If you look at the dietary laws, the injunctions to monotheism, and the laws concerning sexuality and marriage it suggests that the prime concern was with providing the numbers to outcompete other nations, and I am using the word in its original meaning of an alliance of closely related tribes or clans. Israelite Nation, who are the people we have to thank for the Abrahamic religions, could see that it was a pure numbers game. If you could prevent food poisoning and other biological hazards and could also provide an extensive system of laws to adjudicate disputes without the need for violence within the tribes, then you could get everyone faced the same way. You had a growing population so that once the warriors killed the neighbours you could then quickly settle and colonise with the civilian contingent who could then produce more supplies for ever bigger military campaigns.
I didn't know the difference so I looked it up: https://www.spinny.com/blog/index.php/awd-vs-4wd-the-difference-explained/
Site has got a shitty cookie control page that has no means of saving your decisions
If you want to insure yourself against capital flight go for a Land Value Tax. Let 'em shove a hectare of land in their luggage.
OK so it's time to say the quiet part out loud: the reason that governments have so far held off on taxing billionaires at 1% or 2% is the fear that they might spend 2% or 3% against those governments in revenge.
Monty, you terrible cunt!
What ever happened to him?
Well, he pulled it on Rorschach, and Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft.
LBC announces week of guest presenters - Emily Thornberry, Suella Braverman, Jonathan Ashworth, James Heappey and Alicia Kearns lead Britain’s conversation from Monday, July 22.
Seriously, did they just go down the Westminster Jobcentre?
Even worse than that, the far right, as represented by Reform, did better than they have previously done and could yet cause us more problems come the next general election. It's possible that the centrist government that's just been elected will manage effectively enough to kill a lot of the sense of grievance that is currently being harnessed by Reform and directed against immigrants but it's equally possible that another global recession could tank that entire programme.
Still and all I appreciate you coming in here to talk with me about how your thinking has changed. I agree that the French very much did what you say they did. I don't know if there are still people alive who remember the Vichy government but it could be that amongst the traditionally conservative people in their seventies and eighties there's still a horror about what the Nazis wrought.
What happens when a Tory learns about empathy?
Cognitive dissonance.
Only way I can imagine Suella chasing a trans voter is with a cricket bat.
The Conservatives are debating their future - but the path back to victory is not straightforward.
This gave me a big belly laugh:
>Another Conservative said: “The answer is we need to find a way to appeal to voters we lost to all parties. I don’t know how you do that on policy, but Keir Starmer showed you can do it by looking competent and serious. But I don’t know if any of the candidates we have at the moment can do that.”
It's pure maths. The Tory votes plus the Reform votes is a bigger sum than the Labour vote. Listen. I have to live here with these fucks so I don't like it any more than you do. But without the collapse in the Tory vote it wouldn't have mattered what Keir Starmer or Ed Davey did.
That's not what happened. The right wing vote got split by dummies wanting to vote for a party further to the right than their normal brand and the centre voted for the party that was still in the centre. I mean it was a good result in that the Normal Dummy Party got kicked out but if you look at the history they have been in control for most of the past two centuries because the electorate of this country are mainly right-leaning dummies.
Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Definitely. He emboldened Bush with his Christian bullshit.
Yeah, on the other hand he's never going to face up to what he's done so you're right, he probably shouldn't have brought up the single most authoritarian policy New Labour ever proposed.
Blair needs to stop sticking his oar in and give the new government time and space to crack on with fixing the mess left by the Tories. I’m sure ministers have better things to do than shoot down his bad ideas. be dragged off to prison for war crimes.
Tomatyo, Tomahto.
The original settlement of Salisbury was known as Old Sarum. The population and cathedral city had moved in the 14th century to New Sarum, at the foot of the Old Sarum hill.
To them it's hilarious that all of our suffering was caused by someone else praying for it.
Antoinette Sandbach, a descendent of a slave owner, argues she has a right to privacy.
A former Conservative MP has asked to be removed from an award-winning academic's research presented in a TEDx Talk that connects her to a slave-owning ancestor