Since I prefer to speak on topics I know about, I will not refer to Venezuela.Yes, I think we can be pretty sure that some guys are doing very well in Venezuela, like the guys working in the passport dept, but this guy doesn' seem too happy:
How is life like in Venezuela in 2019?
Answer: Hi, I've been living out of Venezuela during the last 6 months, but right now I'm visiting the country and the life is everything but easy… It's a “Zombie Country”… The people's life pass by the search of food and some pretty common products [hygienic paper for example] and for the way t...www.quora.com
Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
- Start date
Here's a nice explanation from a guy from Romania, who's family has been through it. Skip to 8:00 for the nitty gritty.
What will Brexit mean for your money? Key questions answered
From pensions to studying, here’s what will happen after the UK leaves at 11pm on Friday
www.theguardian.com
I don't have to "Focus" on the negative, there is nothing "positive" about either Brexit or this Government.
What they say as a concrete commitment today devolves into an aspiration tommorow, and they reverse the policy on the third day.
Already they have blown every promise made to the stupid new voters they have acquired from Labour.
So the likelihood is that the date regarded as Independence day by the leave campaign is actually as bogus as they are????What will Brexit mean for your money? Key questions answered
From pensions to studying, here’s what will happen after the UK leaves at 11pm on Friday
Pending a trade deal that equates to BRINO? because we won't get one without accepting EU rules, and Japan won't give us a deal unless we do, and as a bonus we have to obey whatever the USA imposes as rules too?
BrexIt has already cost the nation more that we paid in for the entire period of our membership and what have we gained, other than that we have to obey the rules set by the EU and everyone else with no say in the matter?
What the hell has it all been for?? Any clues?
Not in the least, and you know it, instead we have a bunch in charge with fascist tendencies only moderated by their incompetence, laziness and tendency to panic.
Time they had a new and more appropriate party flag
Not much point in a) appointing someone with questionable associations; b) not replacing that person when the associations are made public, if that person then quits. Just more government incompetence. (Wasn't there enough fuss about Moore-Bick being appointed? Didn't that provide a hint?)
Grenfell inquiry panellist steps down over cladding company links
Benita Mehra had been the target of fury from survivors and bereaved of 2017 tragedy
A key member of the Grenfell Tower public inquiry has resigned after fury among survivors and the bereaved at her links to the company that made the combustible cladding.
Less than 48 hours before the inquiry is due to start hearing evidence about “decisions which led to the installation of a highly combustible cladding system”, Boris Johnson announced Benita Mehra was standing down from a panel advising the chairman of the inquiry, Sir Martin Moore-Bick. It followed 10 days of rising pressure on the prime minister to reverse her appointment from the community devastated on 14 June 2017 by the fire which claimed 72 lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/25/grenfell-inquiry-panellist-steps-down-over-cladding-company-links
Grenfell inquiry panellist steps down over cladding company links
Benita Mehra had been the target of fury from survivors and bereaved of 2017 tragedy
A key member of the Grenfell Tower public inquiry has resigned after fury among survivors and the bereaved at her links to the company that made the combustible cladding.
Less than 48 hours before the inquiry is due to start hearing evidence about “decisions which led to the installation of a highly combustible cladding system”, Boris Johnson announced Benita Mehra was standing down from a panel advising the chairman of the inquiry, Sir Martin Moore-Bick. It followed 10 days of rising pressure on the prime minister to reverse her appointment from the community devastated on 14 June 2017 by the fire which claimed 72 lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/25/grenfell-inquiry-panellist-steps-down-over-cladding-company-links
And a nice little judicial review:
Court to probe Carrie Symonds’ influence on PM after cancellation of badger cull
Boris Johnson’s partner and animal rights activist was briefed by Badger Trust weeks before the policy was changed
The influence exerted on the prime minister by his partner, Carrie Symonds, will be explored in court after permission was granted last week for a judicial review into how the government came to pull a cull on badgers in Derbyshire.
The case could embarrass Boris Johnson and raise questions about the government’s willingness to listen to its advisers when formulating policy.
Symonds, a passionate animal rights defender and a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, has, along with environment minister Zac Goldsmith, been a staunch critic of the cull that is operating in 10 counties.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/25/court-probe-carrie-symonds-influence-boris-johnson-badger-cull
I am pretty much set against the badger cull. I dislike the idea. More importantly, there are many reasons to question the science, so-called, behind it.
Court to probe Carrie Symonds’ influence on PM after cancellation of badger cull
Boris Johnson’s partner and animal rights activist was briefed by Badger Trust weeks before the policy was changed
The influence exerted on the prime minister by his partner, Carrie Symonds, will be explored in court after permission was granted last week for a judicial review into how the government came to pull a cull on badgers in Derbyshire.
The case could embarrass Boris Johnson and raise questions about the government’s willingness to listen to its advisers when formulating policy.
Symonds, a passionate animal rights defender and a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, has, along with environment minister Zac Goldsmith, been a staunch critic of the cull that is operating in 10 counties.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/25/court-probe-carrie-symonds-influence-boris-johnson-badger-cull
I am pretty much set against the badger cull. I dislike the idea. More importantly, there are many reasons to question the science, so-called, behind it.
No idea - unless it is ego and attempts at machismo. Which ends up more masochism.
And this is the sort of thing the media do in support of the Double cross party
https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/meghan-markle-megxit-tabloid-headlines-brexit-news/348340
"
Meghan Markle: how tabloids are using “Megxit” to distract us from real news
This latest royal story is slightly small fry compared to basic continued social and economic survival of our country
On 9 January, in case you missed it, the House of Commons debated whether or not refugee children deserve to be reunited with their families after fleeing for their life from countries ravaged by war, disease and terrorism. So that’s reassuring. That’s a good sign of where humanity is at in the UK at the moment.
On that day, the UK was also accused of ‘acting like cowboys’ with international security after illegally copying the EU Schengen database.
And 9 January was also the day that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson got a ringing personal endorsement from the far right, racist, climate change denying, probable conspiracy theorist Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary. Great.
These stories, as you’ll no doubt have noticed, received rather less airtime.
This by the way is a Woman's magazine and seems to have a handle on the situation the media lack
https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/meghan-markle-megxit-tabloid-headlines-brexit-news/348340
"
Meghan Markle: how tabloids are using “Megxit” to distract us from real news
This latest royal story is slightly small fry compared to basic continued social and economic survival of our country
On 9 January, in case you missed it, the House of Commons debated whether or not refugee children deserve to be reunited with their families after fleeing for their life from countries ravaged by war, disease and terrorism. So that’s reassuring. That’s a good sign of where humanity is at in the UK at the moment.
On that day, the UK was also accused of ‘acting like cowboys’ with international security after illegally copying the EU Schengen database.
And 9 January was also the day that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson got a ringing personal endorsement from the far right, racist, climate change denying, probable conspiracy theorist Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary. Great.
These stories, as you’ll no doubt have noticed, received rather less airtime.
This by the way is a Woman's magazine and seems to have a handle on the situation the media lack
No vision involved, just reporting a couple of truths unpopular with all those who lap up the anti-left propaganda.
.
It was all about the Tories not losing votes to UKIP, as usual their blatant self interest taking precedence before all else.
.
Of course the big problem with requiring politicians with a blameless history is the sheer impossibility of finding one
"What the hell has it all been for?? Any clues?. "
Yes there is an excellent article in todays Irish Times which equates it to being a nervous breakdown of the English Psyche. The component countries of Scotland Wales and NI or Ireland , don't have this breakdown, because they have had National Identities. In order for England to become Great Britain, or British ,they had to relinquish their Englishness , and used the growth of Empire as a substitute.
If I succeed in extracting the article I will post it.
..This is the Article. While it is in the current ITs output, it was originally published 2 years ago, and this was a development of an article in the European of 2017. So its not new news ...
Brexit is a collective English mental breakdown
English people living on dreams of empire never learned to see others as equals
Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 01:11
Nicholas Boyle
75
Not until there is a separate English parliament . . . will the delusions that led the country to Brexit finally be dissipated by contact with reality. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
In the White Paper of February 2nd, 2017, introducing the procedures for leaving the European Union, the UK government made an astonishingly frank admission: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” In other words, the Leave campaigners’ principal claim, that it was necessary to “take back control” of UK laws, was false, since control had never been lost; and the campaign was based, not on fact, but on what it “felt like” – on illusion, therefore, and emotion.
Why did it ‘feel like that’? Where did the illusions of Leave voters come from? The question Brexit really raises is one not of economics or politics, but of national psychology. And it is not ‘British’ psychology that is at issue, but English. Scotland voted 62 per cent in support of Remain as did 56 per cent of Northern Ireland (and in the Republic support for European Union membership is currently estimated at more than 80 per cent).
The Leave campaign presented the EU as a lethal threat to national identity, indeed as the stranger and enemy that had already stolen it: give us back our country, they said. And to vote against the EU was to vote to recover what we had lost. The voting pattern, however, revealed that appeal to emotion, and that vision of the EU, worked only in England, and that Europhobia was the outcome of a specifically English crisis of identity.
England sank its identity in the unions with Scotland, in 1707, and with Ireland, in 1800, which gave rise respectively to Britain and to the United Kingdom.
Imperially self-sufficient
From then on the English had no need of a separate identity, for as metropolitans – of Britain, of the United Kingdom and eventually of the British empire – they dealt with no one on equal terms. They were masters of the seas, they could travel around the world without setting foot outside imperial territory, and economically the empire was, potentially at least, self-sufficient.
The dismantling by the United States of the British empire, after its finest hour in 1940, was a traumatic blow to the psyche of two English generations, from which they have never recovered, largely because they have never recognised it.
That is the terrifying truth that membership of the EU presents to the English and from which for centuries the empire insulated them: that they have to live in the world on an equal footing with other people.
In Ireland, the EU, the essential framework for the Belfast Friday agreement of 1998, appears as the guardian of nationhood, the guarantor of the peaceful coexistence of the island’s two factions: when, at the end of your lane, you cross from the Republic into Tyrone, Fermanagh, or Armagh, it is the EU, not London, that tells you you are still in Ireland.
Similarly, in Scotland, to vote for the EU was to vote for the distinctness of Scotland as a legitimate fellow occupant of the island of Great Britain and for its equality with England as a fellow member, alongside Germany and Malta, France and Cyprus, of a larger union than that centred on London.
Only the English could not see the EU in these terms: as the protector of the identity of relatively small nations in a world of conflicting giants. Because only the English could not see themselves as a nation at all.
Haunted
For the English the United Kingdom occupies the psychic space once filled by the empire. Haunted by their unassimilated imperial past, the English continue refusing to think of themselves as a nation in the same sense as Scotland or Ireland and maintain a constitution for their United Kingdom which denies the obvious. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have their variously titled national assemblies, but England has none – not out of modesty, but in order to claim for itself the exceptional position of anonymous master of its now diminutive empire.
The EU challenged England not to give up a national identity, but to acquire one – to give up the illusions embodied in a United Kingdom that never was a nation, but was always a device to conceal England’s colonial relation to the other nations inhabiting Great Britain and Ireland. Instead the EU offered England the opportunity for equal partnership in a common endeavour, which is nowadays all that nationhood can mean.
On June 23rd, 2016, the English rejected that offer and opted to continue living the fiction of splendid isolation that sustained the UK and the British empire before it, and to continue denying the Scots and the Irish a will of their own. Any recovery from this collective mental breakdown will involve treating it in the light of its deep historical causes. Not until there is a separate English parliament, giving England at last the distinctive political identity it has shunned for 300 years, will the delusions that led the country to Brexit finally be dissipated by contact with reality. Perhaps then, with their psychosis healed, the English will apply to rejoin the EU.
Nicholas Boyle is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge
Brexit is a collective English mental breakdown
English people living on dreams of empire never learned to see others as equals
Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 01:11
Nicholas Boyle
75
Not until there is a separate English parliament . . . will the delusions that led the country to Brexit finally be dissipated by contact with reality. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
In the White Paper of February 2nd, 2017, introducing the procedures for leaving the European Union, the UK government made an astonishingly frank admission: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” In other words, the Leave campaigners’ principal claim, that it was necessary to “take back control” of UK laws, was false, since control had never been lost; and the campaign was based, not on fact, but on what it “felt like” – on illusion, therefore, and emotion.
Why did it ‘feel like that’? Where did the illusions of Leave voters come from? The question Brexit really raises is one not of economics or politics, but of national psychology. And it is not ‘British’ psychology that is at issue, but English. Scotland voted 62 per cent in support of Remain as did 56 per cent of Northern Ireland (and in the Republic support for European Union membership is currently estimated at more than 80 per cent).
The Leave campaign presented the EU as a lethal threat to national identity, indeed as the stranger and enemy that had already stolen it: give us back our country, they said. And to vote against the EU was to vote to recover what we had lost. The voting pattern, however, revealed that appeal to emotion, and that vision of the EU, worked only in England, and that Europhobia was the outcome of a specifically English crisis of identity.
England sank its identity in the unions with Scotland, in 1707, and with Ireland, in 1800, which gave rise respectively to Britain and to the United Kingdom.
Imperially self-sufficient
From then on the English had no need of a separate identity, for as metropolitans – of Britain, of the United Kingdom and eventually of the British empire – they dealt with no one on equal terms. They were masters of the seas, they could travel around the world without setting foot outside imperial territory, and economically the empire was, potentially at least, self-sufficient.
The dismantling by the United States of the British empire, after its finest hour in 1940, was a traumatic blow to the psyche of two English generations, from which they have never recovered, largely because they have never recognised it.
- NI businesses fear burden of post-Brexit red tape on goods transport
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The end of empire meant the end of the English pretension to have and need no national identity of their own. Once they admitted their empire was no more, the English would have to become just another nation like everybody else, with a specific, limited identity, a specific history, neither specially honourable nor specially dishonourable, with limited weight, limited resources, and limited importance in the world, and on the Atlantic archipelago.
That is the terrifying truth that membership of the EU presents to the English and from which for centuries the empire insulated them: that they have to live in the world on an equal footing with other people.
In Ireland, the EU, the essential framework for the Belfast Friday agreement of 1998, appears as the guardian of nationhood, the guarantor of the peaceful coexistence of the island’s two factions: when, at the end of your lane, you cross from the Republic into Tyrone, Fermanagh, or Armagh, it is the EU, not London, that tells you you are still in Ireland.
Similarly, in Scotland, to vote for the EU was to vote for the distinctness of Scotland as a legitimate fellow occupant of the island of Great Britain and for its equality with England as a fellow member, alongside Germany and Malta, France and Cyprus, of a larger union than that centred on London.
Only the English could not see the EU in these terms: as the protector of the identity of relatively small nations in a world of conflicting giants. Because only the English could not see themselves as a nation at all.
Haunted
For the English the United Kingdom occupies the psychic space once filled by the empire. Haunted by their unassimilated imperial past, the English continue refusing to think of themselves as a nation in the same sense as Scotland or Ireland and maintain a constitution for their United Kingdom which denies the obvious. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have their variously titled national assemblies, but England has none – not out of modesty, but in order to claim for itself the exceptional position of anonymous master of its now diminutive empire.
The EU challenged England not to give up a national identity, but to acquire one – to give up the illusions embodied in a United Kingdom that never was a nation, but was always a device to conceal England’s colonial relation to the other nations inhabiting Great Britain and Ireland. Instead the EU offered England the opportunity for equal partnership in a common endeavour, which is nowadays all that nationhood can mean.
On June 23rd, 2016, the English rejected that offer and opted to continue living the fiction of splendid isolation that sustained the UK and the British empire before it, and to continue denying the Scots and the Irish a will of their own. Any recovery from this collective mental breakdown will involve treating it in the light of its deep historical causes. Not until there is a separate English parliament, giving England at last the distinctive political identity it has shunned for 300 years, will the delusions that led the country to Brexit finally be dissipated by contact with reality. Perhaps then, with their psychosis healed, the English will apply to rejoin the EU.
Nicholas Boyle is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge
We had one of those.
I will never forget he put it up for sale for £15
Coaches stopped outside our house.
It was useless but for £15 everyone wanted to take the heap of junk away
The Comedy continues in the Daily Express
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1233450/brexit-news-boris-johnson-deal-european-union-uk-us-trade-deal-latest-donald-trump
Boris Johnson’s huge post-Brexit plan as PM vows Britain will become ‘global trailblazer’
BRITAIN will become a "global trailblazer" after we finally leave the European Union on Friday, says Boris Johnson.
In a sign that relying on the European Union is firmly in the past, advertising will centre on 13 non-EU countries. Rolling out on February 1, there will be a digital marketing strategy aimed at priority markets in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China (including Hong Kong), India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UAE and the USA.
It follows revelations that talks on an EU trade deal will not be prioritised and that parallel discussions for lucrative trade deals will happen with the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. "
Just a couple of snags
Had we remained in the EU we would enjoy these deals at no cost to us to make.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1233450/brexit-news-boris-johnson-deal-european-union-uk-us-trade-deal-latest-donald-trump
Boris Johnson’s huge post-Brexit plan as PM vows Britain will become ‘global trailblazer’
BRITAIN will become a "global trailblazer" after we finally leave the European Union on Friday, says Boris Johnson.
In a sign that relying on the European Union is firmly in the past, advertising will centre on 13 non-EU countries. Rolling out on February 1, there will be a digital marketing strategy aimed at priority markets in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China (including Hong Kong), India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UAE and the USA.
It follows revelations that talks on an EU trade deal will not be prioritised and that parallel discussions for lucrative trade deals will happen with the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. "
Just a couple of snags
- Without a trade deal with the EU no one is interested in one with us
- We only have a bunch of rank amateurs to make these deals and nothing to sell they can't get locally
Had we remained in the EU we would enjoy these deals at no cost to us to make.
The herd of elephants on the room.
These are the talks that have the prelude of being told to drop “discriminatory” taxes on big tech companies. And not to use Huawei 5G kit.