Some really looks at the rise of the Nazis in an electoral sense:
I think that’s a platitude that simply isn’t true. Because in 1930 Hitler wasn’t the original, he was a washed-out copy of what was offered by the DVP or the DNVP. The DNVP ran a more antisemitic campaign than Hitler, and yet it was the biggest loser of the election, shedding 7.3% of the vote.
Worth reading in full.
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has confirmed plans to cut 20% of generals and admirals
Retaining only 20% would also work.
Tennessee woman on death row taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections
Christa Pike, sentenced to death over 1995 murder, was heard snoring 40 minutes after lethal doses administered, witnesses said
Executing someone 30 years later somehow violates my own sense of good sense. Not that I’d go to the barricades on this, nor necessarily hold the position if really pressed. But swift and vicious maybe, a generation later seems not quite right somehow.
The Tennessee Department of Correction later confirmed that Pike had survived the state’s effort to execute her, saying “the lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.”
“Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility,” the statement concluded.
It’s always one of those little things that gets me, that they’re going to have to take care of her, cure her, before they try again.
But on Wednesday evening Donald Trump told reporters the incident remained unclear, after he had spoken to Netanyahu. “It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack-job, and he stabbed the pilot,” the US president told reporters in the Oval Office.
Beats the mumblings of everyone else as an encapsulation.
In what have been hailed as acts of tremendous bravery, several passenger rushed the cockpit of the flight and wrestled the controls from the alleged attacker even as the plane descended sharply, managing to eventually taking control and stabilising the plane before making an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
And, well, you know? Agreed, it’s not cowardice:
A video shared by the prime minister’s office showed passenger Yaniv Hayoun, a plumber, speaking to Netanyahu at length about how the events on board played out.
Hayoun told the prime minister how he and other passengers heard screaming and felt the air pressure change as the plane dived before they forced their way into the cockpit and found the attacker at the instrument panel.
“I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and dragged him out first,” Hayoun said during the meeting with Netanyahu after the plane had landed safely and the passengers were flown to Israel.
As others wrestled with the attacker, Hayoun said he grabbed the controls and pulled them the way he had seen on television. Then other crew members took over.
Yet the lesson has, I think, been learned. Those who sat in their seats for fear of something worse all died anyway on 9/11. Therefore folk don’t sit in their seats anymore. Or at least, enough don’t.
And as a personal thing, given history, the one group of people I’d not expect to simply await, passively, their fate is Israeli Jews. Learnt that lesson, fight back anyway.
My belief in the need for a single transferable vote electoral system in this country, based upon multi-member constituencies returning up to 10 MPs each, has never wavered ever since.
If it’s part of Spud’s bedrock beliefs then clearly it is wrong. So, that’s that decision easily made then.
In the heart of Glasgow city centre, nestled between shops, bars, offices and hotels, sits the Mackintosh Tearooms, the last surviving tearoom designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and one of the city’s most treasured heritage sites.
But last week passersby noticed a shiny new shopfront next door to the 1903 category A-listed building: hot-pink capital letters on a white plastic sign, advertising a vape and mobile phone repair shop.
Six months on from a vape shop fire that destroyed the B-listed Union Corner, and almost a decade after the second of two blazes devastated the Mackintosh-designed Glasgow School of Art building in 2018, the decision to allow the shop to open in such a location has drawn ire and opposition from local people and campaigners.
Why would a vape shop be any more dangerous than any other type of shop?
Unless we’ve a gang war going on or something?
The Scottish fire and rescue service confirmed in the days after the Union Corner fire that it had started in a vape shop. A subsequent audit of other vape shops found a range of fire safety issues, including a lack of awareness about legislation and fire safety duties.
Nope, that’s it, that’s the justification. Well, other than that vape shops are dirty and nasty and prole and we don’t want to allow any of them. Which is the true reasoning here.
We should freeze frontier AI development – that is, the effort to build AGI, and only resume the work when there is strong public buy-in and broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.
And we should Organise! Politically! To Make Sure!
It’s the political dream project. It’s impossible – no polity has the power to stop development globally – and will require massive effort. So, gibs me all the money to make the effort, right? Speeches and rallies and marches and achieve wholly nothing.
Perfection.
Participants had a body mass index (BMI) of 27 or above and type 2 diabetes. 48% were women and 52% were men. Their average age was 55.
In the 80-week phase 3 trial, 1,152 were randomly assigned to receive a weekly injection of placebo (289), or retatrutide 4 mg (292), 9 mg (284) or 12 mg (287), alongside dietary counselling and guidance on physical activity.
By the end of the study, those on 4mg of retatrutide lost 11.9% of their body weight on average, increasing to 16.8% with 9mg and 18.8% on 12mg. Those in the placebo group lost 5.1%.
Among those on the 12 mg dose, almost half (47%) shed at least 20% of their starting weight and almost a third (31%) lost at least 25%. That compared with 6% and 3%, respectively, with placebo.
Additionally, 72% achieved an HbA1c (measuring average blood sugar levels for the last two to three months) of 6.5% or lower, a standard threshold used to diagnose type 2 diabetes, compared with 29% in the placebo group.
The next one along in the pipeline of weight loss jabs. 25% of body weight is, erm, a lot. What glory in this very dawn etc.
Well, then he wouldn’t be Spud but there we are:
The Reserve Bank of Australia has lifted its key interest rate to 4.6%, its highest level since 2011, while warning of further hikes.
Did Australian mortgage holders need to be punished as a consequence of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu starting a profoundly unethical war in the Gulf, which they now do not know how to bring to a halt? The answer is obviously no.
Will increasing costs for Australian mortgage holders address the problems that the inflation in question is creating within the Australian economy? The answer is, again, no.
So, the Oz inflation target is already more like what Spud wants – he has indeed said that it should be higher than 2%:
Australia’s inflation target is to keep annual consumer price inflation between 2 and 3 per cent.
OK. And as to the effects of oil etc:
Key statistics
In the 12 months to July 2026:The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.5%, down from 3.8% in the 12 months to June 2026.
The largest contributors to annual inflation were Housing (+5.0%), Food and non-alcoholic beverages (+3.2%) and Recreation and culture (+2.6%).
Trimmed mean inflation was 3.6%, unchanged from 3.6% in the 12 months to June 2026.
Trimmed mean inflation is:
The trimmed mean Consumer Price Index (CPI) is Australia’s core inflation measure that calculates the weighted average price change after removing the most extreme 15% of price increases and 15% of price decreases.
💡 How the Trimmed Mean Works
• Ranking changes: All expenditure classes are ordered by their seasonally adjusted price movement.
• Trimming extremes: The top 15% (largest price spikes) and bottom 15% (largest price drops) of weighted items are discarded.
• Middle calculation: The final rate is the weighted average of the remaining central 70% of price changes.
🔎 Why the RBA Uses It
• Removes noise: Strips out temporary or volatile shocks like sudden fuel or fruit price spikes.
They are already looking at prices without the oil rise. And inflation, by this non-oil measure, is well ahead of target. It’s also housing which seems to be a major driver. Yes, increasing interest rates to take some heat out of housing and so lower the inflation rate to target could be justified.
Is there no beginning to this man’s knowledge of economics?
New York Times exec ‘murdered by elderly in-laws’
Witness claims couple, both 77, took turns to shoot Jonathan McKinsey, 40, in California car park
No, not shooting the son in law, shooting NYT executives.
If it were The Guardian of course we’d not require that added spice of being related now, would we?
A witness claimed in an interview with local Fox News KTVU that the elderly couple, who are 5ft 8in and 5ft 2in respectively, took turns shooting their son-in-law.
Blimey, they were pissed.
BTW, the backstory seems to be that he was very much less than decent in taking care of their grandkiddy. So, warning there, do not piss off Asians ’bout their nippers.
The frenzy becomes less surprising once we understand the way in which liberalism is under pressure, and how that pressure predisposes the saner political forces to look like freedom’s foes. Freedom is the core of liberalism. It is freedom of a particular kind: individual freedom. It lets you do whatever you want as long as you don’t violate the freedom of others or, crucially, their property. The analogy between freedom and property runs deep: my entitlement to do whatever I want is derived from ownership of the self. I am my own quasi-property, and in that capacity I face other self-owners and rely on the state to adjudicate between us.
This balance, between personal freedom and the freedom of all others, is already precarious , but in the face of the global crises we face now, it is especially under strain. Liberalism cannot govern economic inequality or ecological disaster, except by pitting the individual freedom of future or far-away others against the freedom of the currently privileged. Without democratic pride in our collective ability to rule our shared fate, the resulting policies look like sacrifice with no upside – I lose the (however hypothetical) freedom to own a row of houses, or I lose the freedom to drive a car, but even if I got public housing or public transport in turn, that wouldn’t register as compensation. After all, I cannot do whatever I want with those.
Therefore liberalism it is and the left can fuck off and die. Simple enough.
That’s not the lesson this particular socialist in Berlin comes to but then she c’n ‘n’ all too……
Far-right marches led by the self-styled “Danny Tommo” should not be treated like normal protests, the communities secretary, Angela Rayner, has said, calling the marches “intimidation” that should not be permitted.
Rayner said the behaviour of some masked marchers – who have blocked roads and transport hubs – was not an acceptable form of protest.
I’m wholly cool with the idea that certain forms of protest shouldn’t be allowed. Right against publicly torturing kittens to protest fossil fuels, for example. But if it’s the who is protesting, about what, then that’s problematic. Problematic to the point of fuck off, Honey.
Yes, yes, we’re all aware that everyone has some group they’d rather not see making their point. But that’s rather the point of allowing all to do so, see?
To illustrate a piece asbout where all the hunky Englishmen are:
No, really:
The hunk shortage: where are England’s handsomest men hiding?
Sigh.
Why should money earn interest simply because somebody owns it? We usually treat interest as a natural and inevitable part of the economy, but in this Understanding Economics video, I question whether that assumption is justified.
There’s a time value to money. That’s the interest rate.
And isn’t this fun?
I am not arguing that interest should be abolished. I am arguing that the basic interest rate on low-risk money should be close to zero in real terms, while genuine costs and risks should be identified and charged transparently.
Lending money to a bank is pretty risk free. Therefore deposit accounts at banks should pay zero interest. Hmm…..
The vast majority of the UK’s essential foods, including cereals, potatoes, sugar and oil, are grown in areas of England rated as having a moderate to very high risk of drought.
A very high proportion – 81% – of England’s fresh produce is concentrated in parts of the country that are already experiencing water stress, according to the analysis by the nature-focused investment fund Rebalance Earth.
Three-quarters of England’s wheat (77%), barley (75%) and oilseed rape (74%) grow in parts of the country rated as being at a moderate to very high drought risk, along with 70% of sugar beet and 67% of potatoes, it found.
And?
You do not grow wheat in a swamp. You have never grown wheat in a swamp. Wheat is a dryland crop. Or, at least, drier land than a swamp. Thus wheat has always been grown on land more at risk of drought than things grown in swamps.
And?
What remains of my geography O Level seems to be reminding me that it’s the eastern – drier – part of England which does more of the wheat growing while the west does more of the dairy – reliant upon that wet living green grass. No?
Sadiq Khan’s LTNs made me flee Britain, says millionaire philanthropist
Not a reason I’d choose – or did choose – to leave but fair enough. It’s also possible to think that traffic measures are possibly a bit shaky as a reason to leave a country but each to their own.
Geothermal Engineering Limited (GEL) has said it will invest around £43m in the new lithium extraction facility. The investment will create nearly 50 direct jobs and support around 80 more across the supply chain, after receiving an offer in principle worth nearly £10m through the Government’s DRIVE35 Automotive Transformation Fund.
At current prices production will be worth c. £30 million a year. Perfectly sensible idea. And, yes, from within the weird metals industry the chemistry of this does work. That doesn’t mean it works economically, just that they’re not being weirdos in thinking it could do so.
Two obvious questions though. Given that it is a perfectly sensible idea then why is there that government subsidy? The second is that, well, geothermal mining suffers from the same earthquake problem as fracking. Reinjecting the used water basck down produces ‘quakes. So, why is this technology allowed and not fracking?
The government has stepped up work on new laws to stop ticket touts fleecing fans, as the prime minister came under pressure from artists including the drummer from the Smiths, one of his favourite bands.
Keir Starmer said last year that the government would “stop fans from being ripped off” by outlawing the for-profit resale of tickets on sites such as Viagogo and StubHub, a pledge Labour first made in its 2024 election manifesto.
Look how hard it is for govt to stamp out an extant market. And I predict that, whatever they do, the market will continue to exist.
Ooooh, yes, we can, for we can see the incentive therefore we can predict the outcome:
Young people whose complex disabilities mean they have little prospect of getting a paid job should get fast-track access to disability benefits, an official review of youth employment will say.
The review, by the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, will say 16- to 24-year-olds with the most severe lifelong needs should be guaranteed swift and unconditional benefit support rather than having to prove they cannot work.
Currently, many disabled youngsters and their families have to endure repeated lengthy, adversarial and often distressing assessments to access personal independence payment (Pip) and universal credit health benefits.
There will be more young people with complex disabilities.
This is wholly aside from whether youngsters with such complex disabilities get support, lashings of it and fast – I’m generally in favour of that for some definition of “complex” – it’s simply an observation about humans. Clasiming complex will gain more money faster and easier, humans respond to incentives, there will be more claims of complex. QED.