The world watches on – politicalbetting.com
The world watches on – politicalbetting.com
?Due to the regime cutting off the internet last 5 days messages coming out of Iran have decreased by 99% – this one made it through. The scale of civilian massacre is far beyond what has been reported. The figure of 12,000 killed is described as ‘almost a joke’ compared to… pic.twitter.com/Utf7yDtt6N
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Edit: Fake news!
Economy rebounded on monthly figure in November - up 0.3%, and it turned out that it didn’t fall in September, after revisions…
On 3 month figure - up slightly 0.1% but the negative number last month also revised away…
Flattish but not negative/no recession.
Nobody should get carried away on upside with these numbers, but plenty of doom mongers were getting carried away on the downside, and the evidence is that the slight negative numbers at the end of last year were flattish/ slightly up… unlikely now to get a negative number q4
https://x.com/faisalislam/status/2011713807002050914
What seems clear though is Trump has managed to squander his recently acquired cloak of invincibility, like his predecessors did over Assad.
Elon Musk backs down in row over Grok AI undressing tool
The X platform said it had imposed restrictions on editing images, after Keir Starmer threatened legal action against the chatbot
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/grok-ai-x-chatgpt-ai-images-elon-musk-8cwwldb7l
The chief constable of West Midlands police feels “unfairly treated” and is resisting pressure to resign, despite having lost the confidence of the home secretary.
Craig Guildford is said to be “lawyering up” after Shabana Mahmood called for him to go over a decision to ban Israeli fans from travelling to a Maccabi Tel Aviv match against Aston Villa.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-chief-west-midlands-ai-false-maccabi-tel-aviv-fan-ban-0vxk9lrbg
Terrifying.
This isn’t to blame the ONS. They’re doing their best with partial data. Every developed country has the same challenges.
Oh, and a record 8 MLRs.
1) It has a continuous and ancient culture and a history of conquering and being conquered
2) It had a unique and interesting ancient religion (which clings on for a few)
3) It is Islamic, middle eastern and (while ethnically very mixed) definitely not Arab
4) Its ethnic and language roots are Indo European, not semitic
5) While the language is Indo European, its script is Arabic
6) Its cultural history is glorious and continuous
7) Its version of Islam is followed only by about 10% of Muslims, and it is the only large shia country
8) For shia and sunni relationships don't think about UK ecumenism, compare it with 16th century RC v protestant relations
9) Iranians are proud and educated
10) The west is profoundly ignorant of Iranian history. For example, In how many universities in the UK can you study the Elamites compared with the number you can study ancient Greece and Rome or ancient Judea?
Trump's deeply foolish cheering them on without having any levers of sufficient import to pull reminds me of the betrayal of the demonstrators in Budapest '56 and Prague '68.
That said didn't she win nearly £750,000 compensation for unfair dismissal.
Edit it was £679,452.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-28454800
Here is everyone's favourite car, rocket and nude maker with a 45-second parable about GDP estimates:-
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gAjdU-tZuTQ
https://apholt.com/2023/01/03/the-myth-of-religion-as-the-cause-of-most-wars/#:~:text=Steven Pinker has provided his,reviewed 2011 book, Better Angels.
As humanists remind us and need reminding, humans cause wars.
Russian deaths in the last couple of months are higher than the recruitment rate, their army is slowly but surely being dismantled.
Have to LOL at Russians saying that there’s fewer of their tanks being destroyed. Da, it’s true, but only because they have almost no tanks left to field.
It’s quite likely that the real story is going to be much worse than we think at the moment. Tens of thousands of casualties.
There’s an unconfirmed story of a several banks about to collapse, including that which handles government payments. If that’s true, we might see the military start to change their tune if they don’t get paid.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b006qykl
LBC
@LBC
'We drank ten pints, got bang on the whiskey.'
@iamtomskinner
says JD Vance is a 'down to earth, normal guy'.
https://x.com/LBC/status/2011500435333435658?s=20
Edited extra bit: I take the point on it not being quite the same as a jihad or crusade, though.
It's also why closing down debates by insisting disagreement is a moral wrong or trying to take people down for using wrongspeak are major red flags that someone wants to win an argument not through reasoned intelligence and persuasion but by defining the rules of the game and red carding anyone who has the temerity to dissent.
(Asking for a friend.)
https://x.com/spacex/status/2011720896822604226
I am one of the few employees at my firm that can access any website he likes.
For research and investigation purposes, of course.
I have actually watched porn on my work laptop and 26 inch monitor.
I had to investigate somebody being very naughty.
His radio series on the “Invention of x country” was brilliant.
As for Iran, there's a sense the moment has passed (this time). Had America intervened late last week, who knows? Even now, I'm hearing some are turning on Pahlavi as a possible future leader because of his closeness to Trump - it may be the post-theocratic Iran doesn't turn out as Washington and Trump would like or hope. Revolutions are like that - they don't always go where you want or expect.
The Beast - the nexus of online advertising & social media that has done so much to make this world a Joy Joy place.
Wes Streeting says he is ‘horrified’ that Craig Guildford, the chief Constable of West Midlands Police, is still in post and that ‘anyone with integrity would resign’
He tells TimesRadio that the fact he has failed to do so is a ‘stain on his character’ and says he will be ‘horrified’ if he is still in place by the end of the day"
https://x.com/Steven_Swinford/status/2011706974447063307
Then, one of my teachers gave a really gripping lesson about the realities of ancient slavery.
AI could become a "weapon of mass destruction of jobs" if urgent action is not taken, according to London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan."
https://news.sky.com/story/sadiq-khan-ai-could-usher-in-new-era-of-mass-unemployment-13494305
We have a PCC in the West Midlands - for now. That person was duly elected and ultimately it's their decision, rightly or wrongly.
This whole business has been an example of ineptitude in extremis and the argument Guildford (the man, not the city) should be sacked is a powerful one given everything that has happened but that does not condone further Government intervention in the form of expanding the power of Ministers.
What Mahmood is proposing, I believe, is analogous to what used to be the case in London when the Commissioner of the Met could only be hired and fired via the Home Secretary (until the coming of the Mayor).
https://x.com/Kaos_Vs_Control/status/2011511214161961097?s=20
(Did he actually directly lie to parliament? I can't be bothered wading through all the comment on this.)
Introducing . . . Nonce Finance
No, us neither.
https://www.ft.com/content/43b00d73-8a76-494a-8b5f-87dcab406ea5
And
In cryptography, a nonce is an arbitrary number that can be used just once in a cryptographic communication. It is often a random or pseudo-random number issued in an authentication protocol to ensure that each communication session is unique, and therefore that old communications cannot be reused in replay attacks. Nonces can also be useful as initialization vectors and in cryptographic hash functions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce
In particular the 'misled parliament' bit seems more innocuous to me than the many failings of Cressida Dick for instance before she ultimately went.
WMP made the evidence fit the frame, and unfortunately the evidence was very faulty and Guildford personally delivered that faulty evidence. Does the buck stop with Mr Guildford? Quite probably. Should he fall? Probably.
What is depressing is members of the current Cabinet as well as the Shadow Cabinet have framed this as anti-Israel/Jewish rather than as an operational safety issue. I suspect in the first instance the first consideration was for legitimate concerns over public safety. It then all got swept away in a tide of ethnic and geopolitics with a large side order of incompetence.
It’s rather amusing when American cryptologists don’t understand the dual meaning.
Youre trying to sell mediocrity.
Glitter and turds spring to mind
“My basic wager in interpreting modern history is to bias toward the thought that it might be unprecedented,” Tooze told me. “I’m interested in the way the present continuously breaks us. It challenges us. It does not, when you’re honest and serious about it, confirm what you know.” In The Deluge, his 2014 book about the legacy of the first world war, Tooze described the way early-20th-century world leaders confronted “the radical novelty” of a world in which the US economy was newly dominant. These days, Tooze spends most of his time tracking a dynamic that he believes is similarly unprecedented and consequential: the rise of China as an economic superpower.
In Tooze’s view, what he calls the “radicalism of the present” keeps many people, including policymakers, from seeing the world as it actually is.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age
It isn't Iraq.
It is the size of California, Texas and Montana combined. About the same as Alaska.
With vast deserts and inaccessible mountain ranges.
Totally useless.
Boris Johnson and his Government has lurched from crisis to crisis and U-turn to U-turn.
To correct one error, even two, might make sense.
But when they've notched up 12 U-turns and rising, the only conclusion is serial incompetence
https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1301257157011218441?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q