect.
I don't really get why, on rare occasions, people get precious about using or not using native nation names or job titles etc. Taoiseach is a classic example - no problem using it if we want, but if someone within the UK insisted we use it that would be odd, since no one insists we refer to the Bundeskanzler of Germany for example.
Taoiseach is different to Bundeskanzler because Taoiseach is the official title in English (and English is an official language in Ireland). Bundeskanzler is German, which in English is federal chancellor. We could also say 'the prime minister of Germany' but we usually don't. On the other hand nobody calls Meloni 'president' in English even though in Italian she is 'presidente' (del consiglio). It would get confused with the president of the republic I suppose.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
I watched RRR on Netflix the other night. Spectacular action sequences, CGI and even a dance off. Hollywood needs to watch and learn.
OK, it's fairly blatant Hindutva propaganda that will give the PB Blimps apoplexy, but a massive hit and not just in India.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
Pepys impact as MP: not much I think, though he got into trouble over the exclusion crisis.
Russell was a hereditary. His grandfather was the great Lord John Russell, backer of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Giles Brandreth...
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
And Trollope's fictional MP Phineas Finn is wonderful - the sequence of novels is sometimes overlooked but they are a delight, except the last which doesn't quite shine.
if we count Lords who wrote, C. P Snow (Lord Snow) is on the list. Most of his novels are dating a bit, but The Masters is unforgettably top stuff in any company, drawing attention to a very fine college (though not as fine as its neighbour) in a quite good university often neglected in literature; and The Light and the Dark isn't bad too.
The New Men is also well worth a read.
A.P. Herbert wrote some sparklingly witty prose on things like absurd legal cases. He was also the last MP for Oxford University. Hillaire Belloc was a wonderful writer and a pretty bad MP.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
They bought what they thought was a money printing machine, and haven't worked out why it isn't printing money...
I think it could have worked - there's enough side material and fandom to sustain a decent amount of yearly releases - but they released too much of it too fast, and taking a hostile approach to negative reactions does not seem to have worked out when the quality is variable at best, resulting in apathy even from those who do not hate the new stuff. Marvel was an absolute juggernaut that had to end sometime, and so will still be able to crank out some successes but not at the same level, and they don't seem to have realised that despite it being obvious.
The biggest mistake (I think) was rewriting Rise of Skywalker after 'fan' reaction to Last Jedi
They chased a declining demographic, and didn't even manage to please them
The biggest mistake was releasing the bloody "film" at all!
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
They bought what they thought was a money printing machine, and haven't worked out why it isn't printing money...
I think it could have worked - there's enough side material and fandom to sustain a decent amount of yearly releases - but they released too much of it too fast, and taking a hostile approach to negative reactions does not seem to have worked out when the quality is variable at best, resulting in apathy even from those who do not hate the new stuff. Marvel was an absolute juggernaut that had to end sometime, and so will still be able to crank out some successes but not at the same level, and they don't seem to have realised that despite it being obvious.
The biggest mistake (I think) was rewriting Rise of Skywalker after 'fan' reaction to Last Jedi
They chased a declining demographic, and didn't even manage to please them
I agree with this 100%. I like much of what the Last Jedi did, even if with time I can certainly accept some of the flaws. But it was leading to something slightly different, or hinted it at least. The result of which was an already disconnected trilogy became even more so, to the detriment of the whole thing.
LucasFilm and Marvel also both seem really keen to chase new audiences, assuming the old audience would never go anywhere, and neither was worked that well.
£300m on new Star Wars projects...now with everybody on the DOGE train, that seems like an area of wasteful spending that Disney could cut with literally no downsides.
Disney has a problem - they’ve run out of old cartoons to remake as live action movies, marvel is reduced to the fantastic four in the hope of success - so all they have left is Star Wars for which they needs a success
Marvel's store of characters and scenarios is enormous: they've only scratched the surface. I'm really looking forward to Captain America:Brave New World, which I may watch twice just to pwn the MAGA, and Thunderbolts* (the asterisk's meaning is undivulged, but my head canon says they're going to rename it to "The Dark Avengers", just like they did with TFATWS)
I suppose it rather depends whether there's an infinite capacity for this stuff or the public eventually gets bored of it. Especially after all the principal characters have been re-used about 72 times and they're onto the barrel scraping.
Marvel Comics in their modern form have been going for 64 years, with well over 32000 individual comics. They can do the same in film and televisual form.
Elon Musk: "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?"
A fair question.
However, it is also fair to point out that said bueacracy was brought into being by laws, enacted by elected representatives. What meaning does democracy have if an unelected official is able to overrule said laws?
Off topic but I think it's here that someone keeps going on about the Ngorongoro Crater - just planning annual trip to Southern Africa and considering it - is it really that great?
I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned on here, but maybe I missed it. Anyway, I went there years ago and camped on the crater rim, and it was pretty impressive.
The inside of the crater looks a bit like the Black Mountains in the sunshine, with wildebeest and flamingos. The landscape on the drive there is beautiful: lush, rolling, oddly like the drive towards the Black Mountains through Southern Herefordshire.
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
But surely the ballot papers include candidates' names (and wards)? Did he take the other parties' count agents out to the pub while this was going on? And the winning margin was 82 votes so if 83 were fraudulently misallocated, well, it all looks like numerology to me.
You could also see a more innocent explanation that the baseline "request" for finding votes was an early sample estimate, and "find more votes" just meant make another estimate.
But I've never been at a count so am basing this on television coverage and the Stand Up Maths video from the last general election:-
I've been scratching my head. For the parliamentary counts you see on TV this sounds ridiculous, but I'm not sure in what ways local counts differ, are there decent numbers of observers milling about, are verbal declarations made or do the numbers merely get posted, do the councillor candidates typically attend? Is a bundle swap between two trestle tables at a certain point in the count actually possible?
You still have enough people there doing the actual counting, I imagine, though are those council employees whose ears could be bent? I cannot imagine this switch being possible without a number of people knowing, so I am sceptical whether this did actually happen in reality rather than just on the page of their dumb WhatsApp group.
Still, 11 councillors suspended - 9 Tameside, reducing the nominal Labour majority to eleventy hundred, and 2 Stockport, whose loss may have a numerical effect.
Local counts are basically the same as the Parliamentary counts you see on TV.
Elon Musk: "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?"
A fair question.
However, it is also fair to point out that said bueacracy was brought into being by laws, enacted by elected representatives. What meaning does democracy have if an unelected official is able to overrule said laws?
Yeah Musk is talking nonsense. Anyone who can't see through this is either an idiot or wrongun.
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
But surely the ballot papers include candidates' names (and wards)? Did he take the other parties' count agents out to the pub while this was going on? And the winning margin was 82 votes so if 83 were fraudulently misallocated, well, it all looks like numerology to me.
You could also see a more innocent explanation that the baseline "request" for finding votes was an early sample estimate, and "find more votes" just meant make another estimate.
But I've never been at a count so am basing this on television coverage and the Stand Up Maths video from the last general election:-
I've been scratching my head. For the parliamentary counts you see on TV this sounds ridiculous, but I'm not sure in what ways local counts differ, are there decent numbers of observers milling about, are verbal declarations made or do the numbers merely get posted, do the councillor candidates typically attend? Is a bundle swap between two trestle tables at a certain point in the count actually possible?
You still have enough people there doing the actual counting, I imagine, though are those council employees whose ears could be bent? I cannot imagine this switch being possible without a number of people knowing, so I am sceptical whether this did actually happen in reality rather than just on the page of their dumb WhatsApp group.
Still, 11 councillors suspended - 9 Tameside, reducing the nominal Labour majority to eleventy hundred, and 2 Stockport, whose loss may have a numerical effect.
Even at local elections you typically get decent numbers of observers, and candidates usually do attend and verbal declarations made. You might get some time with only 1 or 2 in front of your count table at any one time, but it's all very open.
You'd need a lot of people in play to do something deliberately shady. But weird cock ups can certainly happen. Weird situation in a parish election in Swindon once where they messed up the tabulation somehow and a bunch of people were declared the victor with more votes than there had been ballots (I don't recall how the heck that happened). It was picked up very quickly, but it still required a formal electoral petition to sort out as you cannot just reverse an error made at a declaration.
On topic - I suspect JD Vance is feeling very good about life. He does not care what the Pope says. I am just surprised he bothers to pretend to be a Catholic. Why not go evangelical?
In his book he is quite scathing on Hillbilly's propensity to Charismatic Evangelicalism, seeing it as superficial and without mystery. I suspect that he doesn't speak too much on that any more.
Mostly Vance is a human chameleon, and an ambitious one. As a youth he was part Hillbilly then he went native in the Marines, then at Harvard. It was there he wanted to blend in with the preppy types, who were rather more established, and who were Episcopelian or Catholic. Hence he became a Catholic. He then was an anyone but Trumper while that was the established position, before flipping MAGA when that became the dominant tribe.
Think of him as the Talented Mr Ripley, or Oliver in Saltburn.
Zelig.
The person he reminds me of is the Matthew Macfadyen character in Succession.
It’s a fun comparison but I think he’s smarter and bolder than that
eg Hillbilly Elegy is a genuinely good and compelling book
How many other successful politicians anywhere on earth have been good writers BEFORE entering politics
Disraeli, of course.
Churchill too.
Win one Nobel prize for literature and people are all, “Isn’t Churchill a good writer?”
Surprised no mention of Messrs Johnson, Gove ...
Disgusting that nobody has mentioned Sheridan. Or Sir Thomas More.
I suggested T. B. Macaulay earlier. Does Lord Broughton count? The Gmt loved his writing so much they arrested him!
Edit: How could I forget? William Cobbett.
I suggest that the greatest writer by miles who wrote (but not published) before becoming an MP was Samuel Pepys; he's is in the absolute premier league of English lit, and of prose writers I suggest only Dickens and Joyce are in his league, and of non fiction writers he stands unsurpassed.
Did he make a comparable impact as a MP, though? (Just my ignorance.) He made a huge impact as a civil servant, though, that's for sure. So did Macaulay the historian.
And does Newton count as well? He wrote Principia before becoming a MP.
And there's Bertrand Russell ... a peer.
I never knew Newton had been an MP. Awesome.
Only briefly, and to no noticeable effect.
Newton's main contribution to the nation beyond his scientific career was a lengthy term in charge of the Royal Mint, during which he improved the coinage and succeeded in foiling many counterfeiters.
Elon Musk: "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?"
A fair question.
However, it is also fair to point out that said bueacracy was brought into being by laws, enacted by elected representatives. What meaning does democracy have if an unelected official is able to overrule said laws?
There's a very stupid kind of complaint wherein any kind of procedure or rule that places limitations on or obligations on a single elected person (or even non-elected person) is met with 'is that democracy?!' even when democratic representatives set those rules.
"I, a parish councillor in nowheresville, cannot ignore the law - is that democracy?"
An exagerration, but not by as much as you'd think.
The allegation seems to be that as they were counting multiple wards at once, someone moved some Labour ballots from the Ashton Hurst ward to the Audenshaw ward, helping the Lab Audenshaw candidate over the line while damaging the Lab Ashton Hurst candidate, who they didn't like. Obviously for this to work then they would also have needed to transfer an equal number for some other party's votes (e.g. Con) the other way
But surely the ballot papers include candidates' names (and wards)? Did he take the other parties' count agents out to the pub while this was going on? And the winning margin was 82 votes so if 83 were fraudulently misallocated, well, it all looks like numerology to me.
You could also see a more innocent explanation that the baseline "request" for finding votes was an early sample estimate, and "find more votes" just meant make another estimate.
But I've never been at a count so am basing this on television coverage and the Stand Up Maths video from the last general election:-
I've been scratching my head. For the parliamentary counts you see on TV this sounds ridiculous, but I'm not sure in what ways local counts differ, are there decent numbers of observers milling about, are verbal declarations made or do the numbers merely get posted, do the councillor candidates typically attend? Is a bundle swap between two trestle tables at a certain point in the count actually possible?
You still have enough people there doing the actual counting, I imagine, though are those council employees whose ears could be bent? I cannot imagine this switch being possible without a number of people knowing, so I am sceptical whether this did actually happen in reality rather than just on the page of their dumb WhatsApp group.
Still, 11 councillors suspended - 9 Tameside, reducing the nominal Labour majority to eleventy hundred, and 2 Stockport, whose loss may have a numerical effect.
Local counts are basically the same as the Parliamentary counts you see on TV.
My question, then, is more of whether observers and candidates actually turn up in decent enough numbers, whether for overnight or next day counts, to prevent this, or whether it might be quiet enough for some prestidigitation to be possible and go unnoticed at the appropriate stage in the counts.
Personally, my guess is there are enough wonks in politics who do attend, and enough counters there on the night, to make this a highly improbable story.
EDIT: crossed over with Kle's response which confirms my guess.
Elon Musk: "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?"
A fair question.
However, it is also fair to point out that said bueacracy was brought into being by laws, enacted by elected representatives. What meaning does democracy have if an unelected official is able to overrule said laws?
When the executive in the US says it doesn't have to follow court orders, it is a full-blown constitutional crisis.
It's clear that an attempt is being made to establish a kleptocratic oligarchy.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
So, not DOGE, more DODGY.
If Sir One Term wanted to copy DOGE but claim originality, he could retool that daft 'Department of Value for Money' thing he created and get that to do the hacking and slashing. There are enough daft quangos in this country to find billions of savings before cutting to any actual bone.
GB News spent some of today interviewing someone from 'DOGE UK'.
So it begins...
Let's copy America and go down the Trump rabbit hole into a fascist state.
Just great.
As it happens this person - Charlotte Gill - has often flooded twitter with examples of what she says is wasteful woke spending. So she has form.
Got any examples because what to her is waste is probably sane spending.
I can't recall details. It was usually research projects at universities that irked her iirc. With obscure sounding topics and minute detailed investigations into things she thinks no one cares about.
Basically she does not understand what a university is for.
Still she need not worry. Looks like most UK HEIs are heading to debtors prison anyway.
It would be fascinating to know whether this lady, or any similar such personages, have devised proposals to save proper, serious sums of money - or if it's just the usual culture wars guff about council diversity officers, obscure academic research and the foreign aid budget.
There are probably significant numbers of very daft voters who get wound up about all this sort of stuff because, relative to their own household wealth, the sums involved sound colossal. Therefore, it follows that cutting out the unimportant-to-me-therefore-bad spending will pay for fat pensions, hospitals that will treat you sooner than 2028 and all manner of other goodies, when in fact it's all chicken feed.
Look at the example posted elsewhere - it's £810,000
But it's then split across 3 years, is work across 3 locations (Scotland, Hawaii and Samoa) and is relevant to over projects that kicked off at the same time.
And £270,000 doesn't cover many people once you factor in general university project costs I suspect 3 people max at least 1 of which is a PHD student...
Yes and no. That kind of sum is more in keeping with science/engineering grants employing post docs over a number of years. Without seeing the breakdown I suspect Michelle has secured a lot of holiday work in a rather nice part of the world. Main point is this though - it’s funded through UKRI in competition with other projects in her field. And it looks interesting. Feel free to argue against spending money in that kind of work, but I don’t believe this is an example of woke.
Oh I'm not - I don't think it's that expensive for what it is covering. my point was simply that the headline figure was for a 3 year project...
It’s still rather expensive for what it is. I’d suspect she’s got her salary paid out of it so the 7ni can get someone else in while she’s on holiday work overseas (must stop doing that…). Plus lots of travel costs and accommodation. It’s a big whack for a humanities project where you don’t have much in the way of consumables.
Comments
https://x.com/SwearingKids/status/1887583310580490461
Cheap at the price.
Once you have a culture where a) vibes are all that matters and b) we are continually scrambling round for a bit more furniture to bung on the fire, this is the natural staging post.
No wonder Bernard Cornwell was aggrieved at being beaten by his fosterfather for reading TI as a child (Peculiar People as quoted earlier on the thread).
https://lettersofnote.com/2009/10/28/we-all-feel-like-that-now-and-then/
Kangaroo court. Imagine being stupid enough to actually abide any of their rulings. How fucking stupid is Starmer.
Chewbacca: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh!"
TSE-PO: "He made a fair move. Screaming about it can't help you!"
Han Sunil: "Let him have it. It's not wise to upset a Wookiee."
TSE-PO: "But, sir! Nobody worries about upsetting a Lawyer-Droid!"
Han Sunil: "That's because Lawyer-Droids aren't known for pulling people's arms out of their sockets when they lose!"
TSE-PO: "I see your point, sir!"
[to RCS-D2] "I suggest a new strategy, RCS: let the Wookiee win!"
Trollope. Didn't make it to an MP, came last, but used the experience in his books.
I'm sure it's very good.
He lost to a candidate who, it was said, had it all over him when it came to chilling the electors' blood with far-fetched stories,
Though the Pope disagrees with him on immigration, they do agree on abortion even if Vance is on the more conservative wing of Roman Catholicism that far preferred Benedict and John Paul II to Francis
And so is Trump
Meanwhile, the legend about Newton is that he really had minimal impact as an MP. I don't know if the story that his one spoken intervention was to ask for a window in the chamber to be closed is true or not, but I don't think I care.
He went bust, and that forced him out the Commons, whence he became a novelist.
My bad.
"There's nothing on the news except fucking Trump. I'm sick of it. It's doing my head in".
I sympathised, while upbraiding her for the sweary language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNmxddPMU8Y
"Joshua Idehen - Learn To Swim"
if we count Lords who wrote, C. P Snow (Lord Snow) is on the list. Most of his novels are dating a bit, but The Masters is unforgettably top stuff in any company, drawing attention to a very fine college (though not as fine as its neighbour) in a quite good university often neglected in literature; and The Light and the Dark isn't bad too.
You could also see a more innocent explanation that the baseline "request" for finding votes was an early sample estimate, and "find more votes" just meant make another estimate.
But I've never been at a count so am basing this on television coverage and the Stand Up Maths video from the last general election:-
Surprise results I found as an election Count Agent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-hdJIWsK3A
Elon Musk, who is in the Oval Office, is asked about what detractors have described as a hostile takeover:
“The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk says. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
(And a case study in my theory that one of the keys to a good life is knowing when to stop. Had he become the prep school games master he trained to be, he might actually have got a lifetime of unquestioning adulation and retired to something like the closing sequence of Goodbye Mr Chips. Perhaps writing thrillers during the Long Vac under an assumed name but never quite confirming or denying it when boys asked him.)
Given he seems to still be releasing books it seems like his political career was a complete distraction from a successful career.
And the Eagles told him to fuck off
holidaywork overseas (must stop doing that…). Plus lots of travel costs and accommodation. It’s a big whack for a humanities project where you don’t have much in the way of consumables.@jdawsey1
"We were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office."
They chased a declining demographic, and didn't even manage to please them
You still have enough people there doing the actual counting, I imagine, though are those council employees whose ears could be bent? I cannot imagine this switch being possible without a number of people knowing, so I am sceptical whether this did actually happen in reality rather than just on the page of their dumb WhatsApp group.
Still, 11 councillors suspended - 9 Tameside, reducing the nominal Labour majority to eleventy hundred, and 2 Stockport, whose loss may have a numerical effect.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1889424736301486506
Elon Musk: "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?"
Trump cares
OK, it's fairly blatant Hindutva propaganda that will give the PB Blimps apoplexy, but a massive hit and not just in India.
https://youtu.be/NgBoMJy386M?feature=shared
LucasFilm and Marvel also both seem really keen to chase new audiences, assuming the old audience would never go anywhere, and neither was worked that well.
However, it is also fair to point out that said bueacracy was brought into being by laws, enacted by elected representatives. What meaning does democracy have if an unelected official is able to overrule said laws?
The inside of the crater looks a bit like the Black Mountains in the sunshine, with wildebeest and flamingos. The landscape on the drive there is beautiful: lush, rolling, oddly like the drive towards the Black Mountains through Southern Herefordshire.
You'd need a lot of people in play to do something deliberately shady. But weird cock ups can certainly happen. Weird situation in a parish election in Swindon once where they messed up the tabulation somehow and a bunch of people were declared the victor with more votes than there had been ballots (I don't recall how the heck that happened). It was picked up very quickly, but it still required a formal electoral petition to sort out as you cannot just reverse an error made at a declaration.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx25m165y44o
US absolute banana republic. And of course the Democrats don't have a leg to stand on either with similar behaviour.
Newton's main contribution to the nation beyond his scientific career was a lengthy term in charge of the Royal Mint, during which he improved the coinage and succeeded in foiling many counterfeiters.
"I, a parish councillor in nowheresville, cannot ignore the law - is that democracy?"
An exagerration, but not by as much as you'd think.
Will we ever know the full story behind Epstein? Nothing adds up about that guy.
Personally, my guess is there are enough wonks in politics who do attend, and enough counters there on the night, to make this a highly improbable story.
EDIT: crossed over with Kle's response which confirms my guess.
It's clear that an attempt is being made to establish a kleptocratic oligarchy.