Mind you, if Le Pen does win, buy shares in Belgian toilet paper manufacturers.
Rassemblement Wallonie France struggle to poll more than 1% in the Walloon parliament so there close to zero political appetite within Francophone/Germanophone Belgium for union with France. This could change if Flemish seperatism sparks back into life.
Trump is worryingly starting on the trend of many modern tyrants: finding an enemy, real or imagined, who are smaller and less powerful, and blame *them* for many of the country's ills rather than address the real causes.
I'm hoping he does not continue on that trend, as history shows where it goes next.
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
I'm in a rural area, I'd certainly not take 1 or 2 a week as standard. I'm not expert, but is there an explanation for such a systematic failing?
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
Fair enough. I'd never considered the Newark area that 'rural' compared to people I know in the Peaks or Wales. How widespread is the problem - is it a localised issue?
My parents had very low gas pressure on Chrissy day, meaning the Turkey took a fair while longer to cook. But that's happened before.
Mr. Ace, I was thinking more of the potential damage to the EU rather than the division of Belgium itself. Perhaps I should've written Brussels' rather than Belgian.
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
I'm in a rural area, I'd certainly not take 1 or 2 a week as standard. I'm not expert, but is there an explanation for such a systematic failing?
My sister had one in rural Staffordshire because a car had taken out a wooden roadside post. The post must have been quite rotten as its base was still perfectly vertical, the middle was removed, and the top still hung from the wires!
You also need to differentiate between ones that occur because of lack of national supply and those that occur because of local infrastructure and supply issues, e.g. overloaded or malfunctioning substations.
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
Fair enough. I'd never considered the Newark area that 'rural' compared to people I know in the Peaks or Wales. How widespread is the problem - is it a localised issue?
My parents had very low gas pressure on Chrissy day, meaning the Turkey took a fair while longer to cook. But that's happened before.
We've had four cuts ranging from two seconds to one hour in the last year. There was a cut of 4 days in October 2002 due to fallen trees. Plus several scheduled power cuts due to 'maintenance'.
Western Power Distribution says most are due to 'objects' causing short circuits at the substation. I think they mean animals and birds - which probably don't survive the experience.
National Grid has done a lot to prevent blackouts caused by too few power stations. Luckily domestic electricity consumption is 14% lower than in ~2005 - thank goodness for the EU and its energy efficiency legislation.
If you get several cuts a week, you're really being short-changed.
I couldn't vote for Trump, but could I vote for a Democrat party where candidates for leadership positions say their job is to "shut white people up", because whites are inherently privileged, racist, etc?
Hell no. The American Left is as diseased as the British Left.
Right now I guess I'd abstain, were I an American.
Mr. HYUFD, I think there's a risk, with both the French vote and the two by-elections we have coming [as well as more generally], of looking back at 2016 and believing shocks are likelier to occur than they are.
The EU result wasn't as big a shock as it might've been, given the polling. Trump's victory was a shock, but there were signs of it, and Clinton's campaign was diabolical.
Mind you, if Le Pen does win, buy shares in Belgian toilet paper manufacturers.
Indeed but she already leads round one in the polls which would itself be a first for the FN and give her momentum for round two, it then only needs a big scandal or two to hit Fillon or Macron and the establishment starts getting the jitters
Mr. Ace, I was thinking more of the potential damage to the EU rather than the division of Belgium itself. Perhaps I should've written Brussels' rather than Belgian.
Around 2010-11 MLP was found of saying that France would be "s'honorerait d'accueillir la Wallonie". She seems to have left that particular bad idea alone lately.
I couldn't vote for Trump, but could I vote for a Democrat party where candidates for leadership positions say their job is to "shut white people up", because whites are inherently privileged, racist, etc?
Hell no. The American Left is as diseased as the British Left.
Right now I guess I'd abstain, were I an American.
Is this right? Apart from the dodginess of one section of a political party making contributions to another political party, was giving it to UKIP the best use of resources?
Still, I suppose those Breaking Point posters didn't print themselves.
Labour Leave isn't Labour, any more than Vote Leave was Tory.
They are a 'bit' more, since they called themselves Labour Leave while Vote Leave didn't call themselves Con Leave (pleasing as that would have been).
Mr. HYUFD, don't forget the electorate, and the system. It's very much an uphill struggle for Le Pen.
True but she leads all the round 1 polls now and if anymore scandals hit Fillon or Macron it could get interesting
She's 2:1 behind and totally failed to pick up any transfer votes in previous elections.
Would you like a bet on her being less than 20 points behind in the second round?
I am sticking to my bet she wins round 1 thanks but if some scandals hit Fillon or Macron in round 2 it could get interesting, she is already on 35%+ in round 2 which is double what her father got in 2002 in the run off with Chirac
Fair play to Mrs May - she was as circumspect about Trump as a Tory PM is ever going to be about a US Republican president. If she was prepared to say what she did in public, then clearly she has a lot more stored up for private consumption. A more self-aware and politically astute man than Trump might think to himself that if that is what the Conservative leader of the UK government says just months after Brexit, I am going to struggle to win many friends around the world. Trump, of course, will not give a monkeys. As things stand, it will be him and Netanyahu v the rest.
So, 7/10 for the PM - and that's a lot coming from someone like me. The trade deal remains a cause for concern, though. We represent 4% of all the US's export trade; they represent 16% of ours (the EU is 44%, of course). There's only one side that needs something done quickly. But this is one occasion when it will serve us well to take our time.
Also we're negotiating with Trump, who literally wrote the book on the art of the deal.
You may be confusing "wrote the book" with "had his name attached to a ghostwriter's lucidity".
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
See Dr Sox's response. Also note that after the surrender, the Americans were surprised to see how much material the Japanese had stored ready to protect the home islands. The Yanks thought they'd worn the Japanese down; in reality they'd kept back much more material than expected; in part because of logistics problems in getting it to the Pacific islands.
We cannot know how serious such overtures were. But the experience of the battles before and after shows that surrender was not in the minds of the majority of the senior officers.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
Indeed. And the Japanese had tokko - land-based suicide tactics mirroring those already being used in the air. Assessments are that taking Japan conventionally would have incurred heavy casualties on both sides quite possibly exceeding the toll from the nuclear attack.
If you can justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a war because it potentially "saves" many more than that, you can certainly justify torturing one probably guilty suspected terrorist to save potentially hundreds of lives.
If you are against torture in principle, then to be consistent you should also be a pacifist. Corbyn is consistent (but wrong in my opinion). May is simply inconsistent.
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
Fair enough. I'd never considered the Newark area that 'rural' compared to people I know in the Peaks or Wales. How widespread is the problem - is it a localised issue?
My parents had very low gas pressure on Chrissy day, meaning the Turkey took a fair while longer to cook. But that's happened before.
Sorry JJ. I should have been clearer. I no longer live in Newark although I still consider it my home town. I am now over the border about 15 miles away in Lincolnshire south of Cranwell. Obviously this comes up with the neighbours and others in the village and it seems to be quite widespread. Certainly ours and the surrounding villages all seem to get the same interruptions but beyond that I couldn't say.
Mr. Barnesian, disagree. There isn't a binary choice between being pro-torture or being a pacifist. There's been war throughout history but the treatment of captives has varied widely.
Going back to TMay's excellent speech - and her PMQs - I wonder if she is having drama and elocution lessons etc etc. She's lost some of that awkwardness, and much of the grimacing.
She'll never orate like Barack Obama but she comes across much better. She's also got a pretty good speech writer (with a few bum notes).
Most of all it was a highly confident, intelligent speech, striking all the right notes, it managed to delight Dan Hodges and Dan Hannan, Phil Collins and Nigel Farage, most of the Republican party, and all of the Tory party. FoxNews loved it, so did a bunch of EU politicians.
That's impressive. She's gone up a notch.
It was a serious speech, her second such in two weeks. I've gone from being rather unimpressed with Theresa May to mildly impressed.
She does need to learn to move much more quickly though. These are not times for measured contemplation.
Indeed. And the Japanese had tokko - land-based suicide tactics mirroring those already being used in the air. Assessments are that taking Japan conventionally would have incurred heavy casualties on both sides quite possibly exceeding the toll from the nuclear attack.
If you can justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a war because it potentially "saves" many more than that, you can certainly justify torturing one probably guilty suspected terrorist to save potentially hundreds of lives.
If you are against torture in principle, then to be consistent you should also be a pacifist. Corbyn is consistent (but wrong in my opinion). May is simply inconsistent.
I think most people view actions during 'total war' and 'peace' as two very different things.
Though the other major objection with torture is it doesn't work so wouldn't save hundreds of lives.
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
See Dr Sox's response. Also note that after the surrender, the Americans were surprised to see how much material the Japanese had stored ready to protect the home islands. The Yanks thought they'd worn the Japanese down; in reality they'd kept back much more material than expected; in part because of logistics problems in getting it to the Pacific islands.
We cannot know how serious such overtures were. But the experience of the battles before and after shows that surrender was not in the minds of the majority of the senior officers.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
I thought that the 2016 GDP figure is the arithmetical average of the 4 year on year GDP figures for each quarter?
No. They add up the GDP for each of the quarters (not the growth rate) and compare it with the GDP for the previous year. You therefore need to model the fact that some quarters have more of the year's GDP than others, and you need to recognise that 0.6% (for example) covers a wide spread between 0.55% and 0.649.
There will also be several revisions to the GDP (and therefore the growth rate) coming down the line. It is marginally more likely they will lead to GDP being revised upwards, but we won't have truly final numbers until about September.
Going back to TMay's excellent speech - and her PMQs - I wonder if she is having drama and elocution lessons etc etc. She's lost some of that awkwardness, and much of the grimacing.
She'll never orate like Barack Obama but she comes across much better. She's also got a pretty good speech writer (with a few bum notes).
Most of all it was a highly confident, intelligent speech, striking all the right notes, it managed to delight Dan Hodges and Dan Hannan, Phil Collins and Nigel Farage, most of the Republican party, and all of the Tory party. FoxNews loved it, so did a bunch of EU politicians.
That's impressive. She's gone up a notch.
It was a serious speech, her second such in two weeks. I've gone from being rather unimpressed with Theresa May to mildly impressed.
She does need to learn to move much more quickly though. These are not times for measured contemplation.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view), in terms of pace I think she's the finished article. She's said herself that she's a reflector. She considers things, weighs her options and makes a decision.
That's fine up to a point; I'll own to a frisson of pleasure that she's not as much a slave to the news cycle as Cameron or Blair, but it does make for a ponderous OODA loop.
After sleeping on it, my thought is it was a good, workmanlike speech from someone who is not a natural orator. Her last three speeches have all been pitched very well. I still think her Lancaster House speech was perfect from a negotiating perspective; she'll have to do something remarkable to better that.
Going back to TMay's excellent speech - and her PMQs - I wonder if she is having drama and elocution lessons etc etc. She's lost some of that awkwardness, and much of the grimacing.
She'll never orate like Barack Obama but she comes across much better. She's also got a pretty good speech writer (with a few bum notes).
Most of all it was a highly confident, intelligent speech, striking all the right notes, it managed to delight Dan Hodges and Dan Hannan, Phil Collins and Nigel Farage, most of the Republican party, and all of the Tory party. FoxNews loved it, so did a bunch of EU politicians.
That's impressive. She's gone up a notch.
It was a serious speech, her second such in two weeks. I've gone from being rather unimpressed with Theresa May to mildly impressed.
She does need to learn to move much more quickly though. These are not times for measured contemplation.
That's my journey, too - mildly unimpressed to mildly impressed. I know you hate Brexit, but seeing as it's happening anyway, she's about the best person to be doing it (I've gone off my idea of Boris entertaining us). We need a steely, intelligent character with vision and resolve.
She might just be that person.
Theresa May was alternativeless in the summer (I did say as much at the time). The only other conceivable alternative right now is Philip Hammond and he doesn't seem much interested in the poisoned chalice.
I was appalled at her conference speech which was silly, offensive and strategically inept. She has made a whole set of unforced errors which have served Britain very badly. Belatedly, she seems to have made her mind up about what to do next. That's something.
Indeed. And the Japanese had tokko - land-based suicide tactics mirroring those already being used in the air. Assessments are that taking Japan conventionally would have incurred heavy casualties on both sides quite possibly exceeding the toll from the nuclear attack.
If you can justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a war because it potentially "saves" many more than that, you can certainly justify torturing one probably guilty suspected terrorist to save potentially hundreds of lives.
If you are against torture in principle, then to be consistent you should also be a pacifist. Corbyn is consistent (but wrong in my opinion). May is simply inconsistent.
I think most people view actions during 'total war' and 'peace' as two very different things.
Though the other major objection with torture is it doesn't work so wouldn't save hundreds of lives.
At the time the Allies had some idea of what the Japanese Army was doing, both to civilians in the areas it occupied and to it’s PoW’s. There wasn’t a lot of sympathy, or indeed concern, for the sufferings of the Japanese. Rightly or wrongly.
So why is the growth rate 2.0? Now that I have bet money on it with Robert this is particularly perplexing.
It's compound interest so the sum is 100*1.003*1.006*1.006*1.006. However, the error in summing them is small and typically underestimates.
(1+x)(1+y) = 1+x+y+xy >1+x + y iff x>0,y>0 || x<0y<0 BUT if dx,dy = rounding then (1+x+dx)(1+y+dy) = 1 +y + dy +x +xy +xdy +dx+ydx+dxdy and given x,y>0 =(1+y+x) + (xy+ xdy+ydx +dx +dy +dxdy) Now given dx,dy =-x/2,-y/2 (maximum -ve) =(1+y+x) + (xy -xy/2 -xy/2 -x/2 -y/2 +xy/4) =(1 +y +x) - x/2 - y/2 + xy/4 So the difference between adding and multiplying with maximum rounding is
-x/2 -y/2 +xy/4 - for small x,y we can ignore xy/4
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
Fair enough. I'd never considered the Newark area that 'rural' compared to people I know in the Peaks or Wales. How widespread is the problem - is it a localised issue?
My parents had very low gas pressure on Chrissy day, meaning the Turkey took a fair while longer to cook. But that's happened before.
Sorry JJ. I should have been clearer. I no longer live in Newark although I still consider it my home town. I am now over the border about 15 miles away in Lincolnshire south of Cranwell. Obviously this comes up with the neighbours and others in the village and it seems to be quite widespread. Certainly ours and the surrounding villages all seem to get the same interruptions but beyond that I couldn't say.
Best advice is to complain. I told WPD that I thought four cuts per year was a bit much, given that my internet access depends on electricity and they didn't deny it. OFGEM have given all the companies targets to meet.
Miss Plato, given Germany's migrant stance is due to WWII's lingering shadow, it's ironic that the German word for guilt is the same as their word for debt (schuldig).
Indeed. And the Japanese had tokko - land-based suicide tactics mirroring those already being used in the air. Assessments are that taking Japan conventionally would have incurred heavy casualties on both sides quite possibly exceeding the toll from the nuclear attack.
If you can justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a war because it potentially "saves" many more than that, you can certainly justify torturing one probably guilty suspected terrorist to save potentially hundreds of lives.
If you are against torture in principle, then to be consistent you should also be a pacifist. Corbyn is consistent (but wrong in my opinion). May is simply inconsistent.
I think most people view actions during 'total war' and 'peace' as two very different things.
Though the other major objection with torture is it doesn't work so wouldn't save hundreds of lives.
In total existential war, no holds barred.
In the current smouldering assymetric war it is rather different, brutality can be self defeating. Insurrectionists need a sea of sympathisers to swim in. It is a very different situation.
Incidentally a failed state on the US southern border would not be in Americas interest.
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
See Dr Sox's response. Also note that after the surrender, the Americans were surprised to see how much material the Japanese had stored ready to protect the home islands. The Yanks thought they'd worn the Japanese down; in reality they'd kept back much more material than expected; in part because of logistics problems in getting it to the Pacific islands.
We cannot know how serious such overtures were. But the experience of the battles before and after shows that surrender was not in the minds of the majority of the senior officers.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
What do you mean by 'wrong' in this context?
Do you believe the Japanese would have surrendered soon after August 15th if the bombs had not been dropped? How many more troops and civilians would have died every day the war had continued?
I find this a really interesting and difficult area. I don't like defending their use; but it's difficult to see a realistic alternative where fewer people would have died. Evidently you differ, and that's fair enough.
Is this right? Apart from the dodginess of one section of a political party making contributions to another political party, was giving it to UKIP the best use of resources?
Still, I suppose those Breaking Point posters didn't print themselves.
Labour Leave isn't Labour, any more than Vote Leave was Tory.
They are a 'bit' more, since they called themselves Labour Leave while Vote Leave didn't call themselves Con Leave (pleasing as that would have been).
Their explanation is they put on brexit debates & events in conjunction with Ukip and shared the costs. Ukip paid the bill and labour Leave paid Ukip their share
Indeed. And the Japanese had tokko - land-based suicide tactics mirroring those already being used in the air. Assessments are that taking Japan conventionally would have incurred heavy casualties on both sides quite possibly exceeding the toll from the nuclear attack.
If you can justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a war because it potentially "saves" many more than that, you can certainly justify torturing one probably guilty suspected terrorist to save potentially hundreds of lives.
If you are against torture in principle, then to be consistent you should also be a pacifist. Corbyn is consistent (but wrong in my opinion). May is simply inconsistent.
I think most people view actions during 'total war' and 'peace' as two very different things.
Though the other major objection with torture is it doesn't work so wouldn't save hundreds of lives.
If something is wrong "in principle" it is wrong in total war and in peace. The Geneva Convention sort of recognises that.
But I am a consequentialist rather than an absolutist. It is the bad consequences that makes actions wrong. Your point about torture not working (if that's true) is a good argument against torture. But if it works, and saves lives, what is the objection?
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
See Dr Sox's response. Also note that after the surrender, the Americans were surprised to see how much material the Japanese had stored ready to protect the home islands. The Yanks thought they'd worn the Japanese down; in reality they'd kept back much more material than expected; in part because of logistics problems in getting it to the Pacific islands.
We cannot know how serious such overtures were. But the experience of the battles before and after shows that surrender was not in the minds of the majority of the senior officers.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
What do you mean by 'wrong' in this context?
All were of the opinion the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary. I agree that it's a difficult area, and if I accepted the proposition that they saved millions of lives, I'd agree with you - but I don't.
Is this right? Apart from the dodginess of one section of a political party making contributions to another political party, was giving it to UKIP the best use of resources?
Still, I suppose those Breaking Point posters didn't print themselves.
Labour Leave isn't Labour, any more than Vote Leave was Tory.
They are a 'bit' more, since they called themselves Labour Leave while Vote Leave didn't call themselves Con Leave (pleasing as that would have been).
Their explanation is they put on brexit debates & events in conjunction with Ukip and shared the costs. Ukip paid the bill and labour Leave paid Ukip their share
I don't think there's much wrong with this, although people will be able to use it as ammunition.
Miss Plato, given Germany's migrant stance is due to WWII's lingering shadow, it's ironic that the German word for guilt is the same as their word for debt (schuldig).
Going back to TMay's excellent speech - and her PMQs - I wonder if she is having drama and elocution lessons etc etc. She's lost some of that awkwardness, and much of the grimacing.
She'll never orate like Barack Obama but she comes across much better. She's also got a pretty good speech writer (with a few bum notes).
Most of all it was a highly confident, intelligent speech, striking all the right notes, it managed to delight Dan Hodges and Dan Hannan, Phil Collins and Nigel Farage, most of the Republican party, and all of the Tory party. FoxNews loved it, so did a bunch of EU politicians.
That's impressive. She's gone up a notch.
It was a serious speech, her second such in two weeks. I've gone from being rather unimpressed with Theresa May to mildly impressed.
She does need to learn to move much more quickly though. These are not times for measured contemplation.
That's my journey, too - mildly unimpressed to mildly impressed. I know you hate Brexit, but seeing as it's happening anyway, she's about the best person to be doing it (I've gone off my idea of Boris entertaining us). We need a steely, intelligent character with vision and resolve.
She might just be that person.
Theresa May was alternativeless in the summer (I did say as much at the time). The only other conceivable alternative right now is Philip Hammond and he doesn't seem much interested in the poisoned chalice.
I was appalled at her conference speech which was silly, offensive and strategically inept. She has made a whole set of unforced errors which have served Britain very badly. Belatedly, she seems to have made her mind up about what to do next. That's something.
In the land of the blind a one eyed woman is queen. All other major politicians are even more inept.
I though May's speeches rather dull, full of visionless platitudes that told us very little that we didn't know already. She will look good next to Trump, because she is cautious enough to flatter his ego, but I will not expect too much.
Going back to TMay's excellent speech - and her PMQs - I wonder if she is having drama and elocution lessons etc etc. She's lost some of that awkwardness, and much of the grimacing.
She'll never orate like Barack Obama but she comes across much better. She's also got a pretty good speech writer (with a few bum notes).
It would follow Mrs Thatcher's example but given the timing, I wonder if she got the idea from watching The Apprentice, where one of the finalists was coached at RADA. Business coaching is apparently a big thing for drama schools now. https://www.radainbusiness.com/
Is The Apprentice now the most successful reality show of all time, with one POTUS and two members of the House of Lords?
All were of the opinion the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary. I agree that it's a difficult area, and if I accepted the proposition that they saved millions of lives, I'd agree with you - but I don't.
They are not necessarily unbiased observers: some of the more traditionally-minded people mentioned (e.g. MacArthur) had other agendas.
I see little realistic proposition that the Japanese would have surrendered before mid-1946. Essentially another year of war and a couple of massively bloody invasions, plus more saturation bombing.
Then there's the question of whether the war would just have turned into an Iraq- or Syria-style insurgency.
Is this right? Apart from the dodginess of one section of a political party making contributions to another political party, was giving it to UKIP the best use of resources?
Still, I suppose those Breaking Point posters didn't print themselves.
Labour Leave isn't Labour, any more than Vote Leave was Tory.
They are a 'bit' more, since they called themselves Labour Leave while Vote Leave didn't call themselves Con Leave (pleasing as that would have been).
Their explanation is they put on brexit debates & events in conjunction with Ukip and shared the costs. Ukip paid the bill and labour Leave paid Ukip their share
I don't think there's much wrong with this, although people will be able to use it as ammunition.
They were campaigns, not parties.
Bettertogether was a campaign run by the the main Unionist parties that repeatedly and sanctimoniously disassociated itself from UKIP (and needless to say the even more noisome extremes of Union supporting British politics). How times change.
Brownouts are more likely, but blackouts are still possible. The grid is a miraculous, if rather sensitive, thing.
As it happens, I'll be interested to see what happens if there is a brownout. Electricity is supposed to be supplied in a range of about 220 to 250 Volts, and all Consumer Electronic devices are supposed to handle this range. But experience shows that this is one of the first things that cheap electronics forego, partly because vendors rare check for undervoltage protection.
TLDR; there might be lots of blown electronics after a severe brownout. Or not.
All this talk of brownouts and blackouts being a possibility is rather quaint. If you live in rural areas you will know that blackouts are becoming more and more common.
Really? Outside of really rural areas (i.e. the sort of people who have their own gens because of it) I haven't heard of any recently.
The most notable in our area recently as 1pm on Christmas day. But we get maybe 1 or 2 a week. Normally for 20-30 minutes. They appear to cover quite a wide area and we have come to accept them as part of living in a rural area.
Fair enough. I'd never considered the Newark area that 'rural' compared to people I know in the Peaks or Wales. How widespread is the problem - is it a localised issue?
My parents had very low gas pressure on Chrissy day, meaning the Turkey took a fair while longer to cook. But that's happened before.
We've had four cuts ranging from two seconds to one hour in the last year. There was a cut of 4 days in October 2002 due to fallen trees. Plus several scheduled power cuts due to 'maintenance'.
Western Power Distribution says most are due to 'objects' causing short circuits at the substation. I think they mean animals and birds - which probably don't survive the experience.
National Grid has done a lot to prevent blackouts caused by too few power stations. Luckily domestic electricity consumption is 14% lower than in ~2005 - thank goodness for the EU and its energy efficiency legislation.
If you get several cuts a week, you're really being short-changed.
Regular cuts is more likely to be a local transformer or substation failing intermittently and particularly if you are rural and near the end of a line, unless you are reporting the cuts the distribution company probably is unaware of the issue.
I had to debug a regular IT failure on a farm at 6pm daily. Turned out the pole top transformer cut out briefly.
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
See Dr Sox's response. Also note that after the surrender, the Americans were surprised to see how much material the Japanese had stored ready to protect the home islands. The Yanks thought they'd worn the Japanese down; in reality they'd kept back much more material than expected; in part because of logistics problems in getting it to the Pacific islands.
We cannot know how serious such overtures were. But the experience of the battles before and after shows that surrender was not in the minds of the majority of the senior officers.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
What do you mean by 'wrong' in this context?
Do you believe the Japanese would have surrendered soon after August 15th if the bombs had not been dropped? How many more troops and civilians would have died every day the war had continued?
I find this a really interesting and difficult area. I don't like defending their use; but it's difficult to see a realistic alternative where fewer people would have died. Evidently you differ, and that's fair enough.
By August 1985 the Americans had demolished the Japaneses Navy and airforce and sunk 60% of their merchant fleet. The Army was strong, but a siege and bombardment of Japan over the winter of 1945-6 would have led to millions of deaths of Japanese from starvation and cold. It would have been like the 41 siege of Leningrard writ large.
Mr. Barnesian, disagree. There isn't a binary choice between being pro-torture or being a pacifist. There's been war throughout history but the treatment of captives has varied widely.
I agree. I said IF you are against torture in principle (or bombing civilians) etc, THEN ...binary choice.
But I am not principled. I am a pragmatist. I judge each case on its merits - cost/benefit. So I am not against bombing civilians in principle. Nor am I against torture in principle. My objections would be practical (EDIT and emotional) and there may be cases when I would be in favour.
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
See Dr Sox's response. Also note that after the surrender, the Americans were surprised to see how much material the Japanese had stored ready to protect the home islands. The Yanks thought they'd worn the Japanese down; in reality they'd kept back much more material than expected; in part because of logistics problems in getting it to the Pacific islands.
We cannot know how serious such overtures were. But the experience of the battles before and after shows that surrender was not in the minds of the majority of the senior officers.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
What do you mean by 'wrong' in this context?
Do you believe the Japanese would have surrendered soon after August 15th if the bombs had not been dropped? How many more troops and civilians would have died every day the war had continued?
I find this a really interesting and difficult area. I don't like defending their use; but it's difficult to see a realistic alternative where fewer people would have died. Evidently you differ, and that's fair enough.
By August 1985 the Americans had demolished the Japaneses Navy and airforce and sunk 60% of their merchant fleet.
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
Snip
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
What do you mean by 'wrong' in this context?
Do you believe the Japanese would have surrendered soon after August 15th if the bombs had not been dropped? How many more troops and civilians would have died every day the war had continued?
I find this a really interesting and difficult area. I don't like defending their use; but it's difficult to see a realistic alternative where fewer people would have died. Evidently you differ, and that's fair enough.
By August 1985 the Americans had demolished the Japaneses Navy and airforce and sunk 60% of their merchant fleet. The Army was strong, but a siege and bombardment of Japan over the winter of 1945-6 would have led to millions of deaths of Japanese from starvation and cold. It would have been like the 41 siege of Leningrard writ large.
Sorry to be so frankly brutal, but do you think Truman gave a stuff about your latter point? My understanding he was persuaded that the bomb would save 1000s of US marine lives and that was the important issue.
Is this right? Apart from the dodginess of one section of a political party making contributions to another political party, was giving it to UKIP the best use of resources?
Still, I suppose those Breaking Point posters didn't print themselves.
Labour Leave isn't Labour, any more than Vote Leave was Tory.
They are a 'bit' more, since they called themselves Labour Leave while Vote Leave didn't call themselves Con Leave (pleasing as that would have been).
Their explanation is they put on brexit debates & events in conjunction with Ukip and shared the costs. Ukip paid the bill and labour Leave paid Ukip their share
I don't think there's much wrong with this, although people will be able to use it as ammunition.
They were campaigns, not parties.
Bettertogether was a campaign run by the the main Unionist parties that repeatedly and sanctimoniously disassociated itself from UKIP (and needless to say the even more noisome extremes of Union supporting British politics). How times change.
Given UKIP's lack of strength in Scotland, that was eminently sensible.
All were of the opinion the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary. I agree that it's a difficult area, and if I accepted the proposition that they saved millions of lives, I'd agree with you - but I don't.
They are not necessarily unbiased observers: some of the more traditionally-minded people mentioned (e.g. MacArthur) had other agendas.
I see little realistic proposition that the Japanese would have surrendered before mid-1946. Essentially another year of war and a couple of massively bloody invasions, plus more saturation bombing.
Then there's the question of whether the war would just have turned into an Iraq- or Syria-style insurgency.
Tough to describe LeMay (for example) as traditionally minded. And in any event, they represent most of the US senior military commanders, army. navy and airforce. I would put the likelihood of Japan's surrender within a month post Hiroshima, but without Nagasaki at around in the high 90%s. And it's not as though invasion would have happened in that timescale.
All were of the opinion the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary. I agree that it's a difficult area, and if I accepted the proposition that they saved millions of lives, I'd agree with you - but I don't.
They are not necessarily unbiased observers: some of the more traditionally-minded people mentioned (e.g. MacArthur) had other agendas.
I see little realistic proposition that the Japanese would have surrendered before mid-1946. Essentially another year of war and a couple of massively bloody invasions, plus more saturation bombing.
Then there's the question of whether the war would just have turned into an Iraq- or Syria-style insurgency.
Tough to describe LeMay (for example) as traditionally minded. And in any event, they represent most of the US senior military commanders, army. navy and airforce. I would put the likelihood of Japan's surrender within a month post Hiroshima, but without Nagasaki at around in the high 90%s. And it's not as though invasion would have happened in that timescale.
Look at MacArthur and the Inchon landings as an example of what I mean by 'traditional'. Commanders who have gone up through the ranks using traditional arms and strategy itching to use them.
If you're arguing that they might have surrendered after Hiroshima and without Nagasaki, that's more arguable, although I doubt it's as high as you claim. It also still involves one being dropped.
There are other facts. I’m with Eisenhower and Szilard (and even the sociopathic Curtis Lemay agreed) that the Hiroshima bomb was probably unnecessary; the destruction of Nagasaki was purely gratuitous.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_weber.html Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”…
…In an article that finally appeared
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor...
Snip
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies. But so were Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, etc, etc.
So Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, Admiral Leahy, James Forrestal, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 1946 report were all wrong then ?
What do you mean by 'wrong' in this context?
Do you believe the Japanese would have surrendered soon after August 15th if the bombs had not been dropped? How many more troops and civilians would have died every day the war had continued?
I find this a really interesting and difficult area. I don't like defending their use; but it's difficult to see a realistic alternative where fewer people would have died. Evidently you differ, and that's fair enough.
By August 1985 the Americans had demolished the Japaneses Navy and airforce and sunk 60% of their merchant fleet. The Army was strong, but a siege and bombardment of Japan over the winter of 1945-6 would have led to millions of deaths of Japanese from starvation and cold. It would have been like the 41 siege of Leningrard writ large.
Sorry to be so frankly brutal, but do you think Truman gave a stuff about your latter point? My understanding he was persuaded that the bomb would save 1000s of US marine lives and that was the important issue.
I expect not. A siege of Japan would have been the brutal prelude to a bloody invasion, but of course PresidentvTruman was considering American lives first.
The point that I was making was that the Atom bombs probably saved 10 times the number of Japanese lives as American. Wars rarely end prettily.
All were of the opinion the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary. I agree that it's a difficult area, and if I accepted the proposition that they saved millions of lives, I'd agree with you - but I don't.
They are not necessarily unbiased observers: some of the more traditionally-minded people mentioned (e.g. MacArthur) had other agendas.
I see little realistic proposition that the Japanese would have surrendered before mid-1946. Essentially another year of war and a couple of massively bloody invasions, plus more saturation bombing.
Then there's the question of whether the war would just have turned into an Iraq- or Syria-style insurgency.
When was the last Japanese soldier captured - 1974!
Comments
I'm hoping he does not continue on that trend, as history shows where it goes next.
My parents had very low gas pressure on Chrissy day, meaning the Turkey took a fair while longer to cook. But that's happened before.
You also need to differentiate between ones that occur because of lack of national supply and those that occur because of local infrastructure and supply issues, e.g. overloaded or malfunctioning substations.
Western Power Distribution says most are due to 'objects' causing short circuits at the substation. I think they mean animals and birds - which probably don't survive the experience.
National Grid has done a lot to prevent blackouts caused by too few power stations. Luckily domestic electricity consumption is 14% lower than in ~2005 - thank goodness for the EU and its energy efficiency legislation.
If you get several cuts a week, you're really being short-changed.
Mr. HYUFD, I'd still be shocked if she won.
If you are against torture in principle, then to be consistent you should also be a pacifist. Corbyn is consistent (but wrong in my opinion). May is simply inconsistent.
https://twitter.com/NationalTheatre/status/824908363221700608
So the growth rate can lie anywhere between 1.9 and 2.3% from the quarterly figures.
She does need to learn to move much more quickly though. These are not times for measured contemplation.
Though the other major objection with torture is it doesn't work so wouldn't save hundreds of lives.
There will also be several revisions to the GDP (and therefore the growth rate) coming down the line. It is marginally more likely they will lead to GDP being revised upwards, but we won't have truly final numbers until about September.
Old Holbornski
Migrants cost Germany 22 BILLION Euros in 2016. https://t.co/dA68v2vJE3
That's fine up to a point; I'll own to a frisson of pleasure that she's not as much a slave to the news cycle as Cameron or Blair, but it does make for a ponderous OODA loop.
After sleeping on it, my thought is it was a good, workmanlike speech from someone who is not a natural orator. Her last three speeches have all been pitched very well. I still think her Lancaster House speech was perfect from a negotiating perspective; she'll have to do something remarkable to better that.
8/10 would vote for her again.
I was appalled at her conference speech which was silly, offensive and strategically inept. She has made a whole set of unforced errors which have served Britain very badly. Belatedly, she seems to have made her mind up about what to do next. That's something.
It ain't me in bed with the Kippers!
(1+x+dx)(1+y+dy) = 1 +y + dy +x +xy +xdy +dx+ydx+dxdy and given x,y>0
=(1+y+x) + (xy+ xdy+ydx +dx +dy +dxdy) Now given dx,dy =-x/2,-y/2 (maximum -ve)
=(1+y+x) + (xy -xy/2 -xy/2 -x/2 -y/2 +xy/4)
=(1 +y +x) - x/2 - y/2 + xy/4
So the difference between adding and multiplying with maximum rounding is
-x/2 -y/2 +xy/4 - for small x,y we can ignore xy/4
= -1 (x+y)/2
Simples.
https://www.westernpower.co.uk/About-us/News-archive/£400,000-investment-in-Spilsby-power-network.aspx
Best advice is to complain. I told WPD that I thought four cuts per year was a bit much, given that my internet access depends on electricity and they didn't deny it. OFGEM have given all the companies targets to meet.
Con gain Bootle?
In the current smouldering assymetric war it is rather different, brutality can be self defeating. Insurrectionists need a sea of sympathisers to swim in. It is a very different situation.
Incidentally a failed state on the US southern border would not be in Americas interest.
Do you believe the Japanese would have surrendered soon after August 15th if the bombs had not been dropped? How many more troops and civilians would have died every day the war had continued?
I find this a really interesting and difficult area. I don't like defending their use; but it's difficult to see a realistic alternative where fewer people would have died. Evidently you differ, and that's fair enough.
But I am a consequentialist rather than an absolutist. It is the bad consequences that makes actions wrong. Your point about torture not working (if that's true) is a good argument against torture. But if it works, and saves lives, what is the objection?
I agree that it's a difficult area, and if I accepted the proposition that they saved millions of lives, I'd agree with you - but I don't.
They were campaigns, not parties.
Labour have no-one close to her at the moment.
I though May's speeches rather dull, full of visionless platitudes that told us very little that we didn't know already. She will look good next to Trump, because she is cautious enough to flatter his ego, but I will not expect too much.
NEW THREAD
https://www.radainbusiness.com/
Is The Apprentice now the most successful reality show of all time, with one POTUS and two members of the House of Lords?
I see little realistic proposition that the Japanese would have surrendered before mid-1946. Essentially another year of war and a couple of massively bloody invasions, plus more saturation bombing.
Then there's the question of whether the war would just have turned into an Iraq- or Syria-style insurgency.
I had to debug a regular IT failure on a farm at 6pm daily. Turned out the pole top transformer cut out briefly.
But I am not principled. I am a pragmatist. I judge each case on its merits - cost/benefit. So I am not against bombing civilians in principle. Nor am I against torture in principle. My objections would be practical (EDIT and emotional) and there may be cases when I would be in favour.
I would put the likelihood of Japan's surrender within a month post Hiroshima, but without Nagasaki at around in the high 90%s. And it's not as though invasion would have happened in that timescale.
If you're arguing that they might have surrendered after Hiroshima and without Nagasaki, that's more arguable, although I doubt it's as high as you claim. It also still involves one being dropped.
The point that I was making was that the Atom bombs probably saved 10 times the number of Japanese lives as American. Wars rarely end prettily.