Morning music
Morning thought
Saw a few minutes of some TV propaganda piece featuring Starmer-stein and Rachel Reeves. She is so much of a robot that she puts previous political robots, such as “the Maybot” (Theresa May) into the shade. Rachel Reeves strikes me as a human tick-box, most of the time. There seems to be nothing in between a robotic impression and a meltdown impression, as seen in the Commons yesterday.
Tweets seen
Interesting news. Incidentally, that airport looks better than I had supposed. Photographed nicely, anyway.
Goodwin seems to have been “on a journey”, ideologically. Perhaps that journey has not yet arrived at its final destination.
Travelogue— Batumi (Adzharia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batumi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjara
As on previous occasions, a slightly silly title and subtitle, but the video itself still fairly interesting.
Many years ago, I wanted to visit Sukhumi, a small resort in Abkhazia, north of Adzharia , which resort was developed under 19thC Tsarist rule, but unfortunately there was considerable civil war damage after the collapse of the Soviet Union; at any rate, I never did go there; neither have I ever been to Batumi, an autonomous part of Georgia.
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According to Electoral Calculus, that translates into a Commons with 363 Reform UK MPs, Labour 129, LibDems 69, SNP 29, and Cons 25 (Greens 7, Plaid Cymru 5 etc).
Cons once again in notional 5th place. Near-terminal.
I imagine that, in that situation, Reform could offer most of the remaining Con MPs a home, were they willing to defect. On the other hand, why would Reform even bother, already having a fairly large majority on those polling figures?
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html
It is now probably only a matter of time before the Russian side can achieve a significant breakthrough, and then roll over the whole of Ukraine east of the Dnieper, leaving open the questions of Kiev and Odessa (which should be open cities, probably), and allowing the Ukrainians to maintain a non-belligerent rump state centred on, presumably, Lvov.
Talking point
Migration-invasion news
“Several people were injured after a man wielding an axe attacked passengers on a busy train in Germany today.
The suspect, who has not been identified, was said to have lashed out at travellers on board the ICE 91 train to Vienna this afternoon at around 1:55pm local time.
The man, believed to be Syrian according to German newspaper Bild’s sources, was alleged to have boarded with an axe and a hammer, before one brazen passenger disarmed him of one of the weapons and fought back.”
[Daily Mail]
Incidentally, look at that latest example of the UK’s degraded “newspaper” “journalism”: “brazen” used wrongly, in my opinion. The scribbler in question: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/profile-263/james-clark-reynolds.html
Talking point
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 