Tag: Boris Johnson

Tobacco industry’s 4 step plan to eliminate inconvenient facts

First, the industry appeared to engage, promising high-quality research into the issue. The public were assured that the best people were on the case.

The second stage was to complicate the question and sow doubt: lung cancer might have any number of causes, after all. And wasn’t lung cancer, not cigarettes, what really mattered?

Stage three was to undermine serious research and expertise. Autopsy reports would be dismissed as anecdotal, epidemiological work as merely statistical, and animal studies as irrelevant.

Finally came normalisation: the industry would point out that the tobacco-cancer story was stale news. Couldn’t journalists find something new and interesting to say?

The Problem With Facts, April 24, 2017, at 10:13 AM

Our foreign secretary…

The problem with the foreign secretary is not that he is a poodle: poodles tend to be dependable and loyal. The problem is that he’s a disorganised narcissist.

The Foreign Office needs to learn some new tricks, April 13, 2017, at 11:14 AM

… Yet the foreign secretary is in some ways an embodiment of what is wrong with Britain’s foreign policy: shambolic, distracted and driven by domestic considerations.

Britain, Brexit, Boris. Again :'(

Some of these problems are surmountable. The WTO is not as legalistic as you might think, says Mr Winters; countries that stay in others’ good books find things easier. But so far, British politicians are also struggling on that front. Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, has irritated his counterparts with clownish comments.

The “WTO option” for Brexit is far from straightforward, January 11, 2017 at 01:45AM

Boris Johnson, screwing the British since 2016 😦

Theresa May and the breaking of Boris Johnson

“Elizabeth I is loth to sign her cousin and rival’s death warrant until, in a sylvan encounter, Mary fails to show due humility. Schiller depicts a side of Gloriana that England opts to forget: even dear Old Bess had to be cynical, sly and brutal to keep power in her society. She had to break people.”

Theresa May and the breaking of Boris Johnson, December 20, 2016 at 01:34AM