I think all citizenship tests are somewhat arbitrary and daft (I had to do the Dutch one a few years back) but "the height of the London Eye" reaches new levels of arbitrary daftness.
A lot of the elite became very online for the first time in the pandemic and it’s hit them like smallpox in the Americas
Reminded of a friend who was filming kids in a playground on a rough S London estate for TV programme. Asked the mother if she would sign release forms. She was only 13 so not old enough to sign. She had to get her mother / the kid's grandmother to sign for her. The grandmother was 26.
Goodies have arrived from across the Channel
"the same governing elite, now engaged in new oil deals that raise difficult questions about transparency...diminishing emphasis on restoring democracy and protecting human rights."
Quelle jolie bonne surprise.
www.irishtimes.com/world/americ...
Even if the war itself stops quite soon, I'm expecting years and years of blowback in the form of assassinations, bombings and the like.
A propos of nothing very much, this morning I learned that Reykjavik had a population of just 300 at the start of the 19th century.
"The enemy also gets a vote" is a fairly basic military aphorism.
I am once again thinking about how Americans have no concept of the fact that most of the times when countries go to war their civilians are not safely stowed away from harm the way that American civilians are
I think anything that becomes a Moment has this, as lots of people who wouldn't normally watch that genre find themselves watching it. It's still odd, though. I mean, musicals aren't really my thing; I liked Hamilton; I do not feel the urge to argue it wasn't a musical.
I think this is what happens when a bunch of people who consider themselves above what they consider to be 'genre fiction' actually try some, like it, and then feel like they have to make excuses for why they like it.
Dawson is known in the WhatsApp group of my 6-Nations score prediction competition as the Mystic Testicle.
The trajectory of the oil price has reminded me of Pulp's absolutely banging cover version of a Bond theme
www.youtube.com/watch?v=maeE...
Right, so these strategic geniuses have put themselves in a position where both the exit routes seem deeply unpalatable / politically impossible
Yeah, this would be my bet. Just endless blowback for years to come.
I am just Some Bloke, but the two most likely outcomes I can see are a) they bomb the shit out of Iran for another week or so and then declare victory, leaving the ME a much worse place than it was (bad) or b) they get sucked ever deeper into a ground war (worse).
as someone wrote on here the other day, all the wrong people have imposter syndrome
I'm doing a chunk of work on security of supply chains at the moment and every few days I have to rachet up the descriptions I'm writing of current and potential global instability. It's really not great for my state of mind.
True, though "MOD is not very good at procurement" is not exactly genius-level insight.
[moves to artificial world built on oil exports, food imports, and slave labour from LMICs]: why are you making me think about geopolitics?
Ok, so the line he's been given is "we have been at war with Iran for 47 years" i.e. since the 1979 Revolution, but it seems that was too complicated for him to remember properly.
I live here, it's great!
My sons seem to have significantly upgraded their nerf guns recently.
Feels like a good day for chanting down Babylon, tbh
youtu.be/q8QshGV3o6k?...
It is a damning indictment on our culture that this man was ever taken seriously
Even setting aside that morality stuff, the politics of it is, sheesh, the war is wildly unpopular *now* and it's not going to become more popular when there is e.g. a humanitarian catastrophe in Iran or the global economy tanks.
Hello, I am Daniel Hannan, and I is an utter mentalist
