bickster

Strange things happen... I like Bobby Gentry's voice and I was in town and as I always do, I was in HMV because of the sale I bought this for £14.99. It's a 100th anniversary of HMV limited edition which they were punting out for £25 which was always a bit much for me but at £15, yeah OK I'll have that. You would imagine that as it is in the sale, there wasn't much demand for this I've come home and stuck it in my collection on Discogs - median price - £39. It's only once sold below £35 and that was this week - £22. Very bizarre!

We won't solve any of that without strengthening the economy, there is no point in separating the issues, they are all part of the same thing. Much stronger ties with the EU including FoM is one way of begining to fix the NHS, especially in the short term.

The EU doesn't have any tanks, it's an economic union. The EU has sent more financial and humanitarian aid per GDP than the US because that's all it can do. It has sanctioned Russia and it's oligarchs, it has cut off Russian banks from the International banking system. I really don't understand what it is you want them to do that they actually can do but aren't. They can't send imaginary tanks

Or I was there (working again), everyone thinks it was great, in fact the pinnacle of the band live but really it was shit

How about a twist... I was there. Working the gig... Security

So close to a twofer Wordle 567 3/6

What do you think the EU should be doing that it isn’t?

So we have 200 different people nominated as potential deaths in 2023 The following are the multiple nominations and the points total each will score. The rest are only nominated by a single player and will score 100 points should the depart this mortal coil in 2023 There are 55 players in this years Deathpool (which may be a record - no idea really but it seems higher) We also have an early leader in @Sid4ever who was the only person to nominate Gianluca Vialli so is on 100 points Pick No Pts Dick Van Dyke 7 14 David Attenborough 6 17 Vladimir Putin 6 17 James Whale 5 20 Jimmy Carter 5 20 Clint Eastwood 4 25 Donald Trump 4 25 Tony Bennett 4 25 Bobby Charlton 3 33 Celine Dion 3 33 Gene Hackman 3 33 Henry Kissinger 3 33 Kanye West 3 33 Mel Brooks 3 33 Rhod Gilbert 3 33 Rob Burrow 3 33 Andrew Tate 2 50 Bam Margera 2 50 Bob Barker 2 50 Bob Newhart 2 50 Bruce Willis 2 50 David Jason 2 50 Donald Sutherland 2 50 Gary Glitter 2 50 Hulk Hogan 2 50 James Earl Jones 2 50 Joan Collins 2 50 King Harald V 2 50 Michael Caine 2 50 Michael Parkinson 2 50 Michael Schumacher 2 50 Nigel Farage 2 50 Norman Tebbit 2 50 Ozzy Osbourne 2 50 Paul Gascoigne 2 50 Phil Collins 2 50 Prince Andrew 2 50 Ron Atkinson 2 50 Shane McGowan 2 50 William Shatner 2 50 Willie Nelson 2 50

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If you want an idea of why the figures are accurate, Russia has just started a second general mobilisation, albeit semi-surreptitiously. A massive one, estimates vary between 1 and 2 million men. They had 190,000 dedicated invasion troops at the outset, they mobilised a further 300,000 and now they've started to mobilise at least another million. What Russia appear to be stuck in, is a sunk cost fallacy, that they don't know how to get out of but must keep pouring more and more human resources into. Their losses have gone way beyond what was originally planned and then some but carry on they must because the only thing that matters is a victory they are now incapable of obtaining. They have been going backwards for months and the main reason Ukraine's forward momentum has stalled is the weather and the mud, that will change very soon, the ground will freeze and attacks by Ukraine will become practical again. Then a thaw will come and the mud will return until early summer and off they'll go again and then they'll be off with Bradley M2s etc too Ukraine is much better equipped now than a year ago and will be better equipped again after this weeks announcements, Russia on the other hand has lost huge amounts of its heavy inventory and is nowhere near as well equipped as it was in Feb 22

Miserable weather needs a mood reversal Sonido Gallo Negro - Mambo Cósmico Mexican tropicalia witha bunch of wild influences from all over the world chucked in for good measure Cha Cha Cha

He's on track for a landslide, right now. My concern is that he won't have an electoral mandate come winning to do what is needed to be done. That in itself is a problem as if he does decide to change tack he won't be able to rely on the Salisbury Convention and the House of Lords will block the necesary legislation. The way I see it, is that it is much better to be upfront about such issues, especially with such a commanding poll lead. Trying to introduce them mid-term or as a second term manifesto commitment is a hell of a gamble. I also think he's on for a landslide whether he knows what he's doing or not

Wordle 566 3/6

Considering his very voiciferous opposition to Brexit at the time, he really doesn't appear to be reading the country very well on the issue. A very considerable shift of opinion has appeared, much bigger than that caused by demographic changes alone and he just doesn't seem to have grasped that

Going back to the EU/US military aid to Ukraine. There is obviously a high degree of co-ordination going on between NATO partners as to what equipment iss provided. First it was the French announcement of sending AMX-10RC light tanks to Ukraine, then Germany announces it is sending more Patriot and Marder IFVs and now the US announced a $3bil package which includes for the first time M2 Bradley light tanks. All those announcements have been this week and represents a big shift up in supplying western armour to Ukraine.

They are but that data will feed into the main polls they conduct for their clients and act as part of the modelling. They'll extrapolate trends from that data for example and that will allow them to spot flaws in the data sampling they do for the bigger polls

Cluster - Cluster II. 50th Anniversry Edition. I often post my album covers from Discogs for ease but in this instance that is my copy and from Discogs

I suspect you are seeing raw data and not adjusted modelled data. The data will get weighted to the demographics of those talking part and previous polling data/real world results to produce a much better picture

Labour is just attempting to become the same Labour Party that got elected and changed the country for the better between 1997-2010. I used to criticise that Labour Party a lot but hindsight tells you how much better everyone was under that Labour Govt Having said all that, I still won't be voting Labour because on my two personal key issues, Brexit and Electoral Reform we really don't align. And as I'm of the opinion that those two issues need sorting out as a priority to prevent the country slipping back into this extreme Tory f***wittery ever again I find myself being unable to vote for them. I'm also of the opinion that we can't regain a correctly growing economy until we have some sort of EU Economic Alignment, which obviously in my book would be completely rejoining, so I don't see how Starmer will do it without that. Sorry, I'm off on a tangent there but Labour isn't trying to be Tory, it's trying to be succesful Labour. The Labour = Tory lite line is just wrong.

The figures the Ukraine Govt publishes in regards to casualties/equipment losses are generally considered by independent sources to be in the right ball park. At the start of the war they were considered to be on the high side but not any more. There are some independent sources that claim that the loss of men figures at this point are on the low side Ukraine doesn't publish its own losses and the Russian descriptions of losses are so far wide of the mark, they are laughably inaccurate, in fact most of the time they are just demonstrable lies but no-one considers that Ukraine's losses are even in the same ballpark as Russias. The reasonable estimates put Ukraines losses of manpower at about 20-25% of Russias and probably reducing over the winter as most of the Russian losses are soldiers being told to run towards a well defended Bakhmut and they just get mowed down, day after day after day with little in the way of the support that they need, like you know... tanks. You can read daily reports from Ukraine forces around Bakhmut and the same soldiers are posting pictures of them and their same colleagues day after day. very few of them disappear. I understand your scepticism but there really isn't a lot wrong with the figures for Russian losses that Ukraine publishes. The biggest supplier of armour to Ukraine in this war? It's very probably Russia itself. Russia has lost a huge amount of its mechanised armour inventory, thats why T-55s are now coming out of storage

What on earth does that mean in this context? Are you suggesting the EU exports some politics to Ukraine? The EU's record as an entity with regards to Ukraine is clear to see in those bar charts. But also what isn't clear in those charts is the economic blockade the EU has enacted towards Russia. I'm baffled by the point you are trying to make because what you originally claimed, just doesn't stand up to scrutiny

Coulda been my mate from school too

I need a copy of that methinks, I'm rather low on Sparks

Thats down to Labour when in power to prove the doubters wrong Also worth thinking about, if the polls are currently correct, the Tory Party will be so short of MPs they won't really be an effective opposition and a good number of their current "big Guns" will have disappeared from view. What will remain of the Tory Party will be a lot of the safe seat for life nonentities that the Tory Party is full to the brim with and a few names. The well known names casualty list will be huge Go to https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html and put in your desired figures for each party, then select, display seats that have changed hands and just go down the list of MPs that will be predicted to lose, some absolutely huge names in there from the front and back benches I get my poll figures from Mark Packs poll tracker -> https://www.markpack.org.uk/155623/voting-intention-opinion-poll-scorecard/ I used the figures from the latest poll (Techne) which has the following prediction 25/46/9/5/8 (Con/Lab/Lib/Grn/Ref) and put those figures in the above. You get the result in seats of 115/441/18/1/0 plus the Regional/Indies A Labour majority of 230 with almost 4 times the seats of the Tories Just a selection box of the casualties when you put those figures in: Andrew Bowie Graham Brady Boris Johnson Kwasi Kwarteng Theresa Coffey Penny Mordaunt Mad Nad JRM Andrew Bridgen Andrew Mitchell Anne-Marie Trevelyan George Eustice IDS Alister Jack CHris Grayling Ben Bradley Liam Fox Shaun Bailey Grant Shapps Esther McVey And that really is just a selection I picked out on a quick glance The scale of the Tory defeat may well be absolutely unprecedented

Which one? Duran Duran or ex-Leeds Utd?