peterms

4 minutes ago, KHV said:

Jamie Vardy isn’t having a party 

I knew that already.

I was told by someone ITK.

It was... Rebekah Vardy!

1 minute ago, Derryvillan said:

Konsa eligible for the final.

How?

Some quite shocking correspondence now coming out.

Quote

The architect, builders and fire engineer who worked on the disastrous Grenfell Tower refurbishment knew the cladding system would fail in the event of a fire more than two years before 72 people were killed, according to emails revealed at the public inquiry on Tuesday.

Staff at architects Studio E, the fire engineer Exova, the facade installer Harley, and Rydon, the main contractor, discussed how the cladding system they were planning to wrap around the 120-home apartment block was likely to fail in the event of a fire.

“Metal cladding always burns and falls off,” an architect emailed a fire engineer in spring 2015. An employee of the facade installer told a colleague: “As we all know, the ACM [the combustible cladding panels] will be gone rather quickly in a fire!”...

1 hour ago, bickster said:

Sorry Peter but you always see everything as a conspiracy

Its much simpler, the French are revolting, no-one's bothered, they've been doing it since ... ah who cares, Iran on the other hand is a hot topic right now. One of them sells papers, the other doesn't. It's really that simple

 

Having seen some of your other posts, I'm inclined to think you might actually believe that, and yet have the capacity to understand you're being lied to.  Weird.

1 hour ago, bickster said:

Nah, that really isn't why the stereotype exists, you just want it to be

As someone who has been caught up in many French stikes over the years and had his travel disrupted as a result, let me tell you, it is not a media driven stereotype, for lots of people its personal experience driven

OH yes, when it wasn't sheep farmers striking it was Air Traffic Controllers, thats the other time it hits the news because it affects British people

It's a massive social issue in France, and it's not being reported here.  The reason for that doesn't seem to be based on news values.

In the comparison with the way a tiny and transient protest in Iran was covered, the issue is laid bare.  The Iran protest involving a couple of hundred people for an hour or so, had absolutely no impact on or relevance to British people.  So the motive for coverage is not how far it affects Brits.  It was covered because doing so furthers the agenda which the UK media have been assiduously following, and not for the reasons which their profession would claim as guiding values.

Pour ne pas encourager les autres, perhaps.  Don't want to give the peasants ideas.  Similar motives were in play when the French revolution happened, I gather.  You forgot the fishing boats, that was another one. 

It's useful to compare what gets reported, with what doesn't get reported, and enquire what drives editorial decisions in both instances.  Unless it's a very personal agenda about "my child missed pony school because of these cruel protests delaying the ferry/plane", then it will either be professional judgement, or else political judgement.  In this instance, it's plainly the second.  Which is interesting.

More interesting reporting, with a massive protest against US occupation of Iraq being reported as hundreds of people.

To be fair, there must have been a point in time at which the protest consisted only of hundreds of people, and another point in time at which it consisted of 17 people, or 49 people.  But it's not how any objective report would cover it.

1 minute ago, bickster said:

For the French, going on strike and demonstrating is a pastime, it's something they excel at.

They would be World Champions every year if such a thing existed

Thats why it isn't news

Like me, you must have seen many stories in our media down the years about strikes in France.  In fact, that's why the stereotype you mention exists here.

This time is different.

Interesting priorities and judgements by our media.

A couple of hundred students in Iran avoiding stepping on a US flag gets good coverage.  Meanwhile in France, we are now in I think week 63 of weekly protests, and day 51 of a national strike in which as well as more common occupations, we have seen lawyers, ballet dancers and opera singers on strike, doing pretty photogenic protests which you would imagine a news editor or picture editor would love.

But there seems to be very little coverage.

Very strange.

We could do with something to use against dog owners who fail to clear up after their dog.

Faecal recognition cameras.

Veg lasagne, using things that were reduced price, getting old, or might have been thrown away, supplemented with some store cupboard ingredients.  Quantities and ingredients based on what I had available rather than being a strict recipe.  You can vary the ingredients as you wish, but keep the proportion of butter, flour, milk and possibly cheese for the cheese sauce the same as given here.  Probably less fiddly in practice than it looks written down.

I had some cheap spring onions, kale and mushrooms, all needing used, some courgettes past their best,  and some Parmesan rinds which some people throw away.  The rest was store cupboard stuff.

Put the Parmesan rinds through a heavy duty food processor to grind finely, unless you have a strong arm and lots of time to grind this really hard bit of the chesse.  Set aside.

For 4 people:

Soften three fat spring onions and some garlic in extra virgin olive oil,  add 2 courgettes chopped into pieces about the size of halved pound coins.  Chop some kale (I had about 300gm at a guess), add to the pan, add a cup of veg stock to get it all to cook down, salt and pepper. 

In a separate pan, soften a chopped red onion and 3 or 4 fat cloves of garlic in olive oil.  Add 400gm sliced mushrooms, soften.  Add a tin of chopped tomatoes, a chopped chipotle (I keep a jar of chipotles in adobe sauce in the fridge, really useful), smoked paprika, salt and pepper, a chopped red pepper, a tin of drained butter beans.

With both sauces, cook them down until fairly dry, don't want them giving off lots of water in the oven.

Make a cheese sauce.  Make a roux with 40gm of butter softened gently in a saucepan, add 40gm plain flour and mix in well, add salt, pepper, a little mustard powder or mustard from a jar, a pinch of chilli powder.  Add 400gm milk, stir well, simmer gently while stirring until it thickens and doesn't taste of flour, add 100gm grated cheddar.

Assemble the lasagne.  Put the mushroom etc sauce on the bottom of an oven dish, layer lasagne sheets over, put the courgette sauce on that, drizzle a bit of the cheese sauce on that, maybe a fifth of the total, add another layer of lasagne, put the rest of the cheese sauce on that, and cover with grated Parmesan.

I made it to that point before going out for the day, so we could just turn the oven on when we got back.  If you don't put Parmesan or something else on top of the cheese sauce, it will quickly form a skin, which won't be great.  If you dont have or don't like Parmesan, other grated cheese would be fine.

Cook for about 45-60 mins on 150, starting from a cold oven and cold ingredients if you made it in advance like I did, or maybe 30-45 mins if you have a hot oven and are cooking it immediately after assembling it.

9 minutes ago, M_Afro said:

If this happens I am going straight out to buy a Nzonzi shirt. Please be true.

Just make sure they spell it right, or you'll get some funny looks in the street.

Can something be blindingly obvious, but at the same time also need saying?

Well, it scans, but it's not right.

Just wondering, has there ever been an instance of anyone using the odd word "humbled" of themselves,  as in "I am humbled by...", where the writer isn't a total arse who is trying to draw attention to some trivial achievement or a bigging-up by some utter ballbag, ie not"humbled" at all, but trying to project their imagined magnificence across whatever platform is available?

7 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

The Labour Party is fixating on ‘nationalism’ in a way that tries to paint it as a wholly bad thing, unless it’s the mythic ‘british’ or ‘unionist’ variety of not-nationalism. They appear to be confusing their commendable desire for internationalism with a presumption of evil in all nationalism. It isn’t all about angry bald football fans hating strangers, they need to get beyond that. She is nowhere near alone in the Labour Party in struggling with that concept.

Yes, I agree with that.

But I can't think of other Labour figures seeming to support repression, intimidation and violence as a response to calls for regional or national autonomy.  If she knows what happened in Catalonia, perhaps she could explain why she thinks it's a good example of how to respond, or if she meant something else, what she was trying to say.  I don't see any basis for thinking that her personal ambition or some MPs nominating her for reasons which presumably don't relate to these comments should make us think that other Labour figures or the party as a whole take a similar view, if indeed that's her considered view.  Perhaps she should clarify what she was trying to say.

21 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

Well, yes I can see your point (I think) that it’s not official Labour policy, I accept that. But I haven’t said that, I’ve suggested that if she is one of the 5 best candidates they can muster, someone that thinks the Spanish actions in Catalonia is an example of how to deal with the SNP, someone endorsed for leadership by her fellow Labour MP’s.... well. They might all be broken.

She’s not just a random on twitter claiming to be a supporter, is she. She’s potentially leader of the opposition and so potentially Prime Minister after our next 18 month parliament that we appear to be in a habit of needing. Imagine if she became leader, or got a senior position. Endorsing the militant Spanish thugs ‘beating’ the Catalans.

At best, hopefully, she’s just a **** idiot. If that was her genuine belief and not some weird absolute brain fart, well, she ain’t no socialist bruv.

I am not intending to go down the trolling route of some on here that see anything and everything as an excuse to falsely shout anti Zionist plot bastards.

 

Well, she's someone who managed to get enough support among the PLP to stand.  Those are individual endorsements, not a party stamp of approval.

But then Owen Smith (who?) and Liz Kendall did that, so that's not a great recommendation.

I doubt anyone who voted for her did so on the basis of her garbled thoughts on Catalonia, or were even aware of what she thought about it.  I'm not even sure what I think she thinks about the issue.  It may be just someone who's not very bright or well-read or aware,  coming out with a form of words aimed at deflecting the question,  rather than trying to say that we should have a fascist response to stirrings of local self-determination.

Whatever it is, it's not Labour policy unless I'm very much mistaken, so perhaps best to challenge her as a person individually  on this, and not the party as a whole.

On 14/01/2020 at 18:42, chrisp65 said:

Trump really is one of the oddest, weirdest characters. I can never decide if he’s horrible as some sort of miserable life choice, or horrible because he has some sort of learning difficulty or health issue. I keep telling myself it must be a deliberate choice to be a complete prick because he’s spent too long being ‘in business’ for it to be a health or disability thing.

Even just the weird orange tan and single 200 metre long hair. I mean, who looks at themselves with those white circles around their eyes in the middle of a bright orange face and thinks, yep, that’s exactly the look I was hoping for, time to face the world.

Absolute wrong ‘un. You wouldn’t trust him with your mum or your daughter or your dog or even a carrier bag. Every weird horrid rumour or anecdote about the guy, you think, yep totally believable.

 

I suspect he thinks of himself rather like this.  Probably with more people standing passively round him, like some kind of validation.

1 hour ago, ciggiesnbeer said:

There has got to be a play on words with Marvelous, Targett, House and Ally here somewhere.

You need to wait until we also sign Canthitt and Withabanjo.

4 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

If that’s a senior person in Labour’s take on the situation in Catalonia they need to disband and start again.

While her take on it is shocking and shameful, I don't see why you link it to the party, which as far as I can tell has expressed or endorsed no such view.   Isn't her view something for which responsibility falls entirely to her?

If the bell thing isn't a runner, I hear we will need to fall back on Mr Johnson's alternative suggestion.

Bonk for Britain.

Twitter, facebook, instagram ramping up their censorship of things that don't accord with the Rogue State regime line.

3 hours ago, meregreen said:

With a bit of Stavros thrown in.

Now there's an idea for the route to financial independence via a new career path...

On the point about the US fomenting unrest domestically to create political instability, it's not only very widely known, but even formally acknowledged.  See for example here (pdf) from 10 years back, outlining various options for crushing Iran, specifically including creating insurgency by supporting opposition groups. 

1 hour ago, Awol said:

Leaving the first part aside (no time now to argue the toss over that) and focusing on the above:

1) He was held for several hours.

2) The idea they were simply confirming his identity is preposterous. 

All senior foreign diplomats are followed at all times in Middle East countries, it is the standard procedure of their security services and Iran is no different.

His attendance at the vigil for victims (a perfectly reasonable event to attend as some were British) will have been noted in real time, reported up the chain and a decision taken on how to exploit it. Hence his being detained at a later time and in a different place.

Yes, I’m saying he was arrested in the full knowledge of who he was to create an incident which diverted attention away from the true nature of unfolding events - like the rent-a-crowd protests that followed on at the UK embassy. 

The regime is rattled by rising domestic opposition, and trying to implicate foreign actors as being responsible is a very old tactic in that part of the world. Certainly easier than admitting the agency of their own people and acknowledging the anger directed towards the regime. 

I'm taking "briefly held" from the Guardian report.  Both that expression and "several hours" are unclear about length of time, and the only quantified time I've seen is the statement of an Iranian minister that he was released 15 minutes after the minister was contacted (the reporting up the chain you mention), which doesn't say how long he was held before that.

If he does something which is considered to breach the requirements placed on diplomats, then the proper course of action is presumably for him to be summoned to explain himself, and if the explanation is found wanting, then for the country he belongs to, either to undertake that no repeat will occur or to remove him.  Which would be why he was released, and summoned to attend a later appointment.  That part is standard procedure, I'd have thought, and it's the arrest which would not be.  Clearly you believe the arrest was sanctioned at a senior political level, and that's up to you.

The involvement of foreign countries in creating unrest is an ages-old tactic, and very well known.  The US in particular has used this as a destabilisation technique for a very long time.  A recent example is the meeting between one of the leading Hong Kong protestors and a US embassy official. 

Closer to home, I'm sure we all know about the lengths the security services go to in order to infiltrate groups of antiwar protestors, animal rights activists, climate change campaigners and so on, including trying to get them to mount actions that may discredit them.

Recognising that foreign actors are likely to be involved in Iran is simple common sense, and pretending otherwise would require quite a major act of faith.