I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
Putin has wrapped himself up in religious orthodoxy, that of the Eastern Orthodox of the Russian variety. Its an under studied part of the guy's motivation. Its not just the religion but the political bent that goes with such institutions. He certainly shows plenty of the markers of a swivel-eyed religiously inspired case.
The Russian Church is not even part of the Eastern Orthodox Church now after Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople recognised the Ukranian Church's independence.
We're talking about the Trump who's first impeachment was over cutting military aid to Ukraine, who adored Putin, and whose comments on learning about this:
Hmm. I think the survey says more about Americans than the alternate history
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
As far as the non-tentacled community is concerned, we're not.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We're talking about the Trump who's first impeachment was over cutting military aid to Ukraine, who adored Putin, and whose comments on learning about this:
Hmm. I think the survey says more about Americans than the alternate history
Though Trump did at least want Germany to cut the pipeline from Russia and NATO nations to increase defence spending.
"Germany is still blocking allies from sending weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
Officials from two EU member countries expressed fury and disbelief at Berlin’s position, which Germany has defended as a long-standing policy aimed at preventing bloodshed."
Germany gleefully contributing to Ukrainian deaths, once again. A country of bastards - all parts of their political spectrum are friendly to the Russians, be it the oil guzzling greens of Merkel's Chamberlain-esque CDU.
Just a question, and don't what to be downbeat, but is there any possibility that some of these videos we keep seeing of destroyed Russian vehicles and convoys are actually Ukrainian?
I really hope not, but I think they have much of the same equipment?
I think the white Z is the identification mark for the Russians
Does the big Z marking also good through thermal sights?
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I suppose an equivalent in Britain would be a Scot asking someone English to pronounce “loch”.
Och aye!
The Leith police dismisseth us. The Met stop and search us.
My sat nav driving around Aberdeenshire used to tell me to turn on to Farochie Road (satnav pronounced the 'ch' as in satchel, it's actually pronounced as in hockey), and I was only later disabused of this notion by people laughing at my pronunciation of it.
Use any British made satnav in Europe, and everything is pronounced as it is written were it an English word.
Friend of mine used to live in Worcestershire. I had to have it explained to me how to pronounce the eponymous sauce (Lea and Perrins make). Apparently some German exchange students also loved it - but pronounced it the German way ...
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
Just wondering. Is this a rare if not unique occasion of a geopolitical event completely uniting PB?
Do we have a single PB-er cheering on Putin and the Russians? I can’t think of one
A momentous unanimity. Which says something in itself given the wide variety of opinions on here
You REALLY have to be a contrarian to be cheering on Putin.
Or a Trumpist Republican.
Be entertaining if Putin's greatest achievement is keeping the White House Democrat controlled for a couple of decades.
Sadly, Plato is no longer with us.
Unfair. I know you can’t libel the dead but Plato, bless her, would - I am sure - have reviled this horrible war. She was eccentric and lonely but she was also humane
Sadly I have to disagree. She was *very far* down the alt-right rabbit hole by the end. Would likely have been parroting the QAnon line
They dashed past the army before getting ambushed, and slain. Seems like either Russian comms are diabolical, or the national guard are trying to one up the army.
Just a question, and don't what to be downbeat, but is there any possibility that some of these videos we keep seeing of destroyed Russian vehicles and convoys are actually Ukrainian?
I really hope not, but I think they have much of the same equipment?
We can be pretty sure in most cases - Russian vehicles have the chevron/stripe/z, they have different camo and identification marks (Rosgvardia are distinct), and, as in this case the convoy was seen in Russia just hours before their destruction.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
We have been at war with Russia before, but overwhelmingly with us going over to the continent to fight them. That's not a convincing argument that they constitute a bigger threat to us than someone else.
China has not attacked our mainland either, but they have undermined British companies, stolen British tech, and now developed such a commanding technological lead that our telecommunications infrastructure finds it difficult to progress without them, and our nuclear power stations need to be built by them. They are also responsible, probably not deliberately, for causing a worldwide pandemic and exacerbating its initial spread because of secrecy and lies. Russia hasn't done any of this, because it can't. It bullies its near neighbours despicably, but its ambitions and capabilities aren't comparable to China's.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
Putin has wrapped himself up in religious orthodoxy, that of the Eastern Orthodox of the Russian variety. Its an under studied part of the guy's motivation. Its not just the religion but the political bent that goes with such institutions. He certainly shows plenty of the markers of a swivel-eyed religiously inspired case.
The Russian Church is not even part of the Eastern Orthodox Church now after Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople recognised the Ukranian Church's independence.
Patriarch Kirill is just a Putin stooge
The Greeks regard themselves as leading that heritage. There's a bit of an institutional battle going on there now, which there never was before.
"Germany is still blocking allies from sending weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
Officials from two EU member countries expressed fury and disbelief at Berlin’s position, which Germany has defended as a long-standing policy aimed at preventing bloodshed."
Germany gleefully contributing to Ukrainian deaths, once again. A country of bastards - all parts of their political spectrum are friendly to the Russians, be it the oil guzzling greens of Merkel's Chamberlain-esque CDU.
Here is an idea, bypass Germany, they are unreliable.
Likely bad news for Ukraine if true. His replacement will no doubt have given Putin assurances that the job will done, "WHATEVER IT TAKES...."
It’s clearly not good for Dobby if true. He’ll have to slap a plate over his head. Bad dobby. (I’m sure I saw someone like Dobby, the real one not the Russian tribute act, on the stage in something).
More seriously, it means Russia admitting it’s going wrong, or even better, military now getting cold feet and saying no can only be one or other.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
I'd rather be trying to put the fire out than pouring more petrol on.
There's all sorts of factors at work and for the three of you still with me, it requires much more space and exposition than a place like this encourages and it becomes a history and politics lecture.
To try and cut it short: - our post-Cold War relationship with Russia began to deteriorate in the Yeltsin period and my sense is we feel more comfortable having an adversarial relationship with Russia than we do pretending to be friends. The other point is the ideological fault line of pre-1989 doesn't exist - Putin's Russia is aggressively capitalist in a form even we renounced decades ago but is perhaps a logical evolution in a non-democratic political culture.
We worried about infiltration of Labour and the Unions in the Cold War period - "reds under the bed" and all that nonsense but now the infiltration is different and arguably more effective. The infiltration is not of ideas but of money and the movement of capital readily transcends national borders. The weakness of our supposed strong sanctions response belies the extent to which such infiltration has occurred within both the bodies politic and economic.
Expurgating the Russian influence from our politics, economics and culture isn't going to be easy and will be painful - jobs will be lost and businesses will fail but one might argue compared to the Ukraine, it's a tiny price to pay.
The other issue is what happens IF Putin falls? The idea we will see a new more amenable leader willing to move away from China and towards the West seems romantically fanciful. Indeed, the humiliation of Putin now may create more problems later - this is why we need to give Russia a face-saving way out (if that means Putin is removed by the Russians, that's their business) and an opportunity in time to re-build and strengthen the relationships that matter not the gangster cronyism which doesn't.
Just wondering. Is this a rare if not unique occasion of a geopolitical event completely uniting PB?
Do we have a single PB-er cheering on Putin and the Russians? I can’t think of one
A momentous unanimity. Which says something in itself given the wide variety of opinions on here
You REALLY have to be a contrarian to be cheering on Putin.
Or a Trumpist Republican.
Be entertaining if Putin's greatest achievement is keeping the White House Democrat controlled for a couple of decades.
Sadly, Plato is no longer with us.
Unfair. I know you can’t libel the dead but Plato, bless her, would - I am sure - have reviled this horrible war. She was eccentric and lonely but she was also humane
Sadly I have to disagree. She was *very far* down the alt-right rabbit hole by the end. Would likely have been parroting the QAnon line
I suspect she would have believed that Ukraine was the aggressor and any footage suggesting the contrary was a CNN fabrication. She really did become that radicalized.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Just so we are clear here, the Russian attack on Ukraine isn't going badly wrong because some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. The assault on Kiev as yet hasn't hit full pelt but isn't yet a disaster. The attack in the south east is going ok. Only the North Eastern/Eastern assaults appear initially to have gone badly in the first stages. If there is one failure though its the suppression of air defences. I'm not sure how much of the Ukrainian airforce is left but the ground based air defence appears to be functioning. Russia has large air superiority but doesn't seem to have applied it as you'd think they would. Whether its that they haven't or can't is an open question.
If Kiev is under effective Russian control in a week and the country (or whatever part of it Putin is aiming for) is under effective control within 3 weeks that's still good going. Plus the Russians have more formations to play and stories have it the Belarussians are apparently due to commit their forces in next 48-72 hours after Russian demands of old President Big Hat. Its not known if the Ukrainians have the anywhere between 50-75k of reservists fully committed either admittedly but the assumption they have less cards to play.
There was a post last night on attacking the Russian logistical tail as both a tactical and strategic aim and I mentioned that I'd not seen much evidence of it. Today there is some evidence of this occurring, columns of fuel vehicles, engineering kit and so on being destroyed/abandoned, largely it seems, via airstrikes.
From a wider point of view if the West is shipping substantial kit via South East Poland what are the Russians going to do to interdict it and where are they going to try it? |Anyone who follows the aircraft tracking sites can't help but see US tankers up in the air frequently in that part of Poland. Part of that is supporting air intelligence craft but part of it is refuelling fighter aircraft that appear to be providing an air screen over the main logistics hub.
If continued high-grade supplies of anti armour and anti-air weaponry can get to the likes of Kiev, its going to get messy, especially since the Russians look to be on for some kind of large scale heliborne assault somewhere in that area. The possibility of losing several tens of aircraft over a week or so is a lot to contend with. Can the West, though, really move with enough speed?
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
" some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. "
IANAE expert, obvs., but the Russian strategy does confuse me. I'd have expected them to go for a shock-and-awe approach to knock Ukraine out quickly, as any delay risks other nations getting their ducks in order and causing problems. Once they've won Ukraine, it's a fait accompli.
Instead, they seem almost to be going about it half-hearted. Had they hoped Ukraine would crumble, or is this all to some other plan? If so, what's the advantage to Russia?
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
The mid-Atlantic plate runs right through Iceland, meaning the north-western side of the island is on the North American continent, with the south-eastern side on Europe.
We're talking landmass, not plates! Otherwise India isn't part of Asia!
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
A regime change on the back of a failed military adventure might have some chance of being a little better. Hope so anyway.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
We have been at war with Russia before, but overwhelmingly with us going over to the continent to fight them. That's not a convincing argument that they constitute a bigger threat to us than someone else.
China has not attacked our mainland either, but they have undermined British companies, stolen British tech, and now developed such a commanding technological lead that our telecommunications infrastructure finds it difficult to progress without them, and our nuclear power stations need to be built by them. They are also responsible, probably not deliberately, for causing a worldwide pandemic and exacerbating its initial spread because of secrecy and lies. Russia hasn't done any of this, because it can't. It bullies its near neighbours despicably, but its ambitions and capabilities aren't comparable to China's.
Let's just forget the chemical, radiological, and electronic attacks Russia has perpetrated on this island in the last few years, eh?
I am looking at capability and intent. I do not believe that Russia has ambitions to rule the UK, or that they have anything like the capability to do so. I do believe that China plans to acquire world hegemony, and have far more means to achieve that than their Russian counterparts.
IANAE expert, obvs., but the Russian strategy does confuse me. I'd have expected them to go for a shock-and-awe approach to knock Ukraine out quickly, as any delay risks other nations getting their ducks in order and causing problems. Once they've won Ukraine, it's a fait accompli.
Instead, they seem almost to be going about it half-hearted. Had they hoped Ukraine would crumble, or is this all to some other plan? If so, what's the advantage to Russia?
I think they were wedded to the "peacekeeping" narrative which wouldn't fit with flattening Kiev
⚠️ Confirmed: Various #Russia government websites including the Kremlin, State Duma and Ministry of Defense are again down, with real-time network data showing impact to FSO networks consistent with previous cyberattacks. The incident comes as Russia continues to invade Ukraine.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
Indeed, but that quote itself defines Islands as separate to (though grouped with) the nearest landmass. That's all I'm saying. We are part of Europe but we aren't part of continental Europe.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
⚠️ Confirmed: Various #Russia government websites including the Kremlin, State Duma and Ministry of Defense are again down, with real-time network data showing impact to FSO networks consistent with previous cyberattacks. The incident comes as Russia continues to invade Ukraine.
Just so we are clear here, the Russian attack on Ukraine isn't going badly wrong because some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. The assault on Kiev as yet hasn't hit full pelt but isn't yet a disaster. The attack in the south east is going ok. Only the North Eastern/Eastern assaults appear initially to have gone badly in the first stages. If there is one failure though its the suppression of air defences. I'm not sure how much of the Ukrainian airforce is left but the ground based air defence appears to be functioning. Russia has large air superiority but doesn't seem to have applied it as you'd think they would. Whether its that they haven't or can't is an open question.
If Kiev is under effective Russian control in a week and the country (or whatever part of it Putin is aiming for) is under effective control within 3 weeks that's still good going. Plus the Russians have more formations to play and stories have it the Belarussians are apparently due to commit their forces in next 48-72 hours after Russian demands of old President Big Hat. Its not known if the Ukrainians have the anywhere between 50-75k of reservists fully committed either admittedly but the assumption they have less cards to play.
There was a post last night on attacking the Russian logistical tail as both a tactical and strategic aim and I mentioned that I'd not seen much evidence of it. Today there is some evidence of this occurring, columns of fuel vehicles, engineering kit and so on being destroyed/abandoned, largely it seems, via airstrikes.
From a wider point of view if the West is shipping substantial kit via South East Poland what are the Russians going to do to interdict it and where are they going to try it? |Anyone who follows the aircraft tracking sites can't help but see US tankers up in the air frequently in that part of Poland. Part of that is supporting air intelligence craft but part of it is refuelling fighter aircraft that appear to be providing an air screen over the main logistics hub.
If continued high-grade supplies of anti armour and anti-air weaponry can get to the likes of Kiev, its going to get messy, especially since the Russians look to be on for some kind of large scale heliborne assault somewhere in that area. The possibility of losing several tens of aircraft over a week or so is a lot to contend with. Can the West, though, really move with enough speed?
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
" some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. "
IANAE expert, obvs., but the Russian strategy does confuse me. I'd have expected them to go for a shock-and-awe approach to knock Ukraine out quickly, as any delay risks other nations getting their ducks in order and causing problems. Once they've won Ukraine, it's a fait accompli.
Instead, they seem almost to be going about it half-hearted. Had they hoped Ukraine would crumble, or is this all to some other plan? If so, what's the advantage to Russia?
Putin's a delusional maniac with, if some of the reports that have emerged since his history lecture a few days back are to be believed, more interest in emulating Peter the Great than getting to grips with his country's contemporary problems. And he's spent most of the last two years in paranoid isolation in his Covid bunker, committing the classic dictator's mistake of dismissing anyone who tells him anything he doesn't like until he's surrounded with sycophants.
It's quite possible that he actually believes that the Ukrainian people want to join Russia, as well as it being his right to seize them by force. He may also have an over-inflated sense of the capabilities of his own military, especially the large numbers of forced conscripts who we may assume are less than keen on fighting in this war for more than one reason.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
Legislation being rushed through this week to target where Russian money is laundered through off shore companies into UK property, without officials knowing whose money it actually is, so who actually owns the property. (could be Tony Blair actually if that what he done?)
Question. Should this legislation target just Russians, why not all gangsters and gangster regimes?
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
Yes. The idea that Russia was always destined to be a monster I don't agree with at all. There are certainly autocratic trends it has to deal with, but it's also made several quite clear openings to Europe over the centuries.
It's also much too convenient and comforting for the West, I would say, because it shares some of the responsibility. Putin is a lost cause but Russia isn't.
Musing on what is an old poll but an interesting election which is for the Northern Ireland Assembly on May 5th. SF maintains a narrow lead over the DUP with Alliance polling strongly in third and UU in fourth.
The possibility must therefore exist of Michelle O'Neill becoming First Minister - the Executive (before its suspension) had a balance of 4 DUP, 3 SF and one each from UU, SDLP and Alliance.
It may be we could be looking at 4 SF and 2 from DUP, UU and Alliance as the polling suggests.
As a complete aside, received through the letter box of Stodge Towers a powerful anti-Labour leaflet (one or two inaccuracies in all honesty) from "community campaigner" Mehmood Mirza.
Now for those who don't follow Newham politics (and why would you?), Mirza was once a staunch ally of current Newham Mayor and Council leader Roksana Fiaz who has been selected for another term as Mayor. Mirza has turned on her because she has turned on Momentum and the Corbynites and embraced the centrist path to world domination as described by SKS (apparently).
Mirza, who is very active against the Council, seems likely to stand against Fiaz as "Newham Socialist Labour" candidate (apparently Gorgeous George was also approached). Whether said NSL will put up candidates against Labour in the Council election remains the seen but two Labour Councillors have resigned the Labour Whip and the Chairs of both East Ham and West Ham CLPs have quit the party over the "coronation" of Fiaz.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
The first Tsar is known to history by the epithet "the Terrible." He was crowned nearly five hundred years ago. We're still waiting for evidence of consistent progress.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
[deleted redundant content - I'd meant something else but the pics are much the same]
Nope, don't think I've read that. It's blooming annoying as I definitely saw it in a book or leaflet, and wished I'd scanned it in. I'm then fairly certain I came across the same piccie online, but cannot find it now.
It may have been a local history book from the library.
Musing on what is an old poll but an interesting election which is for the Northern Ireland Assembly on May 5th. SF maintains a narrow lead over the DUP with Alliance polling strongly in third and UU in fourth.
The possibility must therefore exist of Michelle O'Neill becoming First Minister - the Executive (before its suspension) had a balance of 4 DUP, 3 SF and one each from UU, SDLP and Alliance.
It may be we could be looking at 4 SF and 2 from DUP, UU and Alliance as the polling suggests.
As a complete aside, received through the letter box of Stodge Towers a powerful anti-Labour leaflet (one or two inaccuracies in all honesty) from "community campaigner" Mehmood Mirza.
Now for those who don't follow Newham politics (and why would you?), Mirza was once a staunch ally of current Newham Mayor and Council leader Roksana Fiaz who has been selected for another term as Mayor. Mirza has turned on her because she has turned on Momentum and the Corbynites and embraced the centrist path to world domination as described by SKS (apparently).
Mirza, who is very active against the Council, seems likely to stand against Fiaz as "Newham Socialist Labour" candidate (apparently Gorgeous George was also approached). Whether said NSL will put up candidates against Labour in the Council election remains the seen but two Labour Councillors have resigned the Labour Whip and the Chairs of both East Ham and West Ham CLPs have quit the party over the "coronation" of Fiaz.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
The first Tsar is known to history by the epithet "the Terrible." He was crowned nearly five hundred years ago. We're still waiting for evidence of consistent progress.
I don't disagree that there are recurrent and very deeply ingrained patterns. I do disagree that the future is a foregone conclusion because of the past.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
We have been at war with Russia before, but overwhelmingly with us going over to the continent to fight them. That's not a convincing argument that they constitute a bigger threat to us than someone else.
China has not attacked our mainland either, but they have undermined British companies, stolen British tech, and now developed such a commanding technological lead that our telecommunications infrastructure finds it difficult to progress without them, and our nuclear power stations need to be built by them. They are also responsible, probably not deliberately, for causing a worldwide pandemic and exacerbating its initial spread because of secrecy and lies. Russia hasn't done any of this, because it can't. It bullies its near neighbours despicably, but its ambitions and capabilities aren't comparable to China's.
We also poisoned the Chinese people with opium and abused their Emperor and their traditions
As soon as I woke up I felt instantly forlorn. It’s supposed to be a fun day, sunny, racing, England Wales Rugby. But It don’t feel right to be happy and self indulgent with this ongoing crisis so unnecessary and sad.
But I have picked out four horses for a lucky 15. I would caution though, don’t leap on them just because three of last weeks four won, I had nothing for weeks before that, and quite possibly nothing for weeks to come.
Kempton - 1315 - Patroclus Specialises in the distance, first Chase win start of this month
Kempton - 1350 - Moka De Vassy 3 hurdles now in career, placed over 2m in last two,
Kempton - 1500 - Galore Desassences Yet again I am attracted to the long odds for a horse with a history of placing, likes distance and won the last two.
NEWCASTLE - 1515 - Eclair Surf Book spoilt by errors disguises the staying promise form good from last race too
Good luck, whatever you are on! 🙋♀️
Ah yes, the certainties of life roll on despite the darkening world picture.
The certainty of a glorious Saturday morning, some exciting racing and the Stodge Saturday Patent - the Norwich City of bets, Rarely wins and each time it loses, all you get is a shrug of the shoulders.
Anyway, it's Winter Derby day for those who like some proper racing instead of this jumping nonsense:
1.30 Lingfield: TONE THE BARONE 2.40 Lingfield: IMPERIAL SANDS 3.10 Lingfield: MARKS BEAR
Have a 1 point win patent on those three and appreciate the fact you can't buy a sunny day in February in the UK.
Nice post!
I’m working out you are a flat, short, (not to be too personal) Lingfield specialist.
Well. If some of them won occasionally. 🤣
*Update 🐎 Sorry for the cheek Stodge. I had a few travelled exciting near misses on mixed bag day, much like your two seconds?
Other half bringing friends back for Rugby, so I’m cooking party food now 🙋♀️
Legislation being rushed through this week to target where Russian money is laundered through off shore companies into UK property, without officials knowing whose money it actually is, so who actually owns the property. (could be Tony Blair actually if that what he done?)
Question. Should this legislation target just Russians, why not all gangsters and gangster regimes?
Legislation being rushed through this week to target where Russian money is laundered through off shore companies into UK property, without officials knowing whose money it actually is, so who actually owns the property. (could be Tony Blair actually if that what he done?)
Question. Should this legislation target just Russians, why not all gangsters and gangster regimes?
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
[deleted redundant content - I'd meant something else but the pics are much the same]
Nope, don't think I've read that. It's blooming annoying as I definitely saw it in a book or leaflet, and wished I'd scanned it in. I'm then fairly certain I came across the same piccie online, but cannot find it now.
It may have been a local history book from the library.
Musing on what is an old poll but an interesting election which is for the Northern Ireland Assembly on May 5th. SF maintains a narrow lead over the DUP with Alliance polling strongly in third and UU in fourth.
The possibility must therefore exist of Michelle O'Neill becoming First Minister - the Executive (before its suspension) had a balance of 4 DUP, 3 SF and one each from UU, SDLP and Alliance.
It may be we could be looking at 4 SF and 2 from DUP, UU and Alliance as the polling suggests.
As a complete aside, received through the letter box of Stodge Towers a powerful anti-Labour leaflet (one or two inaccuracies in all honesty) from "community campaigner" Mehmood Mirza.
Now for those who don't follow Newham politics (and why would you?), Mirza was once a staunch ally of current Newham Mayor and Council leader Roksana Fiaz who has been selected for another term as Mayor. Mirza has turned on her because she has turned on Momentum and the Corbynites and embraced the centrist path to world domination as described by SKS (apparently).
Mirza, who is very active against the Council, seems likely to stand against Fiaz as "Newham Socialist Labour" candidate (apparently Gorgeous George was also approached). Whether said NSL will put up candidates against Labour in the Council election remains the seen but two Labour Councillors have resigned the Labour Whip and the Chairs of both East Ham and West Ham CLPs have quit the party over the "coronation" of Fiaz.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
Not sure invoking Article 16 in the middle of the current crisis would be a good look for no 10. One hopes that the current situation would help bring the UK and EU closer together .
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
The first Tsar is known to history by the epithet "the Terrible." He was crowned nearly five hundred years ago. We're still waiting for evidence of consistent progress.
Ivan the Terrible Catherine the Great Vladimir the House Elf
Peter the Great was, for the times, quite a reasonable chap. I’m prepared, of course, for further advice.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
[deleted redundant content - I'd meant something else but the pics are much the same]
Nope, don't think I've read that. It's blooming annoying as I definitely saw it in a book or leaflet, and wished I'd scanned it in. I'm then fairly certain I came across the same piccie online, but cannot find it now.
It may have been a local history book from the library.
Annoying when that happens! That publisher/magazine likes to have then and now comparisons and is generally excellent for helping one visualise what things actually looked like at the time.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
[deleted redundant content - I'd meant something else but the pics are much the same]
Nope, don't think I've read that. It's blooming annoying as I definitely saw it in a book or leaflet, and wished I'd scanned it in. I'm then fairly certain I came across the same piccie online, but cannot find it now.
It may have been a local history book from the library.
Thanks, but that's not actually the one I'm thinking of. It had large four-engine bombers parked in a chevron pattern up the avenue. And my memory could be fooling me, but I *think* there was a caption that it was temporary storage as another group had flown into the base.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
"MT-LB, logistics trucks, full grad battery abandoned by the Russians. Are they legitimately running low on fuel?"
Seems weird that they are screwing up the very basics. Did they expect to be welcomed with open arms and jerry cans?
Corrupt, despotic regime like big armies. But are well known for having poor maintenance and logistics stuff is easily stolen....
Given that the Russian Airforce is barely present, and the reports of lack of munitions, is something similar happening here with the Russian Army? Lots of toys, but rust, empty gas tanks and ammunition ranks under the paint?
⚠️ Confirmed: Various #Russia government websites including the Kremlin, State Duma and Ministry of Defense are again down, with real-time network data showing impact to FSO networks consistent with previous cyberattacks. The incident comes as Russia continues to invade Ukraine.
They invented the game, now can’t even get out the group at the World Cup 💻
I wouldn't be so sure.
I think everybody who owns a western company should be making sure their internet security is as up to date as it can be and be extremely careful with clicking incoming links, as as the axis of Russian, China and North Korea are extremely capable when it comes to causing a lot of trouble.
One of the biggest ransom-ware networks is run out of Russian.
The West will target government stuff, the likes of Russia (and proxy criminals) will happily target everything and anything.
"MT-LB, logistics trucks, full grad battery abandoned by the Russians. Are they legitimately running low on fuel?"
Seems weird that they are screwing up the very basics. Did they expect to be welcomed with open arms and jerry cans?
My guess would be, that the Russian High Command told there men and the mid ranking officers that this was just going to be an exercise a month ago when they started to more troops about. The men and importantly mid ranking officers believed that and planed accordingly. When then High Command announced that no this was an invasion not an exercise, that one the message did not get thought to all the men and it terns out not enough fuel and other supplies where prepared. If the Ukrainians has given up in the first 24 hours this would not have mattered, but now it does - oops!!!
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
Musing on what is an old poll but an interesting election which is for the Northern Ireland Assembly on May 5th. SF maintains a narrow lead over the DUP with Alliance polling strongly in third and UU in fourth.
The possibility must therefore exist of Michelle O'Neill becoming First Minister - the Executive (before its suspension) had a balance of 4 DUP, 3 SF and one each from UU, SDLP and Alliance.
It may be we could be looking at 4 SF and 2 from DUP, UU and Alliance as the polling suggests.
As a complete aside, received through the letter box of Stodge Towers a powerful anti-Labour leaflet (one or two inaccuracies in all honesty) from "community campaigner" Mehmood Mirza.
Now for those who don't follow Newham politics (and why would you?), Mirza was once a staunch ally of current Newham Mayor and Council leader Roksana Fiaz who has been selected for another term as Mayor. Mirza has turned on her because she has turned on Momentum and the Corbynites and embraced the centrist path to world domination as described by SKS (apparently).
Mirza, who is very active against the Council, seems likely to stand against Fiaz as "Newham Socialist Labour" candidate (apparently Gorgeous George was also approached). Whether said NSL will put up candidates against Labour in the Council election remains the seen but two Labour Councillors have resigned the Labour Whip and the Chairs of both East Ham and West Ham CLPs have quit the party over the "coronation" of Fiaz.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
Not sure invoking Article 16 in the middle of the current crisis would be a good look for no 10. One hopes that the current situation would help bring the UK and EU closer together .
Absolutely- idiotic idea to invoke A16 but it is an obsession with the right of the conservative party
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
We have been at war with Russia before, but overwhelmingly with us going over to the continent to fight them. That's not a convincing argument that they constitute a bigger threat to us than someone else.
China has not attacked our mainland either, but they have undermined British companies, stolen British tech, and now developed such a commanding technological lead that our telecommunications infrastructure finds it difficult to progress without them, and our nuclear power stations need to be built by them. They are also responsible, probably not deliberately, for causing a worldwide pandemic and exacerbating its initial spread because of secrecy and lies. Russia hasn't done any of this, because it can't. It bullies its near neighbours despicably, but its ambitions and capabilities aren't comparable to China's.
We also poisoned the Chinese people with opium and abused their Emperor and their traditions
Well the Emporor did indulge unwisely in confrontation but yes, that was no excuse for poisoning his people.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
We have been at war with Russia before, but overwhelmingly with us going over to the continent to fight them. That's not a convincing argument that they constitute a bigger threat to us than someone else.
China has not attacked our mainland either, but they have undermined British companies, stolen British tech, and now developed such a commanding technological lead that our telecommunications infrastructure finds it difficult to progress without them, and our nuclear power stations need to be built by them. They are also responsible, probably not deliberately, for causing a worldwide pandemic and exacerbating its initial spread because of secrecy and lies. Russia hasn't done any of this, because it can't. It bullies its near neighbours despicably, but its ambitions and capabilities aren't comparable to China's.
We also poisoned the Chinese people with opium and abused their Emperor and their traditions
Well the Emporor did indulge unwisely in confrontation but yes, that was no excuse for poisoning his people.
To be fair, the Chinese had a long tradition of poisoning themselves with opium; we just insisted they buy ours, at gunship-point....
The other issue is what happens IF Putin falls? The idea we will see a new more amenable leader willing to move away from China and towards the West seems romantically fanciful. Indeed, the humiliation of Putin now may create more problems later - this is why we need to give Russia a face-saving way out (if that means Putin is removed by the Russians, that's their business) and an opportunity in time to re-build and strengthen the relationships that matter not the gangster cronyism which doesn't.
Agreed on the first point. On the second, I don't see any face-saving way out for Russia. The Ukrainians won't accept Russia being allowed to keep its ill gotten gains, and Russia's neighbours to the West (except for Belarus, which it will eventually annex,) are now all so frightened of Russian aggression that Russia has forfeited any right to ask them to compromise over their future choices, even assuming that it had any such right to begin with. If Russia is beaten in Ukraine, Ukraine will then demand to join NATO and it will be hard to reward the Ukrainian's heroic resistance with anything short of it. Finland, and possibly Sweden as well, will also be sorely tempted to do so now that we have had this graphic reminder of the kind of barbarity that we are dealing with.
We can offer all the reassurances we can to the effect that the West won't cross Russia's own internationally recognised frontier - backed up with the very reasonable observation that we, unlike they, haven't violated those boundaries since we worked together to destroy the Nazi Reich in 1945 - but the Russians themselves are so bloody insecure and paranoid that they won't accept them. And there's no way acceptable to the Ukrainians that ends in anything other than a complete Russian surrender of its stolen lands; there might be room to concede a referendum in Crimea, but that's about it.
About the best we can do is offer to co-operate with them on the construction of fixed fortifications - literally, that each of us should build thick walls and ditches all the way down our mutual border, to demonstrate that it is permanently fixed and to make warfare across that frontier more difficult. I don't see what other mutually acceptable means exist to offer Russia any reassurance at all. The trust doesn't exist for anything else, and it won't do for so long as Russia remains an autocracy.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
Do you have a link to a photograph of that? Fascinating.
The link I gave had a diagram of the dispersal points and a wartime aerial view of them, sans aircraft. I've seen a piccie of the avenue heaving with bombers, but annoyingly I cannot immediately find it online. It may have been in a book. Sorry.
[deleted redundant content - I'd meant something else but the pics are much the same]
Nope, don't think I've read that. It's blooming annoying as I definitely saw it in a book or leaflet, and wished I'd scanned it in. I'm then fairly certain I came across the same piccie online, but cannot find it now.
It may have been a local history book from the library.
Annoying when that happens! That publisher/magazine likes to have then and now comparisons and is generally excellent for helping one visualise what things actually looked like at the time.
I live right by the old RAF Bourn (note, not Bassingbourn - I wonder if there was ever confusion with having two airfields similarly named so close). It was quite a large place for a satellite airfield, and I think had much heavier maintenance facilities than most airfields.
On the other side of the road to the airfield are a series of old wooden huts in a field - presumably old accommodation, slowly falling down. I'd love to know the history of the buildings, and am wondering if they are unusual and should be preserved? If I'm right and they are Second World War that is...
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
Legislation being rushed through this week to target where Russian money is laundered through off shore companies into UK property, without officials knowing whose money it actually is, so who actually owns the property. (could be Tony Blair actually if that what he done?)
Question. Should this legislation target just Russians, why not all gangsters and gangster regimes?
On the gangster part, a late Arthur Daley-esque friend reckoned a lot of villains were investing in BTL. That was a few years ago tbh.
On Chess.com whenever I am paired with a Russian I am refusing to play - a bit like Iran when paired with Israel.
My Online Go site has just refunded all money ever paid by its Ukrainian site supporters. Maybe I should boycott the Koreans and Chinese? Might help my ranking.
“In these hours, when our emotions run high, words like the Swift agreement sound very, very tough. Despite everything that’s going through your heart right now, you have to keep a cool head.” 1/2
“Berlin has publicly questioned the idea, and some officials see it as unplanned and foolhardy, noting that Govt's have not fully considered the impact on the world financial system.”
The question is why more contingency work wasn't done ahead of time
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
It won't, Starmer might, Johnson won't.
NATO unity is separate
I am not talking about NATO but trust you to misunderstanding the post
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
The mid-Atlantic plate runs right through Iceland, meaning the north-western side of the island is on the North American continent, with the south-eastern side on Europe.
We're talking landmass, not plates! Otherwise India isn't part of Asia!
We're the crinkly bit at the end of the European peninsula. Turn the map through 90 degrees to see more clearly how everything from prehistory to now flows from the central European plains through to us. IIRC this is Barry Cunliffe's thesis.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
On Chess.com whenever I am paired with a Russian I am refusing to play - a bit like Iran when paired with Israel.
I don't know how the site works, but would not another strategy be to play and engage in conversation at the same time, try to persuade him Putin must go!
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
The first Tsar is known to history by the epithet "the Terrible." He was crowned nearly five hundred years ago. We're still waiting for evidence of consistent progress.
Ivan the Terrible Catherine the Great Vladimir the House Elf
Peter the Great was, for the times, quite a reasonable chap. I’m prepared, of course, for further advice.
Alternatively, no-one was left alive who would say otherwise?
@ZelenskyyUa thank my friend Mr. President of 🇹🇷 @RTErdogan and the people of 🇹🇷 for their strong support. The ban on the passage of 🇷🇺 warships to the Black Sea and significant military and humanitarian support for 🇺🇦 are extremely important today. The people of 🇺🇦 will never forget that!
I thought that wasn’t possible due to to international agreements on allowing ships to return to their home bases .
I mean invading other sovereign nations is also not allowed under international agreements.
This needs parsing ... very tricky for Turkey.
One possibility is that the block relates to ships not home-ported in the Black Sea, which means that the ones from The Northern, Baltic and Pacific fleets currently backed up the Med could be kept out.
On Chess.com whenever I am paired with a Russian I am refusing to play - a bit like Iran when paired with Israel.
My Online Go site has just refunded all money ever paid by its Ukrainian site supporters. Maybe I should boycott the Koreans and Chinese? Might help my ranking.
I played GO at school, have a set in the next room, but relay find people to play.
Incidentally, Dmitry Medvedev (the Putin stooge who swapped the Russian presidency with him back in the 2000s) has apparently gone on the record suggesting that Russia no longer has need of diplomatic relations with the West, and that its suspension from the Council of Europe opens the way to reinstatement of the death penalty for some offences.
Putting relations with Russia in the deep freeze is necessary under the circumstances, but it will have the tragic side effect of removing the last restraints on Tsar Vladimir's atrocious behaviour at home.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
As far as the non-tentacled community is concerned, we're not.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
The British Isles are part of the continent of Europe because that is basic geology/geography. Just as much as Sicily of any of the Greek Islands. Luckyguy needs to go back to school.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
It won't, Starmer might, Johnson won't.
NATO unity is separate
I am not talking about NATO but trust you to misunderstanding the post
You are deluded if you think Johnson will align closer to the EU was the point, the ERG would go mad.
Starmer might if he won the next general election, not the Tories
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I don't believe in lost causes.
They've been threatening us all with death by nuclear holocaust more or less continuously since the 1950s. The gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin lasted about five minutes, and if we're actually lucky enough to live to see the end of Putin then there'll be another tyrant after him, and another one after that.
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
Bit like saying Germany always ends up trying to invade the world. True until its not true.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
It won't, Starmer might, Johnson won't.
NATO unity is separate
So you think invoking article 16 at a time when European countries need to be united would be a good look for no 10.
So no 10 would then be saying fxck unity we’ve decided to lob a grenade into UK EU relations! This obsession by some Tories about invoking Article 16 is to be blunt unhinged .
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
It won't, Starmer might, Johnson won't.
NATO unity is separate
I am not talking about NATO but trust you to misunderstanding the post
You are deluded if you think Johnson will align closer to the EU was the point, the ERG would go mad.
Starmer might if he won the next general election, not the Tories
Czech Republic and Slovakia are donating a total of €17.5 million worth of ammunition and other supplies. Belgium will provide 3,800 tonnes of fuel and 2,000 machine guns.
Incidentally, Dmitry Medvedev (the Putin stooge who swapped the Russian presidency with him back in the 2000s) has apparently gone on the record suggesting that Russia no longer has need of diplomatic relations with the West, and that its suspension from the Council of Europe opens the way to reinstatement of the death penalty for some offences.
Putting relations with Russia in the deep freeze is necessary under the circumstances, but it will have the tragic side effect of removing the last restraints on Tsar Vladimir's atrocious behaviour at home.
Few people think that Putin & Co. have any problems with killing people at the moment.
The DUP have withdrawn from the Stormont Executive though to stop leakage to TUV and will not return unless and until the UK government invokes Article 16
That doesn't stop the Executive from existing, does it?
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
In practical terms though without the largest Unionist party it has broken down as has the GFA until the Irish Sea border is removed.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
I expect you are going to find as this war plays out there will be a large move by HMG to resolve the NI protocol and come together much more with the EU over lots of areas
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
It won't, Starmer might, Johnson won't.
NATO unity is separate
So you think invoking article 16 at a time when European countries need to be united would be a good look for no 10.
So no 10 would then be saying fxck unity we’ve decided to lob a grenade into UK EU relations! This obsession by some Tories about invoking Article 16 is to be blunt unhinged .
It is utterly stupid and this war has changed everything
On Chess.com whenever I am paired with a Russian I am refusing to play - a bit like Iran when paired with Israel.
I don't know how the site works, but would not another strategy be to play and engage in conversation at the same time, try to persuade him Putin must go!
I dont speak Russian and you only get 10 minutes on the clock
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
Not a very successful attempt at mockery then, or a very successful post full stop. Geographically, we are separated from the Continent of Europe by the sea. Geologically, we may be connected by a shelf, but unless the Russians are going to develop gills, it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
"Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark."
The mid-Atlantic plate runs right through Iceland, meaning the north-western side of the island is on the North American continent, with the south-eastern side on Europe.
We're talking landmass, not plates! Otherwise India isn't part of Asia!
Correct
this is a fallacy which irritates the fuck out of me. You have continents (big bits) and islands (small bits) so you have the continent which we are not part of because we are an island. But if you say so there's a bunch of hebephrenic dweebs who make out like you have said something almost as terrible as saying that a person with a cock and balls might be a laydee but that's not where the smart money is, because they think that plate tectonics = continental drift, when it really, really doesn't.
Also, Spain and Portugal are deffo in Africa on this theory.
Comments
Patriarch Kirill is just a Putin stooge
Hmm. I think the survey says more about Americans than the alternate history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe#Contemporary_definition
We're not part of the continental mainland, but we are part of the continent.
https://twitter.com/HankeVela/status/1497578278714068998
He was not all wrong on Russia
"Germany is still blocking allies from sending weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
Officials from two EU member countries expressed fury and disbelief at Berlin’s position, which Germany has defended as a long-standing policy aimed at preventing bloodshed."
Germany gleefully contributing to Ukrainian deaths, once again. A country of bastards - all parts of their political spectrum are friendly to the Russians, be it the oil guzzling greens of Merkel's Chamberlain-esque CDU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk_(Ukraine–Central_Powers)
We have been at war with Russia before, but overwhelmingly with us going over to the continent to fight them. That's not a convincing argument that they constitute a bigger threat to us than someone else.
China has not attacked our mainland either, but they have undermined British companies, stolen British tech, and now developed such a commanding technological lead that our telecommunications infrastructure finds it difficult to progress without them, and our nuclear power stations need to be built by them. They are also responsible, probably not deliberately, for causing a worldwide pandemic and exacerbating its initial spread because of secrecy and lies. Russia hasn't done any of this, because it can't. It bullies its near neighbours despicably, but its ambitions and capabilities aren't comparable to China's.
More seriously, it means Russia admitting it’s going wrong, or even better, military now getting cold feet and saying no can only be one or other.
I'd rather be trying to put the fire out than pouring more petrol on.
There's all sorts of factors at work and for the three of you still with me, it requires much more space and exposition than a place like this encourages and it becomes a history and politics lecture.
To try and cut it short: - our post-Cold War relationship with Russia began to deteriorate in the Yeltsin period and my sense is we feel more comfortable having an adversarial relationship with Russia than we do pretending to be friends. The other point is the ideological fault line of pre-1989 doesn't exist - Putin's Russia is aggressively capitalist in a form even we renounced decades ago but is perhaps a logical evolution in a non-democratic political culture.
We worried about infiltration of Labour and the Unions in the Cold War period - "reds under the bed" and all that nonsense but now the infiltration is different and arguably more effective. The infiltration is not of ideas but of money and the movement of capital readily transcends national borders. The weakness of our supposed strong sanctions response belies the extent to which such infiltration has occurred within both the bodies politic and economic.
Expurgating the Russian influence from our politics, economics and culture isn't going to be easy and will be painful - jobs will be lost and businesses will fail but one might argue compared to the Ukraine, it's a tiny price to pay.
The other issue is what happens IF Putin falls? The idea we will see a new more amenable leader willing to move away from China and towards the West seems romantically fanciful. Indeed, the humiliation of Putin now may create more problems later - this is why we need to give Russia a face-saving way out (if that means Putin is removed by the Russians, that's their business) and an opportunity in time to re-build and strengthen the relationships that matter not the gangster cronyism which doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe#Contemporary_definition
It's Russia. It's their culture, it's their tradition. Look at how much progress has been made in the post-Soviet Baltics, and in Georgia and Ukraine despite Putin doing his best to degrade and destroy them. And then look at Russia. They've actually gone backwards since Gorbachev. It is a deeply, deeply regressive police state, shot through with hatred - often officially sanctioned - for racial, sexual and gender minorities, as well as for any form of opposition. A terror state, with a neo-imperialist at its heart whose mission in life is to subject as many human beings as possible to that terror.
One naturally feels sorry for the likes of brave Alexei Navalny, but the Russian resisters, such as they are, are on a hiding to nothing. Russia is about subjugating its own populace and that of its neighbours alike to the will of whatever autocrat reigns at the time, either by terrifying them with threats or with sheer brute force. Yes, there's a coup every now and then, or even a revolution, but it always reverts to type in the end.
IANAE expert, obvs., but the Russian strategy does confuse me. I'd have expected them to go for a shock-and-awe approach to knock Ukraine out quickly, as any delay risks other nations getting their ducks in order and causing problems. Once they've won Ukraine, it's a fait accompli.
Instead, they seem almost to be going about it half-hearted. Had they hoped Ukraine would crumble, or is this all to some other plan? If so, what's the advantage to Russia?
https://twitter.com/phildstewart/status/1497588560832208898
https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1497594515233951744
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Airfields-Eighth-Then-After-Battle/dp/0900913096
[deleted redundant content - I'd meant something else but the pics are much the same]
https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-spetsrahunok-dlya-zboru-koshtiv-na-potrebi-armiyi
I just donated $1000. Good to finally feel like I can genuinely help.
It's quite possible that he actually believes that the Ukrainian people want to join Russia, as well as it being his right to seize them by force. He may also have an over-inflated sense of the capabilities of his own military, especially the large numbers of forced conscripts who we may assume are less than keen on fighting in this war for more than one reason.
Russian defense ministry likens Ukrainian military to “terrorists in Syria”
https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1497595354031669248
"MT-LB, logistics trucks, full grad battery abandoned by the Russians. Are they legitimately running low on fuel?"
Seems weird that they are screwing up the very basics. Did they expect to be welcomed with open arms and jerry cans?
Question. Should this legislation target just Russians, why not all gangsters and gangster regimes?
It's also much too convenient and comforting for the West, I would say, because it shares some of the responsibility. Putin is a lost cause but Russia isn't.
Musing on what is an old poll but an interesting election which is for the Northern Ireland Assembly on May 5th. SF maintains a narrow lead over the DUP with Alliance polling strongly in third and UU in fourth.
The possibility must therefore exist of Michelle O'Neill becoming First Minister - the Executive (before its suspension) had a balance of 4 DUP, 3 SF and one each from UU, SDLP and Alliance.
It may be we could be looking at 4 SF and 2 from DUP, UU and Alliance as the polling suggests.
As a complete aside, received through the letter box of Stodge Towers a powerful anti-Labour leaflet (one or two inaccuracies in all honesty) from "community campaigner" Mehmood Mirza.
Now for those who don't follow Newham politics (and why would you?), Mirza was once a staunch ally of current Newham Mayor and Council leader Roksana Fiaz who has been selected for another term as Mayor. Mirza has turned on her because she has turned on Momentum and the Corbynites and embraced the centrist path to world domination as described by SKS (apparently).
Mirza, who is very active against the Council, seems likely to stand against Fiaz as "Newham Socialist Labour" candidate (apparently Gorgeous George was also approached). Whether said NSL will put up candidates against Labour in the Council election remains the seen but two Labour Councillors have resigned the Labour Whip and the Chairs of both East Ham and West Ham CLPs have quit the party over the "coronation" of Fiaz.
It may have been a local history book from the library.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf1cSpcjWb0
Sorry for the cheek Stodge. I had a few travelled exciting near misses on mixed bag day, much like your two seconds?
Other half bringing friends back for Rugby, so I’m cooking party food now 🙋♀️
https://nl.pinterest.com/pin/488851734556659861/
I’m prepared, of course, for further advice.
I've gone back to the link and had a read. Great.
France reporting no more objections to swift and an announcement is due later
Excellent news
Given that the Russian Airforce is barely present, and the reports of lack of munitions, is something similar happening here with the Russian Army? Lots of toys, but rust, empty gas tanks and ammunition ranks under the paint?
I think everybody who owns a western company should be making sure their internet security is as up to date as it can be and be extremely careful with clicking incoming links, as as the axis of Russian, China and North Korea are extremely capable when it comes to causing a lot of trouble.
One of the biggest ransom-ware networks is run out of Russian.
The West will target government stuff, the likes of Russia (and proxy criminals) will happily target everything and anything.
The Executive currently represents 81 of the 90 Assembly members - without the DUP, the cross-community votes couldn't happen but routine business could. Whether the UU or Alliance could take the Deputy First Minister role if the DUP refused to serve, I don't know.
I suspect and hope your understanding of the functions of the NI Assembly is superior to mine.
At the time of the GFA it was the UUP the largest Unionist party, now the DUP is largest party and with the TUV makes up well over half of Unionists
Russians have so far lost:
Over 3,000 Killed
Over 20 Plains
Over 100 Tanks
Over 1,000 armed vehicles
Sounds incredible, but we have all seen the videos of destroyed Russian armed vehicles so maybe.
Start at 1m40s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SOVTHjHjbw
We can offer all the reassurances we can to the effect that the West won't cross Russia's own internationally recognised frontier - backed up with the very reasonable observation that we, unlike they, haven't violated those boundaries since we worked together to destroy the Nazi Reich in 1945 - but the Russians themselves are so bloody insecure and paranoid that they won't accept them. And there's no way acceptable to the Ukrainians that ends in anything other than a complete Russian surrender of its stolen lands; there might be room to concede a referendum in Crimea, but that's about it.
About the best we can do is offer to co-operate with them on the construction of fixed fortifications - literally, that each of us should build thick walls and ditches all the way down our mutual border, to demonstrate that it is permanently fixed and to make warfare across that frontier more difficult. I don't see what other mutually acceptable means exist to offer Russia any reassurance at all. The trust doesn't exist for anything else, and it won't do for so long as Russia remains an autocracy.
On the other side of the road to the airfield are a series of old wooden huts in a field - presumably old accommodation, slowly falling down. I'd love to know the history of the buildings, and am wondering if they are unusual and should be preserved? If I'm right and they are Second World War that is...
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2063883,-0.0551522,105m/data=!3m1!1e3
Anyone recognise what they are? Or are they just old pig sheds?
This will have changed the dial on UK- EU relationships and for the better
NATO unity is separate
Maybe I should boycott the Koreans and Chinese?
Might help my ranking.
Suspect this from @ABaerbock won't age well:
“In these hours, when our emotions run high, words like the Swift agreement sound very, very tough. Despite everything that’s going through your heart right now, you have to keep a cool head.” 1/2
“Berlin has publicly questioned the idea, and some officials see it as unplanned and foolhardy, noting that Govt's have not fully considered the impact on the world financial system.”
The question is why more contingency work wasn't done ahead of time
https://twitter.com/mij_europe/status/1497592675364704263?s=21
Fittingly he's come on for the guy who replaced him last time he played.
Great news for a change.
One possibility is that the block relates to ships not home-ported in the Black Sea, which means that the ones from The Northern, Baltic and Pacific fleets currently backed up the Med could be kept out.
But it could mean other things too.
Putting relations with Russia in the deep freeze is necessary under the circumstances, but it will have the tragic side effect of removing the last restraints on Tsar Vladimir's atrocious behaviour at home.
Starmer might if he won the next general election, not the Tories
So no 10 would then be saying fxck unity we’ve decided to lob a grenade into UK EU relations! This obsession by some Tories about invoking Article 16 is to be blunt unhinged .
Have Germany’s helmets arrived?
https://twitter.com/stuartklau/status/1497546661681405952?s=21
this is a fallacy which irritates the fuck out of me. You have continents (big bits) and islands (small bits) so you have the continent which we are not part of because we are an island. But if you say so there's a bunch of hebephrenic dweebs who make out like you have said something almost as terrible as saying that a person with a cock and balls might be a laydee but that's not where the smart money is, because they think that plate tectonics = continental drift, when it really, really doesn't.
Also, Spain and Portugal are deffo in Africa on this theory.