I’m treating my galloping insomnia by abolishing the following sports:
• netball - dainty basketball
• basketball - terrible visuals & acoustics
• swimming - see basketball
• hockey - in it’s modern form, deadly boring, too many fouls
• ice hockey - see basketball
..
..
• water polo - nothing but fouls (mind you, Dad used to play)
• polo - self-explanatory
• dressage - too ridiculous for words
• archery - doesn’t televise
• fencing - same
• that one where you ski a bit & then break off to shoot something - illogical
• curling - FFS
..
..
• bowls - can be played but not watched
• rugby league - boring
• ice dance - we don’t have Torville & Dean anymore lol
• pigeon fancying - cruel
• cycling around entire countries - excessive & unnecessary
• triathlon - see cycling
• the middle 2 hours of the marathon
• Greco-Roman wrestling - 2 guys writhing on the floor for hours? No.
• shot-put - enormous effort for little result. Use cannon.
• the steeplechase - cruel
• heptathlon - being least crap at 7 things
• decathlon - being least crap at 10 things
Tempted to do away with American football on the ground that it’s 3 hours of advertising to every 1 hour of sport but you can always watch the highlights I suppose.
Still wide awake. Great 😕
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Was Navalny justly convicted of embezzlement in 2013 or was it a stitch up? The ECHR adjudicated in 2016 & you can read the densely written judgment here:
.. the hallmarks of a stitch up by someone of whom Navalny was being publicly critical at the time. The proceedings which ultimately resulted in the suspended sentence were ruled unfair & Navalny was awarded compensation.
For reasons unclear, Russia was not directed to ..
.. produce an action plan to, for example, quash the conviction, so, though unfairly obtained, it remained in effect & has just now been activated.
I am not a Navalny fan &, for balance if nothing else, tend to take Putin’s & Russia’s side in most things but this ..
Another reason for wanting defendants to be properly represented is to ensure that, if convicted, it is not open to them to claim unfairness on this ground. We used to have a great system but not anymore. Criminal lawyers are badly underpaid & legal aid is often not ..
.. available. It can even happen that an individual is prosecuted & acquitted but does not have their costs reimbursed.
In Scotland (different jurisdiction but the injustice is the same) right now, Craig Murray is being prosecuted for contempt of court with imprisonment ..
.. a likely outcome if he is convicted. Yet, he has no legal aid. The crown has mired him in expensive interim applications all the way to trial, essentially using public money to outspend him & drain his crowd-sourced funding.
If revenge played any part in the EU’s article 16 move, it would be understandable, wouldn’t it? They have had to put up with the IMB, the puerile slighting of their emissary & more or less constant abuse from British media & right wing politicians. I can imagine the urge to ..
.. pounce at the first opportunity but this gambit seems to have misfired. Pity, because the UK needs a harsh lesson.
I don’t doubt that as time go by there will be better opportunities for the EU to show its power. It probably doesn’t even need to try, as a hippo ..
.. gets its way in most things just by sloshing about & being big.
Meanwhile, there is probably nothing that can be done about the British insistence on framing everything in hostile & bellicose terms, so the EU must get used to it, as a carer with a difficult child must. Too ..
The living wage is not law. No one is obliged to pay it & only about 7,000 employers in the UK do so. Thus there is ‘no requirement’ in the UK just as there is none in the EU.
Contrast the minimum wage ..
.. which, subject to exceptions IS mandatory in those countries which have one.
Setting minimum wages is not an EU competence. Each (sovereign) member state decides whether to have one & how much it should be. This, it is misleading to have an EU column in the graphic ..
.. anyway.
FWIW, France & Germany’s min. wage is about the same as ours. Ireland, The Netherlands & Luxembourg have significantly higher minimum wages. Source:
.. nutcases have abolition of the regulations high on their list of objectives. Rees-Mogg said it was the first EU law he would repeal. So the cretin is boasting about a law his party means to repeal.
• and, as with everything else, it’s a lie anyway. Both the regulations ..
.. & the directive provide for ‘4 weeks’ annual paid leave. That cannot & does not mean 28 days in the UK but only 20 in the EU. What it means is that for a worker with a ‘normal’ working week of 5 days on, 2 days off, 20 days paid leave must be provided. If the working week ..
You would have to go a long way to find a more rabid Brexiteer than John Redwood. And what is his vision? An unattainable autarky in which we grow our own food &, it now seems, our own wood.
As the free market left to itself will not do these things (because they are mad) ..
.. John wants the government to ‘foster’ tree planting & introduce policies to grow more food & secure ‘our’ fish.
We’ll be like East Germany before the wall came down, all driving around in Trabbants, choking the air with fumes & blackening all the buildings as we pass the ..
.. empty shops with dirty windows & shambling pedestrians in their threadbare clothes hurrying back from their weekly allotment duty with some scavenged wood to feed the stove for a brief respite from the gnawing cold.
There’s a reason Redwood is not in govt. (not even THIS ..