On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
Zahawi is the biggest Tory beast so far to defect to Reform, a former holder of a great Office of State no less as Chancellor and a member of both Johnson and Truss' Cabinets. As TSE and the tweets show though, his tax affairs and his former attacks on Farage and Reform have muted the damage for Kemi and the Conservatives and created potential problems for Reform
When Jenrick finally jumps ship the label of "big beast" might not count as he is allegedly just 5ft5.
I've encountered him. While he's not a giant, he's certainly not that short.
I’m becoming a PB Tory! But the Conservatives, in Badenoch, Lam & Jenrick, have more oomph than any of the other parties. They actually seem more normal, which isn’t something you’d have said 2-3 years ago
You probably aren’t saying it now either, but I am!
The polling bears your analysis out:
They do, however, have a very difficult set of local election results this year to navigate. If they can manage that, and if Kemi and co can continue to be heard (unlike six months ago), then it is far from impossible they could continue their resurgence.
Thanks for posting the chart. It clearly shows what I mentioned in the previous thread. Conservative Party support was recovering after the election but it went into rapid decline after Badenoch was chosen leader at the end of October 2024 and then low plateaued until a few months ago when it ticked back upwards, but so far nowhere near to where it was when Badenoch became leader.
On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
I’m becoming a PB Tory! But the Conservatives, in Badenoch, Lam & Jenrick, have more oomph than any of the other parties. They actually seem more normal, which isn’t something you’d have said 2-3 years ago
You probably aren’t saying it now either, but I am!
The polling bears your analysis out:
They do, however, have a very difficult set of local election results this year to navigate. If they can manage that, and if Kemi and co can continue to be heard (unlike six months ago), then it is far from impossible they could continue their resurgence.
That chart is fascinating: almost exactly 12 months ago, Reform passed the Conservatives and since then the two lines look like a mirror image of each other. And since August, the Green-Labour shares have looked equally inversely correlated.
Labour lost voters to Reform early doors and then, as you say, it has been a Tory-Reform swingathon. While the Tories have enticed some folk back from Reform it looks like the ex-Labour contingent are gone.
I’m becoming a PB Tory! But the Conservatives, in Badenoch, Lam & Jenrick, have more oomph than any of the other parties. They actually seem more normal, which isn’t something you’d have said 2-3 years ago
You probably aren’t saying it now either, but I am!
The polling bears your analysis out:
They do, however, have a very difficult set of local election results this year to navigate. If they can manage that, and if Kemi and co can continue to be heard (unlike six months ago), then it is far from impossible they could continue their resurgence.
That chart is fascinating: almost exactly 12 months ago, Reform passed the Conservatives and since then the two lines look like a mirror image of each other. And since August, the Green-Labour shares have looked equally inversely correlated.
With the LDs pootling along doing their own thing.
'Their own thing' being 'bugger all' in this context.
On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
Mogg and/or Truss could be that tipping point.
Get Jenners and then pull the ladder up is the optimum strategy.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
That is just bonkers even by Wootton's usual standards.
I’m becoming a PB Tory! But the Conservatives, in Badenoch, Lam & Jenrick, have more oomph than any of the other parties. They actually seem more normal, which isn’t something you’d have said 2-3 years ago
You probably aren’t saying it now either, but I am!
The polling bears your analysis out:
They do, however, have a very difficult set of local election results this year to navigate. If they can manage that, and if Kemi and co can continue to be heard (unlike six months ago), then it is far from impossible they could continue their resurgence.
That chart is fascinating: almost exactly 12 months ago, Reform passed the Conservatives and since then the two lines look like a mirror image of each other. And since August, the Green-Labour shares have looked equally inversely correlated.
With the LDs pootling along doing their own thing.
You can't expect them to want to get involved with national politics.
On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
Mogg and/or Truss could be that tipping point.
Get Jenners and then pull the ladder up is the optimum strategy.
Jenners knows if Reform win the next GE Farage will be PM and Tice likely Chancellor and his career will not be going far.
By contrast in the Tory Party he is now heir apparent to Kemi if she loses the next GE and if Farage also loses the next GE he would be the best placed person in either the Tories or Reform to unite the right again under his leadership and become LOTO. Certainly as long as we keep FPTP the biggest winner from a divided right are Labour and the LDs
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
T and R are very useful though. RATES is quite good too.
I use SPARE as my starter word. I've got it in two tries 56 times out of 1000 games. 5% My most common result is three tries. 36% of the time.
BREAKING Peers have voted 201 to 169 in favour of a "regret" motion over the Government's Chagos deal.
This is a formal parliamentary procedure for members to express strong disapproval or concern about the Chagos treaty without actually stopping it from becoming law.
It sounds like peers have NOT tabled a kill motion which would have stopped the treaty stone dead. This would have been very rare in Parliamentary terms.
Rumour is the Conservatives did not want a kill motion. Speculation that they may not have wanted to set a precedent for if/when they get back into power. More on @GBNEWS.
Somehow I don't believe this. If the Conservatives wanted to kill the bill I'm sure they would. Which suggests they have a reason not to. It could be constitutional given Labour wants to shake up the House of Lords and this would give them a pretext. I suspect not. Another possible reason is they don't actually want the Chagos deal with Mauritius to be stopped.
It's worth asking why the Starmer government is going through all this grief to maintain an American base when it could just walk away and tell the Americans to deal with it themselves. American administrations upto Biden told the UK in no uncertain terms to sort things out with Mauritius. Trump's position is ambiguous but he's also using Diego Garcia a lot at the moment. His administration is close to Badenoch.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
That is just bonkers even by Wootton's usual standards.
The righties make Your Party seem united.
Capitulation to Islam?
Zahawi is a liberal Muslim on record as saying his whole family drank alcohol without a qualm.
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
I’m surprised that those who hate Musk, Trump, Miller and co haven’t just been flooding the internet with naked fake images of Melania, Ivanka, Mrs Miller, Mrs Vance, Nazi Barbie etc generated by Grok so that those senior politicians have to face what is being enabled and suddenly might not find that it falls under free speech.
Perhaps it's because they aren't horrible people?
The problem that they may or may not recognise is that it's not just Grok.
We are now into the world of local text-to-video "AI". Some can run on your computer. Some will automatically buy compute time on the cloud (Amazon etc). More and more, they are being made easy to setup - I saw a test app (for mobile) that just needs you to setup a cloud account with Amazon, and it does the rest.
So they are going to fall down the rabbit hole of chasing freeware on the internet. See the War On Encryption and the nascent War On VPNs.
There is no clear answer here - stopping this technology is now nearly impossible. Too put meaningful speed bumps out there would require intrusion on a scale that would make the Chinese State giggle - we are talking about the state having full, continuous, access to your devices.
This is the thinking I went through yesterday they made me conclude that this technology will destroy democracy.
The technology is out there now and I don't think you can stop it without very drastic authoritarian steps (either 100% monitoring, or banning men from using any sort of compute device).
The history of porn use on the internet would suggest that the technology will be widely used by men. Its use will be motivated not just to titillate, but to intimidate and punish women. This will provide a backlash from women.
So you either have men using this technology to psychologically subjugate women, or you have the female backlash against this technology imposing authoritarian controls on technology to prevent that.
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
That's good, but are these tools specific enough to be banned? Tools can generally be used to create more things than one.
They will need to completely ban image editing. Deepfakes started with Photoshop, after all.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Why does a roast dinner taste so delicious?
In a word, gravy. Remarkably this is a subject which pops up in Dickens remarkably often. he has a little bit of a thing about it. (Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House for two.)
On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
They are a gang who have screwed the country, so you have to grant them a certain competency for doing so without ever being in government.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Why does a roast dinner taste so delicious?
In a word, gravy. Remarkably this is a subject which pops up in Dickens remarkably often. he has a little bit of a thing about it. (Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House for two.)
The Christmas dinner in Great Expectations as well.
On topic... this is a win for the Fukkers and a blow for the Kemi Project and to say otherwise is pure cope.
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
Mogg and/or Truss could be that tipping point.
Get Jenners and then pull the ladder up is the optimum strategy.
He'll strike a hard bargain though. He's a Big Beast and he knows it.
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
That's good, but are these tools specific enough to be banned? Tools can generally be used to create more things than one.
They will need to completely ban image editing. Deepfakes started with Photoshop, after all.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
You know, that is more than I ever felt the need to know about your fantasy life.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Why did Dubai take over from Singapore with that section of the right?
I’m becoming a PB Tory! But the Conservatives, in Badenoch, Lam & Jenrick, have more oomph than any of the other parties. They actually seem more normal, which isn’t something you’d have said 2-3 years ago
You probably aren’t saying it now either, but I am!
Are you really a PB Tory or are you an anti-Labour or anti-"Left" person who has decided the Conservatives, rather than Reform, are now the most likely group to get Labour out of office?
I wouldn't say I was anti-Labour or anti-left. I spent a great deal of my life voting Labour, and have sympathy with the left, including the Green Party and Jeremy Corbyn. I think it's best to be true to myself, and vote for the party I agree with most at a particular time rather than support a team in the way I support Arsenal, who I want to win whether I agree with the manager and his tactics or not
Thank you for the response and I agree Kemi Badenoch has had a decent few months though she didn't impress on Laura K's show yesterday which should have been an easy ask for her. She sounded unconvincing on foreign policy and while clearly recognising slavish adherence to Washington doesn't sit well with the electorate under Trump, she couldn't formulate an alternative on Greenland without either looking antagonistic toward the Trump administration or looking too pro-Europe so she ended up nowhere.
The Corbyn line is superficially attractive but its failings were exposed in 2019 and for all it doesn't stop a similar line being advanced in the future, is there an election winning constituency for an outright socialist programme - there hasn't been since 1945.
If you are politically non-aligned (which I'm not), then, yes, you can pick and choose from the buffet of policies but at an election you have to vote for a candidate and a party, not a selection of ideas in different parties and that's the problem. If you can't find a party with whose parties you are in full agreement, it's back to the lowest common denomiantor.
Trump's deportation numbers are running well below Bush's, Obama's and Biden's. Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
The good thing about both these visions is that the majority of voters firmly reject them. The other good thing is that they are both arcane mixtures of that which is unwanted, that which is self referentially incoherent when mixed, that which is impractical, that which is impossible, that which is a lunatic fantasy and that which the voters of Clacton certainly don't think is what they are voting for.
Reform's detailed manifesto for 2029 is going to get a lot of attention. If Reform do form a government (I don't think they will) it will in fact be high spend (so high tax) nationalist social democracy.
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Why does a roast dinner taste so delicious?
I think it creates a sense of comfort and security. So long as the roast potatoes are cooked properly.
On Facebook (yes, I'm the only person left still using it), I've had a number of links to the Liz Truss Show, which touches new depths of banality and self-justification.
Our beloved Prime Minister talks to people who she likes and who generally agree with her (I bet we'd all like that). Rees Mogg fetched up and to be honest he looked like someone who wished he was somewhere else. Dan Wootton, who apparently has "the receipts" (I don't know either) has followed Truss down the "it's all a big conspiracy against me" plughole and of course she lapped up all his claims about the deep state and all that nonsense.
Apparently, "the Establishment" wanted and expected Sunak to win as he was "their man" at which point I began to lose consciousness as well as interest. At no point did either Wootton or Truss even concede the possibility her many and manifest shortcomings as a politician and leader might in any way have contributed to her political demise.
I mean, the woman isn't even an MP - neither is Rees Mogg, and they are given money for podcasts and gigs on GB News. It just goes to show how their brand of half witted conservatism won't go quietly into the night. I bet Badenoch wishes they'd disappear.
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
T and R are very useful though. RATES is quite good too.
I use SPARE as my starter word. I've got it in two tries 56 times out of 1000 games. 5% My most common result is three tries. 36% of the time.
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
My first word only has one vowel, and I regularly score 90+ for skill.
Trump's deportation numbers are running well below Bush's, Obama's and Biden's. Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
Is that partly because they're holding people in detention centres that are being used as work camps to create a profit for the companies running them?
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
That's good, but are these tools specific enough to be banned? Tools can generally be used to create more things than one.
They will need to completely ban image editing. Deepfakes started with Photoshop, after all.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
You know, that is more than I ever felt the need to know about your fantasy life.
My neighbour is a sixty-ish bloke, so I really don't want that image in my head....
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
My first word only has one vowel, and I regularly score 90+ for skill.
I find adieu serves me well. It is surprising how sparsely used is the letter o.
My biggest issue is some of the stupid Americanisms they use. Taffy was used recently and it had nothing to do with Welsh people.
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Why does a roast dinner taste so delicious?
I think it creates a sense of comfort and security. So long as the roast potatoes are cooked properly.
I am with you there. A satisfying rattle from the roasting tin and the potatoes earlier.
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
T and R are very useful though. RATES is quite good too.
I use SPARE as my starter word. I've got it in two tries 56 times out of 1000 games. 5% My most common result is three tries. 36% of the time.
STARE would be better. More use of T than P.
It isn't necessarily about getting the letters. You want to split the solution space into as many bins as possible whilst keeping the largest bin small.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Why did Dubai take over from Singapore with that section of the right?
Finally felt well enough to cook Christmas dinner today - ham, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts, mashed parsnip and carrots, braised red cabbage, stuffing and apple & pear sauce.
Why does a roast dinner taste so delicious?
In a word, gravy. Remarkably this is a subject which pops up in Dickens remarkably often. he has a little bit of a thing about it. (Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House for two.)
The Christmas dinner in Great Expectations as well.
Joe gave me some more gravy.
Only because that bastard Pumblechook nabbed all the meat. (Apart from the pork pie...)
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
She's making suggestions even Trump hasn't touched, whilst Farage is riding high, I don't think it is worth the distraction to him for her to join the ranks.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Why did Dubai take over from Singapore with that section of the right?
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Why did Dubai take over from Singapore with that section of the right?
Singapore execute you for doing drugs
And Dubai ain't no democracy.
Dubai don't do taxes. Can't get much more of a Reform wet dream than that.
I could just about cope with Badenoch as a substitute for Farage, with the near certainty she would be a complete disaster as prime minister. She's lazy, she never thinks anything through, she's arrogant and aggressive. The risk is she might try and push through some of her half baked ideas.
Farage and Badenoch as a gruesome twosome doesn't bear thinking about.
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
That's good, but are these tools specific enough to be banned? Tools can generally be used to create more things than one.
They will need to completely ban image editing. Deepfakes started with Photoshop, after all.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
And even the most Puritanical model can be subverted. Because these systems are not really thinking.
even if you could lock them down to the point of being no use for this, the open source models are out there. And there are no controls on them.
When we get the Fukker/tory coalition they will need a Robron/Swarla style couple name. Farenoch is probably the best.
If, by some miracle, Kemi makes it to the next election and then, by some further and even less likely, miracle is in a position to be the senior partner in a tory/Fukker coalition then Farage will betray and depose her within a year.
Trump's deportation numbers are running well below Bush's, Obama's and Biden's. Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
Is that partly because they're holding people in detention centres that are being used as work camps to create a profit for the companies running them?
Your regular reminder that the US alt-right, for many years, claimed that masked Federal agents in black would swarm into States, arrest people for non-existent crimes and haul them off to detention camps. Where they would vanish.
Trump's deportation numbers are running well below Bush's, Obama's and Biden's. Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
Trump wants a reaction. He wants people to be scared, to protest and have ICE clash with them. If he can claim order has broken down - even if it's been deliberately provoked - that gives him legal cover to invoke emergency powers and significantly strengthen his control over the state.
When we get the Fukker/tory coalition they will need a Robron/Swarla style couple name. Farenoch is probably the best.
If, by some miracle, Kemi makes it to the next election and then, by some further and even less likely, miracle is in a position to be the senior partner in a tory/Fukker coalition then Farage will betray and depose her within a year.
Badenage trips more easily off the tongue. Reads like an artisanal process of some sort.
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
That's good, but are these tools specific enough to be banned? Tools can generally be used to create more things than one.
They will need to completely ban image editing. Deepfakes started with Photoshop, after all.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
And even the most Puritanical model can be subverted. Because these systems are not really thinking.
even if you could lock them down to the point of being no use for this, the open source models are out there. And there are no controls on them.
Though doesn't the legal risk fall on the person using it, not just the software distributor?
So anyone using it in the way you describe to make nudies of their neighbour without consent is potentially putting themselves on the sex offenders register.
When we get the Fukker/tory coalition they will need a Robron/Swarla style couple name. Farenoch is probably the best.
If, by some miracle, Kemi makes it to the next election and then, by some further and even less likely, miracle is in a position to be the senior partner in a tory/Fukker coalition then Farage will betray and depose her within a year.
Trump's deportation numbers are running well below Bush's, Obama's and Biden's. Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
Trump wants a reaction. He wants people to be scared, to protest and have ICE clash with them. If he can claim order has broken down - even if it's been deliberately provoked - that gives him legal cover to invoke emergency powers and significantly strengthen his control over the state.
The problem with provocateurs is that even when you know them for what they are, sometimes you have little option but to respond, such is their ability to despoil.
Oooh, Richard Tice has blocked Big Dan on X and he is not happy
'@danwootton Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament. But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…' https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
Interesting. Wootton appears to be the only person prepared to go anywhere near Liz Truss these days, so if that's indicative of factions forming on the Right, then it looks as if a Truss-to-Reform move is off the table.
I sensed when I went to the Tice thinktank session that there are two quite distinct versions of populist right forming, and whilst they cohabit happily on probably 2/3 of the policy agenda, they really don’t have the same visceral motivation or belief system.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Why did Dubai take over from Singapore with that section of the right?
Singapore execute you for doing drugs
And Dubai ain't no democracy.
That might be it. OK to be a police state, but not a nanny state. Singapore is definitely one of those.
I am always struck by the admiration of people strongly anti-immigrant for a country that is 90% immigrant.
Trump's deportation numbers are running well below Bush's, Obama's and Biden's. Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
Trump wants a reaction. He wants people to be scared, to protest and have ICE clash with them. If he can claim order has broken down - even if it's been deliberately provoked - that gives him legal cover to invoke emergency powers and significantly strengthen his control over the state.
Trump said himself the other day that he regrets not ordering seizure of voting machines in 2020 by the National Guard. He may well do exactly that this November mid-terms. He has no restraints.
BREAKING: Senator Mark Kelly sues Pete Hegseth, DOD, and others over Hegseth's censure of Kelly and effort to reduce his retirement grade, alleging violations of the First Amendment, due process, Speech & Debate Clause, and federal laws.
Apologies if I missed this earlier, however a fairly decisive move on Musk / Grok and similar. A provision from the OSA may come into force as soon as this week. *
The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot.
The Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.
Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person's consent, were not "harmless images" but "weapons of abuse". ... It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but until now legislation which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced, despite passing in June 2025.
* This is I think normal. There are provisions from the Equality Act 2010 which are still not in force in England, unlike Wales and Scotland.
That's good, but are these tools specific enough to be banned? Tools can generally be used to create more things than one.
They will need to completely ban image editing. Deepfakes started with Photoshop, after all.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
And even the most Puritanical model can be subverted. Because these systems are not really thinking.
even if you could lock them down to the point of being no use for this, the open source models are out there. And there are no controls on them.
Though doesn't the legal risk fall on the person using it, not just the software distributor?
So anyone using it in the way you describe to make nudies of their neighbour without consent is potentially putting themselves on the sex offenders register.
Only if they share them or get searched for something else.
When we get the Fukker/tory coalition they will need a Robron/Swarla style couple name. Farenoch is probably the best.
If, by some miracle, Kemi makes it to the next election and then, by some further and even less likely, miracle is in a position to be the senior partner in a tory/Fukker coalition then Farage will betray and depose her within a year.
Badenage trips more easily off the tongue. Reads like an artisanal process of some sort.
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
My first word only has one vowel, and I regularly score 90+ for skill.
I always start with ther previous day's solution and then always use all revealed letters. Still on 97%
Excellent progress for Kemi especially in regard to Farage
May she continue her progress
It is suggesting in those numbers, those who tell pollsters they will vote Reform, actually prefer Kemi as PM, that’s important if “party support” in mid term is protest vote and preferred PM more indicative of what happens in May 29.
However ultimately we have to confess, Kemi’s Achilles Heel right now, unless it can be mitigated, is, as far as she has one, the party’s policy platform. “Cavemen done just fine without a welfare state” for example.
A Conservative Rise at expense of Reform may move everything towards a 1983 result, a split tribe cancels itself out allowing “majority unliked” government a landslide.
Predicting the next GE becomes even more uncertain.
I think a window is plausibly opening for the Badenoch Tories to essentially present themselves as the radical small-state, deregulating, low tax, free enterprise brooms. If they can sound plausible on immigration and asylum matters too, then they essentially inhabit a decent ground on the political spectrum to win back traditional centre-right voters, some of the professional classes and those for whom a Reform vote is possible but who cannot bring themselves to vote for Farage when the crunch point comes.
Now that coalition in and of itself probably wouldn’t win them more than 35% of the electorate absolute tops, but that would be more than enough to keep them relevant and on current fragmentation could even win them an election (no laughing at the back).
This is admittedly an overly-optimistic scenario but losing some of the old guard to Reform likely helps them in this situation. The two main problems they have are (a) infighting and leadership - if they’re going to go in on this, they have to look credible and to look credible they are going to have to stick with Badenoch as leader - anything else undermines the narrative of stability etc (b) any sensible reform of benefits in this country requires a discussion around the triple lock and the oldies are one part of their voter coalition they will find it hard to lose.
I know what you are saying, but there’s a reason for being reduced to just 120 MPs, how quickly will that be forgotten?
Reform keep banging on about “Boris Wave” the Conservative Government record on immigration, securing the borders, and assimilation of migrants to UK values, whilst Labour keep banging on about the last Conservative governments records on NHS, public services, cost of living - it’s possible that improvements in coming years on those things the, sitting government gets credit for.
To what extent does the May, Boris, Truss, Sunak government record still hurt the Conservatives not just in 2029, but the 2030’s elections too?
In the bigger picture to this, psephological comparisons with today and the 2 party past, just cannot be made anymore imo - it’s two different things now so comparing can’t neatly read across - same with “worst satisfaction ratings ever” questions.
However, correct me where wrong, what interests me is the current governments “true comparison” - and how, as explained above, lot of pebble counting stats don’t read across so leaves us with “psychological hunch’s” - with Lady Thatchers turbulent and unpopular first term.
What saved the Conservatives in 1983 General Election was neatly split opposition votes, whilst what delivered a landslide win in 1987 was the improved economy, and concern the opposition would fuck it up. You can be in government through some turbulent and unpopular years, and then as a party get even better results.
And where you say credibility in 2029 can only come from sticking with Kemi, credibility in 2029 would also be the policy platform Kemi is tied to - and if it’s not a popular policy platform across the electorate, is one reason she would be sent to Leadership Graveyard. But, if trying to get the best possible result up from 120 MPs is that a “best way to stop a PM Farage is Vote Conservative” message - that would need credibility in policy platform to back it up. Do Conservatives junk Kemi to junk her policies for others with broader appeal across all electorate, or junk Kemi in attempt to out battle Farage with Jenrick?
Do you see what I mean by how precarious Badenoch’s position is? The job simply boils down to put on MPs from historic low of 120 - that’s the only performance measurement really.
Is “cavemen done fine without a welfare state” popular policy across the broader electorate come 2029, whilst option of going toe to toe with Farage on Reforms narrow messaging, to win voters back and put on 120+ MPs, is the slicker Jenrick the better option?
Do you mean is campaigning on welfare reform enough?
No, of course it isn't. But the country is absolutely looking for someone to articulate an alternative, and there is an opening for a party to move to offer that alternative without resorting to the extremes of Reform or the Greens.
Plausibly, the Tories can move into that ground. Badenoch isn't the finished article, but she was flailing hopelessly 12 months ago and has measurably improved. There are cautious signs that she has some understanding of some of the things that need to be fixed* - over-regulation, lack of dynamism, a rigid and complex tax system, an over-powerful process state and civil service bureaucracy, disincentives to investment and enterprise etc. Whether she can continue in that vein, the jury is still out. I have always thought she has potential - I'm not wholly convinced it's enough to turn her into a true leader, but we will see.
*but as a counterpoint, so too does Starmer and Labour at times - they just don't seem to have any kind of plan to resolve them.
“{Kemi} has measurably improved”
How are you measuring Kemi’s improvement?
To some extent I have PM and LOTO (gov and opp) linked on popularity like a seesaw, one down the other up and vice versa, with no actual substance or logic to it. As example, how Labour shot up after the Truss budget in similar measure to how Con sank - but Labours own economic policies were broadly in line with the Truss budget, not just Starmer’s growth growth growth catchphrase, but the thing the markets hated most and main reason for market response, £250B of government handouts, not from growth but from borrowing, to everyone to help with inflation pain, was what Starmer had been bragging all summer he would do - TSE even wrote “Starmer has shot the Tory fox” type header supporting Starmer’s proposal, a plan Truss lifted and stole for her budget.
My point being you can have a surge upwards in popularity, whilst simultaneously talking gibberish and proposing the very worst and ruinous of policy.
So which of Kemi’s policy idea’s do you think underpin the measurable improvement? Do you foresee the manifesto proposals from “cavemen managed fine without a welfare state” being widely popular with the electorate in the 2029 GE?
I think I responded quite fundamentally to those points in my earlier reply, I'm not quite sure what point you are making.
You stated “measurably improved” but no, you didn’t detail how.
Bottom line - what is Kemi actually gaining attention with, in the wider electorate? What do the wider electorate outside party members actually like? I can quickly reel off four measurements here, that are clearly showing bad measures still.
Popular policy announcements - that wrong foot government, who have no choice but steal and implement the policy? Nope.
Strong Rebuttal? When challenged by public or interviewers about failures of last government, Boris Wave, Covid etc, strong rebuttal responses, other than Sunakesque waffle? Nope. The Russell Crowe/Mandleson answer of “I was so busy delivering my remit, i didn’t have control of rest of government - is what she still uses.
Owning PMQs like Hague did against Blair? {and this follows on from previous measure} pinning Starmer down more regular, and not allowing him to use the record of an old government from two years ago to easily punch back with. Nope. Apart from what is planned and rehearsed, Kemi still can’t ad-lib or think quickly off the cuff just like she couldn’t as government minister. This is why Kemi is so poor in so many of her interviews.
Strategy for getting voters back. Is there anything more to the strategy right now than trying to channel public anger at the Labour government? You know that’s not nearly enough come General election’s, such thing happens mid term anyway, even without a LOTO push, so it’s hard to measure if that strategy is ever a success. Are we going to claim the unpopularity of the government is down to Kemi, that a bad result for Labour this May is down to Kemi and her teams strategy? Do you realise how silly and unrealistic that sounds? Also strategy focussing exclusively on Labour is the key to the Conservatives comeback? Well, how many Con seats switched to LibDem, and the party still Below 20% in polling, where are those traditional, lifetime, Con voters now? We know where our voters are, and it’s not with Labour. So what is the strategy for getting voters back from Reform and LibDems? What are the idea’s and the policy differentials between Kemi and Farages Reform, and the LibDems, that is winning voters back? becuase only this happening can properly shore up Kemi’s position as leader and save her from the sack. An Apology for hard Brexit is what those lost to Libdem need in order to come back, is this apology coming from Badenoch?
So measurable improvement in strategy after all this time as leader? Nope. There isn’t any. It’s not clear how voters will be won back. Apart from all these continued failures, on the main things to measure not just Kemi, but all LOTO on, I can’t think of important measurable improvements you suggested are there, you certainly didn’t provide any.
Going to make it much harder for Reform to condemn Big Angie R's comeback if/when it happens. (it's a when, isn't it?)
It's a when. Starmer feels he needs her by his side, for reasons unfathomable.
She'd be a better fit in dodgy Reform.
1.I can't see Starmer surviving this year. 2.I can see her back in the saddle after Starmer falls. 3. She doesn't seem like any kind of a Reform fit, particularly when a RefCon "scoouum" coalition look like the next administration.
Are you looking forward to a RefCon love-in/bunfight?
And how the Dickens did you get Wordle in two? With a starting word of "adieu" I got it in three, which is my best for a while.
Try "CRATE"...
Hmm. Risky. Only two vowels. If I could find a five letter word with five vowels I'd try that.
My first word only has one vowel, and I regularly score 90+ for skill.
I always start with ther previous day's solution and then always use all revealed letters. Still on 97%
I used Trade this morning and did it in 2. Only once have I done it in 1...
Comments
However, there is a limit on how many tory scum the Fukkers can assimilate before they become inextricably linked with gang of incompetent psychopaths that screwed the country but we are not quite there yet.
https://x.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/2010739208097554799?s=20
You can tell a Southerner up North by the Harrington jacket and and uncomfortable grimace.
@MarkReckless
@UKIP
@Nigel_Farage
no chance. Been a Conservative all my life and will die a Conservative.'
https://x.com/nadhimzahawi/status/515940317636612096?s=20
'Has Nadhim passed away? how awful'
https://x.com/JoeBLynam/status/2010683313925599561?s=20
'@danwootton
Richard Tice viewed me as such a close mate I was invited to his joint birthday party with Isabel Oakeshott at parliament.
But if you question Reform’s capitulation to Islam, decision to report Rupert Lowe to the cops & obsession with recruiting Tory wets this is what happens…'
https://x.com/danwootton/status/2010703217454141470?s=20
The righties make Your Party seem united.
By contrast in the Tory Party he is now heir apparent to Kemi if she loses the next GE and if Farage also loses the next GE he would be the best placed person in either the Tories or Reform to unite the right again under his leadership and become LOTO. Certainly as long as we keep FPTP the biggest winner from a divided right are Labour and the LDs
Why does a roast dinner taste so delicious?
I've got it in two tries 56 times out of 1000 games. 5%
My most common result is three tries. 36% of the time.
It's worth asking why the Starmer government is going through all this grief to maintain an American base when it could just walk away and tell the Americans to deal with it themselves. American administrations upto Biden told the UK in no uncertain terms to sort things out with Mauritius. Trump's position is ambiguous but he's also using Diego Garcia a lot at the moment. His administration is close to Badenoch.
Zahawi is a liberal Muslim on record as saying his whole family drank alcohol without a qualm.
What's Wootton on?
The technology is out there now and I don't think you can stop it without very drastic authoritarian steps (either 100% monitoring, or banning men from using any sort of compute device).
The history of porn use on the internet would suggest that the technology will be widely used by men. Its use will be motivated not just to titillate, but to intimidate and punish women. This will provide a backlash from women.
So you either have men using this technology to psychologically subjugate women, or you have the female backlash against this technology imposing authoritarian controls on technology to prevent that.
Democracy dies either way.
It's very, very difficult to prevent an image editing AI from creating images of people 'in states of undress'. My favourite image AI model, FLUX2, was claimed by its creators to be locked down so as not to be able to produce nude images. Took me less than half an hour to prove them wrong.
The end result will probably be image editing functions on cloud AI being geoblocked in the UK. Nobody's training a specific puritanical AI just because Labour want them to, training models is hugely expensive.
And as usual there's little or nothing the government can do about locally hosted AI. Plenty of those, in particular the Chinese produced models, will happily generate nude celebs or take a picture of your next door neighbour and put her in thigh boots and a corset...
And well supplied already with psychos.
Version 1 is the Tice world view. It accords, I think, quite closely with some posters of this parish. Its primary motivators are: climate change and net zero scepticism, vaccine scepticism, flat taxes, deregulation, libertarianism, geopolitical neutrality, mercantilist trade relations. The love children of Redwood and Lilley with a dash of Poujade.
Version 2 is the Rupert Lowe / Dan Wootton one. Shared by various SeanTs formerly of this parish. That’s very different. Its motivations are primarily cultural: nationalist bordering on white supremacist, anti immigration but particularly anti “third world” Immigration, islamophobic in particular, keen on traditional gender roles, more economically left wing than the Tice faction.
One thing notable about some populist right thinking at the moment is the great respect bordering on adulation for the Gulf states as ordered, deregulated, low tax, gas guzzling visions of how the West could have been. Trump is partial too. That’s the school of thought that welcomes a wheeler dealer like Zahawi where the Lowes or Tommy Robinson’s of the world see it as a betrayal.
Joe gave me some more gravy.
https://x.com/nytimes/status/2010783815615058327
If they could only get Lettuce Lady to join him...
The Corbyn line is superficially attractive but its failings were exposed in 2019 and for all it doesn't stop a similar line being advanced in the future, is there an election winning constituency for an outright socialist programme - there hasn't been since 1945.
If you are politically non-aligned (which I'm not), then, yes, you can pick and choose from the buffet of policies but at an election you have to vote for a candidate and a party, not a selection of ideas in different parties and that's the problem. If you can't find a party with whose parties you are in full agreement, it's back to the lowest common denomiantor.
Despite spending tens of billions more.
There is a different agenda here.
DHS confirms up to 1,000 MORE federal immigration agents are being surged into Minnesota, on top of the ~2,000 already deployed.
That means federal agents now OUTNUMBER local police in Minneapolis–St. Paul.
This is one of the largest federal law-enforcement deployments in a U.S. city in modern history, following the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good and days of mass protests.
This is no longer routine enforcement. It’s a federal occupation.
https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/2010710749832769796
Reform's detailed manifesto for 2029 is going to get a lot of attention. If Reform do form a government (I don't think they will) it will in fact be high spend (so high tax) nationalist social democracy.
You be hard pressed to beat that as a pol slogan.
Tim Miller @Timodc
Big news on the Senate map.
Mary Peltola @MaryPeltola
My name is Mary Peltola, and I'm running for U.S. Senate to fight for fish, family, and freedom
https://x.com/Timodc/status/2010724428750192960
https://x.com/MaryPeltola/status/2010699590128071017
Our beloved Prime Minister talks to people who she likes and who generally agree with her (I bet we'd all like that). Rees Mogg fetched up and to be honest he looked like someone who wished he was somewhere else. Dan Wootton, who apparently has "the receipts" (I don't know either) has followed Truss down the "it's all a big conspiracy against me" plughole and of course she lapped up all his claims about the deep state and all that nonsense.
Apparently, "the Establishment" wanted and expected Sunak to win as he was "their man" at which point I began to lose consciousness as well as interest. At no point did either Wootton or Truss even concede the possibility her many and manifest shortcomings as a politician and leader might in any way have contributed to her political demise.
I mean, the woman isn't even an MP - neither is Rees Mogg, and they are given money for podcasts and gigs on GB News. It just goes to show how their brand of half witted conservatism won't go quietly into the night. I bet Badenoch wishes they'd disappear.
Being joined by loads of LibDems?
The shame!
My biggest issue is some of the stupid Americanisms they use. Taffy was used recently and it had nothing to do with Welsh people.
(Apart from the pork pie...)
There are definitely strong hints of a return to much colder conditions later in the month.
Farage and Badenoch as a gruesome twosome doesn't bear thinking about.
Or possibly:
Halibut, Herring and Haddock say
We don't want the USA.
even if you could lock them down to the point of being no use for this, the open source models are out there. And there are no controls on them.
If, by some miracle, Kemi makes it to the next election and then, by some further and even less likely, miracle is in a position to be the senior partner in a tory/Fukker coalition then Farage will betray and depose her within a year.
So anyone using it in the way you describe to make nudies of their neighbour without consent is potentially putting themselves on the sex offenders register.
I am always struck by the admiration of people strongly anti-immigrant for a country that is 90% immigrant.
Tice and Nigey, Nigey and Tice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/trump-voting-machines-2020-election.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
BREAKING: Senator Mark Kelly sues Pete Hegseth, DOD, and others over Hegseth's censure of Kelly and effort to reduce his retirement grade, alleging violations of the First Amendment, due process, Speech & Debate Clause, and federal laws.
Kelly is represented by Arnold & Porter.
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3mcaovts4y226
You know, like Farage saying "gas 'em all".
Bottom line - what is Kemi actually gaining attention with, in the wider electorate? What do the wider electorate outside party members actually like? I can quickly reel off four measurements here, that are clearly showing bad measures still.
Popular policy announcements - that wrong foot government, who have no choice but steal and implement the policy?
Nope.
Strong Rebuttal? When challenged by public or interviewers about failures of last government, Boris Wave, Covid etc, strong rebuttal responses, other than Sunakesque waffle?
Nope. The Russell Crowe/Mandleson answer of “I was so busy delivering my remit, i didn’t have control of rest of government - is what she still uses.
Owning PMQs like Hague did against Blair? {and this follows on from previous measure} pinning Starmer down more regular, and not allowing him to use the record of an old government from two years ago to easily punch back with.
Nope. Apart from what is planned and rehearsed, Kemi still can’t ad-lib or think quickly off the cuff just like she couldn’t as government minister. This is why Kemi is so poor in so many of her interviews.
Strategy for getting voters back. Is there anything more to the strategy right now than trying to channel public anger at the Labour government? You know that’s not nearly enough come General election’s, such thing happens mid term anyway, even without a LOTO push, so it’s hard to measure if that strategy is ever a success. Are we going to claim the unpopularity of the government is down to Kemi, that a bad result for Labour this May is down to Kemi and her teams strategy? Do you realise how silly and unrealistic that sounds?
Also strategy focussing exclusively on Labour is the key to the Conservatives comeback? Well, how many Con seats switched to LibDem, and the party still Below 20% in polling, where are those traditional, lifetime, Con voters now? We know where our voters are, and it’s not with Labour. So what is the strategy for getting voters back from Reform and LibDems? What are the idea’s and the policy differentials between Kemi and Farages Reform, and the LibDems, that is winning voters back? becuase only this happening can properly shore up Kemi’s position as leader and save her from the sack.
An Apology for hard Brexit is what those lost to Libdem need in order to come back, is this apology coming from Badenoch?
So measurable improvement in strategy after all this time as leader? Nope. There isn’t any. It’s not clear how voters will be won back. Apart from all these continued failures, on the main things to measure not just Kemi, but all LOTO on, I can’t think of important measurable improvements you suggested are there, you certainly didn’t provide any.