What could possibly go wrong?

It's not too extreme to say that my life expectancy is dependent upon the result. If Boris wins a majority, I can't begin to explain how frightening that is.

 

keep to the Fen Causeway

However, it seems that Laura Kuennsberg may just have crosssed a line and done something illegal in her desire to promote the Tories. She has obtained postal voting data before election day and reported it.

It is illegal for postal votes to be examined until polls close at 10:00 tomorrow. It is certainly illegal to communicate that information to a 3rd party (ie a reporter). And it is definitely illegal to report on that illegal information.

EvolvePolitics - BBC's Laura Kuenssberg accused of breaking Electoral Law after revealing confidential Postal Vote information

The Representation of the People Act 1983 clearly defines the law, stating:

"No person shall, in the case of an election to which this section applies, publish before the poll is closed [...] any statement relating to the way in which voters have voted at the election where that statement is (or might reasonably be taken to be) based on information given by voters after they have voted, or b) any forecast as to the result of the election which is (or might reasonably be taken to be) based on information so given. "

2 Oct: In the case of Donald Trump and Ukraine, Hunter Biden is guilty of poor judgment
"What was Hunter Biden thinking when he associated himself, and his family's good name, with business dealings in a country so steeped in corruption? And why didn't his dad, then vice president, more forcefully advise him against it?"
11 Dec: Impeach President Trump
"In his thuggish effort to trade American arms for foreign dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump resembles not so much Clinton as he does Richard Nixon, another corrupt president who tried to cheat his way to reelection."

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

UPDATED
As MAX schedule slips again, FAA boss tells Boeing CEO to back off on 737 MAX schedule predictions.
And American Airlines pushes the MAX out of its schedule until April.[_link] via @seattletimes

— Dominic Gates (@dominicgates) December 12, 2019

Qantas picks the Airbus A350-100 over the Boeing 777X as its future ultra-long-range aircraft. (Via @dominicgates) [_link] #aviation

— Seattle Times Biz (@seatimesbiz) December 13, 2019

BREAKING: The Boeing board is weighing a proposal from top management to temporarily shut down 737 production in Renton, according to a person close to the decision makers. [_link]

— The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) December 16, 2019

WTO court and the US-EU fight between Boeing and Airbus

WTO Boeing Dispute: EU issues preliminary list of U.S. products considered for countermeasured

Oh no!

( Trump attacks Christian magazine for backing impeachment then misspells its name during wild early morning rant)

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore
L. Cohen

If I were to describe the power of New Atheism over online discourse to a teenager, they would never believe me. Why should they? [...] imagine the same travelers visiting 2005, logging on to the Internet, and holy @#$! that's a lot of atheism-related discourse what is going on here?

My first forays onto the Internet were online bulletin boards about computer games. They would have a lot of little forums about various aspects of the games, plus two off-topic forums. One for discussion of atheism vs. religion. And the other for everything else. This was a common structure for websites in those days. You had to do it, or the atheism vs. religion discussions would take over everything. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.

How Christmas is ruining the planet

Environmentalists call Christmas the world's greatest annual environmental disaster.

For many it's a jolly time to spend with loved ones, eating heaps of food and exchanging gifts -- but some green groups are saying humbug! to Christmas, calling it the "world's greatest annual environmental disaster."

The 28-year-old has appeared in the ECHO in previous years as part of our festive fugitive campaign as police tried to track him down [_link]

— Liverpool Echo (@LivEchonews) December 26, 2019

For the first four years of his life, until World War II broke out in 1939, Brown spent every winter and spring in what was then the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. His father worked as a railway engineer in Khartoum, having struggled like many other Protestants to find employment in his intolerant Catholic homeland. He alone, of all Brown's direct kin, held a university degree.

Each summer and fall, the heat caused men to send their wives and children out of Sudan. Brown and his mother, a homemaker, returned to a small, quiet, rainy seaside town called Bray on the east coast of Ireland.
[...]
"Living in the Sudan put in me a love of the Middle East, a real interest in it, distant memories of a very sunny world with large, dark Sudanese servants in long white robes," he said.

Those who eventually became our masters noticed what we were doing and crept into our lives on little cats' feet. When they dangled short cuts and algorithmic trickery, we didn't treat them harshly. Search engine optimization turned our headlines into things that looked like they'd been hastily translated into English from some dead language, but we went along with it -- it was One Great Trick that made everything easier. (It's no wonder that, some time later, the next mandate from the God Algorithm turned our headlines into "curiosity gap" promises.) When social media emerged, gifting us a "new front page" for the internet, we thought, "Why not?" These big search engine operators and platforms for sharing just wanted to make our lives easier, after all [...]

Over time, Facebook has discovered the cheap and dirty way to reach the world: tweak its users' amygdalae through constant provocation, engender a cartwheel of extreme emotion (rage, fear, ecstasy, and sorrow), and reward those capable of running that barbaric electric current across its network. And it turns out that those who have proven most capable of this come from a universe of charlatans: fake news purveyors, propagandists, and scammers. Loosed from any sense of standard, these bad actors have flourished. They would not have done so had we not lent these platforms our prestige -- had we not treated the trust we earned as our cheapest commodity.

A catchphrase has become current among young Koreans in recent years to describe their country: "Hell Joseon" - "Joseon" being the name of a long-dead Korean kingdom. That phrase is being superseded by a new term, "Tal-Jo" - a pormanteau comprising "leave" and "Joseon," which, vernacularly, might be best be translated as "Escape Hell."

Example [emphasis original]:

As we have seen, the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is capitalist monopoly, i.e., monopoly which has grown out of capitalism and exists in the general environment of capitalism, commodity production and competition, in permanent and insoluble contradiction to this general environment. Nevertheless, like all monopoly, it inevitably engenders a tendency to stagnation and decay. Since monopoly prices are established, even temporarily, the motive cause of technical and, consequently, of all other progress, disappears to a certain extent and, further, the economic possibility arises of deliberately retarding technical progress. For instance, in America, a certain Owens invented a machine which revolutionised the manufacture of bottles. The German bottle-manufacturing cartel purchased Owens' patent, but pigeonholed it, refrained from utilising it.

IBM, for instance, did this for decades.  One example is their grabbing and suppression of the chorded keyboard a device capable of increasing typing speed over 200 words per minute as well as being a mouse.

Certainly, monopoly under capitalism can never completely, and for a very long period of time, eliminate competition in the world market (and this, by the by, is one of the reasons why the theory of ultra-imperialism is so absurd). Certainly, the possibility of reducing cost of production and increasing profits by introducing technical improvements operates in the direction of change. But the tendency to stagnation and decay, which is characteristic of monopoly, continues to operate, and in some branches of industry, in some countries, for certain periods of time, it gains the upper hand.

An excellent statement of the situation in which we find ourselves.  Doesn't take the brain the size of a planet to see stagnation happening in the UK, US, and EU.  

* Can't do it.  My plate is filled to overflowing over the table, the floor, and running out the dining room door.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Sources tell Tasnim: Hezbollah to hit Israel if US responds #Soleimani #SoleimaniAssassination

— Tasnim News Agency (@Tasnimnews_EN) January 8, 2020

END OF TIMES

Well, I'm on the phone with my computer security service, and as I understand it someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography. I might just be a random target. But this could be an attempt to Qanon me.

It's an ugly world out there.

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 8, 2020

Just really glad that a monoethnic group of befuddled geriatric wackadoos comprising, in a record year, 10% of the tiny state population at a tenth of a percent of the national population will have this magnificently out-sized influence on the election. https://t.co/555YTBBPbG

— Jacob Bacharach (@jakebackpack) January 10, 2020

Xinjiang's vocational education and training centers were education and training institutions established in accordance with the law, which essentially share the same end with "U.S. community corrections, British Desistance and Disengagement Programme (DDP), French deradicalization centers," the officials emphasized.

US "community corrections"
cjrs.gov
ankle monitors "to support the population with a behavioral health disorder"
A DHS Emeritus Center of Excellence
Radicalization and Deradicalization training and research
Combating Terrorism at West Point
"Disengagement or Deradicalization: A Look at Prison Programs for Jailed Terrorists"

archived
< wipes tears > Energy Units

The major cause of this stagnation is that physics has changed, but physicists have not changed their methods. As physics has progressed, the foundations have become increasingly harder to probe by experiment. Technological advances have not kept size and expenses manageable. This is why, in physics today, we have collaborations of thousands of people operating machines that cost billions of dollars.

With fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly unlikely. And lacking those discoveries, the technological progress that would be needed to keep experiments economically viable never materializes. It's a vicious cycle: Costly experiments result in lack of progress. Lack of progress increases the costs of further experiment. This cycle must eventually lead into a dead end when experiments become simply too expensive to remain affordable. A $40 billion particle collider is such a dead end.

Eh, it is true that high-energy physics is now close to running at the limits of the societal resources that are likely to be made available. But the data produced by those experiments is vastly easier to use for secondary studies than during the golden age of fast progress. One grad student can write you a Python script that gives you more information from an old experiment than you got from hiring hundreds of part timers to study emulsion plates. I'm the first to admit that particle physics has stagnated, but that isn't really the main reason.
Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years » IAI TV

And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There's math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn't mean this math describes reality.

Physicists need new methods. Better methods. Methods that are appropriate to the present century.

But even if you don't care what's up with strings and multiverses, you should worry about what is happening here. The foundations of physics are the canary in the coal mine. It's an old discipline and the first to run into this problem. But the same problem will sooner or later surface in other disciplines if experiments become increasingly expensive and recruit large fractions of the scientific community.

All too easy pic.twitter.com/BNBYA8tO3C

— ωεαşεζøίɗ (@WeaselFidget) January 16, 2020

Great British Global Free Trade in the Caribbean: a history of hazards, harassment and human suffering. If we do this, let's remember the lessons from last time: a thread. https://t.co/iwGXiPYXxW

— JenniBarclay (@VolcanoJenni) January 15, 2020

Before this, like British America, Britain divided Barbados thus.

Absolute red alert: This is unbelievably naked retaliation for revealing extreme corruption at the highest levels of #Bolsonaro's administration,  and an existential threat to investigative journalism in #Brazil. https://t.co/qo6v0XjgyZ

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 21, 2020

(h/t: @natogreen) pic.twitter.com/ANmVjkaNmh

— bern thugs n harmony🌹 (@uhshanti) January 20, 2020

Yet today I watched as the Senate Republicans performed an abortion on the Senate floor.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Francis George Steiner was born on April 23, 1929, into a Jewish family living in Paris. His birth was assisted, he revealed in "Errata," by a doctor (Carl Weiss) who then returned to Louisiana to assassinate Huey Long.

Corona Offer $15 Million To Help Change Coronavirus Name To BudLightvirus

Constellation Brands, the company behind Corona beer, have offered up to $15 million to help change the Coronavirus' name to the BudLightvirus.

Executives at Constellation are thought to be `incredibly concerned' with the rising publicity of the deadly virus, that has so far killed over 100 people and have pledged an initial $10 million to change the Coronavirus name to "literally anything else" with a further $5 million if the name change is BudLightvirus.

There's video of the incident, which began when 21-year-old student Madison Moore asked Biden to explain his poor showing in the Iowa caucuses:

Biden tackles a `mean question' about electability after Iowa. pic.twitter.com/mhDaSHbXqU

— Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (@CleveWootson) February 9, 2020

Manchester City have been banned from the Champions League for two seasons by UEFA.

In full ➡ [_link] pic.twitter.com/84Vca6LXBr

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) February 14, 2020

Urgently needed influencers and ££££ to convince the CAS on appeal.

But that's not the same as a fundamental ideological difference. I suspect that when Sanders condemns the depredations of the "billionaire class," or calls for a major power shift from corporations to workers, a majority of the party faithful assume he's just saying out loud what popular Democrats like Barack Obama truly believe in their hearts but are, perhaps, too politically prudent to state so baldly.

Why do loyal Democrats labor under such illusions about their party leaders? Because those leaders go to great lengths to cultivate those illusions -- and for the most part they succeed. Although many of us on the Left tend to tune out the stump-speech platitudes of mainstream Democrats, that makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that, to the ideologically unarmored, those platitudes can make a  speaker sound a lot like someone who shares the values of, say, a Bernie Sanders.

[...]

This hypothesis can help us make sense of some otherwise inexplicable facts.

Take the confounding pattern of voters' first and second candidate choices. How can it be that the top second choice of Biden supporters is Sanders? Aren't Biden and Sanders polar opposites politically?

Yes -- in reality. But in the perception of many rank-and-file Democrats, the two probably resemble each other quite a bit. Both are old-school, rough-around-the-edges, white-haired "Democrats" who are all about standing up for the little guy. That's the image Biden strives to project, even as he (for example) works to strip bankruptcy protections from desperate debtors to please his funders at Delaware banks.

The blueprint sets out what it believes would be the quickest and most effective route for the new state regaining the status it lost last month as a result of the UK's Brexit vote and how Scotland would benefit from membership.

Drawn up by Brussels expert Anthony Salamone, the 125-page document entitled The EU Blueprint: Pathway for Scotland's Accession to the European Union under Independence argues Scotland would meet the required "Copenhagen criteria" needed to apply to join the bloc.

Referring to the new Scottish state as a Republic, it states: "Scotland was previously part of the European Union for nearly five decades. On that basis alone, the Scottish economy is manifestly capable of forming part of the Union economy and responding sufficiently to its associated demands and forces. The Republic will therefore be in an extremely strong position to satisfy the economic criteria of the Copenhagen criteria."

It is significant that she used the specific French word for political change - "l'alternance" - which has a rich history as a rallying cry for the country to swing to the opposite side of the left/right spectrum, especially against longstanding incumbents.

Party Realignment And The New Deal is not one of them.

A 10-year-old boy was accidentally shot by his babysitter when she was taking selfies while holding a gun, a Texas sheriff's office said.

The boy was taken to a hospital in critical condition, but is recovering.