Happy Face

HBCM

If you've not heard it before you might ike this @@David Kelly & @Dr Gloom https://amerigo.bandcamp.com/album/fela-soul-deluxe-edition-prod-amerigo-gazaway Name your price to get hold of it.

Mr Corbyn hailed victory in Stoke as a "decisive rejection of UKIP's politics of division and dishonesty". He added: "Labour will go further to reconnect with voters and break with the failed political consensus I don't think he's listening.

Holy Christ! Her Avatar neck is really bad there. She'd need 2 scarves if it was cold. Still would.

Aye. Didn't quite work though because the stage at Northumbria is off centre so one side was clearly much louder and made their faux competition redundant. They stuck to the routine manfully though.

I wore that daft Daisy for nowt Yeah I loved it. Only 1 track off 3 feet and none off anonymous... Was surprising. I spent the week before listening exclusively to their other stuff so had managed to fill my knowledge gaps, but even on setlist.com their recent shows have included eye know, potholes, Jennifer, Buddy etc. So disappointing to see those left out. Brilliant when they brought out Dres and did the choice is yours. Saturday and ring, ring, ring were class too. Stakes is high didn't seem to go across as well as other lead singles though.

HB2J

I read it on my phone and didn't want to write a lengthy post on there so just hoyed it up for the short term. There's not a paragraph in it that I disagree with and I think it's very good on acknowledging the religious angle that Renton and Toonotl tend to focus on and how that has been mined to a far greater extent by ISIL than it was Al Qaeda. They may disagree. It's also very good at pointing out how incoherent the US "narrative" has been. Bush and Obama would tell America that Mulims are generally good eggs but we still have to kill lots of them because a few bad eggs are focused solely on a warped religious doctrine that demands they bring down western culture. Ignoring any motivation but the religion tells the whole population that the war is on the religion. So it comes as no surprise that majorities now support a muslim ban under Trump that most of us find repulsive. They've had 15 years of being told muslims are irrational murderers. Trump has implemented a policy that is much more consistent. Islam as a whole is bad and we need to crack down on every and any one of them that wants to come to our country. They hate us and our freedom, we have to defeat them and their evil beliefs. The story he is selling is vile and dangerous, but it's consistent. Obviously a consistent and noble leader would recognise the facts from Chilcott and all the other examples cited, which clearly outline the causes of terror and the likely outcomes of further occupation. But because of all the people and causes Parky has outlined, the globe persists in this lunatic descent into carnage.

THERE’S BEEN LOTS of attention-grabbing opposition to Trump’s “Muslim ban” executive order, from demonstrations to court orders. But polls make it clear public opinion is much more mixed. Standard phone polls show small majorities opposed, while web and automated polls find small majorities continue to support it. What surprises me about the poll results isn’t that lots of Americans like the ban — but that so many Americans don’t. Regular people have lives to lead and can’t investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they usually take their cues from leaders they trust. And given what politicians across the U.S. political spectrum say about terrorism, Trump’s executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally no national-level American politicians telling a story that would help ordinary people understand why Trump’s goals are both horrendously counterproductive and morally vile. Think of it this way: On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped two laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah public air raid shelter in Baghdad. More than 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated or boiled alive. For years afterward visitors to a memorial there would meet a woman with eight children who had died during the bombing; she was living in the ruined shelter because she could not bear to be anywhere else. Now, imagine that immediately after the bombing Saddam Hussein had delivered a speech on Iraqi TV in which he plaintively asked “Why do they hate us?” — without ever mentioning the fact that Iraq was occupying Kuwait. And even Saddam’s political opponents would only mumble that “this is a complicated issue.” And most Iraqis had no idea that their country had invaded Kuwait, and that there were extensive United Nation resolutions and speeches by George H.W. Bush explaining the U.S.-led coalition’s rationale for attacking Iraq in response. And that the few Iraqis who suggested there might be some kind of relationship between Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the Amiriyah bombing were shouted down by politicians saying these Iraq-hating radicals obviously believed that America’s slaughter of 400 people was justified. If that had happened, we’d immediately recognize that Iraqi political culture was completely insane, and that it would cause them to behave in dangerously nutty ways. But that’s exactly what U.S. political culture is like. IN AN INTERVIEW last March with Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump tried to puzzle out what’s behind the terrorism directed at the U.S. “I think Islam hates us,” Trump learnedly opined. “There’s a tremendous hatred there, we’ve got to get to the bottom of it.” “In Islam itself?” asked Cooper. Trump responded, “You’re going to have to figure that out. You’ll get another Pulitzer.” During Trump’s speech at the CIA right after his inauguration, he expressed the same bewilderment. “Radical Islamic terrorism,” pondered Trump. “This is something nobody can even understand.” John F. Kelly, now Trump’s head of the Department of Homeland Security, is similarly perplexed, saying in a 2013 speech that “I don’t know why they hate us, and I frankly don’t care, but they do hate us and are driven irrationally to our destruction.” Say what you want about the tenets of this worldview, but at least it’s an internally consistent ethos: We’re surrounded by lunatics who want to murder us for reasons that are totally inscrutable to rational people like us but … obviously have something to do with them being Muslims. Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment aren’t confused at all. Richard Shultz, a professor at Tufts whose career has long been intertwined with the national security state, has written that “A very senior [special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as ‘a small price to pay for being a superpower.’” That small price, of course, is the deaths of regular Americans, and is apparently well worth it. The 9/11 Commission report quietly acknowledged, hundreds of pages in, that “America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.” A senior official in the George W. Bush administration later put it more bluntly to Esquire: That without the post-Gulf War sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, “bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass.” Intelligence professionals were quite aware that an invasion of Iraq would take the conditions that led to 9/11 and make them far worse. The British Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war published a February, 2003 assessment by British intelligence of the consequences of an invasion of Iraq, which would occur one month later. “The threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq,” the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee told Tony Blair, and “the worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly.” The CIA had the same perspective. Michael Scheuer, who for several years ran the section of the Agency that tracked bin Laden, wrote in 2004 that “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” For its part, the Defense Department’s Science Board concluded in a 2004 report that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.” WHEN BARACK OBAMA took office, he had two choices. First, he could tell the truth: That the U.S. has acted with extraordinary brutality in the Middle East, that this had been the main motivation for most Islamist terrorism against us, and if we continued the same foreign policy Americans would be killed indefinitely in intermittent attacks. Then we could have had an open, informed debate about whether we like our foreign policy enough to die for it. Second, Obama could continue trying to run the Middle East without public input, but in a more rational way than the Bush administration. Obviously he went with the second choice, which demanded several different forms of political correctness. Most importantly, Obama pretended that the U.S. has never done anything truly wrong to others, and can enjoy the benefits of power without any costs. This is the most pernicious and common form of political correctness, but is never called that because the most powerful people in America love it. But Obama also engaged in something more akin to what’s generally called political correctness, by contending that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. But it does — just not in the way that Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller would tell you. Religion and nationalism have always been similar phenomena, and Islam sometimes functions as a form of nationalism. And like all nationalisms, it has a crazy, vicious right wing that’s empowered by outside attacks on members of the nation. The right loves to jeer at Obama for calling Islam “a religion of peace,” and they should — not because Islam specifically isn’t a religion of peace but because there is really no such thing, just as there is no “nationalism of peace.” It’s true religions and nationalism can bring out the best in people, but they also bring out the worst (sometimes in the same person for the same reasons). But Obama could never say anything like that, because he knew the U.S. needs the governments of Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to keep the rest of the Middle East in line. This amalgam of political correctness made it impossible for the Obama administration ever to tell a story about terrorism that made any sense. For instance, in his 2009 speech in Cairo, he declared, “It is easier to blame others than to look inward” — and then went on to demonstrate that truism. His description of wrongs done by the U.S. was vague to the point of meaninglessness: “tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.” Also, “Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world.” Obama then explained that “Violent extremists have exploited these tensions.” So … 19 people were motivated to fly jetliners into buildings by “tensions”? If that’s the only story that non-Muslim Americans hear, they’ll rationally be terrified of Islam. In 2010, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, emitted a similar bland puree of words at a press conference when questioned by Helen Thomas about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed underwear bomber. Their exchange went like this: THOMAS: And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why. BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents… [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they’re] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death. THOMAS: And you’re saying it’s because of religion? BRENNAN: I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way. THOMAS: Why? BRENNAN: I think this is a, uh, long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland. At his sentencing, Abdulmutallab explained his motivation in less time than it took Brennan to say there wasn’t enough time to explain: [i pledged] to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants. To be fair, there is one situation in which American officials have lost the mushmouth and drawn a direct connection between a country killing Mideastern civilians and terrorist retaliation: when that country is Russia. William Burns, formerly Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, recently and accurately proclaimed that “Russia’s bloody role in Syria makes the terrorist threat far worse.” John Kirby, an Obama State Department spokesman, warned that Russia’s brutalization of Syria would lead to “attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities.” Russia’s response to our friendly observation was about the same as ours when Russia told us before the invasion of Iraq that it would cause a “wave of terror.” THAT BRINGS US back to President Trump and his executive order on immigration. Trump’s story about why it’s necessary is, factually speaking, garbage. But a normal human being can at least understand it and its moral: These incomprehensible foreigners are all potential psychotics, we’ve got to keep them out. Under these circumstances, who cares that no one from any of these seven countries has killed any Americans yet? They’re all part of a huge morass of ticking time bombs. By contrast, the Democratic, liberal perspective laid out by Obama makes no sense at all. We’ve never done anything particularly bad in the Middle East, yet … some people over there want to come here and kill us because … they’ve been exploited by violent extremists who’ve perverted Islam and … gotta run, there’s no time to explain. Regular people could sense that anyone mouthing this kind of gibberish was hiding something, even if they didn’t realize that Obama was trying to keep the U.S. empire running rather than concealing his secret faith in Islam. And because a coherent narrative always beats the complete absence of a story, no one should be surprised that many Americans find Trump’s fantasy of inexplicable Muslim hatred persuasive. The only way to conclusively beat it will be with a coherent, complicated, true story like this: America has done hideous things to countries across the Middle East for decades, such as bomb a civilian air raid shelter, burning the silhouette of a mother trying to protect her baby onto its walls. It was inevitable that some people would seek revenge. This doesn’t mean that their brutality is justified, any more than the slaughter at Amiriyah was justified by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. It just means that humans are humans, violence begets violence, and Americans will always be in danger unless we change our foreign policy. We must welcome immigrants from the Middle East both for moral and pragmatic reasons. Morally, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is what sent the region spiraling into catastrophe; only psychopaths set someone’s home on fire and then lock them inside. There are already three million Muslim American citizens. If the government keeps bombing the Middle East while making it clear that it genuinely hates Muslims, that will only spur to action more troubled weirdos like Omar Mateen — who was born in Queens, a few miles away from Donald Trump’s childhood home. And we’d better get started with this story soon, because it may not be true forever. Israel has done an exemplary job turning a solvable, straightforward fight over land into a religious war that may no longer have any solution. We’re making similar strides in transforming a conflict that was 90 percent political, where there can be compromise, into a religious conflict where there can’t. This can be seen, on the one hand, in ISIS propaganda. Bin Laden generally just talked about kicking the U.S. out of the Middle East and said things like, “Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.” The ISIS magazine Dabiq cheerfully tells us that “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah … even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.” On the other hand, Donald Trump is president of the United States and Steve Bannon is his chief strategist. Bannon straightforwardly believes, as he told a conference at the Vatican in 2014, that “we’re in a war of immense proportions” that’s part of the “long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam.” To win, Bannon says, we must form the “church militant” – an archaic term for the “Christian church on earth regarded as engaged in a constant warfare against its enemies, the powers of evil.” So it’s quite possible ISIS and the Trump administration can successfully collaborate on getting what they both want: a totally unnecessary, civilizational war. To stop them we have to end our truckling equivocation about terrorism, and start telling the truth while there’s still time. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/18/why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-decades-of-denial-about-americas-role-in-the-world/

Like marine A, i can't believe the public support these loose cannons get for their murders.

You pissed?

Spending £50m on 5 players isn't going to get you much better than what we have. Prefer 2 or 3 £20m players.

No , just a horrible racist that companies are within their rights to disassociate from You're seeing coordinated attacks by the "status quo" or the " mainstream media " at every turn. Milo is just a cunt, and his accumulated twattery leaves him with fewer platforms to spout his nonsense.

Bozo the clown?

Milo's been sacked from the CPAC conference and had his book deal rescinded for advocating for paedophiles.... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/milo-yiannopoulos-denies-supporting-paedophilia-cpac-online-video That black geezer is Malcolm Nance who also said the Clinton emails were riddled with obvious forgeries, but if they weren't forgeries then they were just exerpts that made them look worse than they are (despite wikileaks getting stick for providing EVERYTHING and never excerpting/editing). Real Time's been a shambles for a while.

Total Poster 26 Anorthernsoul 26 ewerk 25 acrossthepond 25 Happy Face 25 Kevin Carr's Gloves 22 Ant 22 OTF 22 The Fish 22 Tom 22 wykikitoon 21 scoobos 20 barnabox 20 Dougle 20 Rayvin 20 strawb 19 Dr Gloom 19 Howay 19 StoneColdStephenIreland 18 Looneytoony 17 @yourservice 17 David Kelly 17 MiddleAgeCool 16 ohhh_yeah 15 Andrew 14 Holden McGroin 14 Kitman 14 rogerbarton 12 tooner 11 Monkeys Fist 11 TheGingerQuiff 10 aimaad22 10 ChezGiven 10 Jintsay 10 zico martin 9 ToonMarshy 8 Renton 7 sammynb 6 McFaul 5 Christmas Tree 5 gpirlo68 5 jonasjuice 5 SpartaFC 5 trophyshy 3 247 3 Ausman 2 vimalraja 1 AJack 1 angrysteve 1 arc89 1 Bryn5 1 Geordie1973 1 holycrosser 1 JonGoodwyn 1 Monroe Transfer 1 PaddockLad 1 The Mighty Hog

NUFC To Score 0 - 1 - wykikitoon, Kevin Carr's Gloves 2 - Rayvin, Anorthernsoul, Ant, strawb, acrossthepond, Dr Gloom, StoneColdStephenIreland, @yourservice, LooneyToony 3 - ewerk, Andrew, The Fish, David Kelly, Howay, rogerbarton, tooner, Happy Face, MiddleAgeCool, OTF, Dougle, barnabox, aimaad22 4+ - Tom, scoobos, ohhh_yeah, zico martin, Kitman, TheGingerQuiff NUFC To Concede 0 - ewerk, Andrew, Kevin Carr's Gloves, Tom, The Fish, David Kelly, Howay, rogerbarton, Anorthernsoul, Happy Face, MiddleAgeCool, scoobos, ohhh_yeah, strawb, Dr Gloom, Dougle, Kitman, barnabox, aimaad22, TheGingerQuiff, LooneyToony 1 - Rayvin, wykikitoon, tooner, Ant, OTF, zico martin, acrossthepond, StoneColdStephenIreland, @yourservice 2 - 3 - 4+ -

Almost?

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/ five thirty eight provide some of the most respected (or least ridiculed) polling analysis. They refer to the 1% figure, but gave him a 29% chance. If the election was run 3 times he'd win 1. Polls aren't about media opinion or being out of touch though. They're about asking the public their opinion and collating a representative view that most closely resembles reality. Polls can't ever predict the future though, only report intention. Only exit polls reflect how people voted. If you're complaining about partisan hacks inflating or reducing someones chances then, again, that's life.

But saying "if the press hadn't acted like the press" is like saying "if Corbyn hadn't acted like Corbyn". Both did as predicted and as everyone knew they would. Up to Labour to go again. The public largely like their jobs for their people, they don't like the other. You have to use racist and nationalist language to foster an uprising that would outfank traditional media. I can't see Labour going that way. Alternative fact

Only a quarter of a million people voted Corbyn into his position. Among the other 64.75m his support is nothing like as fervent. Read the Corbyn thread on here from September 2015. Almost exclsively a centre/left board but no-one would say that Corbyn had any hope, even if we hoped he could prove everyone wrong.

The press have been ridiculous to Corbyn. That said, on the day of his election the majority view was that he was a liability to the party. Labour stalwarts were walking away, tories were celebrating etc. I don't think they needed the press to sway their heads, they knew that Corbyn (high on idealogy, poor on leadership and compromise) would be a poor choice. Partially, this view was informed by the precognition that the press would lambast him, not eventually reached only after the bad press he got. You didn't need Rupert Murdoch to tell you whether it was worth a tenner on Labour winning an election under Corbyn. In Britain, you aren't operating in reality if your agenda can only be advanced if there are no privately owned media corporations promoting the interests of other privately owned corporations.

Good to see you posting sensible climate change research for once... "the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008." “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.” Hope you didn't just read the first paragraph and whack it up as if it supported your lunatic conspiracy theories?

Yeah, most people wopuld have missed it. I think that's not accidental. Almost everyone is purely watching Trump. I read this a fortnight ago and thought it was very good at the time https://theintercept.com/2017/02/09/tom-perez-apologizes-for-telling-the-truth-showing-why-democrats-flaws-urgently-need-attention/ The focus on Trump seems to me to only have sharpened since though. Thought it particualrly informative in relation to that article that today Trump's Sweden faux pas, his persecution complex, the tiny Trump meme and Trump poetry are given more significance than the entire direction of the Democratic party and how it will position itself in opposition. We're still repeating the same mistakes of the election by giving Trump blanket coverage. As if he is the only show in town.