It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
Top tip: Make your home Halloween Ready by simply never dusting. It will soon be festooned with spooky cobwebs, ready for the big day.
And good to see Mike back in the saddle.
I'm not sure this is in good taste, but I saw an effusive advert for one of the weirdest bicycle saddles I have ever seen this morning. Apparently it's going to transform the world of bicycles. Someone has a British sense of humour.
"A unique invention that has the potential to reshape the cycling industry." Anglia Ruskin University. Invented, developed, and tested in the UK, SaddleSpur™ has been designed to look as good as it feels. Whatever type of cyclist you are and whatever type of bike you use, you’ll find SaddleSpur™ to be a perfect fit."
Ah, I had one of those. Had been through some unknown other kid and my brother before me, but it was my pride and joy in a very fetching gold colour scheme.
How much of that production will remain in the UK is still an open question, I think, depending on whether or not they triple the planned initial capacity for their new battery plant near Sunderland.
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
True but a collapse is unlikely to be gradual and linear, more than it reaches a tipping point and then builds up its own momentum. It is coming to winter and Ukraine should / will be better equipped to withstand the cold the Russians.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
At risk of appearing culturally insensitive, where were these people educated? If abroad, anything is possible. If here, it is possible they gave up biology before being taught evolution. It is worrying because at one level evolution is common sense, part of the zeitgeist almost, like splitting the atom, but I doubt many sceptics know the details of what they reject. Does it matter? Hmm.
I can't find the word "Baptist" in the part of that paper I can see, or any numbers. Can you quote?
I can see that it says 16-17% of the general population are cited as rejecting evolution, and that rejection is stated as twice as high amongst evangelical* / Pentecostalist denominations vs Anglican / Methodist.
* I need to see their definition of "evangelical". Historically Methodists are evangelical, but not so much in the last 20-40 years.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
I remember attending a debate at uni where Peter Hitchens was in attendance and, once off the topic of the debate, someone asked him if he believed in evolution - he got really angry and basically said it was an unproven theory that is as much faith as religion... So creationism is found in very strange places.
I always find the 'believe in' idea for science odd.
I don't believe in evolution. I find it the most convincing theory of the development of life, but I'm quite open to alternatives. I don't believe in the big bang - I find it an interesting theory that explains much but also leaves a lot of questions. I don't believe in gravity - I don't need to, it's demonstrable.
Belief in things is, for me, reserved for things like religion or other more abstract/moral concepts.
In the colloquial sense "belief" is fine in my mind in this situation. Belief does not always mean "sans evidence" or "on faith", especially when used casually.
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
"In professing to believe that it can expel the Jews from the river to the sea, Hamas has been selling a dream that has brought only tragedy and rubble. Once Hamas has been destroyed, the people of Gaza will only be able to flourish if they learn from all the other peoples who suffered large-scale population transfers in the later 1940s, and forswear revanchism."
"They must accept that back in the immediate post-Second World War period, many national groupings had to move en masse from the lands they had previously occupied, and happiness has only come to those who have been able to deal with it."
After WWII, though, most of the displaced national groupings actually had somewhere to go to. All of the Germans expelled from what are now parts of Poland and Czechia were able to go to the remainder of Germany, where they were easily accepted. The Palestinians had nowhere to go to and were the victims of a war they didn't start. They have paid a terrible price for European guilt at the horrors inflicted on the Jews.
They've paid a terrible price for the decisions take by their own leaders, and neighbouring Arab governments.
How many Arabs alive today were alive in 1947, let alone responsible for those decisions?
Not like you Sunil to question the right to return by acknowledging that very few people alive today can "return" to Israel.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
I remember attending a debate at uni where Peter Hitchens was in attendance and, once off the topic of the debate, someone asked him if he believed in evolution - he got really angry and basically said it was an unproven theory that is as much faith as religion... So creationism is found in very strange places.
Well he is a very strange person indeed, so not that unexpected.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
So is bike theft. But you don't get the Met doing anything about that.
Also driving a van with photos of hostages on it is not illegal. But the Met still stopped that.
Let's not be disingenuous. They have said that it is to preserve "community cohesion". In short, they are more worried about upsetting the sort of people who do not want to see photos of hostages. It feels like appeasement of people who threaten violence if they do not get their way. It is inconsistent with how they treat others who behave in the same way.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
It's a discussion board and I see it as my role to help those who are less able to take part do so in a full and meaningful way.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
I remember attending a debate at uni where Peter Hitchens was in attendance and, once off the topic of the debate, someone asked him if he believed in evolution - he got really angry and basically said it was an unproven theory that is as much faith as religion... So creationism is found in very strange places.
I always find the 'believe in' idea for science odd.
I don't believe in evolution. I find it the most convincing theory of the development of life, but I'm quite open to alternatives. I don't believe in the big bang - I find it an interesting theory that explains much but also leaves a lot of questions. I don't believe in gravity - I don't need to, it's demonstrable.
Belief in things is, for me, reserved for things like religion or other more abstract/moral concepts.
It's generally used as a verbal shorthand, I think ?
'Do you accept that the theory of evolution is a persuasive one, most consistent with an extremely large body of known evidence', or something along those lines, would be more accurate, but a bit of a mouthful.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
So is bike theft. But you don't get the Met doing anything about that.
I mean, yesterday we discussed police looking into miscarriages in case they were illegal abortions. But the thing about the UK is we're supposed to have discretion - I don't think it's right for cops to tear down these posters (even if it is illegal) because, really, what's the point?
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
It's a discussion board and I see it as my role to help those who are less able to take part do so in a full and meaningful way.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
So is bike theft. But you don't get the Met doing anything about that.
The Police seem increasingly to take an overtly political role in their decisions about which crimes to pursue. In addition they are inordinately keen on pursuing crimes which require minimal effort.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this is fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
It's a discussion board and I see it as my role to help those who are less able to take part do so in a full and meaningful way.
My days are packed but I can still (usually) find a couple of minutes to ponder the mystery of how you can disapprove so heartily of people taking a super strident pro-Ukraine position on Russia/Ukraine whilst yourself doing just the same viz a vis Israel in the (what most people would see as the rather less black and white) matter of Israel/Palestine.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
The combination of limited gains with apparently massive attrition of Russian equipment and men suggests either Russia has much deeper reserves of both than we thought, or there is massive over-counting of attrition. But it's not so hard to count destroyed equipment as it is people so the latter can't explain it all. Or simply the brutal effectiveness of massive minefields.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
I remember attending a debate at uni where Peter Hitchens was in attendance and, once off the topic of the debate, someone asked him if he believed in evolution - he got really angry and basically said it was an unproven theory that is as much faith as religion... So creationism is found in very strange places.
IMHO the most fruitful approach to, say, evolution, is Popper's view: scientific knowledge is based upon hypotheses that are tested and well confirmed - as is evolution - but that there are always two qualifications for it to count as science:
1) Even though we call it 'knowledge' it has to be open to the possibility of falsification and
2) Arising from this there have to be what may be called 'falsification criteria' - real and testable possibilities which if found to be true would tend to falsify the hypothesis.
What doesn't meet these tests isn't science; which doesn't mean it is irrelevant (eg Shakespeare).
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
It's a discussion board and I see it as my role to help those who are less able to take part do so in a full and meaningful way.
'Role' is it?!
What a tit.
You see what we call "name calling" is not a good discussion board technique. It advances the discussion not at all and adds no insight to it either.
Perhaps expand upon your "interesting" point about outrage generators or whatever it was when you first started.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
True but a collapse is unlikely to be gradual and linear, more than it reaches a tipping point and then builds up its own momentum. It is coming to winter and Ukraine should / will be better equipped to withstand the cold the Russians.
Given the level of Russian losses, the suggestion is that they’re piling in men and machines to try and defend their front lines, and that the Ukranians are advancing slowly because of minefields and trenches that need clearing. At some point, there’s simply no men and machines left to keep throwing at those lines, and the advance then happens rapidly. It’s not far from winter now in the South of Ukraine, and the defenders still have the range advantage to strike enemy positions, so long as the rest of Europe keeps those weapons heading East.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
The combination of limited gains with apparently massive attrition of Russian equipment and men suggests either Russia has much deeper reserves of both than we thought, or there is massive over-counting of attrition. But it's not so hard to count destroyed equipment as it is people so the latter can't explain it all. Or simply the brutal effectiveness of massive minefields.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
No one who had any sense "thought" anything. It was or should have been a question of waiting to see what transpired.
Cummings is up tomorrow at the whitewash inquiry into how well the government of Britain coped with covid.
Could be box office.
Popcorn ready...
Why call it a “whitewash inquiry”? It’s revealed plenty of critical material so far, and it’s only just getting started.
The way the KCs handled the Oxford evidence-based meds guy was a disgrace.
And seems they are not going anywhere near asking the actual question that matters:
Why did Sweden do far better than us?
Not even interviewing Tegnell.
It's a sham. Total whitewash as far as the real substance is concerned. All this bollx about who said who was a fat waste of space on WhatsApp is amusing and a bit relevant but it is not the issue that actaually matters for the next pandemic.
Sweden didn’t do far better than us.
Also, there’s a helluva lot more Inquiry to come.
Do they have a whole generation of kids with a mass of problems thanks to lockdown of schools for months?
Sweden actually had quite significant disruption in schools, contrary to the narrative. All upper secondary schools were shut for around five months, and in the lower secondary schools the high rate of infection among teachers meant around 50% of teaching was online, which was in some ways rather more disruptive than what we had here as it was unpredictable and so chaotic.
They managed to keep primary schools mostly open. However, you should also remember they have much smaller class sizes than we do anyway (which is something I've been advocating for years) around 21 as against 28, so it was much easier to contain any outbreaks.
It is also worth pointing out that the reason schools were kept open is not because of some mythical 'Swedish model' but because the Swedish schools system is independent of the government and several senior figures didn't want to shut their little empire. If OFSTED had been in charge of schools during the pandemic (which is the equivalent) schools would have stayed open. Not because it was the right or wrong decision, but so that twat Spielman could strut around saying how wonderful she was.
If she'd managed to save children from falling months behind in their schooling because of a virus that didn't affect them she would indeed be wonderful and deserve some self-congratulation.
But she wouldn't have, as the rest of the comment makes clear.
In any case, if you are less exercised about:
1) her decision to put inspectors in rooms alone with vulnerable children without having safeguarding checks or basic training, or
2) prewriting reports to force perfectly good schools to academise, or
3) putting in place an inspection framework that if followed correctly makes it impossible for 25% of children to learn to read
than about trying to avoid unavoidable school closures - to reiterate, despite the lies often told, Sweden *did* shut schools - your opinion isn't worth much.
Edit - to be fair, that's rather off the point. The issue (and this really does need to be rammed home) is Sweden didn't keep some of their schools open out of a desire to avoid damage to learning, or because they thought it would make no difference to the virus, but because of administrative procedures.
The issue is it did cause the much wider spread of Covid, particularly among teachers, and it did put a major strain on the educational system. Less than it did in this country when we tried to keep schools open in December, because of their smaller class sizes, but still significant.
The issue in this country was that due to the ineptitude of the government and its advisers, most of whom are very stupid and all of whom are profoundly ignorant of educational matters we didn't take measures that might have mitigated school closures - e.g. blended learning where you have two weeks on and one off - and a chaotic system where every teacher was supposed to set and mark two lessons for every child - one if they were in, and one if they were not.
The result was utter meltdown and the bankruptcy of the school system. Which has actually been considerably more damaging to the education system in the long term than the lockdowns, which were hardly ideal.
Thank you for that. It is always nice to have an opinion from somebody who deals with these issues every day and has considerable expertise in a subject. One of the strengths of this forum is the wide range of knowledge amongst many of its members - that and an unusual tolerance of alternative viewpoints absent in many other similar websites.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
I remember attending a debate at uni where Peter Hitchens was in attendance and, once off the topic of the debate, someone asked him if he believed in evolution - he got really angry and basically said it was an unproven theory that is as much faith as religion... So creationism is found in very strange places.
IMHO the most fruitful approach to, say, evolution, is Popper's view: scientific knowledge is based upon hypotheses that are tested and well confirmed - as is evolution - but that there are always two qualifications for it to count as science:
1) Even though we call it 'knowledge' it has to be open to the possibility of falsification and
2) Arising from this there have to be what may be called 'falsification criteria' - real and testable possibilities which if found to be true would tend to falsify the hypothesis.
What doesn't meet these tests isn't science; which doesn't mean it is irrelevant (eg Shakespeare).
This leads to another anecdote, where Dawkins is giving a talk and someone asks "If we found a fossilised modern rabbit in Cambrian era stratum, would that not be better evidence in favour of time travel than against evolution, given the weight of evidence we have at the moment?"
As much as I sometimes find Dawkins objectionable in his political views, The Greatest Show on Earth was a great book for detailing how evolution was testable and falsifiable and outlined many really cool and interesting examples.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
So is bike theft. But you don't get the Met doing anything about that.
I mean, yesterday we discussed police looking into miscarriages in case they were illegal abortions. But the thing about the UK is we're supposed to have discretion - I don't think it's right for cops to tear down these posters (even if it is illegal) because, really, what's the point?
So apparently the back story to this is that an individual posted a load of anti-semitic / anti-zionist stuff online and so somebody came along and stuck all the posters onto the shutters of his business (I believe a Chemist). So the police decided what they need to do was get officers to remove them, because that would lower tensions...and this is in area with a substantial Jewish population.
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
So is bike theft. But you don't get the Met doing anything about that.
Also driving a van with photos of hostages on it is not illegal. But the Met still stopped that.
Let's not be disingenuous. They have said that it is to preserve "community cohesion". In short, they are more worried about upsetting the sort of people who do not want to see photos of hostages. It feels like appeasement of people who threaten violence if they do not get their way. It is inconsistent with how they treat others who behave in the same way.
It is not policing without fear or favour.
Like saying that "jihad" has more than one meaning, or that electoral intimidation in Tower Hamlets is "a cultural matter."
'Mossad is the most sophisticated security organisation in the world....are we really led to believe that they didn't know this was happening?'
I mean, I'm not going to defend McCluskey if he does go "false flag" on this, but we have been told that Egypt and the US had warned Israeli intelligence about this and that they were more interested in the West Bank and didn't believe Hamas was going to do anything. Which is why, in Israel, most people are blaming the government for failing to prevent the attack.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
The combination of limited gains with apparently massive attrition of Russian equipment and men suggests either Russia has much deeper reserves of both than we thought, or there is massive over-counting of attrition. But it's not so hard to count destroyed equipment as it is people so the latter can't explain it all. Or simply the brutal effectiveness of massive minefields.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
The destroyed vehicles tell the tale - they are still working through the huge rust piles of tanks and SPGs. The losses are a mix of ancient vehicles with a smattering of recent production.
There's some fairly good analysis pieces out there, using satellite shots of the vehicle parks around Russia. Especially noticeable was the stripping of spare gun barrels from vehicles that were otherwise abandoned.
Chanelling Top Gear - GOOD NEWS !!! (Especially for people with asthma.)
ULEZ compliance in London is now above 95%: Not bad.
First data on @SadiqKhan's Ulez expansion: 🔴Londonwide zone raises up to £26m in first month in levies and fines 🟢95.2% of vehicles now comply with the exhaust emission rules 🟢 77,000 fewer non-compliant vehicles a day being driven in London, down 45% https://twitter.com/RossLydall/status/1719246092091392085
Detail:
My asthma becomes markedly worse every time I visit London. I'm here now for work reasons but leaving as soon as I can. I have got used to fresh air and not having my chest tighten when out and about. I cannot begin to tell you what a blessing that is. My last 3 years living in London full-time led to bronchitis, asthma & hospital visits every year. No way to live.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
Layla Moran has been very sensible and sensitive on this too - someone else with close family directly involved in Gaza. As someone who's sometimes not taken very seriously even within the Lib Dems I think she's shown her intelligence and humanity in the last couple of weeks.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
It's a discussion board and I see it as my role to help those who are less able to take part do so in a full and meaningful way.
'Role' is it?!
What a tit.
You see what we call "name calling" is not a good discussion board technique. It advances the discussion not at all and adds no insight to it either.
Perhaps expand upon your "interesting" point about outrage generators or whatever it was when you first started.
You’re a hobbyhorse rider therefore not very ‘interesting’, so trot on.
They should go out to there to express their solidarity.
The posters literally show examples of queer Palestinians writing what are perhaps their last words because they are going to be killed by Israeli bombs. Unless you think those queer Palestinians a) don't exist or b) are in Hamas?
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
The combination of limited gains with apparently massive attrition of Russian equipment and men suggests either Russia has much deeper reserves of both than we thought, or there is massive over-counting of attrition. But it's not so hard to count destroyed equipment as it is people so the latter can't explain it all. Or simply the brutal effectiveness of massive minefields.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
The destroyed vehicles tell the tale - they are still working through the huge rust piles of tanks and SPGs. The losses are a mix of ancient vehicles with a smattering of recent production.
There's some fairly good analysis pieces out there, using satellite shots of the vehicle parks around Russia. Especially noticeable was the stripping of spare gun barrels from vehicles that were otherwise abandoned.
There's a really quite plausible and deeply depressing set of events from now that involves Russia getting perilously close to the end of its stockpiles and teetering on the brink but still looking strong, US support for Ukraine fading away, and Ukraine being forced into a peace deal in which it's the loser which gives Russia a few years to restock for the next war.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
Still, interesting enough for you to chip in in your increasingly stalky manner.
It's a discussion board and I see it as my role to help those who are less able to take part do so in a full and meaningful way.
'Role' is it?!
What a tit.
You see what we call "name calling" is not a good discussion board technique. It advances the discussion not at all and adds no insight to it either.
Perhaps expand upon your "interesting" point about outrage generators or whatever it was when you first started.
You’re a hobbyhorse rider therefore not very ‘interesting’, so trot on.
Again, you're not really advancing the argument, but seem to be digging quite deep into your reserves of personal insults.
Rational Muslims probably have the second most, after Jews, to fear of Islamism
I think the problem is that islam is a political ideology in some parts as much as a religious one. I am afraid of radical islam for the same reason I am afraid of fascism, and for much the same reason. I've no such fear of Christians or Zoroastrians.
Where we in the west have made our bloomer, is in trying to be tolerant and diverse to all religions, which is admirable, without acknowledging the political aspects and tenents of radical Islam. What is happening at the moment is not about religion, it is about fascism. We believe fascism looks like Herr Flick in his dark uniform and leather coat. Unfortunately it takes other forms.
In a secular society then being tolerant and diverse to all religions is entirely reasonable, since if society is secular people can choose their own religion (or none) and it doesn't affect anyone else.
The clash of cultures comes when people oppose secularism and want their faith imposed by force as it is the "word of Yahweh/God/Allah/Buddha/FSM" himself.
Whether that be radical Islamists, radical Christians, radical Buddhist/Jews/Hindus/Vegans/whatever anyone who tries to impose their fundamentalism onto others is a problem.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the USA. Apparently the new Speaker they elected is something of a fundamentalist himself.
He is a Southern Baptists but then that is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, hardly on the fringes
He doesn’t believe in evolution. That’s a pretty fundamentalist view from a UK perspective.
Not for UK evangelicals it isn't
Every single one of the UK evangelicals I have met believe in evolution
80% of Baptists and Pentecostals in the UK reject the theory of evolution "Rejection of Darwinian Evolution Among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/24644037
I remember attending a debate at uni where Peter Hitchens was in attendance and, once off the topic of the debate, someone asked him if he believed in evolution - he got really angry and basically said it was an unproven theory that is as much faith as religion... So creationism is found in very strange places.
IMHO the most fruitful approach to, say, evolution, is Popper's view: scientific knowledge is based upon hypotheses that are tested and well confirmed - as is evolution - but that there are always two qualifications for it to count as science:
1) Even though we call it 'knowledge' it has to be open to the possibility of falsification and
2) Arising from this there have to be what may be called 'falsification criteria' - real and testable possibilities which if found to be true would tend to falsify the hypothesis.
What doesn't meet these tests isn't science; which doesn't mean it is irrelevant (eg Shakespeare).
This leads to another anecdote, where Dawkins is giving a talk and someone asks "If we found a fossilised modern rabbit in Cambrian era stratum, would that not be better evidence in favour of time travel than against evolution, given the weight of evidence we have at the moment?"
As much as I sometimes find Dawkins objectionable in his political views, The Greatest Show on Earth was a great book for detailing how evolution was testable and falsifiable and outlined many really cool and interesting examples.
The rabbit is tricky one. Either Einstein or Darwin has to be dethroned. I think we had better wait till we find the rabbit.
They should go out to there to express their solidarity.
The posters literally show examples of queer Palestinians writing what are perhaps their last words because they are going to be killed by Israeli bombs. Unless you think those queer Palestinians a) don't exist or b) are in Hamas?
You made me look at the link and they show posters with some writing but don't show examples of queer Palestinians writing. I had expected some photos (AI notwithstanding these days) of said queer Palestinians pens dipped in ink or using a biro. But there were just passages said to be written by them.
Can anyone else recall the police pulling down posters?
It is not a perfect comparison, given that the kidnapped kids will sadly not be found sheltering in someone's greenhouse, so the signs are clearly a social comment rather than a direct form of help.
'Mossad is the most sophisticated security organisation in the world....are we really led to believe that they didn't know this was happening?'
I mean, I'm not going to defend McCluskey if he does go "false flag" on this, but we have been told that Egypt and the US had warned Israeli intelligence about this and that they were more interested in the West Bank and didn't believe Hamas was going to do anything. Which is why, in Israel, most people are blaming the government for failing to prevent the attack.
While from Gaza we are deafened by the silence of people shouting out their opposition to their ruling class and demanding a cease fire following the return of hostages.
"On the other hand, in the Gaza Strip, under the jurisdiction of Hamas, forbids same-sex acts between men.[citation needed] This is due to their interpretation of Islamic law.[citation needed][4] An Amnesty International report on Palestine from 2022 claimed, "Section 152 of the Penal Code in Gaza criminalizes [male] consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment."[ambiguous][5] but it has been removed from their current report as of 2023. Palestine has no civil rights laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination nor harassment"
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
The public /private property aspect interested me, too. Does this mean the police will start removing racist graffiti from people's homes? Even on public property, it's usually the building owner/manager that does the clean up, not the police.
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
The combination of limited gains with apparently massive attrition of Russian equipment and men suggests either Russia has much deeper reserves of both than we thought, or there is massive over-counting of attrition. But it's not so hard to count destroyed equipment as it is people so the latter can't explain it all. Or simply the brutal effectiveness of massive minefields.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
The destroyed vehicles tell the tale - they are still working through the huge rust piles of tanks and SPGs. The losses are a mix of ancient vehicles with a smattering of recent production.
There's some fairly good analysis pieces out there, using satellite shots of the vehicle parks around Russia. Especially noticeable was the stripping of spare gun barrels from vehicles that were otherwise abandoned.
There's a really quite plausible and deeply depressing set of events from now that involves Russia getting perilously close to the end of its stockpiles and teetering on the brink but still looking strong, US support for Ukraine fading away, and Ukraine being forced into a peace deal in which it's the loser which gives Russia a few years to restock for the next war.
For what is going on, I would suggest looking at the concept of Brokenback War - The Hudson Institute under Herman Kahn did a fair bit on this. Essentially, Russia will continue regressing through it's stockpiles with a smattering of new production and new tech (for smaller, faster to produce items such as drone).
The most important point is that strategy becomes dictated by the remains capability.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
The public /private property aspect interested me, too. Does this mean the police will start removing racist graffiti from people's homes? Even on public property, it's usually the building owner/manager that does the clean up, not the police.
Isn't it the council under the auspices of keeping the streets clean. Whatever the graffiti says.
They should go out to there to express their solidarity.
The posters literally show examples of queer Palestinians writing what are perhaps their last words because they are going to be killed by Israeli bombs. Unless you think those queer Palestinians a) don't exist or b) are in Hamas?
You made me look at the link and they show posters with some writing but don't show examples of queer Palestinians writing. I had expected some photos (AI notwithstanding these days) of said queer Palestinians pens dipped in ink or using a biro. But there were just passages said to be written by them.
And you believe it all.
It's from a queer map app which people (typically) use to share stories (or to hook up). That same app, when you hover over Gaza, instead has stories from closeted young queer people scared for their lives, not from oppression, but from bombs - often sharing the stories of the people they have loved from afar, or have been able to love. The homophobia is bad, no doubt, but right now that isn't what is killing queer Palestinians.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
The public /private property aspect interested me, too. Does this mean the police will start removing racist graffiti from people's homes? Even on public property, it's usually the building owner/manager that does the clean up, not the police.
The problem with this is that the police have appointed themselves the arbiters of what's fine and what's not fine in terms of keeping the peace. Presumably, if the rallies were going up to Stamford Hill or Golders Green, then the police would not be fine with that. But if Jews don't feel safe going into central London on a Saturday, is that acceptable?
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
The public /private property aspect interested me, too. Does this mean the police will start removing racist graffiti from people's homes? Even on public property, it's usually the building owner/manager that does the clean up, not the police.
The problem with this is that the police have appointed themselves the arbiters of what's fine and what's not fine in terms of keeping the peace. Presumably, if the rallies were going up to Stamford Hill or Golders Green, then the police would not be fine with that. But if Jews don't feel safe going into central London on a Saturday, is that acceptable?
Or being able to walk around Ealing without getting assaulted, say.
They should go out to there to express their solidarity.
The posters literally show examples of queer Palestinians writing what are perhaps their last words because they are going to be killed by Israeli bombs. Unless you think those queer Palestinians a) don't exist or b) are in Hamas?
You made me look at the link and they show posters with some writing but don't show examples of queer Palestinians writing. I had expected some photos (AI notwithstanding these days) of said queer Palestinians pens dipped in ink or using a biro. But there were just passages said to be written by them.
And you believe it all.
It's from a queer map app which people (typically) use to share stories (or to hook up). That same app, when you hover over Gaza, instead has stories from closeted young queer people scared for their lives, not from oppression, but from bombs - often sharing the stories of the people they have loved from afar, or have been able to love. The homophobia is bad, no doubt, but right now that isn't what is killing queer Palestinians.
That is probably true but it is a pretty funny hill to die on (forgive the insensitivity). Are queer Palestinians saying, now, please leave Hamas in place to continue to discriminate against us.
I would be cautious about their supposed love for the government of Hamas.
Wearing swimming trunks on the Northern Line: Not OK
Why? It's probably always hotter on the Northern Line than on Brighton Beach.
Almost certainly always.
Sticking a poster up of the hostages/the paragliders in Luton/Golders Green could be interpreted as provocative.
That said I haven't clocked who took posters of what down from where.
But it being PB that hasn't of course stopped me weighing in on the matter.
You've got in one as to why the police have intervened. They do have a tough job, but I do think they are pandering to feelings of the (much) larger group.
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Given the solid MAGA lock on the vote counting and affirming process, in many states?
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
They should go out to there to express their solidarity.
The posters literally show examples of queer Palestinians writing what are perhaps their last words because they are going to be killed by Israeli bombs. Unless you think those queer Palestinians a) don't exist or b) are in Hamas?
You made me look at the link and they show posters with some writing but don't show examples of queer Palestinians writing. I had expected some photos (AI notwithstanding these days) of said queer Palestinians pens dipped in ink or using a biro. But there were just passages said to be written by them.
And you believe it all.
It's from a queer map app which people (typically) use to share stories (or to hook up). That same app, when you hover over Gaza, instead has stories from closeted young queer people scared for their lives, not from oppression, but from bombs - often sharing the stories of the people they have loved from afar, or have been able to love. The homophobia is bad, no doubt, but right now that isn't what is killing queer Palestinians.
That is probably true but it is a pretty funny hill to die on (forgive the insensitivity). Are queer Palestinians saying, now, please leave Hamas in place to continue to discriminate against us.
I would be cautious about their supposed love for the government of Hamas.
Have I said anything to the contrary? Again, the homophobia and oppression under Hamas is awful. But with 8000+ Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands displaced - the main force harming queer Palestinians right now is the Israeli military.
Apologies if already mentioned but on my X-twitter feed someone has posted pictures of Met officers tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Apparently, the Met says it is "looking into the matter."
Flyposting is illegal.
Not to trivialise the situation but it would be interesting to see how dozens of fly posted posters of dead Palestinian kids would be treated by the authorities, not to mention how the outrage generators would react to their placement and cops removing them.
There's definitely a point in there, albeit it is convoluted to the point of complete obscurity.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The police tearing down the hostage posters is rank cowardice. Sure, fly posting is illegal, but so is bicycle theft and they don't give two hoots about that.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
Fly posting may be illegal but was that public or private property ? It was outside a shop. Is that private property and not their concern. The Met have had a shocker and have enabled some of the anti semitism we have witnessed.
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
The public /private property aspect interested me, too. Does this mean the police will start removing racist graffiti from people's homes? Even on public property, it's usually the building owner/manager that does the clean up, not the police.
Isn't it the council under the auspices of keeping the streets clean. Whatever the graffiti says.
Only if its a council owned building. Not all public buildings are council owned/managed.
Whatever, even if it was racist or otherwise jusged to be provocative or likely to cause civil unrest , I've never heard of the police participating in the actual clean up before
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Given the solid MAGA lock on the vote counting and affirming process, in many states?
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
Good luck with that thinking.
They had a lock on those states in 2020 but there were not enough of them to win the EC, if Trump is convicted and jailed next year he probably won't be, if he isn't he may well be as the swing voting states are not happy with the economy and high inflation
The number of companies going bust this year is on track to be the highest since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. Insolvencies rose 10% from a year ago in the three months to the end of September, the latest official figures for England and Wales show.
I don't know about anybody else, but I rather feel like we are in the situation where Wile E. Coyote has run off the cliff, legs still pumping, haven't not yet realised there isn't any ground below.
Since I'm doing pics I find amusing, here are a couple of interesting barriers.
1 - This one looks like a legal tripwire so people going round it can be definitely shown to have done something unauthorised.
2 - Not sure how new this is, but it is unlawful as it will substantially disadvantage many disabled people. Are they planning to build a fence?
3 - This is like 2, but has been there for at least 25 and perhaps 50 years. I think I recall cycling through this on my Raleigh RSW14 at the age of 8. Also unlawful for the same reasons. And a total waste of money / space.
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Given the solid MAGA lock on the vote counting and affirming process, in many states?
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
Good luck with that thinking.
Trumps best chance of stealing the election was when he was already POTUS - and we basically see that is what he tried to do, using his network and influence as President to try and force GOP pols in states to overturn results and, when that failed, trying to pressure Pence and the House with the threat of violence.
I think Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the EC just because the US is 46/46 and that 8% who aren't fixed into a party have weird priorities that don't quite make them "the centre" but do mean they could vote either way depending on what they care about most on the day.
A bigger issue, in my mind, will be if Trump loses but the GOP keep the House - they would totally refuse to accept the delegates and that does put you in "civil war" territory where the constitution doesn't really provide a workable answer (I think if the EC isn't accepted it becomes a vote of the states, where each delegation votes and then whichever is the majority in that state can say who they support, which would probably go in favour of the GOP)
It’s all been rather quiet in the media over the last few weeks, but there’s been a string of days of 1,000 losses for the enemy, alongside a dozen or more tanks and a hundred other vehicles. For how many days can they lose 10 MLRS, and still have any to field? Not that they’re a lot of good now that the defenders have ATACMS (Army TACtical Missile System, as I leaned a few months ago; and pronounced Attack’ems, as I learned a couple of weeks ago) with a massive range advantage, that will quickly push all of the Russian airfields and command posts back to what the Ukranians agree is Russia.
The Russian casualties look unsustainable but the Ukrainians have made no material advances in nearly 2 months. With the risk of ammunition being diverted to Israel the dreaded stalemate is looming.
This guy is pro Ukr but tends to the more verifable facts analysis so often lacking here and elesewhere.
You can't say the much heralded counter-offensive has failed because no objective for it was ever articulated. It seems to have been more of a political construct than a military one. The situation has been a stalemate for six months now as there has not been a significant territorial gain since Artyomovsk/Bakhmut in May.
The combination of limited gains with apparently massive attrition of Russian equipment and men suggests either Russia has much deeper reserves of both than we thought, or there is massive over-counting of attrition. But it's not so hard to count destroyed equipment as it is people so the latter can't explain it all. Or simply the brutal effectiveness of massive minefields.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
The destroyed vehicles tell the tale - they are still working through the huge rust piles of tanks and SPGs. The losses are a mix of ancient vehicles with a smattering of recent production.
There's some fairly good analysis pieces out there, using satellite shots of the vehicle parks around Russia. Especially noticeable was the stripping of spare gun barrels from vehicles that were otherwise abandoned.
As for the strategy of bleeding Russia to death, I point out (again) that this is a mispoint. Conceptually the amount of materiel is infinite: no matter how much you destroy, it can always be replaced with something. It doesn't matter if they turn up with Armatas or Toyotas with machine-guns. The point is to evict them: destroying their materiel is just a side benefit.
As pointed out by William Spaniel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lebWSl49R0c they switched months ago from retaking land to using the salient as a base for raiding attacks. Assuming that Putin cannot reinforce until the May 2024 election, they believe that those raiding attacks will attrit the Russian forces down to a level where Ukraine can advance quickly. That's the theory but I'm suspicious of it, for the reasons above.
Top tip: Make your home Halloween Ready by simply never dusting. It will soon be festooned with spooky cobwebs, ready for the big day.
And good to see Mike back in the saddle.
I'm not sure this is in good taste, but I saw an effusive advert for one of the weirdest bicycle saddles I have ever seen this morning. Apparently it's going to transform the world of bicycles. Someone has a British sense of humour.
"A unique invention that has the potential to reshape the cycling industry." Anglia Ruskin University. Invented, developed, and tested in the UK, SaddleSpur™ has been designed to look as good as it feels. Whatever type of cyclist you are and whatever type of bike you use, you’ll find SaddleSpur™ to be a perfect fit."
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Given the solid MAGA lock on the vote counting and affirming process, in many states?
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
Good luck with that thinking.
They had a lock on those states in 2020 but there were not enough of them to win the EC, if Trump is convicted and jailed next year he probably won't be, if he isn't he may well be as the swing voting states are not happy with the economy and high inflation
...if Trump is convicted and jailed next year he probably won't be, if he isn't he may well be...
Edit: I think I've deciphered that on the 6th reading.
Since I'm doing pics I find amusing, here are a couple of interesting barriers.
1 - This one looks like a legal tripwire so people going round it can be definitely shown to have done something unauthorised.
2 - Not sure how new this is, but it is unlawful as it will substantially disadvantage many disabled people. Are they planning to build a fence?
3 - This is like 2, but has been there for at least 25 and perhaps 50 years. I think I recall cycling through this on my Raleigh RSW14 at the age of 8. Also unlawful for the same reasons. And a total waste of money / space.
Off now - have a good day all.
I once ran full tilt into a no 3 in the dark, rather painful. Like that one it was painted a colour that doesn't show up in the dark, and if I had a headtorch on, it was pointed more at the ground
Since I'm doing pics I find amusing, here are a couple of interesting barriers.
1 - This one looks like a legal tripwire so people going round it can be definitely shown to have done something unauthorised.
2 - Not sure how new this is, but it is unlawful as it will substantially disadvantage many disabled people. Are they planning to build a fence?
3 - This is like 2, but has been there for at least 25 and perhaps 50 years. I think I recall cycling through this on my Raleigh RSW14 at the age of 8. Also unlawful for the same reasons. And a total waste of money / space.
Off now - have a good day all.
I once ran full tilt into a no 3 in the dark, rather painful. Like that one it was painted a colour that doesn't show up in the dark, and if I had a headtorch on, it was pointed more at the ground
I presume the thinking behind 1) is that if they put the fence to the edge of the platform, it risks hitting trains and people can still climb round it?
3) is the kind of thing that was ancient when I was child.
What are the sensible, rational, effective methods for preventing urban paths becoming rat runs for the electric bike Deliveroo types?
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Given the solid MAGA lock on the vote counting and affirming process, in many states?
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
Good luck with that thinking.
Trumps best chance of stealing the election was when he was already POTUS - and we basically see that is what he tried to do, using his network and influence as President to try and force GOP pols in states to overturn results and, when that failed, trying to pressure Pence and the House with the threat of violence.
I think Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the EC just because the US is 46/46 and that 8% who aren't fixed into a party have weird priorities that don't quite make them "the centre" but do mean they could vote either way depending on what they care about most on the day.
A bigger issue, in my mind, will be if Trump loses but the GOP keep the House - they would totally refuse to accept the delegates and that does put you in "civil war" territory where the constitution doesn't really provide a workable answer (I think if the EC isn't accepted it becomes a vote of the states, where each delegation votes and then whichever is the majority in that state can say who they support, which would probably go in favour of the GOP)
It is only the Vice President as Senate President who affirms the result of the EC and Harris will of course still be VP in Jan 2025. The House can challenge state EC results but only with Senate support have a chance to change anything.
It only goes to state representatives if there is no EC majority for any one candidate
I particularly liked the part about rather being electrocuted than being eaten by a shark.
In contrast, I think Biden has been extremely Presidential in the way he has dealt with the Hamas crisis. It plays to his strengths and long experience but he has been measured, clear and not at all afraid of action (as shown by the air raids in Iraq and the interception of missiles in the Red Sea).
I think the multiplicity of law suits, the increasing risks to his wealth and indeed his liberty, is making Trump desperate. His fund raising is increasingly focused on paying for the plethora of lawyers he needs to deploy. Assumptions about him being the Republican nominee may well prove to be misplaced.
Yes. For me if you take a holistic impressionist view of the Donald Trump situation rather than an analytical mechanistic one (a Monet rather than a Stubbs if you will) you see a man with little chance of regaining the White House. The 2.9 current price is truly something to behold imo. I envy people with a clean book who can start laying him at that sort of level.
You keep trying to apply a rational analysis to American politics. At the moment we are deep into shark jump territory. Or perhaps.... General Boulanger territory. A large chunk of the population will vote for Trump, no matter what. He has a solid lock one of the two main parties.
Take your point but no, I'm doing the opposite of that on this one. I'm usually Mr Spock but here I'm Captain Kirk. I'm using fuzzy 'big pic' intuition not bottoms up logical analysis. I've learnt to trust it when I have it. There'll be no POTUS Trump 2.0.
Given the solid MAGA lock on the vote counting and affirming process, in many states?
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
Good luck with that thinking.
They had a lock on those states in 2020 but there were not enough of them to win the EC, if Trump is convicted and jailed next year he probably won't be, if he isn't he may well be as the swing voting states are not happy with the economy and high inflation
...if Trump is convicted and jailed next year he probably won't be, if he isn't he may well be...
Edit: I think I've deciphered that on the 6th reading.
The take over of electoral related offices in various states came out of the refusal of officials in many places to do what Trump wanted in 2020. With the declared intention of making sure "the system" cooperates next time.
Comments
https://insideevs.com/news/693336/nissan-assb-japan-mobility-show/
How much of that production will remain in the UK is still an open question, I think, depending on whether or not they triple the planned initial capacity for their new battery plant near Sunderland.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-wanted-scrap-covid-31319472
I can see that it says 16-17% of the general population are cited as rejecting evolution, and that rejection is stated as twice as high amongst evangelical* / Pentecostalist denominations vs Anglican / Methodist.
* I need to see their definition of "evangelical". Historically Methodists are evangelical, but not so much in the last 20-40 years.
But I'm not sure if what you describe would be "interesting" to anyone apart from your good self.
The anger is also characteristic.
Also driving a van with photos of hostages on it is not illegal. But the Met still stopped that.
Let's not be disingenuous. They have said that it is to preserve "community cohesion". In short, they are more worried about upsetting the sort of people who do not want to see photos of hostages. It feels like appeasement of people who threaten violence if they do not get their way. It is inconsistent with how they treat others who behave in the same way.
It is not policing without fear or favour.
'Do you accept that the theory of evolution is a persuasive one, most consistent with an extremely large body of known evidence', or something along those lines, would be more accurate, but a bit of a mouthful.
What a tit.
"Community relations" is all fine and well, but when you also have thousands of people chanting "jihad" and "river to the sea", with detailed explanations by the police explaining why this is fine, you don't get the sense that all communities are valued quite the same.
The double standard is obvious, even if their actions are within their role upholding the law. It's also that cowardice, masquerading as "community", that gave us Rotherham (etc).
This whole episode has been deeply depressing. I find myself clinging onto Humza Yousaf as the only person who seems to be navigating it sensibly, probably because he has actual family in the firing line rather than the performative nonsense we have from the ultras on both "sides".
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/lgbt-activists-hack-london-tube-and-bus-adverts-with-stories-of-palestinians/ar-AA1j5M1o?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=8b9868beb581481a8416c69311d96249&ei=18
Yousaf has been sensible at times, I really felt for him when interviewed on Kuenssberg before the SNP conference and he seemed very human but at other times very tribal and using this for political advantage.
What's clear is Russia must have learned lessons from the major reverses it suffered in Kharkiv and Kherson last year.
1) Even though we call it 'knowledge' it has to be open to the possibility of falsification and
2) Arising from this there have to be what may be called 'falsification criteria' - real and testable possibilities which if found to be true would tend to falsify the hypothesis.
What doesn't meet these tests isn't science; which doesn't mean it is irrelevant (eg Shakespeare).
Perhaps expand upon your "interesting" point about outrage generators or whatever it was when you first started.
https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1719102747570491701
'Mossad is the most sophisticated security organisation in the world....are we really led to believe that they didn't know this was happening?'
As much as I sometimes find Dawkins objectionable in his political views, The Greatest Show on Earth was a great book for detailing how evolution was testable and falsifiable and outlined many really cool and interesting examples.
Poster of hostage. Not OK.
There's some fairly good analysis pieces out there, using satellite shots of the vehicle parks around Russia. Especially noticeable was the stripping of spare gun barrels from vehicles that were otherwise abandoned.
If Ulez helps improve air quality hooray!
Wearing swimming trunks on the Northern Line: Not OK
And you believe it all.
Great to hear you're on the mend Mr. Smithson.
"On the other hand, in the Gaza Strip, under the jurisdiction of Hamas, forbids same-sex acts between men.[citation needed] This is due to their interpretation of Islamic law.[citation needed][4] An Amnesty International report on Palestine from 2022 claimed, "Section 152 of the Penal Code in Gaza criminalizes [male] consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment."[ambiguous][5] but it has been removed from their current report as of 2023. Palestine has no civil rights laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination nor harassment"
The most important point is that strategy becomes dictated by the remains capability.
https://www.queerty.com/anti-gay-maga-candidate-trolled-with-photo-of-her-hubby-dancing-in-speedos-at-er-pride-20231012
Sticking a poster up of the hostages/the paragliders in Luton/Golders Green could be interpreted as provocative.
That said I haven't clocked who took posters of what down from where.
But it being PB that hasn't of course stopped me weighing in on the matter.
We were using it to take our very young daughter to see the in-laws, one year, and it got worryingly hot for a baby.
I would be cautious about their supposed love for the government of Hamas.
"The people will vote. My brother will count the votes" - Napoleon.
Good luck with that thinking.
An announcement is expected shortly from the Department for Transport.
For more examples of queer stories in Gaza:
https://time.com/6326254/queering-the-map-gaza-lgbt-palestinians/
Whatever, even if it was racist or otherwise jusged to be provocative or likely to cause civil unrest , I've never heard of the police participating in the actual clean up before
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67261798
I don't know about anybody else, but I rather feel like we are in the situation where Wile E. Coyote has run off the cliff, legs still pumping, haven't not yet realised there isn't any ground below.
1 - This one looks like a legal tripwire so people going round it can be definitely shown to have done something unauthorised.
2 - Not sure how new this is, but it is unlawful as it will substantially disadvantage many disabled people. Are they planning to build a fence?
3 - This is like 2, but has been there for at least 25 and perhaps 50 years. I think I recall cycling through this on my Raleigh RSW14 at the age of 8. Also unlawful for the same reasons. And a total waste of money / space.
Off now - have a good day all.
I think Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the EC just because the US is 46/46 and that 8% who aren't fixed into a party have weird priorities that don't quite make them "the centre" but do mean they could vote either way depending on what they care about most on the day.
A bigger issue, in my mind, will be if Trump loses but the GOP keep the House - they would totally refuse to accept the delegates and that does put you in "civil war" territory where the constitution doesn't really provide a workable answer (I think if the EC isn't accepted it becomes a vote of the states, where each delegation votes and then whichever is the majority in that state can say who they support, which would probably go in favour of the GOP)
As for the strategy of bleeding Russia to death, I point out (again) that this is a mispoint. Conceptually the amount of materiel is infinite: no matter how much you destroy, it can always be replaced with something. It doesn't matter if they turn up with Armatas or Toyotas with machine-guns. The point is to evict them: destroying their materiel is just a side benefit.
We've been here before with Verdun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun. And that went wrong for the same reasons.
As pointed out by William Spaniel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lebWSl49R0c they switched months ago from retaking land to using the salient as a base for raiding attacks. Assuming that Putin cannot reinforce until the May 2024 election, they believe that those raiding attacks will attrit the Russian forces down to a level where Ukraine can advance quickly. That's the theory but I'm suspicious of it, for the reasons above.
Edit: I think I've deciphered that on the 6th reading.
3) is the kind of thing that was ancient when I was child.
What are the sensible, rational, effective methods for preventing urban paths becoming rat runs for the electric bike Deliveroo types?
It only goes to state representatives if there is no EC majority for any one candidate
Hardline MAGA installed all over the place.