[Watchman]

He’s always been a curmudgeon so well suited for a Meldrewesque pundit role. And he’s not a prize twat like Quentin Letts or Clarkson.

The housewives “Peter Hitchins”

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -power-men

Turns out the Dalai Lama's gone a bit peedy. Marina wonders why so many old farts can't just pack it in. Pretty forgettable stuff.

[Youngian]

Doesn’t look like Adrian’s upping his game. Editor Katherine Viner really needs to have a word.

[Andy McDandy]

For a few years now, Robert Crampton has been knocking out this sort of crap every Saturday in the Times. Confused middle aged man shouts at clouds.

[Abernathy]

Chiles seems to be being indulged in churning out this totally pointless Victor-Meldrew-with-a-keyboard crap by dint of being the partner of Katharine Viner (editor of the Grauniad).

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... daytime-tv

Marina Hyde on This Morning, which is apparently getting a lot of people excited.

Lambasting ITV for what he alleges was a cover-up over Schofield’s relationship with the young man, Eamonn explained: “All I’m here to do is to speak for people who hadn’t got a voice … I’m speaking on behalf of them.” Mm. Not all heroes wear sour grapes. The suggestion that Eamonn is bitter enough to say anything to get back on to terrestrial TV could not be further from the truth.

Eamonn Holmes is one thing, but what about Nadine Dorries?

I can’t help feeling Nadine’s moral outrage is somewhat selective. I never remember hearing her tell the world that Boris Johnson had questions to answer when he decided to actually promote someone he knew very well had issues with non-consensual sexual misconduct to the position of deputy chief whip. According to Nadine, ITV executives “don’t have the authority to ride roughshod over public opinion or to set their own standards of behaviour or rules” – a practice she didn’t seem to find quite so distasteful when it was indulged in week-in, week-out by Johnson, from whom she’s reportedly soon to accept a peerage.

The point being:

People apparently find it easy to obsess about “unwise, but not illegal” things that happened on daytime telly, but hard to maintain interest in the fact that at last count, almost 60 members of parliament were facing claims of sexual misconduct, including three who were cabinet ministers at the time. Many of those complaints were made by much younger people, few of whom would be saying it was consensual.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Why does the Guardian do this? Rowan Atkinson, who studied Electrical Engineering nearly 50 years ago, is given a column to scorn the encvironmental benefit of electric cars? Among his insights is that people often change cars after 3 years, which he seems to think means that the car is never used again. In reality, this in effect subsidizes poorer people to get better cars than they could other wise afford, with the safety and environmental benefits that brings. No reason why that shouldn't happen with electric cars too.


With elecrtric cars improvements are "years away", while everything else is definitely going to happen commercially because of something Formula One is doing in 2026.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... n-atkinson

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Except it doesn't.
Seemed like a pretty balanced piece to me.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Except it doesn't.
Seemed like a pretty balanced piece to me.

Really?

Take away the "I like electric cars", and it's basically an extended pop at them, with some implied strawman that people who support electric cars support chucking it away after 3 years. And of course some other stuff he's read about is definitely going to work.

His trump card- that EVs use more electricity in production- doesn't engage with the progress being made on greening the electricity to produce it. An old petrol car being driven around "forever" is always going to be spouting shit out.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

So a divergent point of view is automatically wrong?

You might want to think about that.

[Tubby Isaacs]

My objection was that he was wrong, not automatically wrong.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Is he? His argument seems to be reasoned, and yours seems to be less so.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I'm no expert on cars, but I'm able to spot this sort of article. "Here's some bad things about x, which won't get better, and here are some good things about y which has an exciting future of innovations".

[Tubby Isaacs]

I find this thread far more persuasive.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This on the other hand is good, even if it's by Lexit Larry Elliott. On the Welsh Valleys.

My solution- give the people who live there more money.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... sh-valleys

[The Weeping Angel]

I find this thread far more persuasive.

Someone else not impressed with Atkinson's article

[Youngian]

The gist of Rowan’s article is that internal combustion engines would be great if it wasn’t for petrol and so would EVs if it wasn’t for batteries.
Strangely I was having this conversation (batteries Vs hydrogen fuel cells) last week on a campsite with a farmer. Like Atkinson and myself he was an informed lay person on the subject. Perhaps he’d been reading Rowan’s beginners guide.

Only have a BTEC in electronicals but I don’t even need that to understand what a battery is.

[Bones McCoy]

One hardly needs an Oxbridge engineering degree to know that eking a bit more use out of something is generally more economical than binning it and buying a new replacement.

That does seem to be the core of the argument.
And I've heard of few people (high net value individuals excepted) who've adjusted their car replacement schedule to "go electric".

[Andy McDandy]

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... re-council

Marina tackles Captain Tom, his Moneish daughter, and the question of have we been had?

[Philip Marlow]

Grim as hell, but a necessary read.