There's a kind of new aristocratic class developing a broad ideology of anti-populism in power in the UK. The majority of politicians are drawn from backgrounds, or familial backgrounds, in the British news media and get careers there for themselves or their spouses after leaving government. The majority of senior news media personnel, in journalism or management, are drawn from the political establishment in the same inverted way. They organised the Tory leadership elections to install Johnson and later Truss on the belief that low-tax austerity would improve the country and then, facing a continued decline of London relative to the UAE by the policies they championed, coordinated to give Starmer the most complimentary media presence possible from mid 2023 to until the day of the election, conditioned on his continuing their policy platform.
One example of this is how the most recent interview Starmer has been given at the time of writing was to the newly-promoted politics correspondent of Sky News, the spouse of one of his most loyal Labour MPs, formerly an assistant editor of The Spectator, a popular politics magazine that promotes the abolition of inheritance tax, reductions in the age of consent, the introduction of qualified immunity from war crimes for the armed forces, the introduction of civil forfeiture, the return of the death penalty and holocaust denial. Unless an outside force compels other factions in UK politics to act, the media faction will likely replace Starmer with some other NEC loyalist who avoids flubbing line delivery on camera sometime this year. After all, the Starmer government has set a record in UK politics for the fastest decline in polling numbers and Starmer has personally put out the message in news briefings that removing him from office in 2026 would be a grave mistake for the party.
I don't presume to know the reasons. I want to believe that "leaders" just have their own misguided view as to what is "good for the country". That is, no malice, just gross incompetence. Maybe I'm naive. I don't know.
What I do know and is more and more apparent to me, is that the current systems of world relating to governance, here in the UK, no longer work. Not fit for purpose. Broken beyond repair. Scary.
Johnson and Starmer are from a "broad ideology of anti-populism"?
Utter nonsense. They are the very definition of populism. Johnson appealing to the hoi polloi with the wishful thinking of Brexit, Starmer running his government on opinion polls rather than pragmatism and a modicum of consistency, to the point of turning Labour into Tory-lite selling its soul just to capture a little more mind share, but effectively becoming hateful for both sides.
The reason that the abolition of an arbitrary and cruel legal system was sought in the enlightenment was because although it often had a monopoly on legitimate usage, the state did not have supreme military power over the public (who were widely opposed to both the perceived disproportion of punishments and the rate of false positives).
If either side of any struggle acquires supreme force, the other side suffers without limit or recourse.
If you want the big picture stuff to give your vague direction more precision try giving the top articles of Ribbonfarm by year a quick skim. It sounds like bad advice but the content has broad domain applicability.
Track maintenance is the single biggest cost sector of rail lines in good condition even on very low slopes. The ballast needs regular inspection and replacing even without adverse weather or underbed problems, and the track can develop cross fall or slew and/or creep in transverse and longitudinal directions over time, sometimes taking subsurface layers with it. Every other kind of gravity storage makes more sense on paper than this, even the tower crane rearranging concrete cubes proposal.
It's true that track maintenance is costly but it's mostly costly because there's a whole lot of track to maintain; many hundreds of miles of it, often in hard to reach areas. This looks like it'd be a few hundred meters at most, all parallel to each other in one place. So hopefully it's easy enough. The tower crane also requires maintenance.
This narrative omits the strong, repeated and extensively documented disagreements between the colonists and Britain on whether or not to launch expansionist wars of conquest against the neighbouring American Indian polities.
Yes, with strong religious and historically early ethnonationalist motivations, including against denominations of European colonists who weren't English-speaking, while the British opposition was largely motivated by pragmatic diplomatic efforts to avoid large wars, expenses or both. Taylor's book American Revolutions is a great starting point for the period (with depth exceeding the typical ACOUP article) and the bibliography delivers plenty of follow-up material by topic and/or place.
It won't help with oil. The Permian's breakeven prices have crept upwards and, because VZ crude grades are high-sulfur, the US refinery complex can't absorb it without retooling away from the plants specialised for the low-sulfur Permian output.
Possibly dragging supply down, with no net effect at best.
>90% of Venezuelan crude has been refined in China in recent years.
This is going to hurt China economically, and in a way that isn’t going to be seen as targeted at China or unfair by international community.
Russia’s production and refining capacity has been seeing attrition from Ukraine’s efforts. They’re producing less oil, selling it for less, and for rubles that each buy less.
I’ve said before on HN that I thought Venezuela was intended to soak up Russian resources - this is just the next step.
Just because DJT has limited subtlety, doesn't mean he has zero subtlety. The ambassador to Sweden will tell the members of the committee, one by one in a way where they can't confer with each other, to accept the bribes or "else". It's not like it would be the first inducement to the committee in recent years, so they are likely to go along with it.
Why is it so popular to make up ridiculous fantasy stories about bad things that people/organizations you don't like might do? There's plenty of real stories you can refer to. It's almost as if you want your enemies to do more bad things to justify your hate.
Now you're confounding 'humor' with 'quality humor'. The first one only needs that the intent of the sentence is tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be taken literally; which the OP clearly was, and the first reply clearly missed.
He believed that within the limits of the political culture of America introducing accountability would lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of imprisonments and executions by each party against the other under the cover story of accountability, with the possibility of gradual escalation towards an end state of states mobilising armored brigades against each other to siege cities and cleanse target populations. Like the Congo, or Rhodesia. His memoirs are wacky stuff.
One example of this is how the most recent interview Starmer has been given at the time of writing was to the newly-promoted politics correspondent of Sky News, the spouse of one of his most loyal Labour MPs, formerly an assistant editor of The Spectator, a popular politics magazine that promotes the abolition of inheritance tax, reductions in the age of consent, the introduction of qualified immunity from war crimes for the armed forces, the introduction of civil forfeiture, the return of the death penalty and holocaust denial. Unless an outside force compels other factions in UK politics to act, the media faction will likely replace Starmer with some other NEC loyalist who avoids flubbing line delivery on camera sometime this year. After all, the Starmer government has set a record in UK politics for the fastest decline in polling numbers and Starmer has personally put out the message in news briefings that removing him from office in 2026 would be a grave mistake for the party.
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