ORDraper retweeted
Cenk Uygur has re-released an anti-Jewish ad supporting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
It's from Uygur's failed 2024 campaign for Democratic presidential nominee. He got 692 votes.
Why does he still think an antisemitic ad blaming Jews for America's problems is a winning strategy?
The BBC mindset, ladies and gentlemen. Deliberately not understanding every single thing.
ORDraper retweeted
I am not saying this for effect, I mean it quite literally: rhetoric like this gets Jews killed. Cenk is not just an embarassment, he is a hateful demagogue.
New @RebellionPac ad dropping in Michigan. We have to suffer here at home, so Israel can get all its wars. That’s why they buy politicians like Mike Rogers. He promised to serve Israel “unconditionally,” but never made that promise to you.
A whole generation of people who cannot think and merely repeat soundbites and therapy speak. Genuinely bizarre.
ORDraper retweeted
I know this isn’t meant to be funny, but I’m literally cackling. “My decades long thesis on just war demonstrates israel has been fighting one, therefore I am revising my decades long thesis because it cannot possibly be that israel is doing something right”
Michael Walzer published “Just and Unjust Wars,” an attempt to delineate the rights and wrongs of warfare in both its causes and its conduct, in 1977. In the nearly 50 years since, no other book on the subject has matched its influence. The precepts are not complicated: it is just to defend your country from an invasion and it is unjust to invade a country that has not attacked you—although Walzer does allow for exceptions, mostly for humanitarian causes. It is just to assume certain risks to avoid civilian casualties and it is unjust to bomb towns indiscriminately to compel an enemy to surrender. The justice of going to war—what philosophers call jus ad bellum—is separate from jus in bello, the justice of how a war is fought.
The war in Gaza has made Walzer rethink one of the book’s fundamental principles. “The wall between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which had sustained his theory for almost half a century, was no longer sturdy,” Jordi Graupera writes. As Walzer said to him, “There is a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust.” Read about why a philosopher of war is now reconsidering his seminal work: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/T7…
ORDraper retweeted
Burnham and Healey are gambling that they will get another chance to do a big budget. But they may look back on this as the best opportunity they had.
There are, to my mind, three possible explanations for their approach.
One is that they would rather not level with their MPs and the country now. The argument goes that they will be in a better place to confront the trade-offs next autumn. But political capital is a depreciating asset.
The second is that they are doing a Mr Micawber, hoping something will turn up to improve the public finances. That could be faster-than-expected growth or a big reduction in government borrowing costs. Either is always possible, but look around the world and you will see the opposite is expected.
The other possibility is that they are planning an early election. That would push the reckoning beyond polling day, giving them more flexibility. As I know all too well, elections are never risk-free.
The problem is that Wednesday’s budget, and the IMF’s praise for Britain, are founded on fantasy - the idea that the Labour Party will accept the tight spending limits that are meant to kick in as the next election approaches.
My preference would be for a budget that cut spending, reduced business taxes and enacted growth-enhancing supply-side reform. Yet with his party in no mood for cuts, you can see why Healey is likely to avoid doing anything too bold on Wednesday.
They will never have more room for manoeuvre than now. I know, having done both jobs, that you regret the decisions you don’t take far more than the ones you do.
More on the budget in my @thetimes column today 👇
thetimes.com/comment/columni…
ORDraper retweeted
£874 million to be spent on between 5,000 and 13,000 rough sleepers (depending on whose figures you accept), taking the higher number and dividing that into £874 million gives us £67,230 to be spent on every rough sleeper.
Or put another way, it's another money laundering scam where taxpayers money will be put into the hands of Labour voting apparatchiks in non jobs.
When the lower (government) figure is used the sums become even more outrageous, £174,888 to be spent on every rough sleeper.
In some parts of the country £67,230 can still buy a house!
ORDraper retweeted
This post goes some way to explaining the dire financial straits the UK is in...
"Britain has almost run out of taxpayers, or at the very least, it’s slowly running out of people who pay enough taxes to plausibly finance the state."
"...in 1998, about 43 per cent of British earners paid sufficient tax to cover the Government’s average per-capita spending. During Covid, that figure fell to an absolute low of circa 20 per cent, then by 2025 recovered modestly to 26.6 per cent."
No wonder if fewer than 27% of people are net contributors to the state
It's stats like this that make me want to leave. Big new project in the US in the next few months might be just the springboard I need
@griffitha @LiamHalligan
open.substack.com/pub/ieains…
ORDraper retweeted
The Economist's estimate of Britain's age- and sex-standardised conviction rates for sexual offences by the offender's nationality
economist.com/britain/2026/1…
The state’s ability to waste money is astonishing.
‘That’s £190,000 per person…’
‘We could buy them all a house!”
@NickFerrariLBC runs the numbers on the government's pledge to end rough sleeping by Christmas.
ORDraper retweeted
New low for normalized Jew-hate in the American Democratic Party. Very sad:
Painting your political opponents as puppets of Jews, as this El-Sayed ad does, and as crazed baby-killers and money-grubbing villains who are the root cause of every bad thing not just in the world, but in your life—from wars to the price of eggs to the reason you can’t have free healthcare—is not just low-grade Jew-hate. It’s pure Third Reich stuff, translated directly from the original German.
Do you remember when Jewish Democrats in Michigan explained that they would vote for El-Sayed despite his open disdain for Jews, since there are many other important issues they need him to fight for? That anything was worth it to “defeat MAGA”?
Well, here’s El-Sayed’s answer to them: Don’t worry, all those issues we agree on, like healthcare, inflation, and climate change, I’m going to make them about Jews too! I will tell the public that the Jews are the reason they can’t have those things.
ORDraper retweeted
BREAKING: BBC forced to take down its education website used by millions after it was found to contain all sorts of devices and articles promoting the Labour Party, leftist politics, as well as ‘extreme views on migration and Net Zero’ (via @DailyMail) dailymail.com/news/article-1…
He’s not entirely wrong. A large minority of the high and middle earners I know well have left or are planning to leave.
ORDraper retweeted
Imagine there are two brothers: A & B. A has no assets & no job. B has a business worth £1m but with debts, staff not trained in modern machinery, & many repairs & upgrading needed of its plant & equipment.
Then an aunt dies & leaves them each £100k.+
It’s almost funny that this is being pumped out with zero recognition that this has nothing to do with Russia or Syria and everything to do with not having built nuclear.
“Be ready by having some everyday essentials… three litres of water per person per day, tinned goods... to last a few days”
Speaking to @vicderbyshire, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting details advice to households to be prepared for a “dangerous and turbulent world”.
#Newsnight
Gail’s is viciously exploiting the proletariat’s need for £7 loaves of sourdough bread and oddly flavoured croissants.
It’s like feudal times all over again.
Why would private equity firms like Bain Capital want to own Gail's? Because like care homes and places to live, bread is a basic human need – and therefore profitable forever.
I explain to @ShelaghFogarty why private equity's hostile takeover of our basic services matters.