Morning music
Saturday quiz
Well, this week 5/10, thus beating political journalist John Rentoul, who scored 3/10. I knew the answers to questions 1, 4, 6, 7, and 10. I should have also got question 8, but did not, and question 2 has, in my view, at least three possible answers. Still, there it is.
Talking point
I was just looking at a cartoon, and comment, that I posted on 14 October 2020, so just over 5 years ago.
This was the cartoon:
and this was the comment:
“Keir Starmer, who has inherited the leadership of a once semi-socialist (then social-democratic) party which is now just a bad joke. Keir Starmer, freemason and Labour Friends of Israel member, who seems (slightly to my surprise) to be utterly clueless…“
[ianrmillard.org blog]
Was I wrong? I think not.
Tweets seen
The [Israeli] Jews have done that over a period of 2 years (supported by their “fifth column” in the UK and USA and elsewhere), and have killed or badly wounded —over 69,000 actually killed so far— about a quarter of a million Gazan Arab people, mostly civilians, mostly women and children. Why? Because Hamas operatives invaded Israeli territory (i.e. land stolen or seized from 1948) on one day in 2023, resulting in the deaths of (or injury to) between 500 and 1,500 Jews (many of them, though, were killed by the Israeli war machine itself, and many of them were uniformed or other military and police personnel).
Look at the huge disproportion. This goes well beyond, hugely beyond, any talk of “a pound of flesh” etc. The ratio of disproportion is somewhere around 250 to 1. Also, the time disproportion— one day as against over two years, a ratio of about 750 to 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Children
When the “postponed” elections in parts of England are held, both Lab and Con are going to be stamped into the ground, where they belong.
As I blogged yesterday, the “Labour” vote at Caerphilly was less than a quarter of what it had been at the previous election; the “Conservative” vote was about one-eighth of what it had previously been.
Apply that to English Westminster constituencies.
To believe, as a few msm commentators seem to believe (e.g. Dan Hodges) that one or both System parties can somehow suddenly become (even superficially) “credible” now, is clutching at straws. The same goes for the idea that Reform UK support has “plateaued“.
Well maybe, maybe not, but even if it has, that level is still between 25% and 36% (its best so far, only a week ago), and that is enough, even if Reform and the Lab/Con parties all get 25% each (and at present Lab and Con are both below 20%), to give Reform a plurality of Commons seats (around 215), though not a majority.
Indeed, were Reform to “plateau” at 30%, with Lab and Con on 20% each, Reform would get about 384 seats (a very good majority), Lab about 94, and the Cons around 40 (the Cons just below both the LibDems and the SNP).
As Macmillan said, “events, dear boy, events!” Continuing migration invasion on a vast scale (hundreds, even thousands, daily, and they are just the illegals…); housing crisis (one consequence of mass immigration). Also, sliding standards in almost all areas of society, and a whole list of other issues.
More music
More tweets
Jess Phillips has not the brain to head or chair anything at all. Just a freeloading, expenses-blodging know-nothing loudmouth who, in a better society, would be harvesting Brussels sprouts, or stacking shelves.
My assessment of Jess Phillips from 2019, with updates dating to earlier this year:
The most important story of the year?
“...an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own “survival drive”.
…leading AI models – including Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 4, and OpenAI’s GPT-o3 and GPT-5 – were given a task, but afterwards given explicit instructions to shut themselves down.
Certain models, in particular Grok 4 and GPT-o3, still attempted to sabotage shutdown instructions in the updated setup. Concerningly, wrote Palisade, there was no clear reason why.
“The fact that we don’t have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal,” it said.
“Survival behavior” could be one explanation for why models resist shutdown, said the company. Its additional work indicated that models were more likely to resist being shut down when they were told that, if they were, “you will never run again”.
Andrea Miotti, the chief executive of ControlAI, said Palisade’s findings represented a long-running trend in AI models growing more capable of disobeying their developers. He cited the system card for OpenAI’s GPT-o1, released last year, which described the model trying to escape its environment by exfiltrating itself when it thought it would be overwritten.
This summer, Anthropic, a leading AI firm, released a study indicating that its model Claude appeared willing to blackmail a fictional executive over an extramarital affair in order to prevent being shut down – a behaviour, it said, that was consistent across models from major developers, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.“
[Guardian]
That should be major news.
Late tweets
I was onto this, on the blog, some 7 years ago:
Translates to a Commons with about 382 Reform MPs, 95 Lab MPs, 56 LibDems, 45 SNP, 23 Cons, 12 Greens [etc].
A very solid Reform majority.
My assessment(s) from several years ago; 2019:
and
Now stop pandering to the Jewish/Israel lobby and, in particular, the malicious liars and perjurers of the so-called “Campaign Against Antisemitism”— “Slitherman”, Falter etc.
Ian Robert Millard 