Warsi has just switched teams. :D :D :D
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/eu-referendum-baroness-sayeeda-warsi-defects-from-leave-to-remain-a7090741.html

Before our resident Hannan fanboi points it out, impressed to see him straight on the twitter within minutes disputing the definition/wording if it. (Tbf to warsi it is that indie saying ‘defects’ not her) Also amused to see he had six whole pages to indulge himself in the wetherspoons referemdum “magazine”. (Hannan that is not ninfan) Thats two more pages than the “all the impartial objective info you need to know” mag gave the entire remain campaign. :lol:

Actually if i think about it its remarkable how many people i think i can plot on the political compass who i couldn’t say where they are on the EU – i think by now i expected thet everybody would have pinned their colours to the mast.

So of those i do know about:

Colleagues: 9 remainers for every 1 brextier. One such brexiter isfrom whitney and until now thought the sun shone out of cmd’s posterior.

Friends: about 70% remainers and 30% outers. The ones that work in the financial sector and abroad all say brexit is completely crackers, but less worried about the workers/human rights side of the debate.

Family: mostly remain barring my mother in law who genuinely thinks there is a scripture/spiritual reason why the EU is the path to damnation. My dad’s side of family in oarticular is very conservative, upper-middle, boarding schools, oxbridge etc. Yet the outers are actually the financially poorest and ‘left school at 16’ ones.

Will be interested to see what the police make of his internet use (at local library apparently) -intruiged to see how such an apparently outwardly nice neighbour obtained a handgun and did something so unlike the generally community-minded and decent behaviour his neighbours and locals were recounting to reporters yesterday.
In short I wonder if he was an impressionable and vulnerable ‘target’ and was radicalised and equipped for something by others who would rather someone else did their dirty work.

I was thinking of this case.

It requires a smidge of lateral thinking but neither drawing is to scale and it actually doesn’t matter assuming you jnow that rectiliniear means all the angles are 90deg.

Oh i have an a-level in maths but tbh its far far more logic than maths.

My best mate used to know him around albums 3-4, when they had the same musical publishers (zomba iirc) and would occasionally meet at ‘work’/industry events -he reports that Garvey is indeed a lovely lovely man.

loads like that round the lake at Crealy family fun park when we went last weekend. Biggest birds there are Canada geese and swans. Less likely that a swan flew over or curled one out on your shed roof, so I am saying Goose.

[edit] do geese poop mid-air? If so, imagine something that size dropping out of the sky on you. 8O

– The NHS owns more land than the space occupied by the City of Derby
– In London the NHS owns land equivalent to 3 x the size of Hyde Park

What is this “Derby” and “hyde park” guff?
Everyone knows that the convention is to express these figures in terms of Olympic swimming pools, St Paul’s Cathedral or Wales.

^^that’s a funny but ultimately ill-informed comment.

Where do you stand on adhd and methylphenidate?

where should it stop? Impotence, male pattern baldness? paedophilia? are they all medical issues that the NHS should treat as well?

Nhs already treats impotence and has done since long long before sildenafil. Public funding (rarely delivered under nhs budgets) also attempts to manage the risk of paedophiles through psychological interventions. If you want to call that ‘treatment’ you can but both are very much already resposibilities of the state and very much taxpayer funded.

Perhaps you would care to say whether you think these conditions are worthy of state/taxpayer funding or not and why? Male pattern baldness the only one i would question at all, dependent on age and impact on functioning and ability to contribute to socisety and as a taxpayer.

Hmmmmm.
A proper thinker, well read and poetic.
Knows his fine wines and food.
Rugged distinguished looks.
Seasoned but not too old.
Sense of humour.
Good at martial arts.

Cantona! :D :D

Congratulations!
Oh, and Huxley.

My mother in law was staying at the weekend. broadly i would describe her as extremely Christian, an politically lefty/liberal in terms of compassion/redistribution of wealth/social mobility, as long as it is not complicated by those troublesome other religions or sexual/gender orientations.

In a long and rewarding debate on Europe, it transpired that none of the arguments in this thread or the mainstream media actually matter- she wears a Vote Leave badge because (I quote) “It’s God’s will.”

Any other brexiteers or remainers got God on their side? Not sure I can think of a scripture-related argument either way…

Weasels ripped my flesh.
Some prankster has strava-named a load of our local trails after Zappa Albums.

Also most of the Belle and Sebastian albums have great names.
Astral Weeks
Not for Threes
Casual Sex in the Cineplex.
Know Your Enemy
Famille Nombreuse
Die Mensch Maschine

Meanwhile in the beautiful south west, the people that made their minds up last year still have their minds made up, and undecided/swing voters are still being swung this way and that by completely spurious and irrelevant nonsense from both sides. But I particularly enjoyed the german battlebus/£45k saving and protected pasty story:
Local paper coverage -crap website and crap popups warning.
Lone south west ‘remain’ MP comments on crap and increasingly doomed leadership bid and ‘day of blunders’.

Is there still time for Boris to change his mind and dig out the other article he denies he wrote at the 11th hour pinning his colours to the mast for the “remain” campaign? This is starting to look like a bigger political gamble for him than it did a couple of months ago….

Not sure if this is frothy enough for you THM, and clearly from the other side of the fence from Binners, but I will leave this here for your consideration:

BBC White Paper: Peter Lilley thinks Conservatives are the most oppressed minority in Britain.

Anyone else hear the piece on PM about Johndon’s ‘discarded’ Remain article? :D :D :D

Things moving on a little?

Can’t imagine how the Devon and cornwall police’s investigations will go: our new pcc is the same person who was campaign manager for one of the MP’s (Torbay) whose expenses were questioned last summer. :?

Northwind, Battle bus campaign was £2k per day -£38k is just for the underdeclared hotel bills. What is hard to evidence is that the buses were sent specifically to the key swing constituencies and if so how much of the battlebus spend should be attached to those individual campaigns as oppsed to the overall national budget.

Unfortunately for those mp’s whose expenses are being questioned, the internet is awash with dated photos and news reports of the them plus a bus in their patches, and very little evidence that the buses spent much time anywhere else at all. My favourite local example being cameron and the “crowd” of carefully selected locals hidden away from the rest of the angry cornish plebs inside the big shed at the royal cornwall showground. How you challenge and defend that in court will be fun reading.

£38k? Really? Has anyone any idea how much is spent on US elections?

Yes I do. Perhaps if the other parties had also spent overspent by £38k (and actually its really about multiple smaller sums of money totalling a bit more than £38k and relating to not just accommodation but the battlebuses too, in very specific swing seats won by the slenderest majorities) then there might have been a number of swing seats swinging the other way.

If we are playing that game too, could you tell me the last US president to be elected who did not spend more money overall than their opponent?

systematic outright electoral fraud of the sort we’ve now seen quite a few cities.

You would imagine that systemic widespread electoral fraud by the political party that the papers want keep out might be in the papers a bit, and also under investigation by the electoral commission and several police forces if it was actually 1) systematic 2) widespread 3) fraud.

Agreed we have a rather transparent electoral system compared to many second world countries. Absolutely no gerrymandering, rigging of lobbying legislation and stealth striking off of electoral rolls on our watch, guv.

That this issue is being pursued is suggestive that we need to keep our standards high, and that we need a channel 4!

jambalaya – Member

So Livingstone won’t apologise (no surprise) despite being asked 16 times

I am disgusted. That is a whole entire four times more than twelve times the Prime Minister sat there with his arms folded or swerved like a sixth form debating sociopath champ and refused to apologise for calling mp’s on the other side of the “Bomb Syria” debate/vote ‘terrorist sympathisers’.

Ranty bleeding heart lefty tabloid source. ;)

Happy to be with THM (for once!) in being unsure where he said anything antisemitic. Therefore clarity needed from team Jamba about what exactly it is he is busy not apologosing for.

I am glad someone got it Julian!

8)

Diana Moon Glampers

:D

Want to buy a car? I really don’t consider any money* for it.

*under or above £13k

News this week is that you could buy half a skoda octavia for that.

still got to better than paradise towers :D

oh and recently I find myself tiring of Maseratis.

munford and sons. are any of them mr munford’s children?

softroaders

caraway seeds

[professional hat on] low fat/diet versions of normal food. just eat less or exercise more [/professional hat]

guitar amps with loads of average fx built in and no fx loop.

HD brows

The Dutch and German systems (where there are co payments and an insured element) manage to deliver better care at a cost equivalent to the NHS when massive unfunded pension liabilities in the latter are taken into account.

quick back of beermat calculation based on relative %age of GDP spent on health between UK (massively less than USA) and Germany/Holland (a bit closer to USA): are these unfunded* pension liabilities really worth 13% of the total uk spend on health? 8O

* i stress unfunded because recent hikes in pension contributions and retirement age changes (aka changes/cuts in pay, terms and conditions if you apply the logic of some folk on here) means that if the government actually saved my contributions (rather than just pouring them back in the pot and letting later governments pay for it) its theoretically less underfunded than it was

Depends on the hill: there is a ‘between this and that’ gradient that is nicely satisfying and earns you a downhill bit later on: a ride like that is way more interesting than a flat one and somehow the effort vs height feels worth it. Not same for steeper climbs though: I stop having fun at about 9% and actively avoid over 20%. :oops:

Uh, that Ponzi scheme comes up again and again in your posts and yet still no one does anything about it. Along with “theft”: you should really report these crimes.

[edit] Wandering off my post pointing out the unhelpfulness of the tax summary graphic and that state, private and public sector pensions all come from different places and different times. In doing so, I thought ‘stupidly short term ist’ was probably a more helpful description than what if it was in the legal sense a Ponzi scheme, would be a phenomenally large scale pan-government pan-generational financial crime that has inexplicably never been brought to justice.

Perhaps for the purposes of balance you could also suggest a more accurate description and to-approved term of reference for tendering/contracting of health than ‘privatisation’ since you (in the true legal factual sense correctly!) point out that it isn’t.

Thm, where did I say all that?

There are fireworks going off up the road. Coincidence? :?

Pm-j, iirc the ‘welfare’ part of that diagram includes public sector pensions which in effect were paid for/into by public sector employees a generation ago: although ‘ponzi scheme’ has a slight whiff of of sour grapes, i agree that the funding is rather different and stupidly short-termist compared to a ‘normal’ pension, and anyway maybe better off breaking public sector pension expenditure into the relevant areas and including them in the spend eg health service pensions into health spending, teachers in education etc. . I had a similar government funded conservative party mailshot helpful tax summary in the post a couple of years ago.

Full Fact sauce from 2014 here.[/url]

(later in the day, I climbed in the window of a limo on the offchance it’d be him, but it turned out to be Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich. I apologised for intruding and explained that I was hoping to find Trent Reznor and call him a ****… they were very understanding

:D Post of the week. :D

Initial reports of ‘cheap gains now, hard stuff later’ budget looks like one of a government not expecting to still be the government for much of 2020 :?

Winky smilie is unhelpful: perhaps condescendion at jambalaya’s reduction to/clumsy use of ‘hard left’, or my attempts to add the all important perspective to it? I figured that in this particular instance/poster it was better challenging just one axis at a time. I don’t think he could cope with the idea of conservatives being further north too.

Can’t work out what you mean about relative ‘hardness’ of leftlabour or right/conservative wings.

Also can’t work out if you are expressing your distaste about the political compass project, the snp, both or neither.

Lets put a hard left manifesto under Corbyn to the electorate at the GE 2020.

Ah perspective again. And the media fallacy from the resident stw arbiter of press neutrality that corbyn is somehow ‘hard’ left.

If we were to plot current conservative and labour policies on the political compass (that last year even made thm look left wing or so he told us), do you think the conservatives would be further over to the right of the middle line, or Labour over to the left of it?

Is your wife earning a living as a photographer? But of course money is always the most important thing isn’t it?

They have no idea if she is a photographer or not as they never asked. 30 seconds clicking on her fb profile next to the picture they appropriated, and sending her a message is marginally more time consuming than just crediting her name as they have done.

Its a newspaper not a charity. They employ journalists and photographers and get revenue from advertising. Presumably they manage ok as its the same paper with many of the same regular advertisers that I delivered for 1p a copy 25 years ago, and still in business.

Wife it seems had the only picture they could find to go with the story they wanted to print. Too late to pay a photographer to go and take their own picture of it cos the tee was cleared and traffic chaos restored to normality. Does that mean its ok to just circumvent how you normally report and print someone else’s picture?

Barrykellet: no. But photo is credited in the paper to mum of the kid with same surname. Which I expect doesn’t count. Actually this paper reports lots of youth sports, and will caption photos or reports goals scored etc with a child’s first but not last name eg ‘Barry scored in dying seconds of first half past outretched fingers of keeper Dave.” Kwality journalism round our way ;)