Verbal

Calling shurlock to the Lounge. There's another doolally mess to clean up.

So you'd think the May government would be doing some forward planning on this worst case scenario. But no. They continue with the 'have cake and eat it' fantasy, all while the constant message from the 27 is that any deal Britain gets, if it gets it, must be bad. Just as Cameron refused to allow the civil service to plan for a Leave vote, May is refusing to allow the civil service to allow for the most likely non-outcome of negotiations. I'm amazed the Brexit loons are not hopping, but rather seem to be wandering blindly into a cul de sac where they'll find themselves kettled. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-talks-deal-failure-gross-negligent-crispin-blunt-foreign-affairs-committee-a7476411.html

Just to reassure us that we're in good hands, the excellent Sam Coates, in The Times, gives a revealing insight into the quality of discussion on Brexit in cabinet. Mrs May's summaries typically give little indication of future decision-making and usually involve a request for more information. Boris Johnson...has so far said very little. He appears to be adopting an "I'm only going to care when it matters" approach Liam Fox gives expansive updates on world even on "things that you wouldn't necessarily know". Andrea Leadsom gets "quite irritated" when three people in a row say Brexit is quite difficult and "puts them right". ...Mrs Leadsom's contributions have been noted for repeated references to post natal depression and the importance of a child's first 1,000 days. Brilliant. Cabinet debate by Brexiteers is just as cretinous as on here.

So while you busy yourself making puerile comments, your shining hero Corbyn remains silent while Assad's murderers go door-to-door massacring men, women and children in East Aleppo. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-38301629 This is what Corbyn's allies on today's Morning Star call, with criminal cynicism, the 'liberation of Aleppo'. Do you agree with this? Do you agree with the conspiracy theory that the White Helmets are western stooges and the people they rescue merely crisis actors? Will you agree with the White Helmets' appeal: For years, our humanitarian volunteers have worked to save the lives of our people in Aleppo: operating in underground hospitals, rescuing entire families buried under the rubble and risking our lives to document what the daily war crimes committed by Assad regime [sic] and its ally Russia. We can do no more. We can't believe the world's most powerful countries can't get 100,000 civilians to safety that is 4 KM away! In short, are you interested in politics at all, or merely in being a brainless gimp in a 'personality' cult?

So just to be clear, are you one of those dimwitted Corbyn cultists who believe White Helmets conspiracy theory propagated by Assad's regime? Are you really that dribblingly stupid? I do hope not, for your sake. I'm no Blairite, despite your desire to pigeon hole all those who find Corbynism - and the Putin-supporting Stop the War sham - morally bankrupt. Yet Blair deserves some credit, as late, great Christopher Hitchens says: When Tony Blair took office, Slobodan Milošević was cleansing and raping the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Mullah Omar was lending Osama bin Laden the hinterland of a failed and rogue state. Charles Taylor of Liberia was leading a hand-lopping militia of enslaved children across the frontier of Sierra Leone, threatening a blood-diamond version of Rwanda in West Africa. And the wealth and people of Iraq were the abused private property of Saddam Hussein and his crime family. Today, all of these Caligula figures are at least out of power, and at the best either dead or on trial. How can anybody with a sense of history not grant Blair some portion of credit for this? And how can anybody with a tincture of moral sense go into a paroxysm and yell that it is he who is the war criminal? It is as if all the civilians murdered by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be charged to his account. This is the chaotic mentality of Julian Assange and his groupies. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/02/hitchens-201102 One of the banal idiocies of the Corbynist cult is it holds Blair criminally responsible for all the evils unleashed by the Iraq invasion and all that's happened in Iraq and Syria since. Of course, the truth is that Blair had no effect on the outcome of anything in Iraq. The neo-cons who'd seized power in Washington were going to have their war with Saddam regardless, and the invasion would have happened with or without Blair or anyone else. So as much as anyone wants to decry his decision to support Bush, it changed absolutely nothing. So a suggestion: you'll find you'll manage in life a lot better if you admit that the world might be a tad more complex than the Corbyn cultists would ever allow. Or you can, as here, simply revel in vacuous post-truth virtue-signalling until the cows come home.

So speaks a Corbynist, mindlessly parroting the 'party' line: if you're centre-Left but oppose Corbyn you absolutely must be a Tory. Those percentages are only going to get wider apart with such fatuous dimwittery. And it's only going to get worse, as people see what scumbags the Corbynist cabal really are. Here's another Corbynist, outside a rally led by Corbyn, yelling at Peter Tatchell by spouting one of the Corbynists' favourite conspiracy theories - that the White Helmets are Anglo/US spies, directed by mysterious Jewish forces. https://twitter.com/JonIronmonger/status/807550636065755136 What's especially lovely about this conspiracy theory is that it is widely believed by Assad and his murderous gang, so that when he retakes east Aleppo, courtesy of Putin, the White Helmets will be, literally, in the firing line. You must be so proud.

For the vanishingly small number of people who now give a ****, this week's YouGov poll couldn't be clearer about what is dragging Labour down. Labour are a record-breaking 17 points behind the Tories (Tories 42% Lab 25%) Corbyn himself is a record-breaking 33 points behind May (49% to 16%) on the question of who'd make the best PM. He's like a ten-ton boat anchor on a dinghy.

For grown-ups, this is an excellent commentary on the Article 50 case before the supreme court: https://www.ft.com/content/83965752-f008-39e0-a039-48a43c508266 Green makes a good point about the myth of the unwritten constitution, and its bearing on the case - as well as about the actual stakes in the outcome, rather than those paraded on the front page of the Daily Mail.

Which reminds me - I've heard more sense from Talibs talking about the 72 virgins after martyrdom than Brexiters refusing to be deflected, whatever the cost, from their 'sunny uplands' equivalent.

Interesting to note from this that ministers are insisting that they are brought only good news on Brexit. No wonder they're always dribbling on about 'having cake and eating it.' Here's the reality they refuse to face: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/06/twenty-reasons-brexit-trickier-than-we-thought Meanwhile, the companies who can't tell ministers that Brexit will be a disaster are busy doing what you'd expect companies to do. In the City, for example, an exodus is well under way, and has reached due diligence stage, with many in advanced planning to move substantial operations to Paris. Bang goes a big chunk of the UK's tax base. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38245646

Brexiters at their finest... The wholly admirable Gina Miller, the lead claimant in the Article 50 case currently being argued in the Supreme Court, has had a torrent of abuse of Brexit fanatics, including threats of acid attacks and death, along with - of course - a great deal of racist/misogynistic yelling and screaming aimed at her criminal stance of being non-white and non-male. She makes a telling point too about having to do what should have been done by the now terminally incompetent Labour party, buried under the worst, and dimmest, leadership in its history. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/11/bigger-just-brexit-how-gina-miller-held-government-account-over-eu

What does this even mean? The Italians knew perfectly well that they were voting on constitutional reforms, which many across the political spectrum felt were undemocratic. As for Brexiters: Some want membership of the single market. Some do not. Some want to remain in the customs union. Some do not. Many don't even know what it is. Some want to 'take back control' of immigration. Some do not. Some want dozens of bilateral free trade agreements. Some do not because they won't protect jobs; they want to 'Trump' the UK with a 'Britain First' protectionism. Some want the restoration of Parliamentary 'sovereignty'. Some rail against the metropolitan elite who reside in that same Parliament. So which of these binary opposites did you vote for?

Brexiteers' finest: 'Someone Jo Cox Anna Soubry'. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/anna-soubry-shares-jo-cox-death-threat-tweet-as-she-laments-what-has-happened-to-our-politics_uk_584133f0e4b00b318b0f5858

In Yiddish it's 'firer'. Suit you better?

Nope. Not only have you defended a rabidly anti-semitic rant, with the laughable qualification that it was about the supposedly world-controlling behaviour of 'A Jew'. You've also resorted to renaming a poster on here as 'Shylock', one of the most notorious Jew-hating stereotypes in literary history (although you seem to have ceased doing this, hopefully because you've finally been shamed out of it). Jew hating is a uniquely middle class pastime, and is often denied by the perpetrators. And on the question of the denialism of the political (now Brexiteering) Right and its responsibility for the murderous and violent behaviour of the far Right, here's the way in which the Daily Mail scandalously covered the outcome of the Thomas Mair trial: It uniquely among the nationals kept the story off the front page: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/24/daily-mail-jailing-jo-coxs-murderer-front-page And on the inside pages it sneaked in a suggestion that Mair was driven to murder by immigrants and the actions of Jo Cox herself: https://twitter.com/cglendinning95/status/801759166578774016 So as a staunch defender of anti-Semites, do tell whether you fellow-travel with this scumbaggery as well.

Excellent piece by David Aaronovitch (warnings Tender, he's Jewish, and the following makes reference to books) in The Times today, on why the political Right needs to take responsibility for the violent and murderous behaviour of the far Right: A snippet: "Nor do I think the fact that Mair was probably mentally ill helps us to explain his crime. Mental illness explains everything and explains nothing here. Why, after all, would such an illness take that specific form of psychotic behaviour? I have yet to come across an example of a public figure murdered by a mad liberal whose home was found to be stocked with books by John Stuart Mill and covered in slogans calling for proportional representation."

One Brexiter murder trial down, one to go. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/23/thomas-mair-slow-burning-hatred-led-to-jo-cox-murder

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All of which has absolutely nothing to do with why the electoral college exists. Read up on your Madison, Hamilton and Tocqueville. Or try this on the justification for the electoral college's not accepting electoral vote winners, from Alexander Hamilton: "Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States" It was designed, in other words, to keep out Trumps of the day - which is why constitutionally none of the electors in the electoral college is bound to vote for the state-by-state or indeed the popular winner.

And the government is going to hire an additional 30,000 civil servants just to cope with Brexit issues. The EU employs just 24,000 in total.

Maybe you should dial down the rage. That, after all, is what this case is about. And to repeat: the prosecution case is that this was a man killing a young mother and MP for a 'political cause'; not a random 'nut job' but a planned political killing in the name of that cause.

The Jo Cox murder trial has started depressingly as expected. Opening arguments by prosecutors suggest this was a political murder by a white supremacist Brexiter. The prosecution's case is that this was a "premeditated murder for a political and/or ideological cause." Thomas Mair has entered a plea of not guilty. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/14/jo-cox-killed-in-politically-motivated-murder-trial-thomas-mair-hears

For all the damage Trump will cause - to women's rights, black lives, the global environment, and any hope of a revived Middle East peace process (forget it) - the economic damage he can cause, to scale, will be as nothing compared to Brexit. Britain's leading Brexiteers far, far outweigh Trump in the competition to be the most malevolently stupid. Interesting to see that May - terrified of offending the Brexit loons in her party - was ninth on the list of world leaders Trump called after his election victory. And this just after she was sent packing from India with a handful of sweet **** all. So even after Trump, Britain still leads in the laughing stock stakes.

Boom indeed. While everyone's attention is diverted by Syria, Trump's two big positions in the Middle East are the unprecedented American support for moving the capital of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and tearing up the nuclear agreement with Iran. Both have been reconfirmed since his election. In Israel, this has already resulted in the far-right - who remember are in power - declaring that the two-state solution is dead, and that the Palestinians can kiss goodbye to ever seeing meaningful self-rule. And the Iran decision, which will involve among other things the removal of inspectors, will restart the Ayatollahs' nuclear warheads programme.

There's been a lot of comment in the US today about how the constitution's checks and balances will protect from the worst and most irrational of a President's behaviour. Where there are few meaningful checks and balances is in foreign policy - and above all in the ultimate foreign 'policy', initiating nuclear war. The President has sole and, in the last instance, unchallengeable power to start a nuclear attack. From his decision to enter the launch codes to the missiles themselves launching is around five minutes. https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-nuclear-weapon-launch/