Your assumption is correct. This will not be an easy or a smooth path. And it will happen in a few months. They’ve been talking about needing 10+ years to deliver their goals. But they need to show enough progress in about 4 or 5.

This was an interesting election.

• Labour won in a landslide, but voter turnout was low (lots if thoroughly disillusioned people).
• A lot of the new seats they won were by narrow margins, indicating that while they have a mandate, it’s not as emphatic as the MO count might suggest.
• Regardless of their policies/objectives, Reform made good gains for a new party. Not many MOs to sit for it, but they will feel invigorated by how many races in which they outpaced the Tories.
• The Liberal Democrats has a fantastic night, increasing their MP count by something like x7.
• The Scottish independence cause took a hit with the collapse of the SNP.
• This election was a spectacular culmination of missteps (both individual and organizational) for the Tories. And this might have been a mortal wound for a nearly 200 party that will massively change British politics. Such a collapse hasn’t been witnessed for centuries. If they survive it might be as a nationalistic husk within which the Reform party takes up residence. Though nothing is certain for the Tories at this point. They might come back from the brink of death; they might shuffle back to the centre; they might become a third party for the next couple of decades; etc. Labour had to do a huge rebuild over the last 5 years and managed it. But their situation is very different from the Tories, so that analogy isn’t the best.

I don’t think that strategy for testing is purely a Chinese thing. When my kids were little and before they could read, they did eye tests with those same characters. And I’m in America.

Exactly. They will probably send all the citizens they want to get rid of knowing that they will likely die. It’s a win-win for Rocket Man: he gets to eradicate any ‘inferior’ or ‘disloyal’ peons while ingratiating himself to Putin.

Considering all the ways they’ve been ridiculously incompetent in their invasion of Ukraine, I could actually see this incident being due to ineptitude.

She’s got the crazy eyes for sure.

For those who don’t get the reference, I think this is referring to the Mark of Cain teaching in Mormonism. This resulted in black members of the church being seen as lesser or inferior by many white members. The church officially abandoned it as an official teaching in 1978. But the stigma for black members still persists to some degree unofficially, with some white church members still believing it today.

Russia reminds me of the black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He has all his limbs cut off by Arthur, to the point where he’s just a useless torso perched on the ground. But he’s still defiantly insulting Arthur and looking for a fight.

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

He’s been listening to his pal Trump too much. But the pro-Russian contingent is less significant in the UK than it is in the US.

Oh he was a total shitheel to so many different people. Very effective wartime leader, but a horrible human being.

That is a very fair point!

There’s already a strong emotional connection between Irish and Palestinian people (as shown by Ireland being one of the first European countries to officially recognize Palestine recently). Now there’s another association - Churchill and Netanyahu’s loathing for their respective people.

Comparing himself to Churchill defending the UK from the Nazis has got to be the shittiest analogy I’ve heard in a long time. You aren’t Churchill in this situation, Netanyahu. You’re the invader hell-bent on wiping out a population.

Awkward crab shuffling commences

A wizard never falls. He departs the stage precisely as he means to.

The beatings will continue until morale improves!!

And sending their rusty old fishing boats, err, ‘battleships’… to Cuba.

In favor of the ceasefire. But more in favor of letting Israel do whatever the fuck they want.

There are a quite a lot of nursing and medical admin staff in healthcare who are rabidly antivax. At least in America, so I assume it’s at least partially true in Canada to. I wonder if that had something to do with this clearly terrible pairing of organization and washed-up clown ‘comedian’.

Calling him an “actor” is incredibly generous.

This the same navy that couldn’t keep their boats afloat in Crimea? Oooh, very intimidating!