Best Of

I have not posted for about 2 weeks and more relevant I have not been lurking either during this time. I decided I needed a break. I'm not flouncing and I may well be back in time, but even with my modest level of posting I do spend a lot of time lurking and I do have a busy life.

Mostly I will miss the superb humour and the news. I was going to list out those that I will miss most, but realised I would miss too many out.

The deciding factor was again being sucked into one of those pointless debates, which is such a waste of time, but which sadly I fall into the trap of rather than dealing with, with wit and humour, like most of you do so well.

It was the debate on driving (U turns, 70mph across roundabouts, bends, stopping at roundabouts, etc). As some of you will be aware from my past posts I have quite a few friends who are existing, or ex-cops, including a retired Chief Superintendent, a Royal Protection Officer and a number of blue light drivers, all with the highest driving qualifications. I showed some of them the posts being made by 'we all know who', and typical comments were 'What a load of bollocks' and 'Shouldn't be allowed behind a steering wheel'.

But more relevant was why did I feel the need to do that? So before I do the same again and waste more of my time I am taking a break for a bit.

See you all soon.

How thrilling for them, they obviously missed the driver who was convicted of killing a motorcyclist driving between 66 and 76mph in a 30mph limit only this month then. So clearly their high driving qualifications or time in the police haven't allowed them to convince the CPS and the courts in those instances.
https://www.gloucestershire.police.uk/news/gloucestershire/2026/january/man-who-was-double-the-drink-drive-limit-pleads-guilty-to-causing-motorcyclists-death/

But enjoy your break anyway!

I have just popped in to see if my post of the other day had any comments.

Thank you @Big_G_NorthWales for your very kind reply. Appreciated. Also thank you everyone who liked my post. Again very much appreciated.

I see hyufd felt the need to reply with more nonsense by linking to a case where a driver was prosecuted for hitting a speeding motorbike. I mean really are you on drugs or something? Of course the van driver was prosecuted. He was over twice the legal drink drive limit and driving at over twice the speed limit. Is there any brain in there at all?

A driver involved in an accident who is driving with care and attention doing everything correctly but unfortunately collides with a reckless driver due entirely to the fault of the reckless driver should not be prosecuted (this really shouldn't need saying). He wasn't a careful driver was he? A recent example was shown on a TV documentary. Two HGVs collided head on, on a bend. The onboard cameras showed one driver (from Europe) was on the wrong side of the road. The skid marks and cab records showed the other driver reacted accordingly and was driving appropriately for the conditions. No action was taken against him (obviously). The stuff hyufd posts is idiotic.

I didn't post all the comments made by the blue light police drivers about hyufd's posts, but here is another. hyufd repeatedly said you should stop at a roundabout give way line even if your exit is clear. The response by two of the police officers I showed this to was that if they saw you doing this (and you didn't have L/P plates) they would stop you and breathalyse you, as this is typical behaviour of a drunk driver overcompensating. 

There is a driving acronym (TUG) that is repeatedly referenced in the police driving manual. It stands for Take, Use, Give and refers to information you obtain about other drivers while driving and the information you give them. Not just signals, but your actions, car position etc. You would be giving very confusing and dangerous messages by randomly stopping at a roundabout when you have a clear exit.

On a driving test this very specific manoeuvre is classified as a minor fault (not an instant fail), but if you do the same fault (stop unnecessarily at a Give Way) 3 times it is a test failure. But as we all know hyufd knows best.

Honestly @kjh , your best bet is just to leave this one. He's never going to change his mind (an aspect of him I find quite enjoyable) but I think every other poster agrees with you. Consider it a win.

New Ukranian ground drone is taking no prisoners.

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2014634820962255204

It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.

Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be.
Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway,
(The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)

Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.

I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe.
The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.

True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.

At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.

Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.

Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.

Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.

The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.

There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.

One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.

One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.

For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.


https://maps.app.goo.gl/mG2vLkTSt5By8YwD9

RAF Lossiemouth is on the coast with landings over the sea and Moray golf course onto the runway

Elgin is over 5 miles inland

Yes, however I think Elgin is the nearest place known to most people.

I have a friend who used to run a shop there called the Fochabers Framer.

Lossiemouth is well known for its base and is the birthplace of my wife

I'm getting strong "stop when entering a roundabout" vibes

Like this? - https://maps.app.goo.gl/VpUXpjpvgPpwi2fJ9

I was once playing golf with an uncle and on the green of a par 3 I was addressing a putt when out of nowhere the deafening noise of a Vulcan taking off immediately overhead was like something you simply could not imagine

It was an experience I have never forgotten

The .map is excellent showing the airfield and Lossiemouth

As a child, we were walking along the side of a valley in the Lake District (I think it was). The entire hill started rattling. 3 Vulcans flew past, one after another. Below us.

‪@paulhayward.bsky.social‬

With the US president saying Nato/British troops stayed "off the front line" in Afghanistan, Nigel Farage won't want British voters being reminded that he called Donald Trump "the bravest man I have ever met."

It astonishes me that his opponents don't draw more attention to Trump's war record. He is now the Draft Dodger-in-Chief, isn't he?

You think that Americans didn’t know this when they elected him? Twice? You think that they didn’t know about his disgraceful behaviour on January 6th? You think that they didn’t know he had been convicted of crimes of dishonesty and found guilty of sexual assault?

I honestly despair how much time and effort the Democrats put into “proving” all this and more as if it were some revelation. Americans know and they elected him anyway. Twice.

Just maybe, if they thought about why and how utterly irrelevant their own obsessions are to most people’s lives we wouldn’t be in this mess.

So many of the issues discussed on here are about to be rendered spectacularly irrelevant by advances in technology - eg robotics

We are 1-3 years from advanced humanoid robots entering the market at scale. Think what that does to, say, defence

Eg look at the latest Unitree robot (from China). Imagine taking on that, on the battlefield. It will be tireless and relentless and be equipped with 100% accurate weapons

https://x.com/wevolverapp/status/2013956331611324883?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

It will also go into factories and the like. Vast wealth will be created

And that is just one example

Defence is why we are 100% NOT about to get advanced humanoid robots entering the market. Musk even described the Tesla Robototron as his "robot army". No way are autonomous robots making it out into the general pubic. Factory use? Far better to use a specific robot for a specific task as we already do.

Humanoid droids on the battlefield? Maybe. Your own persona robototron that could be remote programmed to kill us all? No chance

New Ukranian ground drone is taking no prisoners.

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2014634820962255204

It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.

Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be.
Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway,
(The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)

Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.

I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe.
The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.

True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.

At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.

Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.

Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.

Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.

The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.

There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.

One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.

One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.

For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.


https://maps.app.goo.gl/mG2vLkTSt5By8YwD9

RAF Lossiemouth is on the coast with landings over the sea and Moray golf course onto the runway

Elgin is over 5 miles inland

Yes, however I think Elgin is the nearest place known to most people.

I have a friend who used to run a shop there called the Fochabers Framer.

Lossiemouth is well known for its base and is the birthplace of my wife

I'm getting strong "stop when entering a roundabout" vibes

Like this? - https://maps.app.goo.gl/VpUXpjpvgPpwi2fJ9

I have not posted for about 2 weeks and more relevant I have not been lurking either during this time. I decided I needed a break. I'm not flouncing and I may well be back in time, but even with my modest level of posting I do spend a lot of time lurking and I do have a busy life.

Mostly I will miss the superb humour and the news. I was going to list out those that I will miss most, but realised I would miss too many out.

The deciding factor was again being sucked into one of those pointless debates, which is such a waste of time, but which sadly I fall into the trap of rather than dealing with, with wit and humour, like most of you do so well.

It was the debate on driving (U turns, 70mph across roundabouts, bends, stopping at roundabouts, etc). As some of you will be aware from my past posts I have quite a few friends who are existing, or ex-cops, including a retired Chief Superintendent, a Royal Protection Officer and a number of blue light drivers, all with the highest driving qualifications. I showed some of them the posts being made by 'we all know who', and typical comments were 'What a load of bollocks' and 'Shouldn't be allowed behind a steering wheel'.

But more relevant was why did I feel the need to do that? So before I do the same again and waste more of my time I am taking a break for a bit.

See you all soon.

How thrilling for them, they obviously missed the driver who was convicted of killing a motorcyclist driving between 66 and 76mph in a 30mph limit only this month then. So clearly their high driving qualifications or time in the police haven't allowed them to convince the CPS and the courts in those instances.
https://www.gloucestershire.police.uk/news/gloucestershire/2026/january/man-who-was-double-the-drink-drive-limit-pleads-guilty-to-causing-motorcyclists-death/

But enjoy your break anyway!

I have just popped in to see if my post of the other day had any comments.

Thank you @Big_G_NorthWales for your very kind reply. Appreciated. Also thank you everyone who liked my post. Again very much appreciated.

I see hyufd felt the need to reply with more nonsense by linking to a case where a driver was prosecuted for hitting a speeding motorbike. I mean really are you on drugs or something? Of course the van driver was prosecuted. He was over twice the legal drink drive limit and driving at over twice the speed limit. Is there any brain in there at all?

A driver involved in an accident who is driving with care and attention doing everything correctly but unfortunately collides with a reckless driver due entirely to the fault of the reckless driver should not be prosecuted (this really shouldn't need saying). He wasn't a careful driver was he? A recent example was shown on a TV documentary. Two HGVs collided head on, on a bend. The onboard cameras showed one driver (from Europe) was on the wrong side of the road. The skid marks and cab records showed the other driver reacted accordingly and was driving appropriately for the conditions. No action was taken against him (obviously). The stuff hyufd posts is idiotic.

I didn't post all the comments made by the blue light police drivers about hyufd's posts, but here is another. hyufd repeatedly said you should stop at a roundabout give way line even if your exit is clear. The response by two of the police officers I showed this to was that if they saw you doing this (and you didn't have L/P plates) they would stop you and breathalyse you, as this is typical behaviour of a drunk driver overcompensating. 

There is a driving acronym (TUG) that is repeatedly referenced in the police driving manual. It stands for Take, Use, Give and refers to information you obtain about other drivers while driving and the information you give them. Not just signals, but your actions, car position etc. You would be giving very confusing and dangerous messages by randomly stopping at a roundabout when you have a clear exit.

On a driving test this very specific manoeuvre is classified as a minor fault (not an instant fail), but if you do the same fault (stop unnecessarily at a Give Way) 3 times it is a test failure. But as we all know hyufd knows best.

@steverichards14

Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’:
“If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.
In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”

https://x.com/steverichards14/status/2014612676777779396?s=20

If Labour are to win the next election we MUST rejoin the EU. Starmer or Burnham must batter it through. No Referendums. Just a huge parlianentary majority. The full fat version including Schengen. We must put ourselves at the centre of Europe.

Labour have nothing to lose. They are sleepwalking to possible defeat at the hands of Farage. There is no form of REJOIN that would be a worse fate for this country than that.

Rejoin plus Euro means zero chance of Labour re election

Nobody is suggesting the Euro

Roger is (“…full fat version…”) in the comment HYUFD is replying to!

The reality of Rejoin is

1) We would be asked to follow the process that all applicants to the are do. The politics of Europe will not slow a special exemption - too many countries would get upset
2) So we would be signing up to “full fat” Europe
3) This means signing up for the Euro. Since this would remove a huge chunk of the mucking around with the economy the politicians love, this would be a matter of
I) Signing up to the Euro joining process
II) Never actually meeting he requirements and joining

The number of countries that want Britain to join the Euro is zero. They've got enough problems already without adding a country with a weird housing thing going on that's not really into it.

It's perfectly possible that the application would just get held up forever, and it's also possible that some countries would say they don't think it'll last and they're not going to play the hokey cokey but the Euro wouldn't be the blocker.

It would also be in the US and Russian interests to stop the UK from rejoining so Orban might put the blockers on it (and maybe Fico too) and then you get down to the usual EU shenanigans of wanting a pound of flesh from the UK for cooperation even when it’s in the EU’s benefit to cooperate so no doubt the French making silly fishing demands and Spain wanting to change Gibraltar’s status.

This is the greatest tragedy of Brexit: that rejoining will be much more difficult and painful than it would have been to remain. No taking it back to the shop if it didn't fit.

It won’t be difficult, it will be impossible

I’ve been through this before, but one more time

It needs a government to sell Rejoin in an election and then win the election with that mandate. Then they must call the referendum, and win that. All this time very awkward questions about the euro and Schengen and fisheries and the City and much else will crop up, making that referendum suddenly seem a lot more difficult to win than first appeared. An unpopular government will lose it. A popular government will think “why bother taking the risk, we’re popular, why spend all that time and capital, let’s forget the referendum, thing”

So we won’t even get as far as a referendum. And even if we did and it was won, we would then have 5-10 years of painful painful negotiation with the EU to establish terms, during which any of 28 countries could simply veto, just for the fuck of it. This would consume a decade of British politics, with no guarantee of success at the end. The Rejoiners who glibly say “oh they want us back” are as foolishly complacent as the Brexiteers who farcically claimed “it will be the easiest deal in the world”

No sane UK government will ever attempt Rejoin, an insane government would fuck it up. Ergo, it is never going to happen

Sorry

You're bizarrely wrong about this due to a failure of imagination.

Back in the deep mists of time the Lib Dems were one of the first people to propose an in/out referendum on the EU because they couldn't conceive that out would win. They completely failed to imagine the way in which public opinion might be shifted and the part they might play in that.

So it is with Rejoin. You describe the politics of the status quo. But you fail to imagine how the politics would be different were public opinion also radically different, and the EU itself changed.

For sure, most advocates of Rejoin also lack the imagination to conceive of the work they will need to do to achieve it, so I certainly don't think that Rejoin is likely.

But it's not hard to imagine it happening.

New Ukranian ground drone is taking no prisoners.

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2014634820962255204

It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.

Scarier is that we haven't really defined what their future purpose will be.
Last year's defence review is already half-obsolete, and nearly seven months on later barely started to do anything practical about it anyway,
(The Typhoon upgrade actually makes sense, despite its hefty price tag.)

Building a European defence capability (inc us) that can operate effectively without the US is so challenging on every level that there must be a temptation to hold off and hope America pivots back to being an ally once the closing credits run on the Trump Show.

I don't think it's quite so difficult as that, particularly if we act in concert with Europe.
The biggest problem is the sunk cost capabilities like F35, which depend entirely on US cooperation for their ongoing utility.

True but we know that we will already be looking at the next generation of aircraft and we shoudl take the opportunity to look towards non-US sources, whether that is Sweden, France or South Korea.

At any given point we will always be beholden to the US for some of our military hardware until we make the decision to source elsewhere so that, in a decade or more, we know longer have that reliance.

Hell, we could even start building our own weapons again.

Actually, a simple start would be building a solid fuel rocket with the mould line of Trident.

Winding a carbon fibre hulls is fairly straightforward and fuel itself is fairly straightforward. The tricks are in casting large motors without voids.

The probable end result would be a rocket with less range than Trident, but given the massive downloading, since the arms reduction treaties, it only needs to carry 1 or 2 warheads.

There are many other simple starts, but I don't get the impression that enough of them are being taken very seriously. TBF, some are being taken seriously.

One blatant example is how many of our £50-250m aircraft have the type of hardened shelters that means they can't be taken out by £500 drones. We know that any damaged aircraft would make a hole in our capability that would take many months, or several years to recover. This is a known issue for years and years.

One effective flight of drones from a container on a ship, and our air force is significantly crippled.

For example, I think this is a £1bn of Boeing P8 Poseidon's in a £1bn row of sitting ducks at RAF Lossiemouth, about 1km from the Scottish Coast at Elgin. If the identity is correct, it is 4 from the 9 we have. The piccie is from Google Satellite View, and I think is 2026.


https://maps.app.goo.gl/mG2vLkTSt5By8YwD9

RAF Lossiemouth is on the coast with landings over the sea and Moray golf course onto the runway

Elgin is over 5 miles inland

Yes, however I think Elgin is the nearest place known to most people.

I have a friend who used to run a shop there called the Fochabers Framer.

Lossiemouth is well known for its base and is the birthplace of my wife

I'm getting strong "stop when entering a roundabout" vibes