Seen in the News

[Stanley]

"Macron was naive"
I think that's the key phrase there Peter. Macron has always seemed a bit out of his depth to me.....

I saw THIS in this morning's BBC news. Very worrying as demands on the food charities rise in the face of increasing levels of poverty. Add to this suspicions that Truss is contemplating the unthinkable, cutting benefit levels, as the pressure comes on her to fund her tax cuts.
We are only just at the start of what could be a very hard winter.

[Tizer]

Yes, and there will probably be other unintended consequences coming into play, ones that we haven't yet predicted. For example, the UK has taken in about 130,000 Ukranians and and now we're being warned that many of them will have no homes this winter. Those who were taken in by British families will find that the 6-month subsidy provided by the government to help them be homed is coming to an end now, and there seems to be no plan to help them.

Meanwhile, some juicy information on Trump gets published. Great!
`Confidence Man: Key revelations from new book on Donald Trump' LINK

[Stanley]

Is it my imagination or is the weight of hard evidence slowly mounting against Trump? If so, perhaps the truth might eventually win..

[Tizer]

I too would like truth to eventually win in the US but sadly the country is rapidly going even more libertarian and probably into fascism. Read this article and you'll see why I say that....
`US midterms: 'America's elections could turn really nasty'' LINK

We and our non-American allies need to take very seriously what is happening in America. Trump or a Trumpist President is likely to be in charge of that country soon or at the very least it's going be in a chaotic state and won't be paying much attention to its allies and their safety. It's essential we sort out Ukraine and Putin before that happens. Also, America in chaos will be the ideal time for China to invade Taiwan. We live in interesting times!

[Stanley]

There are religious sects who would say that what we are seeing is 'the end times'. Who knows? At last they might be right. Read Revelation in the Bible, that gives the road map!
On another matter. I have just heard on Farming Today that Suella Braverman has told farmers they should 'work harder' to attract pickers to their farms. That's helpful isn't it!

[plaques]

On Suella Braverman apparently in her own words she dreams of planes full of asylum seekers taking off to Rwanda. What a sick person she must be.

[PanBiker]

I have just heard on Farming Today that Suella Braverman has told farmers they should 'work harder' to attract pickers to their farms. That's helpful isn't it!

They won't let them in, our lot won't do the job!

[Stanley]

I heaved a sigh of relief when I realised we had got rid of Priti 'Orrible but from the look of it we have another even battier version of her. Would she have let her own parents into the country? (They emigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius respectively.) We seem to be seeing a pattern here.

[Tizer]

The front page of The Times this morning has a nib headlined `Brexit backers lined up to become peers' and refers to those who supported Johnson being made peers to reduce the chance of Tory legislation being defeated. There are 15 on the list.

[Stanley]

That's the way political bribery still works in this brave country. Preferment and privilege for the supporters of a particular cause. It's all based on the Honours system and Monarchy, bolstered by spurious tradition. High time we had a clean sweep!

[Tizer]

More about HMS Prince of Wales this morning in The Times. The carrier was supposed to go to Rosyth for repairs to the broken coupling on the starboard prop shaft. That has had to be cancelled because of a new `problem with a fuel line'. The news article also described earlier problems with the carrier, the worst probably being when `the engine room and electrical cabinets' were flooded! HMS PoW is supposed to be the NATO flagship but HMS QE is having to stand in for her at the moment (and there have been problems with her too).

[Tizer]

The front page of The Times this morning has a nib headlined `Brexit backers lined up to become peers' and refers to those who supported Johnson being made peers to reduce the chance of Tory legislation being defeated. There are 15 on the list.

More on this today in the same paper. Now Truss is trying to delay the appointments until after the next election....
`Truss may ask King to approve delay of Johnson peerages' The Times
`Boris Johnson has nominated up to eight Conservative MPs for peerages in his resignation honours list, prompting frantic efforts by Liz Truss to avoid a series of damaging by-election defeats. The former prime minister is understood to have rewarded key loyalists in Westminster with seats in the House of Lords in one of his final acts in No 10. The move could trigger a row with the Lords authorities because Truss has asked the nominees to defer their appointments until after the next election. Constitutional experts said such a move would be unprecedented and risked dragging the King into politics because he would have to approve the arrangement.'...
[Sorry, I meant to post that in the Politics thread!]

[Stanley]

Re. the carrier Peter. I realise that they are complicated beasts and some teething problems are to be expected but the Navy has a bad track record when it comes to procuring and maintaining vessels of late. Remember the embarrassing problems with the frigates and the fact that there were no spare engines for them? Our track record of keeping submarines on patrol was swept under the carpet repeatedly. Now we have these two expensive ships that seem plagued with problems and they haven't even got planes to put on them, we have to borrow the US Marines. (They put a brave face on this and call it 'joint force exercises'.)
What other problems would be revealed if the whole of defence procurement was subject to honest and transparent investigation?

[Tizer]

Admiral Jackie Fisher would never have allowed this to happen!

[Stanley]

If I remember rightly the quotation that Peter refers to was at the Battle of Jutland when Fisher is said to have remarked that there seemed to be something wrong with our ships today.... So many of them were sinking!
(Nice one Peter and yes, it would fit the present case perfectly....)

[Stanley]

See THIS BBC report of a court case that baffles me. Every now and then we see cases like this where nurses poison those in their care and I simply can't get my head round the deed. It's the antithesis of everything we expect from the nursing profession.

[Tizer]

Every now and then we see cases like this where nurses poison those in their care...

We have some very strange people about these days - or did we always have them but in the past we didn't notice or they didn't get into positions were they could cause a lot of damage?
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I listened to a lady on the Today programme this morning being interviewed about barristers and lawyers.The BBC man said `I suppose they have much more paperwork to do' to which she replied `No, they don't have paperwork - it's all been digitised now'.
That's nonsense. By `paperwork' the Beeb man means communications, messages, reports, documents etc. It's still time-consuming, whether you write them on paper or key them into a computer. And the availability of PCs, smartphones, tablets, laptops etc has led to more of it.

[Whyperion]

Every now and then we see cases like this where nurses poison those in their care...

We have some very strange people about these days - or did we always have them but in the past we didn't notice or they didn't get into positions were they could cause a lot of damage?

I think we can run out a short list at least over the years. I think there have been studies into the psychological conditions that give rise to this kind of behaviour ( given where it is women it could even be some kind of evolutionary thing of killing others children to give ones own a better chance of success ). Was there not the case that a fair few of the women guards in nazi concentration camps treated people worse than average male ones ?

[Stanley]

Re. barristers workload Peter. From what I have seen of the profession I think you are right. There is still a lot of old-fashioned research involving reading and taking notes, especially of old cases that have become precedents. It sounds to me as though the lady you refer to didn't actually know what she was talking about.
I suspect that this is very often the case with radio interviewees.... Unfortunately some of us tend to believe what we hear on the BBC.

[Stanley]

See THIS NYT report that the families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims on Wednesday won nearly $1 billion in damages from the Infowars fabulist Alex Jones, a devastating blow against his empire and a message from the jury that his lies and those of his followers have crippling consequences.
We are short of encouraging news from the US but this fits the bill.....

[Tizer]

I'm glad they've fined him but his multitude of followers give him so much money that it's water of a duck's back to him. Note that: Jones broadcast himself watching Wednesday's verdict and scoffing at the court proceedings. He also appealed to his followers to make urgent donations, and pledged that the funds would not go towards his legal costs. "The money does not go to these people," he said. "It goes to fight this fraud and it goes to stabilise the company."

Also that his lawyer told reporters that they will appeal the decision and said that from start to finish the case was fixed. Heard that somewhere before?

[Stanley]

Sometimes I don't recognise this world we look at today. It seems to me to be full of madness and descending into chaos. We live through a storm of it at the moment with our politics.

[Tizer]

We feel that way to and it also extends outside politics. Take the Post Office Horizon scandal for example. An article today highlights Fujitsu's role and how the company has been in other scandals, yet our government continues to award contracts to Fujitsu...
`Fujitsu: How a Japanese firm became part of the Post Office scandal' LINK

[Stanley]

And when major scandals lie the Horizon programme or the Blood Contamination disaster strike nobody is ever sanctioned, it's as though the system has its own built in protection. We know that somebody is culpable and should pay but time and time again the system looks after its own. Think of the number of police staff who have retired 'on health grounds' with a full pension just before disciplinary proceedings were to be started. Look at the big accountants, time and time again they are found out and then awarded more contracts!
If you or I broke the law we would be nailed in the blink of an eye. Something wrong somewhere Peter.

[Tizer]

A news headline this morning reads: `Elon Musk under federal investigation over Twitter deal'. Instead of the Twitter deal he should be under federal investigation over his links with Putin. Musk has announced that he will no longer allow Ukraine free access to his Starlink satellite system which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with secure communications and high resolution data. He says he `cannot afford to let it continue for free' and has demanded that the US Department of Defense fund it. That sounds suspicious to me when he's been having private talks with Putin (and also with President Xi).