peterms

Tee hee.

5 minutes ago, sharkyvilla said:

That would be barbaric.

Well, yes.

But why one and not the other?

54 minutes ago, sharkyvilla said:

Chopping their hands off still makes it hard for them to wipe their arse and to complete other tasks, so still a decent enough deterrent imo.  Also, if someone turns up on your doorstep trying to scam you and they've got no hands, you'll probably suspect that they're dodgy as **** and been convicted of something previously.  One of the few things I reckon the Saudis have it right on tbh.

I was thinking more that the idea behind this bizarre punishment is that the hand is the agent of theft, and the mind is the agent of fraud, therefore an equivalent punishment for eg banksters would be decapitation.

Isn't that how it works?

Was required to do the late breakfast for everyone who stayed over until boxing day.

Bacon, black pudding, haggis, fried mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, fried eggs, for 9, all seved together.  Someone else saw to the beans, toast and coffee.  Cooked in stages and kept warm until it could be served - 5 or 6 runs at the small grill to do enough bacon etc, two lots of a big frying pan full of eggs...one broken egg for the dog, no wastage,  all scoffed.  But they ate all the black pudding before I could serve myself.  Bastards.  Should have done sausages as a diversion, but it wasn't my house or my supplies.  Oh well.

2 hours ago, rjw63 said:

You certainly wouldn't enjoy my scotch bonnet special

"Would you like to taste my Scotch Bonnet?"

Cheeky devil.

On 26/12/2019 at 09:48, sharkyvilla said:

I've mentioned this a few times but I reckon repeated/career criminals should get their hands chopped off.

I think the logic for this sentence is that theft is committed with the hands, therefore removing them prevents future offences.

Just wondering, what is your take on crimes relying more on the mind, say, fraud?

34 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I’m pretty sure the whole “soy makes you grow breasts” thing has been debunked anyway but i can’t put my hand on any evidence right now. 
 

although I don’t remember the last time I saw a vegetarian or vegan make walking around with tits so that’s probably a good indication 

That's the spirit.  Ignore the knockers.

On 06/11/2019 at 19:51, Davkaus said:

Has anyone here (particularly people who still eat meat) tried a Beyond Burger? i ordered a burger for lunch in a pub a few days ago, and I put it down after a bite thinking they'd mixed up the order and brought me a meat one, it seemed pretty spot on to me, though it'd been a few years since I ate an actual  meat one.

Some info here on another of these synthetic burgers.

Quote

The doctor goes on to explain the process used to make the Impossible Burger have the look of meat, writing that the beef-like appearance of the vegetable-based burger is a product of genetic engineering.

According to Stangle, the red appearance of the vegetable patty comes from genetically splicing a soybean and yeast:

The bacterial enzyme that binds the nitrogen is damaged by the presence of oxygen so the bacterium makes the leghemoglobin to bind oxygen to keep it out of the way. To make enough leghemoglobin to add to the impossible whopper, scientists spliced the gene for leghemoglobin into yeast. They can grow the yeast easily and separate the leghemoglobin and add it to the impossible whopper. So the impossible whopper is technically a genetically modified organism (GMO).

Finally, the doctor explains the radically high amount of estrogen featured in each burger.

“The impossible whopper has 44 mg of estrogen and the whopper has 2.5 ng of estrogen,” wrote Stangle. “That means an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper.”

He went on to compare the level of estrogen in the Impossible Burger to soy milk, writing that eating four of the vegetable burgers daily would result in a human male growing breasts:

Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill.

In short, the Impossible Burger is a genetically modified organism filled with calorie-dense oils that can make a man grow breasts if eaten in sufficient quantity.

I would think either meat or a proper vegetarian diet are preferable to eating this genetically engineered, processed stuff.

And the "red wall" thing is seriously overstated, as well as Blair's magic powers...

Is it possible to read Alan Bennett without hearing his voice in your head?  Not for me.

But this was good.

Quote

...I have no particular memories of wartime food, and even if I had, a working-class family in Leeds wouldn’t have been dining out on much except fish and chips in the cafés of department stores like Hitchens (fish and chips, tea and bread and butter 1/9), with Schofields slightly higher up the scale. There was Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley, where we would often have just chips when we went hiking across the fields to Burley in Wharfedale. What I don’t recall is any longing for food (or for elaborate food) that coloured the everyday. On the contrary, what sticks in the mind is how tasty some very ordinary meals were: the first new potatoes, for instance, so delicious one would save them up till last when having one’s dinner (i.e. lunch). The first strawberries similarly, gooseberries, plums – all bought (and queued for) at the Co-op on Armley Ridge Road. Even the nowadays much reviled Spam and corned beef seemed quite tasty to me then, more so than the stewing steak we had regularly, as Dad was a butcher at Armley Lodge Road Co-op. He was either very scrupulous or quite timid, so we never had more than the ration, the meat always overcooked and never the grander cuts. The first proper steak I had was in the army in Cambridge when I was 18 and which shocked me as it was rare – blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley...

Nestlé, one of the most oppressive and exploitative corporations in the history of everything,  tell us what to eat.   For their profit.

Stay away from their engineered shite.

39 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

I do wish Americans would stop referring to black British people as 'African American'. 

But it's techically correct.  They have African heritage, and we're all American subjects, aren't we?

8 minutes ago, ferguson1 said:

Mate, I love the ideas, but please make it easier on yourself! 

.........also cocktail sausages on sticks, vol au vents, tube of pringles and some Black Country Stollen (just cut up Black Pudding)! You can thank me after the event!! 

 

Sausages and black pudding in a couple of days.  Have bought some chorizo and morcilla to use with stale bread for Migas, which I described a while back and a couple of people liked.

Sister in law is doing the dinner for about 16 of us, I've been asked just to do some snacks for people while they have a drink before dinner.

So, canapés.  No charge, on the basis that people canna pay.  (Oh, is that my coat?  Thank you).

Tomato bruschetta with basil
Butterbean puree and muharamma on oatcakes
Manchego y membrillo
Sweet potato puree with lime and coriander salsa on rice crackers
Spicy peppers stuffed with tabbouleh
Masala potato wedges with tamarind sauce
Flatbread with za'ataar, labneh with mint and sumac

And a  vegan main for a couple of people, aubergine with crushed chick peas and spicy tomato sauce.

Almost all done the day before apart from grilling the flatbread and assembling everything for serving, then feet up for me.

Cheers.

21 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Evidence-based policymaking, how are ye

 

Interesting on the framing of how the results were reported.

Quote

Accusations of BBC media bias have flowed thick and fast from right and left, but the real scandal of the 2019 Election Night was that seats projections were announced at 10pm, while information on the parties’ national vote shares came along only seven hours later, when almost all viewers had gone to bed. Pippa Norris and Patrick Dunleavy argue that this extraordinary delay formed the centrepiece of a thoroughly over-legitimizing representation of the UK’s election process, exaggerating the Conservative and SNP victories, artificially demeaning Labour’s performance, and ignoring the injustices meted out to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and others. A simple re-framing could easily combat the BBC’s and other broadcasters’ now firmly enrooted ‘bias against understanding’, entailing something of a move back to older and more accurate election night formats...

...Only after 5am did the BBC’s Jeremy Vine at last announce an estimated three-party national vote share for Britain, to a residual audience of insomniacs and election geeks.

And what a different story this told. Despite the Brexit Party standing down in their favour, the Conservative vote share increased by just 1.2% on their 2017 performance. And Labour’s 32.1% share of the UK vote under Corbyn was not historically poor, exceeding as it did Ed Miliband’s in 2015 (30.4%); Gordon Brown’s performance in 2010 (29.0%), and Neil Kinnock’s vote share in 1987 (30.8%). Indeed, the 2019 Labour vote was just a couple of points behind their average performance since February 1974, when multiparty competition started to reduce the average two-party share of the vote. Labour’s vote share was down sharply on 2017 (-7.8%), driven by supply-side patterns of party competition which split the Remain camp. The Liberal Democrats under Jo Swinson had actually achieved a near 50% increase in their vote share, despite winning only two handfuls of seats. The divisions amongst the UK’s clear majority of the Remain voters were exacerbated by the UK’s electorally disproportional First-Past-the-Post system. It returned to its typical form in 2019, vesting Boris Johnson with 13% more seats than his national vote share, and awarding four fifths of the Scottish seats to the SNP for 45% of votes there. There was no vast blue tsunami in the grassroots British electorate. Different choices on the ballot simply altered party fortunes, which the electoral system then reshaped and exaggerated...

It's a good job they didn't accuse Israel of war crimes, because that would be anti-semitic.

Quote

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the International Criminal Court of anti-Semitism on Sunday over its chief prosecutor’s plan to pursue a war crimes probe in the Palestinian Territories.

17 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

People praising Blair. It's like Klopp taking credit for Rogers hard work. They were on the upwards trajectory when he took over. 

Did you look at the graph?  The appropriate comparison would be if they were already top of the league, not on a trajectory from somewhere else.

26 minutes ago, desensitized43 said:

It seems to me completely bizarre that when you're conducting a review into why you keep losing elections, you wouldn't ask the most the successful Labour leader in the parties history. The guy that won 3 elections in a row and managed to deliver majorities that the current crop would only see in their dreams.

Blair and his supporters keep on about three elections in a row as though it was his personal achievement.

In fact, if you look at what was happening at the time, the picture is a little different.

Thatcher had resigned in 1990, and the tories were in turmoil.  They won the 1992 election despite that, and that was the high point of their popularity for many years.  We had all the "sleaze" stuff, Major's pathetic "back to basics" charade, and most importantly Black Wednesday and Lamont's misguided attempt to hold the value of the pound, leading to ERM withdrawal and the loss of the party's always unjustified reputation for economic competence.

Shortly after the election, Labour went ahead in the polls, and remained there.  When John Smith died, Blair inherited this very favourable position.

(Graph from here).

This polling position, fairly consistent from before Blair became leader to the 1997 election, was reflected in the landslide vistory.  Blair didn't build that, he arrived with it in place.

Following that, Labour lost votes and members consistently, not least because of the illegal and shameful Iraq war.

I can see why Blair and his familiars would like to spin the tale of him personally building up this vast majority and holding it until someone else let it all go to pot, but actually it wasn't like that.

I can also see why Labour wouldn't want to consult him on where to go now.  Just about every pronouncement he makes is either trashing the party, or self-justification, or rewriting history.  He has nothing to offer.

9 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

Labour under Corbyn were not centre-left. 

Oh yes they were.  (seasonal reference)

From any reasonable northern European perspective, it was a moderate, incremental programme, too timid if anything.

Take back control.  Stop being the poodle of the US.

14 minutes ago, Risso said:

There needs to be more official sites for the traveller community, but there does also need to be more that local people can do to protect themselves from their anti-social behaviour, of either just illegally trespassing on private/public land, or buying plots of land and doing what they like on them.  Everybody else has to comply with planning laws, why shouldn't they?

Agree with all those points.  But the seizure and destruction of their homes is not a reasonable or proportionate measure, nor one directed against other people committing antisocial acts, or contravening planning law (though someone can be required to remove a building they have built without planning permission, which is not directly equivalent).

It is a measure which is designed to play to hatred of travellers, and by "othering" them it reinforces and validates racism.  I would hope the courts would find that it is something directed at one idetifiable group in a way which contravenes equalities law.