QUOTE OF THE DAY. TRIPPS ORIGINAL

[Tizer]

Lying was a profitable business for him when he was writing for the Daily Mail.

[Stanley]

What went wrong? How did we get him as PM? The old saying is that you get the government you deserve....

[Tizer]

Jacob Rees-Mogg quoted on BBC News regarding the fuss over Hancock and Cummings: "There's a great line from Dr [Samuel] Johnson, that in lapidary inscriptions [engravings in stone] a man is not on oath. And I think the same applies to text messages, which are essentially the trivia, the flotsam and jetsam, the ephemera of life, and they're fundamentally unimportant." He said of Hancock: "...the brilliant, the one and only successful genius who has been running health over the last 15 months,...he has done so much to make not only the country but the world safer".

[Stanley]

I think of him as the man whose hide has been saved by the NHS and dedicated scientists while he was playing games with the private sector to reduce costs. Look at the amount of outsourcing to dodgy companies has been done on his watch.

[Stanley]

The NFU president Minette Batters speaking on Farming Today about the recent trade deal with Australia.
"The government is selling sound bites when questioned about the deals."

[Tripps]

" The large print giveth, the small print taketh away"

[Stanley]

I have just been listening to General Jonathan Shaw giving his opinion on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The man knows what he is talking about, (see THIS) and one thing he said grabbed me because it echoes what I have said all along. The big mistake was to assume there was such a thing as a country called Afghanistan. He says it is the territory where a group of tribes each control their corner and form their own allegiances. For that reason our approach was always flawed.

[Tizer]

That echoes what I read in Saturday's Times written by an expert, the paper's war correspondent in Afghanistan, Antony Loyd. He's in direct contact with the tribal leaders and in particular with a 58-year-old fighter who lead his thousand followers against the Russians and then the Taliban. Loyd had lodged in the man's house years ago and has gone back to get his views. Of course he's disappointed to see the Taliban getting stronger but has got the Afghan leader to agree to re-arming his men and and he's raring to go. Loyd expects it to turn into a free for all with them fighting each other as much as the Taliban.

I was shocked to read about the way the US troops are leaving the country. They're taking some of the best military stuff with them but destroying the rest in such a way that it's impossible for the Taliban to use. It's the scale of it all that's shocking. For example, thousands of armoured fighting vehicles which cost a million dollars each are being destroyed by cutting up with special tools and then all left as scrap metal piled up in the desert. Many thousands more of the vehicles are being airlifted back to the US and it's taken 900 journeys by C-17 Globemaster jet transport aircraft.

[Tizer]

From Roger Harrabin's BBC article today...
He says how the attempt to determine a `safe carbon budget' can be dangerous - it may turn out to be zero. Then he notes how Margaret Thatcher remarked in the late 1980s that making such an experiment with our only planet was folly...

In 1989 she riveted the UN with her warning that greenhouse gases were "changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways". Mrs Thatcher - formerly a research chemist - continued: "The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom. Indeed, its results could be even more far-reaching. It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. We shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort." This was extraordinarily prescient, and her words were even more devastating from the lips of a towering, right-wing world leader who couldn't be dismissed as a fretful hippy. If the world had heeded her warning back then, imagine where we would be now?

But Thatcher's views were challenged by climate "sceptics" - some of them funded by a decades-long campaign of disinformation from fossil fuel firms. Rich nations fixated on economic growth rather than saving the planet from a hypothetical threat, and developing economies asserted their "right" to pollute the air just as rich nations had done. Wealthy countries stinted the cash they offered to poor nations to get clean technology. And international negotiations consistently failed to deliver the difficult and sweeping changes Mrs Thatcher thought necessary.

[Stanley]

We have a similar situation at the moment with Covid, so much of the world is desperately trying not to do anything that might be 'too expensive'. Our Chancellor Sunak has made the same decision now he thinks he has vaccines to protect people. I wonder what the cost of long term immune deficient disease caused by the Covid19 virus will be?

[Tizer]

From a BBC news story today about the UK's tantrums over the NI Protocol...
Expect some tension in the next few days, some under-the-radar talks during the summer and then something that feels like a crisis as a series of deadlines expire at the end of September. Brexit is - but also isn't - done. LINK

[Stanley]

Indeed. If it wasn't for the diversion of Covid this government would be in much more serious trouble.

[Stanley]

A young lady student was being interviewed on Today about her experience working on a 'Zero Hours Contract'.
She said that the whole concept of these contracts should be banned as "They are a breeding ground for exploitation of the workers'.
That sounds about right!

[Tripps]

From The Guardian - File under 'Keeping up Appearances'

" The Scottish government is refusing to publish details about the Queen’s secret lobbying of ministers because it would undermine “the appearance of political neutrality” that the monarch adopts in public."

[Stanley]

I heard the radio report of that David and the same unworthy thoughts passed my mind. Political neutrality goes out of the window when One's Lawyers are lobbying on One's behalf surely?

[Tripps]

From a current advert - no idea at all what they are advertising, but the clip is cute . . . .

"I'm six years old - you figure it out"

[Stanley]

I haven't seen the advert so that's lost on me....
Sorry David.

[Tizer]

Same here - don't watch adverts!

I'm sick and tired of the Radio 4 trailers which are now increasingly in the form of noisy adverts. Also, thankful that the screaming, shrieking Olympics reporter has gone - but, oh no, I hear we're now going to endure it all again for the Paralympics!

[Tripps]

Same here - don't watch adverts!

Amazed you haven't seen this one. Cute kid at 34 seconds.

To be fair I've had a struggle to find it. Seems to funded by Amazon and is a bit of 'virtue signalling' by them. I guess they can afford the bill.

[Stanley]

"screaming, shrieking Olympics reporter "
Couldn't agree more Peter. As soon as I heard him I switched off. I think I will be avoiding the Paralympics...
The advert didn't load David, I have not gone into a decline. (I hit the button again and got it.) Why do I regard these as near exploitation?

[Tizer]

Alok Sharma on the Today programme yesterday: There's already a large number of electric cars on the roads in Britain.
OG Reality Check: Electric cars represent about 4% of the total on UK roads.

[PanBiker]

We have two charging points in Barlick on Ellis street behind the Library. Quite often the spaces are taken up with folk just using them for parking when round about in town. Are there any statistics yet for the number of folk run over with the silent assassins? Or is there not enough of a sample with only a 4% take up?

[Stanley]

I listened to Alok Sharma as well Peter and thought afterwards how fluent and plausible he was despite the fact he was in full Tory spin mode. They are getting this new method of being economical with the truth to a fine art.

[Tizer]

We have two charging points in Barlick on Ellis street behind the Library. Quite often the spaces are taken up with folk just using them for parking when round about in town. Are there any statistics yet for the number of folk run over with the silent assassins? Or is there not enough of a sample with only a 4% take up?

Our hybrid Jazz emits a warning sound when moving at about 17mph or less. I think all the electric vehicles have to do so. At higher speeds it's the tyre noise rather than engine noise that warns pedestrians of all vehicles. Tyres are so big now with large `footprints' and road surfaces noisy due to improved drainage that they drown out normal IC engine sounds (except for the boy racers!).

[Stanley]

I've never heard one giving a warning in the Pioneer Car Park Peter. It did occur to me as I sat on my form watching the mugs going into the bookies that the death of the IC engine means the end of boomer exhaust systems that make a family hatch-back sound like an F1 racing car. I suppose they will have to get bigger and louder boom boxes to get attention which is what the exhaust systems are all about.