leicsmac

Absolutely no disagreement whatsoever there. The US as it is now is at least a potential and at most an actual belligerent towards the UK and the values it and other forward looking nations should possess. Anyone still of the mindset you mention needs to (as you say) get their head out of the sand, or be viewed as someone keen on the kind of inevitably destructive nationalism the US is currently selling.

Of course. What's also obvious is that something like this, done for the reasons stated, puts yet another lie to their sense of superiority on such matters that appear to be a cornerstone of this administration. The hypocrisy is profound.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp39kngz008o Two British social media campaigners are among five people denied US visas after the State Department accused them of seeking to "coerce" American tech platforms into suppressing free speech. Imran Ahmed, an ex-Labour adviser who now heads the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and Clare Melford, CEO of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), were labelled "radical activists" by the Trump administration and banned from entering the US. Land of the free... apparently.

Perhaps, but I also think it's a hell of a gamble to be taking with pretty much the rest of his Test career (if it all goes Kerrigan). There will be other Ashes series for him, I'm sure.

Know what you mean, but do/did we really want Rehan to be thrown into the Aussie bear pit practically first-up Test wise? That could end horribly.

I think that Vance would not inspire the same kind of perverse bullheaded loyalty, but I do see what you mean here. I guess that we'll find out in due course I hope that you're wrong, but I fear you may not be.

That is good news. Also goes to show how incomplete the picture regarding life on Earth may well be.

Clinton: "I'm going to hell but I sure as shit am not going there by myself".

Particularly when Duckett has grossly underperformed on this tour so far.

The entire average is being shifted upwards, yes. Unfortunately it seems that most people won't really accept the gravity of the problem until it's right on their doorstep, which of course will be too late. Speaking of which, I saw that another couple of people have added to the poll indicating that rising global average temperatures are not real at all. Not entirely sure how I can get my head around that concept at all these days. I mean, disavowing human input, yes, but denying the entire phenomenon is happening wholesale?

Yeah, it's a cult of personality above all. That, however, is good in a way because it means that if you neutralise the cult leader(s), then you by and large neutralise the cult. Here's hoping that happens before too much damage is done.

And the worst thing is that the consequences of the above may not just be as mentioned in the article. They may well be absolute. The Earth has shown through its history that it doesn't tolerate either the selfish or the clowns running the circus for long.

Related to the above: In 1952, Adlai Stevenson’s supporter shouted that every thinking person in America would vote for him. Stevenson replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do. I need a majority.” The crowd laughed. Seventy years later, no one is laughing. The joke became prophecy, and thinking itself became the disqualification. The scholar sat in the corner of the Iowa diner, nursing cold coffee while a local farmer explained why the university professor running for Senate was exactly what was wrong with America. Not because of her policies. Not because of her voting record. But because she had a PhD. “These people think they’re better than us,” he said, gesturing with his fork. The irony hung thick in the air: he was dismissing expertise while trusting his crops to agricultural science, his health to medical research, and his smartphone to quantum physics he couldn’t begin to explain. We have arrived at a peculiar moment in American political history. Education, once the great promise of democracy, has become democracy’s alleged enemy. The path from Jeffersonian ideals of an educated citizenry to our current suspicion of anyone who stayed in school past 22 deserves examination, because it reveals something far more troubling than simple anti-intellectualism. The transformation began quietly in the 1970s, when economic opportunity started diverging sharply along educational lines. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1979 the wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates was 47%. By 2021, it had grown to 62%. College graduates pulled away from their non-college peers in earnings, job security, and geographical mobility. What had been a moderate distinction became a chasm, and the working class watched their children compete for service jobs while the college-educated competed for careers. This economic sorting created cultural sorting. College-educated Americans increasingly clustered in the same neighborhoods, married each other, and developed shared cultural markers that had nothing to do with actual intelligence or worth. They shopped at Whole Foods, listened to NPR, and spoke in the careful language of institutional credentialism. The non-college educated noticed. They noticed hard. Conservative media strategists, brilliant in their cynicism, recognized the exploitable resentment and systematically weaponized it. Rush Limbaugh pioneered the template in the 1980s: mock the “liberal elite” and their fancy degrees while never mentioning that most actual elites, the ones with real power and real money, were busy cutting taxes and shipping jobs overseas. Fox News perfected the formula, creating a parallel information ecosystem where education became evidence of corruption rather than qualification. The strategy worked because it contained a grain of truth wrapped in a mountain of misdirection. Yes, many credentialed professionals had become insufferably self-satisfied. Yes, meritocracy had calcified into a hereditary aristocracy of test scores and résumés. The Brookings Institution found that 70% of children born to college-educated parents now earn college degrees themselves, compared to just 10% of children whose parents lack degrees. Yes, institutions of higher learning had priced themselves into irrelevance for working families. But the conclusion drawn was deliberately backwards: the problem wasn’t that education had become a class barrier, but that education itself was suspect. By the 2000s, the equation was complete. Intelligence became smugness. Expertise became elitism. Knowing things, particularly knowing things through systematic study rather than gut feeling, became practically un-American. A 2019 Pew study found that 59% of Republicans believed colleges and universities had a negative effect on the country. We arrived at the absurd spectacle of politicians boasting about their ignorance as proof of authenticity. The Obama presidency accelerated the collapse. Here was a constitutional law professor, articulate and measured, whose very eloquence sparked rage. His competence felt like condescension to millions of Americans who had been told for decades that educated people looked down on them. Trump’s victory completed the circuit: a billionaire who lived in a golden tower convinced working Americans he was one of them, partly by performing ignorance so convincingly that it read as honesty. The consequences have been catastrophic. We sneer at epidemiologists during pandemics, dismiss climate scientists as the climate shifts, and treat economists as partisan hacks while wondering why our policies fail. We’ve created a political culture where being wrong confidently beats being right carefully, where complexity is weakness and certainty is strength. The cruelest aspect of this transformation is how it has poisoned the well for working-class kids who do pursue education. They get caught in the crossfire, accused of abandoning their roots by their communities and never quite trusted by their new peers. Social mobility, the very promise education was supposed to deliver, now comes with a price: cultural homelessness. So what happens to a democracy that treats knowledge as conspiracy and education as treason? What becomes of a republic where expertise is the enemy and ignorance the credential? How do we solve climate change when scientists are dismissed as alarmist? How do we manage pandemics when epidemiologists are ignored? How do we build an economy when economists are just another special interest? The farmer in that Iowa diner and the professor running for Senate are not enemies. They never were. But someone profits from the lie that they are, and that someone is counting on us never asking who benefits when Americans stop trusting the people who know things. Ask yourself: in a fight between the educated and the uneducated, who wins? Not either side. The fight itself is the point, and while we’re busy fighting each other over diplomas, the actual elite, the ones with the real power, the ones who are neither farmer nor professor but predator, they’re laughing all the way to their offshore accounts.

Clearly it would appear that one Danish official telling Trump to fvck off on the matter of Greenland isn't enough. Hopefully the next response will involve action like additional travel restrictions for US tourists and instant persona non grata status for the new "special envoy", rather than having him visit Greenland at all.

Yeah, fair play. I do think that the point about matching the Aussies in kind in terms of ruthlessness stands, though.

Was about to mention something along those lines - Jardine succeeded about a century ago by outscoring them in the ruthless bastard stakes to the point that they kicked up a diplomatic storm about it. And to be fair to him, Jardine didn't back down and the end result was a convincing victory despite Aus having the greatest bat ever to draw breath available. It's either that or the 2010 approach - a group of great players who were ideally prepared, ideally trained and ideally led and just got on with the job.

Also, the Aussies are - team, press, people - brutal winners and even worse losers. They don't do magnanimous. Never have. That kind of soulless bastardry is another thing that helps make them that good.

They've lost less than 15% of their home Tests since 2000, and only lost six out of 36 home Test series in that time. The Saffers have the best record there, with three wins, but they're all in three-match series. The important thing is to get ahead of them from the start - five of those six Test series wins by touring sides came after they had won the first Test match that had a result. Let Aus get ahead, and almost always they're going to stomp you. Touring Oz is only for the very, very best, and it tends to be only the very, very best that win there. This England team, sadly, are not that.

Well, the second photo is publicly available and shows rather clearly a meeting between Clinton, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, along with Diana Ross' and Jacksons own children in 2003 at a fundraising event. The first photo is rather clearly that same photo with redacted faces to give the impression of impropriety, and that photo has clearly been included in the direct release of information by the US Department of Justice over the last day or two. I'm not sure what else there is to say as it's patently obvious what has been done, unless someone has another theory here.

I'm not sure we should really expect high standards of such things given who has done it.

... is anyone particularly surprised that the current US administration would do this?

Well, that's a plan in of itself. Of which there are nine, and regardless of people hyperfocusing on the other two, results against those sides are neither unimportant nor irrelevant. Do agree entirely however with the idea that it's clearly not worked against the hardest of opposition in the hardest of places and a plan B is needed...but that itself being said, what plan B has been shown to be effective against India and Oz on home soil, other than simply having quality through the team ala 2009-2013 (with two of the best seamers, one of the best spinners, a couple of the best bats and one of the best all round wicketkeepers England have ever produced)?

Brook has deeply frustrated me here. He's a damn good player and I'll happily challenge anyone who says otherwise, but the Aussies seem to have a plan for him that works again and again. At least with KP they had much more trouble getting to him in terms of technique.

Not for long, if they continue to act in that way. Geologically speaking, anyway.

It is vile. But a rather cold comfort is that such systems cannot and do not last forever. These people are, after all, only human.