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We potentially are over four years away from the next election, a lot can happen between now & then
We potentially are over four years away from the next election, a lot can happen between now & then - politicalbetting.com
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simply because Labour won't improve the lot of the don't haves so as with Redcar the electorate will vote for the next party on the list having discounted the ones that promised but failed to deliver.
I'm not so sure on Reform. To me their coalition looks fragile.
Those missing in action could be dead or in captivity, Zelensky told NBC News on Sunday.
Ten days earlier, on 6 February, Zelensky said 45,100 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and around 390,000 had been wounded. Military experts in Ukraine and the West believe the number could be far higher.
Russia hasn't released an equivalent figure, but UK Defence Intelligence estimated in December that an average of 1,523 Russian soldiers were being killed and wounded every day.
Zelensky says up to 350,000 Russian soldiers have been killed - other reports suggest that number could be much higher.
I need @Leon to tell me how many cats there are in Zanzibar today.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/feb/17/reeves-warned-uk-inflation-will-push-public-sector-unions-to-seek-higher-pay-rises
What a waste, and Putin could stop it any time by withdrawing.
To put it in context, 265,000 British combat personnel were killed in the whole of the Second World War.
Certain Russian troop types will have been destroyed and be down to new recruits. Such as tank crews. Their life expectency now will be lower than that of WW2 German U-boat crews.
The number of Ukrainian POWs is very difficult to know as the Russians have a tendency to execute their captured POWs.
- Patriotism vs Trumpism when the USA turns its back on allies and the rest of the world.
- Between Rich men based in Dubai or the US or wherever feathering their nests vs grass roots who want to be loyal British.
- The enormous black holes in their Manifesto between declared intention to shrink the state and policies that require much more public investment.
- The contribution their MPs actually make to doing their jobs vs their second jobs in media.
- The tensions between various shades of Right in their internal coalition, and the supporters they need to attract from the mainstream.
I don't see it holding together.
I despair.
I did not know his tentacles reach to Planet Trump, where Space Karen squats on the throne.
However, the Zanzibar Leopard is probably no more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanzibar_leopard
They have the potential to make POTUS 47 look like a model of administrative competence.
Mind, that's a big caveat.
Trump DOJ Assigns Sensitive Ethics Powers to Political Aides
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-doj-delegates-sensitive-ethics-powers-to-political-aides
The Trump Justice Department has assigned politically appointed newcomers decisionmaking power over sensitive matters, including ethics, employee discipline, and release of information sought by inspectors general and Congress, stripping these authorities from the longstanding oversight of a senior career official.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, in a Jan. 27 memo reviewed by Bloomberg Law, handed the authorities to two of his staffers — one a former criminal defense lawyer for President Donald Trump and another a 2021 law school graduate.
The two political appointees will be able to make final determinations on “adverse personnel actions and bar referral matters,” ethics recusals and waivers, nominee financial disclosures, and a variety of other delicate professional responsibility decisions that have historically been handled instead by the department’s highest-ranking career official...
Our media (and some commentators) have consistently, but occasionally, interpreted that number as "killed".
Ukraine MOD number for Russians has quite reliably matched UK MOD and USA estimates to within about 10-20%.
I am not aware of anyone published who has visibility on the higher Ukraine number.
( @Malmesbury ?)
If a nation continues to fetishise a war that happened 80+ years ago with deaths in the tens of millions, I imagine sacrifice is very much a cultural part of its psyche. Just as they can't comprehend societies that value (up to a point) their citizens and troops, we can't really understand that level of dogged acceptance.
The NorKs fighting in Kursk in particular have had a total schocker, 10k men lasted about three weeks before they had to withdraw and regroup in a much smaller group. They have desertion problems, communication problems, language problems, blue-on-blue problems, and general tactical problems in that they don’t know how to fight this type of war.
There’s also reports of injured soldiers back on front lines as drivers or weapons operators, and the infantry transport vehicles are now mostly old civilian Ladas or motorbikes, leaving them sitting ducks for drone and artillery attacks. The killed-to-wounded ratio isn’t going to get any better for the Russians than that current 2-1
Here’s one tactical video from yesterday, the enemy lost close to 100 men defending a single field in 24 hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sHyCeakBYs
Then again, there are so many ultra-nationalists in Russia. The rot goes deep.
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1891195175566729708
Worse Russia have conscription so it's very likely that there is a significant and permanent gender gap in the age range of 18-24....
Edit and the Mongols but they were a unique case..
Some, such as Pam Bondi the attorney General, have records of (here I say apparent) corruption, in addition to their poisonous politics. Bondi has a record of decisions favourable to parties related to political donations from those parties - including Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Bondi
And the Poles in 1609 and 1920.
And the Swedes in 1708.
Apart from that I'm struggling.
How many of them are now dead?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGfIp64A3CI
are definitely full of passionate intensity, and they've got guns and the internet.
https://x.com/KashifMD/status/1891289023932428604
Part of the reason the Nativist Russian Nationalists wanted Ukraine was the extra Ethnic Russians there, in face of collapsing birth rates in Russia itself.
Generations that could see in the past decade a life and opportunity closer to what we lived in the West, suddenly plunged into a war of attrition that very few of them support.
The lucky few have managed to escape somewhere, but only the wealthy or very skilled will be able to resettle there. Of those who have moved out of Russia, there’s little appetite from them to return even after the war is over.
Life denying fanaticism is deeply embedded in Russian culture and unless one is able to grasp, in totality, and politically contextualise the Nechayev Affair then it's impossible to make any serious comment on the SMO.
Start with Bakunin and Nechayev's Revolutionary Catechism. Nechayev also recommended sleeping on a hard wooden board.
On these numbers, a plurality of Russians must know someone fairly close to them who has been killed or wounded in the conflict - but that may be enough just to increase the determination to continue the war, rather than to end it.
Farage (and especially Tice) are already under tension between trying to support Trump wrt Ukraine and the consistently firm position of the British public - afaics the Reform support in the UK is mainained by an endless conveyor belt of shouting at clouds, some of which (eg the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Local Councils digging up war graves, the one we do not talk about here) are fabricated / hugely exaggerated narratives.
We've seen previous tensions over support for Elon Musk trying to drive neo-fascism in European politics, and support for Yaxley-Lennon.
Plus we are still in the dead zone before Labour start to deliver results - we have no even had the measures from the first budget come into force yet. The ~2009 Margaret Hodge piece I linked last summer that the key factor to take the foundations away from the further Right (choose your word - she was fighting Nick Griffin but the insights apply) was for services and prosperity to improve. What happens when NHS Waiting Lists are reduced by 2 million?
Here is the somewhat challenged Tice vs (of all people) Julia Hartley-Brewer:
https://x.com/TalkTV/status/1889993335177138530
We may agree or not on the positions taken, but he's getting some aggro.
Reality is Russia having destroyed a generation of it's own people should live with the consequences of a far smaller population in the future...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Russia
However I have a Yekaterinberg story
Around 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I tried to cure my heroin addiction by taking the Trans Siberian across Russia to Vladivostok, there to take the first ever civilian boat out of that port, to Japan (it was a newspaper commission)
Given my intense habit it was predictably chaotic and all went predictably very wrong (at one point I got thrown off a troop train in the Siberian taiga, at midnight - literally left to the wolves). The whole story is pretty mind boggling
At another point I ended up sleeping three nights in Yekaterinberg airport - sleeping so heavily the airport security woman was worried I was very ill, or that I might starve. So she gave me a boiled rabbit
Eventually she helped me get from the airport to the station so I could re-discover my train, but on the way I realised we were passing the place, site of the Ipatiev House, where the Romanovs were shot dead in a cellar
I got out the car and approached the bare patch of earth - marked by one of those weird skewed Siberian crosses. There was no other memorial, nothing but the cross, it was otherwise just a patch of waste ground in the thin Siberian summer sun (this was one year after the end of communism)
As I stood there imagining the horrible scene, the gun fire mowing down the imperial children, a babushka emerged from nowhere and scuttled over to me and pressed something hard and metal into my hand, then she crossed herself, and disappeared
I looked down. It was a handsome metal badge with the double headed imperial eagle of the Romanovs. I still have it now
It was so long ago I think Yekaterinberg was still called Sverdlovsk
Number of entries for each age range decade, where “Dead” = False in the database.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891398562874818990
There’s 12m entries aged over 120, and they’re not all exactly the same age.
Suspect there’s a lot of dates of birth that are 100 years away from what they should be, and 1,000 people seemingly born in 1,800.
It’s worth remembering that it’s only a handful of years ago that the last Civil War widow was still alive, and receiving her pension. She died in 2020, 155 years after the war finished!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century
A disabled daughter of a veteran was still receiving a pension until 2020, however.
There are also tensions starting to bubble up in the USA amongst Trump's core base.
We already have Trump supporters having their workforces, families and spouses deported. And monies being cut off abruptly in the USA as they were cut off across the world when USAID was shuttered. For example I saw one where a farmer had had his federally funded fencing and drainage project stopped in its tracks when half-built.
But if for example if the Department of Education gets shuttered, that will impact Red States which get the most money effectively cross-subsidised from Blue States.
There's also things like cuts to Medidaid and so on, and NIH research cuts are impacting Universities in Red States. There was one (may have been Alabama) where the University was the most significant employer.
https://archive.is/20250212171438/https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/12/trump-universities-funding-cuts-016328
Any of that could blow up unpredictably. And when tariffs start impacting or retaliaton comes in ... eg Canada supplies the overwhelming majority of heavy crude refined in Texas, with few alternatives (aiui Venezuela, Russia). For example, what happens if Canada does a reverse tariff and puts 10% on the price?
My problem is that I have too many!
One day SOON I shall work out a way to thread the necklace
(but thankyou for your kind words)
Apparently the thinking within US social security is that their primary aim is to minimise complaints, which means minimising false negative flags in the database. No-one receiving money they’re not expecting is making a complaint, and for various reasons this has been happening for decades with no auditing.
The working estimate for Musk’s team is several hundred billion dollars a year paid out incorrectly.
When added to the story from last week of the federal employee retirement process still being done on paper and taking months to complete, It’s quite the insight into just how antequated are all of the systems they’re using. One can imagine that the UK government will also have a number of equally silly stories about systems that hang together by the barest of threads.
Thankfully for many of the later stories I have plentiful photo evidence (once cameraphones came along). Also police records, in places
But I certainly do not lack material...
The problem the fratboys are causing is that they can't tell the difference. They are cutting off limbs instead of trimming fat.
The end result is likely to be increased expense to try and repair some of the damage.
Does this mean that the Red Cross is not getting access to Ukrainians in Russian captivity?
I suspect it might have been lost on the Romanovs, who would deffo have felt they were being despatched to "Siberia"
Some good news on the NHS numbers this morning. If Starmer goes before the election Streeting might be the one to fight 2029.
The US government contracts most stuff under the Federal Acquisition Regulations. These came about by, every time there was fraud or profiteering, adding more regulation.
So a company working on a FAR contract can often only make a certain amount of profit. Yes, being too profitable is an offence (see War Profiteering and WWI).
An intense system of paperwork and supervision is put in place inside the companies to enforce all this. This is all paid for by the government via increased cost. Better yet, this forms a massive barrier to entrants - only companies setup to generate the tidal wave of paperwork can get involved.
The fun really starts at outsourcing. The simplest thing to do (paperwork wise) is to subcontract a piece of the work to another company. And they in their turn etc etc. The beauty of this is that profit is allowed at each stage in the pyramid of outsourcing. So I contract Fred to make something. He gets it made by Dave, who puts 20% on top. Dave gets Arnold to make it and puts 20% on top.....
Awesome fun.
But it gets better. This structure is awesome for distributing work politically. So you don't donate to Congressman Turd. No Sir. But all the companies in the pyramid, in his district do.... So you align the pyramid with those who vote to pour money in at the top.
It's a bit like those stack of champagne goblets they use in the movies to express conspicuous consumption by rich people. A flunky pours champagne in at the top and it fills all the glasses in the pyramid.
And even better. What happens, if you accidentally own shares in companies that own shares in companies that are part of the pyramid? Well, you collect far more than your profit..... It's enough to make you cry with joy, isn't it?
And it's all legal and In The Best Possible Taste! (as Kenny Everett used to say)
is the full quote.
Various sources suggest a high likelihood that these words WERE shouted in the face-off between General Millan-Astray, Franco's one-eyed propaganda-chief and Unamuno, philosopher, novelist, cultural critic and erstwhile tepid supporter of Francoism.
Though sources are
Keiren Pedley sort of contradicts himself in his thread, saying polls can change remarkably quickly, whilst also seeming to rule out the idea of this Parliament not running the full five year term. Polls would clearly need to change, but they do tend to do so, and there is every chance of a UK election in 2028.
Reading about him it strikes me yet again that in all that ferment what a cultural powerhouse was Russia, even all the way to late stage Soviet Union (was Tarkovsky the last great Russian artist?). Pussy Riot are good and everything, but now it seems a dead zone.
Yeh, right.
People have not truly grasped what has befallen America.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning
And now, guess what? Inflation is down, fast growth is back, poverty has declined to below the level when he took over.
https://www.santander.com/en/press-room/specials/latin-america-growth-drivers-for-2025/argentina-the-normalization-of-the-economy-will-continue-in-2025
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/expert-reports-say-argentinas-poverty-rate-has-fallen-to-368.phtml
Milei is so far showing himself to be the greatest politician in the democratic world since, and possibly including, Margaret Thatcher, from whom he learned so much. He did this without a majority in Congress, and in the face of Argentina's disastrous corporatist/socialist Peronist tradition. He has made some mistakes, in particular by not liberalising the exchange rate fast enough, but the lefty economists have proved yet again that knowing some economics and being good at economic policy are very different (something Starmer should have realised when he chose Reeves). Needless to say, they have not asked themselves why they got Milei so badly wrong.
And the comparison between him and Starmer/Reeves, or for that matter Macron, Scholz or Trump, is just embarrassing.
The legend is that the length of time it stops is almost exactly the length of time needed to run down to the lake (naked, naturally), dive in and run back to the train.
It is to my eternal shame that I didn't test the legend when we passed about half midnight in the summer of 2008.
It is, to put it mildly, a high-stakes test, especially in winter.
Big Piles Of Dead People Is Awesome.
You find even not especially tankie Lefties in the UK, in between anti-war activism, summoning the Glorious Dead of The Great Patriotic War. They get very upset when you point out that vast numbers of those deaths were a complete waste.
Simple example - It took the Nazis 35 days to conquer half of Poland, while the Soviet Union was stealing the other half. So, if they had still had Poland in between The Soviet Union and Germany, it would have taken the Germans *weeks* to get to the front door. Especially is the Soviet Union wasn't attacking from the other side.
Instead, they had the Germans at the front door.....
The live stream of savings is on: https://doge.gov/
If it's going to be stopped it'll either be because of the courts or congress people's vested interests.
Next stop the US military, and err "emphasising" the need for Europe to deal with it's own issues will allow an absolute chainsaw to that budget.
Seems like Cooper is going to copy aspects of DOGE anyway to try and find savings.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9l9elr95zo
So why aren't they fighting the Taliban ?
What's the ratio of how many Afghans fought the Taliban takeover in 2021 compared with how many who have since tried to get asylum ?
Yekaterinberg is east of the Urals so, psychologically, if not cartographically, it would have felt like "Siberia" to the Romanovs
Indeed it feels like that to the Russians. When I was sold the one way air ticket - in 1990 - in Moscow, the Aeroflot lady said "this will get you into Siberia". That was my flight from Sheremtyevo Airport to Sverdlovsk (aka Yekaterinberg)
Buying that ticket left me entirely without money (and no credit cards). The only way I could get to the airport was by bribing the cab driver with my Sony Walkman
I was relying on the kindness of strangers. x1000. Luckily Russians can be incredibly kind, in various forms - troops, doctors, sailors, airport ladies, water engineers, prostitutes wih golden hearts, mayors of small cities, old ladies in too many cardigans - they kept me in vodka and pickles all the way to Vladivostok, albeit with several disasters on the way and then I got the first civilian boat out of Vladvistok across the Sea of Okhotsk and then I arrived, several days later, in Yokohama and I jumped the ticket barriers on the Shinkanesen and made my way to a friend who was living in Kyoto by the Philosopher's footpath and every evening we would cycle past the Zen temples and the fireflies and the knicker vending machines down to the canals of Old Gion and we'd watch the geishas go to work, in their wooden clogs, under their antique parasols, smiling at us shyly with their blackened teeth
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265215/us-oil-production-in-million-metric-tons/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265331/natural-gas-production-in-the-us/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191320/total-us-petroleum-exports/
Exports The top exports of United States are Crude Petroleum ($125B), Refined Petroleum ($107B), Petroleum Gas ($83.2B), Gas Turbines ($69.3B), and Cars ($65.3B), exporting mostly to Canada ($269B), Mexico ($243B), China ($154B), Germany ($94.8B), and Japan ($80.2B).
USA = petrostate. A giant Saudi, but with alcohol.
Various increasingly absurd projects (Boeing Pelican) were being proposed to give the US military global mobility, faster.
Rumsfeld came up with a simpler answer. Stockpile heavy equipment at various locations around the world. Shrink wrapped tanks, artillery, ammunition, fuel etc in air conditioned warehouses. The US already does this, but he proposed it on an epic scale. Whole armies of it.
The various sites would only need a smallish team of maintainers. In the even of a conflict, soldiers would be flown in to activate the equipment - a few hundred airline flights would bring in a division. This would actually be far cheaper than having some kind of exotic transport system for heavy equipment - and would be faster.
Politically, this would mean that huge number of US troops would be moved back to the States. Which would be good for local economies there, and make troop retention easier. The arms makers would get to sell more examples of their weapons - so a political win there.
The irony was that this was going to be implemented in Saudi Arabia first - draw down to set of warehouses. And US troops in Saudi was Bin Ladin's big complaint....
Spending on others isn't always viewed positively.
And people complaining that their illegal immigrant workforce has been deported aren't going to get much sympathy.