Brexit Arms Festive Special. Will the Grinch steal christmas? Could it be ‘Christmas with the Kranks?’ Or will we end up with a ‘Blue’ Christmas after all?...🤷🏻‍♀️🎄

[EpicShitDippedBatBiscuit]

First off, comrade Hilda has been busy in the propaganda dept! Praise be to Hilda! The dear leader will appreciate and reward your efforts with a cushy job in the newly opened Ministry of Bullshit. ✊🥀

Specials board.

⭐️ Snacks.

•Salty Bar nuts
(we always have too many)

•Marrow crisps,
I know you all hate them, but we had a glut and needed to do something with them. 🤷🏻‍♀️😬

⭐️ Mains.

A festive choice of...

•’Properly Stuffed’ “Christmas voting” Turkey.

•Festive Glazed Gammons.

•Goose that laid the Gilded socialist egg.

•’Whigs’ in blankets.

•Sauce for the Goose and Sauce for the Gander

•Brussels’ sprouts.
Divisive, yet still popular in some quarters...

•Neeps and tatties.
Grown in Corbyn’s Communist plot and kindly gifted back to us by the SNP.

⭐️Festive Drinks.

•Rebecca’s long Baileys.
Seems nice enough, but can be vicious if you have too much.

•Corbyn’s Victory Gin.
State sanctioned by big brother.

•Bag in, artisan Earl Grey Cocktail.
A Boris election special.

•Red flag Rum.
for the singing socialists among us.

•Egg nog.
Gifted by Trump. Sticks in your throat a bit, but it’s polite to drink it and pretend to half enjoy it anyway.

•The #ClassicDmitri.
Shaken and stirred. A Russian Vodka based Cocktail, shrouded in mystery and intrigue. No one really knows how it came to exist, but all we know is, that it might have happened. Somewhere. And now it’s on the menu. Enjoy!

⭐️Desserts.

•Imported Panettone.
Get it fast, I’m reliably informed we will never ever have it again post Brexit.

•Traditional Christmas pudding.
have a good look for that old fashioned sixpence inside, we might need it when all the money runs out.

•Damson jam steamed pudding.
I’m told by the suppliers, that It’s like the infamous Mumsnet chicken, we can get eleventy billion servings from it and still have more for the freezer.

As always, welcome to all who pass through this place, but, as ever please observe the sign above the bar. If you can’t read it. It says...

DON’T BE A TWAT.

🎄 🌟 🎁 🍸 🥜 🦃 🎅

“He's like giant millstone round everyone's neck.
Gin and tonic please. Cheers!”

You are not wrong! Here’s a bottle!

“DH is thrilled about the Waspi payout. He's planning to self ID as female, and claim lots of the loot that Jezza is flinging around.”

A gin calendar? I'm jealous! Sticking to builders brew though...

Q. How many millstones can be carved from an EdStone?

That might be the electoral equivalent of how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

Biggly huge... Trump fuck up I imagine although Farage said he will state he doesn't want NHS. I'd rather he didn't say anything.

Presidential happy meal

🤣🤣🤣🤣 Sent from brexit arms with biggly love. I'm sure some of cooks in here could keep him occupied with food delicacies, hamburgers etc.

For me, wonderful new landlady...

A double dose of classic dimitri please. And one for yourself....

Hi Comrade Sally!

Another #ClassicDmitri coming up for you! And thanks for mine!

I’m happy to throw some hamburgers and diet comes at him, anything to keep him away from the main stage! 😬🤦🏻‍♀️😂

Cokes! I’m defo not throwing any ‘comes’ at him... 😱😱😱😱😳

I'm guessing he wouldn't object, either way.

🤮 🤮 🤮

Last time, Melania brought 32 pieces of luggage for a three day visit and never smiled once.

I'm betting she forgot which suitcase she packed her toothpaste in.

Such a disorganised woman. I hope she makes a better job of it this time.

The bikes thing pisses me off. No way could anyone here cycle to a station to get anywhere they needed to go - nearest station is 8 miles and the most useful one is 12 miles, and we have these strange things called hills, which make cycling even less appealing.

Still antiBoris and proRemain though, but I'll have a large please and shuffle off to the far end of the bar and hope I can get some warmth from the fire.

I hate my current computer set up! DS has moved components around so much that only the tablet works so I can't c&p my very important post about drug development to this thread where you can all take it to bits. I spent an hour writing it, and missed the the shift over. It's too long and complicated to retype, and I have no mouse and a midget keyboard, so if you are at all interested, you have to read the end of the last thread.

XingMing Mon 02-Dec-19 17:11:52

If I might scroll back up to the discussion of Big Pharma. Between 1987 and 2010, my work was writing company annual reports and I worked on a lot, in all sorts of industries, one of them being pharmaceuticals. It takes on average the examination of many thousand compounds (animal, vegetable and mineral) to identify ONE that might hold some potential as a treatment; it will be five to eight years in the lab before that promise is proven; 95% of everything tested out will be discarded. It will then take longer still, in animal trials, before the compound is deemed sufficiently safe to be trialled on humans, initially with a small group of terminally ill folk who are out of options. If they show improvement and the side-effects are within defined parameters, then the pharmaceutical company will go into phase 2 clinical trials of a much larger (thousands of participants) of a double-blind programme over a period of months or years. If those are equally good, then the company will work out how the drug can be manufactured in prescribable quantities. At some stage, a patent will have been applied for but the art comes in not applying too soon, because the patent only gives 10/15 years of exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from sales before the patent expires and any other drug company, which has not spent a penny of the £20+ million development costs (1990s figures -- this is my historic stuff, so won't bear forensic scrutiny) can make a cheap generic version, which is mostly what the NHS buys unless there is no choice. It also has to be marketed so doctors know about it, and that costs bundles too. And sometimes you'll discover a medication that only has value to poor people who can't pay for it. There is a drug called Mectizan (made by Merck) which prevents blindness resulting from the bites of a fly in parts of Africa. It wasn't what it was developed for, but they still make it AFAIK, because it's important. So big drug companies also need to support their 'orphan' drugs too.

It costs a pharmaceutical company far far more to bring one new drug into safe use than you would believe and the failure rate is triple that in creative industries. One hit movie or a music act pays for thousands of failures, also-rans and straight to video dogs. (I also worked on the shareholder reports for a global entertainment organisation for several years). When a company's management is good at picking winners, their shares soar but too many failures and out the door they go. Hence the high salaries and the close attention the investment analysts take in who's hot and who's not.

Lecture over, except to say that when you understand this, it explains why the focus is always on drugs to treat the problems of well-off populations of chronically (not terminally) ill people. And why savaging big pharma will do more harm than good. Ditto for most companies with traded shares.

What else are our pension funds going to invest in, other than corporate equities and debt securities, if they are going to meet liabilities that won't be paid out until retirement, perhaps 40 or 50 years away? Pension funds can't stick it in the building society at 0.115% if they are going to grow and beat inflation. Sorry to bang on.

Well done, Xing! I was just going to do that for you.

How did you do that? Magic! I wanted this read. Thank you so much.

Apologies that it isn't even slightly amusing.

Thank you WalkingDeadFanGirl.

I read it on the other thread too!

It's the sort of important information that Corbyn glosses over your make a grand sweeping proclamation about Greedy Capitalists!

It infuriates me

All political parties do the same I know, but Corbyn is obsessively pursuing the narrative that all profit driven ventures are inherently evil, and in this case it's so very far from true

I detest the man 🤬

The way Corbyn talks he seems to want to ban any drugs made in America, if they wont sell them to him for peanuts. How many people will that kill?

Xing thank you.

I'll remember that post when myself and my entire family are working on the Dr evil tracksuit production line, sporting the suit and kitting out the entire nation in one.

Now this is a rather interesting plot twist. Corbz getting his dodgy NHS dossier off the Russians...

Was just coming to post the same thing Holly!!

Also two bar graphs I've just seen about train use compared with income & region, & also train use vs bus use by income

Yet another of Jezza's stupid ideas

Proving once again that he's for the south, for the city & for the few... 🥀

Dusty, he has just abandoned working class voters altogether. Labour needs a new slogan. No wonder many of them are turning to Boris.

"Labour is for the many, not the Jew or you or you"

Walking to the rescue!

Xing's point about the high failure rate just to produce one effective drug applies equally to engineering patents. James Dyson went through something like 300 variations on his original vacuum design before he came up with the one that worked and was eventually marketed. The university of engineering he founded in Wiltshire is based on giving young engineering inventors the time, space and resources they need to experiment with new ideas, refine, adjust, even discard, because the potential for finding an idea that revolutionises design and reliability was so great.

That takes a lot of money, time, patience. James Dyson can afford it and his satisfaction lies in investing in the future but a commercial firm is in business to make profit. It has to juggle its R&D costs against viability but if it didn't explore new and better products, it would be undercut by rivals and die.

Just seen the reference to alleged Russian interference on the Press Preview, Holly. I'm sure it's in no way connected to the Telegraph report today that:

"Nato should de-escalate conflict with Russia in order to focus on the climate crisis and the wealth of billionaires, Jeremy Corbyn has said. In a show of support for French president Emmanuel Macron, who said last week there should be a “change in direction” by the security bloc and closer ties with Moscow, the Labour leader on Sunday called for “a wider perspective” on threats to the West."

And all on the eve of the NATO summit.

Jezbollah, sympathetic to Russia? Surely not.

Or in simple terms, Dusty, this.

Let the average taxpayer on average wage subsidise the richest users of rail (mainly in London),

Of course, there's not much point in having 33% knocked off the price of your rail ticket by a benevolent Labour government when that same Labour government backs strike action.

Oh dear. Emmanuel Macron calls NATO brain dead. And Trump's response (from the Washington Post):

"The White House says it is considering tariffs of up to 100 percent on $2.4 billion in French imports. The tariffs would come in response to a French tax that affects American Internet companies. President Trump had warned the French not to proceed with the tax and had vowed to retaliate."

He's not going to play nicely, folks, is he? We're going to get dragged into this