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For now, I have been focussing on just two words – politicalbetting.com
For now, I have been focussing on just two words – politicalbetting.com
BREAKING: Former Vice President Kamala Harris has announced that she will not run for governor of California. https://t.co/sq5tbkFkqw pic.twitter.com/lw0lbt72lD
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Which is why the Germans, despite the better quality of their ships overall, never seriously contemplated a full fleet action during WW1, and, when they got trapped in one, at Jutland, their only thought was to flee as quickly as possible.
Interestingly there were a few months in late 1914 and early 1915 when the Germans did have rough equality in numbers in Dreadnoughts with the Royal Navy. But that changed once the 15-inch gun Queen Elizabeths and then the Royal Sovereigns started arriving, and once the Americans sent their 6th Battle Squadron.
She’s a two time loser. Picking her again would be insane.
Still it would make Kinabalu happy 😉
The Democrats need to look to the future.
Why would the Dems touch her?
I would not have chosen for Britain to remain neutral in WW1, I would have had us help our allies with our Navy. My issue lies with our disastrous involvement in the land war.
I know Trump did but a lot of dubious practices including pretty open bribery were involved.
Andy Beshear, Josh Stein, Tim Buttigieg, or possibly Jon Ossoff if he holds his senate seat look like better bets.
Parliament isn’t using its power, but it’s there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir
Well, it's a view.
The group is funded by anonymous donors and was described as a “lobbying organisation” by one of its former directors.
Now, an official probe has been announced by parliament’s standards commissioner, after Declassified revealed the MPs had not mentioned the trip in their register of interests.
It's one of those unwritten rules.
A bit like how Russia needed three fleets: the Baltic, Pacific and Northern?
I don't think Kamala will be up for it, so 50:1 maybe as a trading bet, but I don't see here coming in to say 10:1 so perhaps not.
PB successful 50:1s tend afaics to be around unlikely & obscure future winners rather than retreads, though I could have a faulty memory. The obvious one is perhaps Gavin Newsom.
Perhaps Kamala needs to do something which will also allow her to make some money.
Rwanda does however serve a political function, it allows more enthusiastic right wingers to argue we should join Russia and Belarus and jettison the ECHR.
What a contrast to the non-battle at Alexandria, where both Brits and French had good leadership.
They should have sailed to the West Indies as offered.
The sad passing of Councillor Neil Wilson means there will be a by election in Plaistow South in Newham which could be a fascinating test of opinion in the run up to the 2026 locals.
In November 2023, the Newham Independents won a by election in Plaistow North by over 500 votes. The former is a strongly Muslim Ward and the latter, from memory, less so but I expect the Newham Independents to go strongly on this contest. It will be interesting to see if groups like the TUSC and the new Corbyn/Sultana party stand aside to give them a clear run.
There's also a less interesting subtext in the battle between Greens and Conservatives for what I suspect will be a distant third place. Reform will no doubt stand but seem unlikely to make much impression.
There were times when British naval supremacy was lost in the Mediterranean in 1941 and 1942 as we had to protect the Atlantic supply lines, supply routes to Russia, and defend the Channel and sea routes to India all at once.
It explains why Japan had such a free ride in SE Asia over the same timeframe. Once Germany had been defeated, we deployed the British Pacific Fleet to Japan - the largest ever.
And another on Jutland: the RN failed to take advantage of the extra range of their guns. They could have had 15-20 minutes of free fire, but cocked up the range estimates so the Germans opened fire first on the first engagement.
They were short of aeroplanes, and especially quality aeoplanes, on the Malta Convoys because the RAF had nobbled earlier Fleet Air Arm attempts to develop a suitable naval fighter.
So even later they ended up with the Seafire, a bodged Spitfire which broke its legs like Bambi.
F35A vs F35B .... as DA goes on about.
Neither did Matthew Parris or Ken Clarke.
Neither did Matthew Parris or Ken Clarke.
They lost all self confidence between the wars,
feared the Germand but thought they almost deserved to be beaten, then wanted to join them, and then resented Britain for not doing the same.
It was all very weird.
Ego means that someone always thinks their plan is better and wants to be the one on top.
There's a whole group of possibles - and I'd even rate the new model Newsom's chances over hers. And we've yet to have the midterms, which might bring new faces into contention.
By WW2, Royal Navy gunnery was actually very good but, by that time, aerial attack had shifted the dial for what drove dominance at sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria
(There are some astounding videos of the wreck on YouTube, which would be more astounding but for the stupid backing music.)
Which deliver very little in the mainland European theatre.
The navy has nobbled the RAF by persuading governments to go for prestige over defence capacity.
The problem wasn’t the ships in existence.
A Germany supreme on the continent would have had the resources to build a One Ocean navy more powerful than the Home Fleet.
The secondary problem is this - Imperial Germany had a war cult. War is Good. War is God. Literally taught in the schools and universities.
It was already metastasising in fuckwit fanaticism - see the incident with the cobbler in Alsace pre WWI.
If Germany won WWI, it would have doubled and redoubled. The Cult of War would rule.
Which made WWII inevitable. Hell, the planned peace terms (occupation of Belgium, a big chunk of France) were about crippling France - for the next war. They were planning it.
So on the new timeline, in about 1928, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin makes a breakthrough in nuclear physics. Just as the drum beats for war are heating up, again…
Fun, n’est pas?
What are the local Reform politics?
Will it be a "stepping forward for my community" political naif type, will it be one of their black / brown candidates of whom there are a few, will it be a (probably Tory / Independent?) defector, or will it be one of the inheritors of the further right (being polite) type politics from their hard-right wing which exists in parts of East London?
That's not a certainty.
And performance requirements meant that aircraft had to be much less friendly to land and take off, from carriers.
The 2+ man crews were predicated on navigation requirements. In WWII, it became clear that the risks of pilots doing their own navigation had to be accepted.
So you got designs like the Firefly.
Note that they went back to 2 man crews in the early jet age.
It was the biggest stick (well, not quite) the Government had to deter those who were trying to come over and there was some evidence it was acting as such a deterrent.
There was a big cost issue but the current situation has a big cost issue as well. Presumably we'd have assembled a plane load of illegals and then flown them out to Kigali - how many flights a week would we have seen? The idea we'd have flown three or four people on a plane to Kigali was ridiculous but the desperate desire of the last Government to show their plan was "working" led us to that point.
The other side of the issue was whether we would transport those already here from their (allegedly) four star hotel accommodation to something somewhat more rudimentary on the outskirts of Kigali and I'm sure that was under consideration before the Conservatives were swept away in July 2024.
It's not just about flying illegal migrants TO Rwanda - there's the small matter of returning those whose applications were successful (about half perhaps?) and sending the unsuccessful to some other country so in the end it was much more symbolic than serious, more propaganda than practical.
So we’d be governed by an unelected elite if Reform ever formed a government? We’d have to take back control.
https://x.com/RhonddaBryant/status/1950813297722191963
Harris is a terrible politician and a terrible candidate. She should quietly fade out, stage left.
But she won’t.
"This is why @Nigel_Farage has said most of Reform’s Cabinet will not be MPs."
Farage seems to be dreaming of a US model with a de facto President (him) and a cabinet of appointees with no political base or legitimacy of their own.
The US has more checks and balances for their model. We have a parliament which has untrammelled power.
Up pipes an Air Force cadet: 'And how much of the world is covered by air?'
WW1 fuelled the rise of ethno-nationalism, but I am not sure what the alternative would have been, as the war destroyed Austria-Hungary's economy and administrative structures and the Poles certainly would have wanted their own country, although the 2nd Republic was of course multi-ethnic
50/1 seems about right.
Nuclear power start-up pulls out of Britain as Miliband drags feet
Newcleo plans to build new facility in France after frustration with Labour’s indecision
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/07/30/nuclear-power-start-up-pulls-out-uk-miliband-drags-feet
He should come to PB to see how people can defend what this Israeli govt is now doing. They're pretty crap at at it, but still..
Piers Morgan
@piersmorgan
10h
FFS. This is so disgusting. How can anyone defend what this Israeli govt is now doing???
https://x.com/piersmorgan/status/1950663160232624628
Personally I would be finding a way in which we are shipping 20,000 a year back to France in return for 20,000 (or even slightly more) legal migrants who would prefer to be in the UK rather than France.
I know this will bitterly disappoint many PBers, but on this basis Trump is clearly not gaga. He takes five press conferences (unlike Biden), does hours of interviews, seems entirely lucid, and comes across as “in complete control”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/07/30/inside-donald-trump-scotland-trip/
Some Trump controlled lucidity:
'Windmills send the whales loco'
It is remarkable that the Building Safety Regulator is rejecting 70% of applications. For comparison, the planning system rejects around 10% of applications, including on large sites. This is because delays are very costly for developers, so they try extremely hard to be compliant.
A 70% rejection rate suggests that developers *don't know how* to meet the standards the BSR is enforcing, presumably because they are unclear or unmeetable. This is very concerning.
https://x.com/SCP_Hughes/status/1950564519111016667
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta3hzIEDlhE
Chelsea have agreed a deal for Ajax defender Jorrel Hato for an initial fee of £37m, subject to the Dutch club's supervisory board approval.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cgjy77w0e41o
In the late 90s the government decided it wanted to replace the Invincibles. After much faffing an order was placed for the QE class ten years later. We couldn't remotely afford CATOBAR so STOVL it was. This resulted in having a choice of exactly one aircraft - F-35B. This aircraft was eventually rolled into the FOAS program to replace Tornado resulting in a joint RAF/RN enterprise that the RAF runs just like JFH and with similar results.
The RN would have rather stayed out of the fixed wing business altogether and had helicopter carriers that the RAF couldn't fuck around with but they have to pretend that the QE/F-35B combo is a brilliant idea. The F-35A acquisition is partially running out of money and partially discovering that if you send F-35B to sea without sufficient engineering support they come back completely fucked so the solution is to buy more aircraft that can never go to sea.
So now we've got JFL running at about 50% of the required humanpower because the RAF (and civvies) don't want to be drafted on to it because they don't want to go to sea. It takes a year to prepare for a cruise, most of the surface fleet a year to execute one and a year to recuperate. The government chooses to counter the apparently deadly serious emergent threat of the Russians by sending the CSG to the Timor Sea rather than the Baltic or the High Arctic. Bloody well done to all involved.
The AH empire wanted war. Maybe Serbia?
There were plenty of examples - two of the most cynical being a culture war transport policy, where the official policy embraced what was later identified officially by the (Conservative) Leader of the Commons as conspiracy theory, and deliberate delays in providing the Opposition with normal pre-Election access to the Civil Service.
No point sending it to any war with China as it won’t last long, won’t add much to the US fleet.
Much of the outrage was, and still is, performative. ‘Oh look at me, I’m being worthy’
Amazing to think that a ship of the line in 1815 sailed and fought pretty much like one of 1715, whereas by 19 15 we had superdreadnoughts and torpedo-firing submarines
@acyn.bsky.social
Reporter: Kash Patel reportedly found burn bags of Russiagate materials.
Trump: What?
Reporter: Burn bags
Trump: I don’t know what you mean
Reporter: Bags full of—
Trump: Oh, I thought you said appointed a man named Burn Bag
https://bsky.app/profile/acyn.bsky.social/post/3lv774c6q752l
@atrupar.com
Trump is fighting for his life to stay awake during this roundtable event
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lv7jqv75tb2a
Top of his game...
#pbpedantry
Ok, I’ll let all you old men get back to your military discussion.