@Mailman

I'm certainly not aware of a single 'public servant' - council employee, councillor, police officer, civil servant, minister, CPS employee - having received any kind of material sanction for their part in the systematic betrayal of the grooming gang victims. An absolute travesty. One can only hope that they do at least now lie awake at night haunted by their passive or active inactivity but I suspect that most will simply have shrugged it off on the basis of 'I was just following orders' - holding anyone to account for anything in the public sector is nigh-on impossible these days. It's a great shame that the person who at one point claimed to have received an email from the Home Office to the effect that they should not pursue the grooming gang members never produced evidence to back up that claim (I forget who this person was and in what capacity they received the email, but his claim did receive some publicity at the time). The alleged email being when Brown was PM, IIRC.

The utterly vile 'shut up for the sake of diversity' MP is still an MP - she rather typifies what the Labour Party has become.

We are, of course, still waiting for the report commissioned by Sajid Javid to be published, having been fobbed off with an 'interpretation' of the report by a collection of useful idiots. Perhaps Reform should make it a stated policy that they will publish the report if ever elected. Although that would give the Home Office plenty of time to conveniently lose all copies of it.

The one nation video seems pretty on the mark with everything these days. I mean they did nothing about the children being raped up north for the fear of looking like racists and how did that one turn out for the girls?

Dont recall anyone in the decision making process being banged up for their role in enabling the rapes? Or did any of them get locked up...or something like a harshly worded letter?

Mailman,
Even so, 10k would sting. The domain I was looking into was just a <person-name>.com.au address, so was never going to be worth very much. Checking today, I see the squatters have released it. Seems likely they keep stats on web server hits on their captured domains to see if it's worth holding onto them. Guess they made a loss on that one.

This animated video from One Nation is probably quite close to what really goes on in the Canberra decision-making machine. Not far off for Washington or Westminster either.

Robo,

Friends of mine had to buy their domain from some sketchy russians a few years ago for 10k.

Mind you, they sold their security business earlier this year for lots of dollars so they aren't crying much now about the domain squatters :)

.,
Hard to know where the boundary is between reality and hype on thorium reactors. As you say though, it's handy that the heating and turbine-driving parts of the power station are reasonably independent. A change of boilers and your old coal station is nuclear.

tomo,
My experience must have been with the small fry; they openly advertised their price. It was something like $100 to buy back the domain. Wasn't even worth that so I didn't proceed. Maybe $100 was a low advertised price and, if I'd got in touch, they might have cranked it up to match my level of desperation.

It doesn't add up..., tomo,
Wasn't previously aware of that name. It does still resolve, the host responds to ping, and I get a blank page at "lander", which means a web server is running there. Perhaps Andrew (sensibly enough) hasn't paid for the domain name this year. In my (minimal) experience, when this happens, a tip-off goes from the unpaid domain registrar to squatters (suspect there's not much distance between them), who quickly move in. We might be in a grace period of blank screen before getting the familiar message of "this domain available (for a price)".

Recent EconTalk was well off the beaten path, interviewing Sabin Howard, who has sculpted a WW1 war memorial for Washington DC. A good interview. His version of my N=1 mantra was along the lines of "governments might declare wars, but men fight them" (not as succinct as my formula, but more widely understood I expect). Fellow is quite highly strung, but very engaging.

One point he was quite clear on was that America's part in WW1 was pretty superficial. I think his creation sorts that out by being applicable to any of the participants.

Thinking of America's roughly 100,000 WW1 deaths, compared to millions in the major participants reminded me of the post-war confrontation between Australia's then PM, Billy Hughes, and Woodrow Wilson. E.g. (from here):

He publicly crossed the lofty Wilson in an exchange seen by observers as the ‘little David facing the American Goliath’. Chided later by Wilson in the debate on the German Pacific colonies because Australia represented only a small country of five million people, Hughes replied simply: ‘I speak for 60,000 dead.’ As the story of the confrontations spread around Paris, Hughes became something of a folk hero.

Anyhow, the good news is that art is not dead; seems Sabin Howard has a pretty good idea what it is.

Even with cancel culture tearing down statues, it'd take a particularly idiotic woke idiot to attack this work.

If it works out... they'll be bolting them onto their coal fleet

https://youtu.be/t4EJQPWjFj8

idau

yep - saw that a while back - Squarespace is hiccupping regularly too when rendering the site.

I asked Andrew if he's make the top right book/pamphlet downloads free - and he said " sounds like a good idea " - but nowt happened ....

I see bishop-hill.net is no longer an access route.