During the committee’s questions, he was asked about targets and replied: “I’m not giving you a deadline right now. I have been forbidden from announcing any more targets.”
You have to wonder, by whom was he forbidden, given that he is the actual, erm, prime, uh, minister? He really only has one boss.
No, silly, not her….
Yep, that’s da man!
Oh, yeah, then there’s Gove being left looking even more stupid than he usually is:
**********
Today’s laughs:
And for something utterly different…
Thanks to John and Brendan.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Well, it isn’t real. is it?
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Not really… Oh wait, yes it is.
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Wuhhhhan woops!
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/21/australian-researchers-see-virus-design-manipulati/
Not Danny’s favourite rag, I know, but nevertheless.
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Naaaaaaahhhhh, Kangaroo! The Washington Times is a right-wing, conservative rag, and this is just another conspiracy theory spun to detract and distract from Trump’s reponsibility for his piss-poor handling of the “Chinese virus”.
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Here’s a shortened URL to the Wikipedia article on it: https://is.gd/W3CKwy.
Not a reliable source of information!
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OK Ed I will see if I can find a reliable source. That will exclude most of the American press and broadcasters and every UK source too, well maybe the National is OK, but thats all. As for Wikipedia well Philip Cross put paid to that a long time ago.
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Here’s a wee bit more comment on it – of course, what Americans might call “lean right” is what I might call bloody barking. https://is.gd/Twj41I.
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The caption on the photo of Carlaw is a bit unfair. He was just keeking to see if there were any paintings were under the desk.
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LOL.
🙂
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Ah well,that’s it all over.
A few days of fun but doris has spoken, Now is not the time for any enquiries, Move On there you plebs.
The doris is opening up the pubs for his friends,no not the customers,his donation friends.
First the estate agents, now the pubs, the casino has never stopped.
Now it’s your own fault when you pick up the virus as you will have to use the facilities but join an orderly queue, no pushing at the back, immunisation will have to wait.
Meanwhile in the USA the death toll is now 100,000 from official figures and trump in on the ruthie crusade, false postal votes will cause him to lose the election,don’t see it,another 4 years for the don,he’s got rid of his non vote base.
Isn’t it wonderful to live in the land of drake, frobisher, gove, cummings and johnston, pirates all.
The EBC is back in it’s box with reports from 1984.
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I’m looking forward to the Orange shutting down Twitter.
I heard Hancock this morning telling everyone in England what their duty was.
And Emily gets suspended for making a political point on Newsnight, but Labour’s Sarah Smith is permitted to say, well I didn’t mean that Nicola was enjoying that.
And Mr Cummings gets to do whatever he wants.
I see a lot of people on Twitter saying they won’t use Cumming’s App. Scared that it will collet data on them, and loads of people saying, sod the lockdown. If Cummings does, why should I?
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To be fair, there’s a back-log of enquiries that need to be cleared away before we start a new one.
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Better get all these judges out of retirement.
The Russia Inquiry, however, has already reported to the Prime Minister and he was going to release it after the election 6 months ago. Where is it?
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I’m sure Cassandra had something to say about that report, as in expecting to have shuffled off this mortal coil before ever having any sight of it…
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Probably gone down the back of his settee, or maybe Saint Dominic ate it?
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I’m kinda hoping some public-spirited person leaks it – because I think that’s the only way we’ll ever get to see it, especially if the Tories manage to install the 1000-year blue-rinsed Reich they seem so intent on.
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I think if he suppresses it that Dominic Grieve QC, who was chair of the Security Committee in parliament until the election might be tempted to find a way to get it out there.
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It may be released, “oh dear. How ever could that have happened?” when the back bench committees see their 80 seat majority evaporating and if the damage from the report can be contained to Johnson and his close associates. The tories are in a trilemma,
Need Johnson gone, to preserve their majority.
Fearful of a party still riven.
Fearful of showing any hint of “wobblyness”
regarding brexit, that could lead to transition
or a second vote on brexit. Huge cost in votes
quelling public unrest.
They are also a long way out from a GE. Now I know schadenfreude is regarded as a sin in Germany but having been told frequently by our church, “you are sinful, you were born sinful and you’ll die as a sinner” I can accept reality, “Are you sitting comfortably, popcorn at hand?”
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If I were a more forgiving person, I’d feel sorry for Tories.
They had an appalling set of candidates for the last leadership election, although they could have been forgiven for imagining that anyone or anything would have been preferable to “Strong and Stable” May.
They went for Johnson. It was a tiny electorate of mainly elderly, main;y well off, mainly south-east English people. They thought Johnson was most likely to deliver Brexit.
I suppose it didn’t occur to them that there would be other, more pressing problems that would require real leadership.
Looking at the candidate list, I doubt if we there would have been anyone better than coping.
But they also, have a parliamentary party that is full of third raters.
Where are the good people?
Gone!
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Your second to last sentence Dave jangled, it was the word pirates.
A couple of nights ago I was reading about the collapse of civilisation. Not a recent one, this was 1177BC. The middle and eastern Mediterranean taking in what we refer to the middle East. It was by any measure a vibrant inter connected “global” (limited global from a modern view). The archeologists can’t agree on the cause of the collapse, a complete collapse bar a much weakened Egypt. As I read the evidence of a roving drought (pollen samples) and famine (clay tablet reports) my thoughts questioned the resilience of the nations to maintain the safety of their mutual trading routes. This was a roving drought, it doesn’t look as if it affected all nations simultaneously, the nations understood their inter dependency.
Any way back to the word in your comment Dave, pirates. There is every likely hood that it was pirates that disrupted the trading routes of the famine weakened nations. This was when the similarity with the UK struck, we have had a bunch of pirates trying to disrupt our established trading routes and now they have succeeded, it is a bunch of unprincipled pirates in charge.
Historical PS,
the collapse of 1177BC wasn’t overnight it was over a period between 1250BC and around 1177BC. It’s the pedant in me.
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Arrgh. The above should’ve been up above, in reply to Dave. I’ll try changing browser.
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No, Alan.
It’s WordPress.
It (or at least the cheapo version of it that Munguin uses) doesn’t necessarily list replies right under the original comment.
It is most upsetting.
Danny (for one) sussed this and tends to start his comment with the name of the person he is addressing. I always mean to follow his example, but usually fail to remember.
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Good advice, Tris. I shall attempt to follow it.
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Good advice, I’ll try to follow
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I can just see Johnson playing the lead in “Pirates of Penzance” in the Eton school play.
I am a pirate king, hoorah for the pirate king and it is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king.
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Tris (as per advice), I remember Peter Lilly at the party conference unfold a seeming toilet roll list of people in his targets, whilst singing to a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, “I have a little list and on this little list is (pause) single mothers” etc etc to much guffawing from the thatcher adoring hall. Mikado, a little list of offenders, single mothers? ffs. So it runs in that tribe.
Just mentioning her name, it brought to mind an Adam Curtis film I watched (it brought to mind more than the film!) It dwells on the delusional qualities of the woman and Churchill.
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Oh that looks as if it’s going to be fantastic.
Will watch tonight.
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Hm. I just started to watch that when – strange but true – a thought popped into my head. Other Munguinites must know this already and most likely know it better than I do, but apparently at some early point in his reign during WWII Churchill wrote to De Valera wanting Ireland to join the war effort – but he did it in such an imperial-imperious-colonial-master-British-exceptionalist-condescending manner that De Valera basically binned it and didn’t even reply. Delusional indeed, and no appreciation whatsoever of just how offensive he was being.
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I didn;t know that, but tbh it doesn’t in the least surprise me. Of all of them, he was certainly the most prominent that believed Britain was at the very top of the pinnacle.
It must have come as a dreadful shock when the Americans started reminding him who was boss.
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Although Churchill had left office by the time of the Suez, driving the pecking order placing home. Sort off, don’t even think of parking your tank on my lawn, Egypt is my lawn now piss off. Delivered in a slow American drawl, for emphasis. He had left office but perhaps the event contributed to his first stroke.
Suez reminds me of another Adam Curtis film, it may have been called Bitter Lake. The film covered the middle east, starting off in Egypt as I remember. I found it a disturbing film leaving me sad and angry at the easy dismissal of another culture, in the pursuit of expanding their power base. If my memory serves and if this is the film!
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The assumed superiority of the Brits always amuses rather than angers me.
Given that they are by and large seriously crap at so much.
A neighbour of mine was busy telling me about his granddaughter living in Australia. In Perth, where the weather has been horrific.
He neighbours, he told me, are nearly all foreign, but they won’t go home becasue life is better for them in Australia
Eh?
He got rather cross with me when I asked if his granddaughter thought of herself as Australian, having been out there now for two years and if she would be coming “home” at any time…
It the foreign immigrants and British expats all over again.
They make me physically sick.
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Meetings of these types, incongruous viewpoints, can leave me perplexed for days, untill I think I have grasped an idea of the possible mindset.
Years ago at some exhibition/selling do I was in conversation with an elderly, blue rinsed matron. I was surprised when she said she was an Australian, she sounded solid county set, and followed that with, “Just home for a short break”. I immediately had this cartoon in my head of this woman having a foot in both homes 9500 miles apart, with the thought that all of India or Africa, depending on winds, would see her knickers. Any she was in full flow, seeming to think she had met a kindred thinking soul and proceeded to tell me how many foreigners are now Australia, “can’t move anywhere and there they are” “and they are even having lessons at school in their foreign languages.” At a pause I asked what the black indigenous people think and mentioned that having other languages in school would be good for the children. It was then she lost some of her decorum. It may have been her disappointment that I wasn’t on the same wavelength. I burst out laughing, it may have been her Lady Bracknell impersonation (Coward) “Gooood, goood. What Aaabbos think” or her continental knicker flashing, that I couldn’t unsee that set me off. And with a flash and clink of jewllery she spun off, agitated heels clacking, a waft of antipodean? lavender trying to catch her up. Certain details stick clearly, she lived in Pauline Hanson territory and I remember feelling sorry for not controlling my mirth, sorry for her possible disappointment thinking that I was someone who would understand/empathise with her anguish/fear.
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Brilliant story, Alan.
Australia belongs to them!
I always think the same sort of thing when I hear about people in the US going on about immigrants.
It’s as if they don’t realise the history of their country.
I may have told this story before:
A lady in a supermarket queue in California, talking on her phone. Guy behind her say… “hoy, you’re in America, talk English not Spanish. You wanna talk Spanish go back to Mexico”.
She replies (in English). “I’m not talking Spanish, I’m talking Chumash (I think it was). If you want to speak English, go back to England.”
That, of course isn’t exclusive to Americans… or Aussies.
I was in the post office queue a while ago talking on the phone to a mate (who happens to be Scottish, but we met working in France so we always speak French together. I hear a woman behind me saying “f***in’ Polacks. Be good when they F*** off back home”.
I looked round. Two rather ugly middle aged women.
I smiled. I said in a slightly exaggerated Scottish accent: “It’s French, not Polish. They are, as I’m sure you know, vastly differerent” I then added: “Allez faire foutre, mesdames.”
Alan was choking himself laughing on the other end of the phone.
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Brilliant Tris.
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I seem to remember a few years back seeing a clip of Boris talking about Brexit and things immigration-related (I think) and he seemed to be saying that post-Brexit, the UK would open up to people “like us” such as Australians and New Zealanders. Then some audience reaction: a young black guy says “Not like me, they’re not”.
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Johnson appears to be a racist.
Watermelon smiles; letter boxes; money better spent in Croydon than Glasgow…
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Sorry, but I’ve quite literally got tears running down my face….
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Brilliant, Jake….
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“Thanks to this country’s collective efforts…”. So, which country would that be, Boris? You really should be more precise in your use of language and have a more accurate understanding of your role: were you speaking as Prime Minister of the UK, or as First Minister of England?
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Well, in this case it would only be proper from him to speak as First Minister of England. He has no part in Scottish, Northern Irish of Welsh arrangements. Unfortunately, except that he controls the purse strings and the borrowing.
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Yes, Tris, and he also controls access to testing kits, I believe.
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I didn’t know that, Ed.
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😨 didn’t know that.
The bastards, money and life and death and Leonard, Carlow and Murray can only see Nike, Care homes and bloody pidgeon shite as issues.
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I think these people care less about the mess and more about putting down the SNP.
Can you imagine if Carlaw had been first minister?
Cheltenham Races…
The care homes are a s bad in England…
I’m not sure about their pigeons though!
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Pidgeons? Coming home to roost. Surely?
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LOL. Munguin says he thought it might be a new species!
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Kangaroo, I’d be reading anything on Covid 19 with an open but sceptical mind. The virus affords the “willy waving” an opportunity to severly tarnish their nemesis, by blowing smoke up truth’s arse. I tend to class these theories/stories into degrees of probability, starting at vaguely probable.
The following I present as smoke dispersal only, not probability, regarding Covid 19 coming from a Wuhan lab. Pompeo and Trump have now back peddaled from “enormous evidence” to “we don’t have certainty that it (covid) came from a lab.” This following anger from Australia and others refuting the dossiers origins, it was reported as coming from intelligence intercepted by Five Eyes Intellgence (Australia is one of the Five).
Here is a link to the Australian article;
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/australia-hits-back-at-us-claim-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab
The US has history of sloppy pathogen handling, safety, containment and proper inactivation of pathogens not carried at their military run bio lab at Fort Detrick.
The US CDC gave Wuhan lab $3.7m, was this to aid/carry out research on the American’s behalf too risky at the prone US lab? American lab personel were back and forward to China. There were 12 or 15 US military in Wuhan just prior to China getting patient zero, who incidentally had no conection with the meat market.
Loads to read online, some from reliable sources;
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/virus-biological-us-army-weapons-fort-detrick-leak-ebola-anthrax-smallpox-ricin-a9042641.html
Or this;
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/11/24/cdc-inspection-findings-reveal-more-about-fort-detrick-research-suspension.html
Or this from BGR
“CDC shuts down military virus lab after failed safety inspection . By Mike Wehner @MikeWehner. August 7th, 2019 at 1:34 PM. When you’re handling some of the world’s most deadly viruses.”- – – – – “inspectors found multiple shortcomings in the procedures used by staff at the facility, as well as the facility’s systems, such as wastewater decontamination.”
The truth is we will never know for sure The truth, I’m content to have my various coloured jars of probabilities arranged around the shelves of my brain. I’ll occasionally take a couple down, dust them off and put them back. I suppose like Sir Parsifal I can live with the question.
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Ach, wordpress. The above was supposed to be a reply to Kangaroo, way up above.
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Ach…wordpress, as you say.
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Thanks Alan, I was aware of most of that. It just continues to raise more questions than it answers.
I suspect Trump & Co will continue to drip drip answers to Russia collusion etc for a while so that the US public come on board and realise whi tbe bad guys are, and if people in other countries are also prompted to ask questions then so much the better. Skripal et al is one such story that needs questioning.
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Should’ve proof read my comment!
“willie waving” *countries*
inactivation not properly carried *out*
Probably too late to be any use now,
The hand of fate’s fickle finger has moved on, oh well.
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Ah, you’re licky, Alan – you could have hit the U key next to the I when you typed “fickle”…
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Undeed Edd, undeed a close calk 😊
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Ed: LOL LOL!
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