The Anti-Targ

I guess there is a movie in there from the snippets from LOTR, but to much will be strasight made up. There isn;t enough for an actual adaption. I don't trust it.

New EV sales in New Zealand have fallen off a cliff with the new govt axing EV/Hybrid/PHEV subsidies and axing taxes on big engine ICE vehicles, as well as introducing a new tax for EV and PHEV drivers. The tax for EVs and PHEVs was always going to come, since our govt (whether right or left) still labours under the false belief that taxes pay for govt spending. And hence the public also believes it, for some reason near universally believing what the govt tells them, which is virtually unheard of on any other subject. So they had to put a tax on EVs and PHEVs in lieu of the petrol taxes ICE car users pay, so that everyone "pays their fair share" for maintaining and building roads. So, necessary and fair if you believe in the "pay for" fallacy, which means pretty much everyone including EV and PHEV owners believe it's necessary and fair.

MTG surely knew her motion would fail, so what audience was she playing to with that stunt?

Except perhaps a contract as an consultant to the new Labour govt when they win the election. Something she wouldn't get if she became a Reform MP. The reason you hop over to Reform is so you can get on the grift. I guess she can't be bothered with the kind of work and public profile that comes with being on the Reform grift, and is more comfortable with the lower profile govt consultant grift.

That's like saying the American revolution was reform. Or demolition of a derelict building to build a new, useful building is just remodelling. The existence of the veto is one of the exact reasons the UN can't be reformed. Veto has to get gone, and in will never happen in the UN, which you have so eloquently stated. The UN is no longer fit for purpose. I don't think I suggested the UN should be disappeared without a new global governance structure replacing it. So I agree the UN needs to limp along on its crutches until the world wakes up. Which might only be after a real disaster of global proportions.

Technically in the general assembly there is equality, since each country has one vote. But I don't know why you are taking what I've written and interpreted it in such an absolute sense. The fact that there will never be wealth or income equality at the individual level does not mean we should simply accept the current extremes of wealth and poverty we are seeing. Similarly with nations we should not merely bow and accept absolute impunity on the part of some countries and irrelevance and subservience by others. The bullies of the world must be able to be held to account and the smallest of nations must be guaranteed justice. Reform of the UN is not possible in practice. It's dismantling and construction of a global institution far superior to the current UN with the real ability to hold all to account is needed.

Which is why the UN will also ultimately fail (or arguably has been failing since its inception). It's a body in a coma that doesn't realise it's never waking up and its only future is death.

Is it too much for Biden to say he has a no problem with students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza and they should be free to do so in the manner of the US's long proud history of peaceful protest on all manner of political and social issues, even if he doesn't agree with their criticisms, but what he has no time for is violence or calls for violence or statements in support of Hamas' campaign of terror against Israel. You can't just come out with statements in opposition to antisemitism and claim to have addressed the complexities and nuances of this mess nor the injustices being perpetrated by Israel. Focusing on antisemitism is tantamount to legitimising everything Israel is doing. There's no moral high-ground in doing that. Not doing anything wrong is not the same as doing the right thing. Esp when it comes to a president leading means actively doing [hopefully] what's right.

Selective enforcement is the hallmark of pretty much every justice system in existence today, just ask minorities, esp racial minorities in certain western countries that claim to be bastions of equality and justice, and the poor who find themselves in prison when a richer and/or differently skin coloured person would receive a non-custodial sentence or a significantly lesser term of imprisonment for exactly the same crime. Not holding the rich and powerful to account for wrongdoings is a feature for how the current (dis)order operates. To hold the ICC to a higher standard of exception is odd indeed as a rationale for its disestablishment. The fact that countries were given the opportunity to opt out is tantamount to recognising the claims of the sovereign citizen movement. You opt out of (or don't ratify) the ICC you should be out of all global governance institutions with the exception that you retain a UN general assembly vote (but no speaking rights), which includes the US losing its security council veto. If you're not going to be a global player, you don't get to be a global playah. Of course no one has the guts to stand up to the global bullies, so bully they will continue to do.

Given Biden is a neolib and captive of orthodox macro-economic mythology the best that can be said is lesser of two evils, IMO. Perhaps people can pick specific ways they differ but my impression is that this pretty much applies to the USA just as much as to Australia (and most of us) and it doesn't matter too much if it's a R or D in the oval office (or LNC / ALP in Canberra for Australia).

IIRC in 2016 Lichtman said he couldn't make a prediction, so far he is being pretty coy this year. I predict he's not going to make a firm prediction this year, which to me leans towards a Trump win. The incumbent wins more often than not, so to not be able to predict an incumbent win is not a good sign for the incumbent. Lichtman's keys do appear to be reliably correlative, there probably needs to be a lot more elections before any causative or predictive value can be asserted. But as far as forming the basis for an educated guess it seems to be more reliable than other attempts at formulating predictive criteria. There's no way his keys can be 100% predictive for elections where he has made, or will make a definitive prediction. So his predictive model actually needs a few failures, to be able to really assess what sort of predictive value the keys have. Of course population shifts towards certain undemocratic preferences, fascism and authoritarianism, can also ruin what predictive value the keys may have objectively had in the past.

I may be reading him/them wrong, but I doubt even a President Trump would send gun blazing soldiers into the Hague to break out Bibi and his crew. May be different for US citizens, but even then I think a negotiated handover with an assurance they would be investigated and possibly tried for war crimes under US law on US soil would be attempted first. Whether the US carried through on such an assurance or reneged on the basis that it was forced under duress would be a different question. I guess it's also unlikely any US citizens would be taken across the EU border let alone all the way to the Hague before they got "rescued".

What did they decide to make the legal names of the spawn? One might argue as is the Jewish heredity wont that sans DNA test you can only be 100% sure that the one who gave birth is the parent (though with donated eggs even that's not absolute, in a genetic sense, anymore), so that's a potential argument for the sprogs to take the mother's name. Conversely, I guess, if you want everyone to believe the male partner contributed the sperm, whether true or not, the kids should take the father's name to minimise rumours and gossip.

Right there were the mistakes. Baked beans on toast is a magical flavour and texture combination, don't know how or why but it just is. If you mess with it by having pork in the can, or using some carb other than toast it simply doesn't work. If you can afford it butter the toast first, or put butter in the beans while you are cooking them. Simplicity is one if the hallmarks, so frying up some onion is extra effort for possibly not all that much reward. But if you have the time and inclination it sounds like a good variation on the classic.

I guess to complete that person's thought "doesn't deserve to be called a friend by Israel"...without Donald Trump as president. Seems like a campaign statement to me.

My experience of it is my wife and I went with a double-barrelled surname, and when my son got married instead of a triple barrelled name he went double barrelled with his wife's surname and dropping my family name. If more and more double-barrelled names are adopted I wonder what decision a couple will make when both of their names are double-barrelled. Seeing for the first time that quadruple barrelling actually exists I guess that's on the cards for some, but I doubt that's likely to catch on. However I'm not sure double barrelling will become more common, as I'm seeing more couples take on the wife's surname only, often for reasons like the man having a few brothers, or the woman being an only child or only having sisters who are already all married and taken on their husband's name. I even know a couple who took the wife's mother's family name, not totally sure of the reason, but could be that it was so the name wouldn't die out in their family tree. Interestingly there is a possibly of my family name dying out in our family tree, though the name itself seems unlikely to ever die out since it is common as muck in the English-speaking world.

There is only one reason Israel agrees to a temporary ceasefire with partial release of hostages, and it's not a good one. There is only one reason Hamas proposes a temporary ceasefire and partial release of hostages, and it's also not a good one. This isn't progress, it's a halftime show.

I wouldn't waste time worrying on behalf of mega millionaires and billionnaires. If they aren't financially savvy enough to manage the liquidity of their own investment portfolio they certainly pay people who are. The tax liability is all very predictable manageable for anyone who actually has a clue.

None of these countries or groups got their hands on any sanctioned tech without someone in the countries that produce it, or legally trade it being the point of origin. A US made chip can only have the USA as a point of origin. So perhaps people who worry about such things should be thinking about their own citizens flagrantly violating international law and not giving a crap about "our" norms and conventions. Not that I'm putting this forward as an actual conspiracy, but I can imagine rationale whereby the US and some of its allies would prefer to have black market trade in chips and other high tech weapons stuff made by them because if they keep some track of that illicit trade they have quite a good idea about how many high tech weapons these rogue entities and enemies have. If they were to completely starve even the black market trade (assuming it's even possible), the concern might be that they could start creating their own manufacturing infrastructure for own chips and other tech, then the US would completely lose track of what these entities have.

Big oil might have known from a corporate knowledge perspective since only the 1960s, but IIRC scientists working in the fossil fuel sector had surmised things about global warming since before WWI.

In those fields one develops expertise in things that can potentially make major contributions in that speciality as one grows in knowledge and experience. Entering politics at 18 as a career only makes you become expert in being a politician. I would rather our best and brightest do anything other than politics for their early adult life. Not to gain life experience, but to contribute to the progress of society in a myriad far better ways than becoming a full time politician.

That's all right then. I just don't want Wootton getting the wrong message.

Nah, you can keep him. 'Sides he's not a foreigner, both his parents are British, it was just an accident where he was born. He went home when he moved to the UK.

What kind of delusion must Tory leadership contenders have to want to become the PM now?

Israel is the tail that wags the US dog. Such is the irreplaceability it knows it is in the mind of the US political class it can act with impunity even to the detriment of the USA and Israel. It is as a willful and petulant child and the USA is an indulgent and negligent parent.