Interesting to see a couple of airbourne tankers around Kabul. At a guess, they’re taking off with minimum fuel for a faster climb and/or more cargo, then taking on mission fuel airborne when clear of danger. Not something ever seen in civvy street operations!
One I was watching looked like it took off from Qatar.
His performance in the past few days has been very, very poor.
Should he have been in Kabul clearing the runway?
I do wonder what people think a British Foreign Secretary can do in this situation
He could have liaised with the UK Ambassador at the airport so they didn't swap out experienced consular staff for 18 yo squaddies handling visa applications for starters. Then he might have discussed matters with other G7 Foreign Secretaries to coordinate a more coherent response than we've had so far.....and I'm sure if he'd put his mind to it there are others (India, Pakistan, the Gulf States, for starters) who could have been useful interlocutors - but we're getting "deer in headlights" like we did when Johnson was in hospital.
The clown was probably looking up an atlas to find out where Afghanistan was.
This is pure anecdata but all my American friends who have expressed an opinion - and they are 100% anti-Trump, generally liberal - say they are ‘ashamed’ by the Afghan situation. That’s their word
Perhaps more interestingly, they are starting the conversation. eg ‘Are you watching the news from Afghanistan?’
This must hurt Biden? But my friends might be unrepresentative
Well, the situation is shaming. Western powers are leaving people in the lurch. Even if it's the least bad available option, it's shaming.
I'm kinda inclined to agree with Biden on this one and think that the greatest shame is that Afghans, with some exceptions, wouldn't fight for their own freedom from the Taliban.
This is not like the situation in Hong Kong, say, where they face the overwhelming might of the Chinese state. The Taliban have some outside assistance, they have unity of purpose, but they shouldn't have proven to be an irresistible foe for a country enjoying the invigorating impetus that generally comes with the achievement of freedom.
I think abandoning the Kurds in Syria to Turkey and Assad was far more shameful. I find it hard not to think that Biden is only doing what Obama should have done twelve years ago.
Tend to agree.
From the short snip I have seen of Biden justifying his position, he is coming across very hard-headed and unapologetic. I suspect his exasperation with Afghanistan and the Afghans (however wrong-headed) is shared by most Americans. He is putting America first.
I think Leon is wrong. This decision will do Biden no harm at all, and probably helps his chances of re-election.
Agree, I thought he came across very well last night and if still a basket case after 20 years and trillions spent , it was a total waste spending any more time on it for sure. Neither US or UK should be in countries with armies trying to prop up puppet governments.
I can think of one government I wish the UK would stop propping up with subsidy funding levels.
I can think of one government without the bottle to make it happen.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
I was looking at a company called Form Energy the other day, they may actually have some sort of feasible storage solution to the problem of intermittence with renewables.
It looks like New Zealand could have the same problem as Australia. They’re going into a national lockdown.
And we know with Delta the lockdown needs to be a lock people in their homes level or it won't work. It's shocking that advanced nation's like Australia and NZ are so far behind in their vaccination programmes. The next 6-12 months in those countries will look a lot like our March 2020 - April 2021.
Friends on Facebook were on a skiing holiday in Queenstown and are flying back to Wellington on Wednesday morning. I'm surprised that they're allowed to return home. I'd have thought the thing to do is ban all but essential travel.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
This is pure anecdata but all my American friends who have expressed an opinion - and they are 100% anti-Trump, generally liberal - say they are ‘ashamed’ by the Afghan situation. That’s their word
Perhaps more interestingly, they are starting the conversation. eg ‘Are you watching the news from Afghanistan?’
This must hurt Biden? But my friends might be unrepresentative
Well, the situation is shaming. Western powers are leaving people in the lurch. Even if it's the least bad available option, it's shaming.
I'm kinda inclined to agree with Biden on this one and think that the greatest shame is that Afghans, with some exceptions, wouldn't fight for their own freedom from the Taliban.
This is not like the situation in Hong Kong, say, where they face the overwhelming might of the Chinese state. The Taliban have some outside assistance, they have unity of purpose, but they shouldn't have proven to be an irresistible foe for a country enjoying the invigorating impetus that generally comes with the achievement of freedom.
I think abandoning the Kurds in Syria to Turkey and Assad was far more shameful. I find it hard not to think that Biden is only doing what Obama should have done twelve years ago.
Tend to agree.
From the short snip I have seen of Biden justifying his position, he is coming across very hard-headed and unapologetic. I suspect his exasperation with Afghanistan and the Afghans (however wrong-headed) is shared by most Americans. He is putting America first.
I think Leon is wrong. This decision will do Biden no harm at all, and probably helps his chances of re-election.
He is putting America first only if he thinks that being seen as an unreliable ally is not going to harm America. That remains to be seen.
The World has seen that the US is unreliable for a while, now.
This is pure anecdata but all my American friends who have expressed an opinion - and they are 100% anti-Trump, generally liberal - say they are ‘ashamed’ by the Afghan situation. That’s their word
Perhaps more interestingly, they are starting the conversation. eg ‘Are you watching the news from Afghanistan?’
This must hurt Biden? But my friends might be unrepresentative
Well, the situation is shaming. Western powers are leaving people in the lurch. Even if it's the least bad available option, it's shaming.
I'm kinda inclined to agree with Biden on this one and think that the greatest shame is that Afghans, with some exceptions, wouldn't fight for their own freedom from the Taliban.
This is not like the situation in Hong Kong, say, where they face the overwhelming might of the Chinese state. The Taliban have some outside assistance, they have unity of purpose, but they shouldn't have proven to be an irresistible foe for a country enjoying the invigorating impetus that generally comes with the achievement of freedom.
I think abandoning the Kurds in Syria to Turkey and Assad was far more shameful. I find it hard not to think that Biden is only doing what Obama should have done twelve years ago.
Tend to agree.
From the short snip I have seen of Biden justifying his position, he is coming across very hard-headed and unapologetic. I suspect his exasperation with Afghanistan and the Afghans (however wrong-headed) is shared by most Americans. He is putting America first.
I think Leon is wrong. This decision will do Biden no harm at all, and probably helps his chances of re-election.
Agree, I thought he came across very well last night and if still a basket case after 20 years and trillions spent , it was a total waste spending any more time on it for sure. Neither US or UK should be in countries with armies trying to prop up puppet governments.
I can think of one government I wish the UK would stop propping up with subsidy funding levels.
I can think of one government without the bottle to make it happen.
BJ, balls-ups not balls.
Bigger problem is SNP lack of bottle to call another vote, and Scottish people's lack of bottle to go it alone, but you can rest assured I heartily hope you get there eventually.
I've noticed a political divide in mask wearing. The wanky coffee places in and around Liverpool Street/Shoreditch are very pro mask and seem to be trying to hold on to the social distancing theatre. The people are not wearing masks or distancing in any sense. Normal places just seem to not care now. There is definitely a self righteousness wrt mask wearing in parts of London.
There is certainly an element of Mask wearing = political correctness. If I am correct, it is quite amusing that the trendy coffee places around shoreditch are now the epitomy of political correctness.
I've definetly noticed that young/trendy professional types have a tendency to stick with masks on trains etc, whereas older people tend to not bother (with certain exceptions).
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
Interesting to see a couple of airbourne tankers around Kabul. At a guess, they’re taking off with minimum fuel for a faster climb and/or more cargo, then taking on mission fuel airborne when clear of danger. Not something ever seen in civvy street operations!
Kabul airport is also probably out of fuel - and given the current circumstance it's probably better to get your fuel from known and trusted sources (i.e. what you arrived with and what you can get from the airbourne tankers after take off).
Yes, they’d want to minimise use of what’s a scare resource on the ground, and might be a target for insurgents. Better to be self-sufficient in the stuff.
That’s quite the operation the US Mil have got going on there.
You know how we keep being told how great the Swedes are and how horrible the Brits are?
Swedish staff left the embassy as their Afghan colleagues worked. Then, they refused to answer calls from the Afghan staff and even blocked their official email accounts. Left the country.
From Dutch newspaper @NRC : When Afghan employees of the Dutch embassy in Kabul arrived at the office on Sunday, they were flabbergasted to find that the Dutch had all left without telling them anything. They just left.
But didn't you know? The English are EVIL and every other country, whatever they've done wrong in the past, have learnt from their lessons and do nothing wrong. Germany in particular has learnt from its past, and has no racial issues at all. Oh no.
Even North Korea is a paragon of openness and culture compared to England.
No, no, no. That's all wrong.
Being abandoned by a properly cultured, decent country is far better than being evacuated by a bunch of evil, neon-fascist, imperialists.... like the English.
I am trying to imagine neon-fascists. The swastika in fluorescent lime green and orange?
I actually do something similar. Just 5 mins ahead. I find it useful particular in my car.
My wife does that with her alarm clock, it’s about 10 minutes fast and she reckons it gives her extra time in the morning - as opposed to taking her a second to realise it’s the wrong time, and hitting snooze once more.
The car clock adjusts itself from the RDS data stream, and I’m pretty much always looking at a computer or phone with ntp time. I make a point of keeping the (old-fashioned, mechanical) wristwatch adjusted to the phone time evey few days.
For someone like the PM it’s perhaps not a bad idea, as his movements are all carefully choreographed and involve others. It would be rude to keep people waiting.
I don’t have any difficulty being on time with the watch set correctly. If I set my watch wrongly, I’d just make an adjustment in my mind.
Having a PM that cannot be trusted to arrive on time without trying to kid himself by setting his watch wrongly is not a good look.
I don't mind other people being late - so long as it's just a few minutes - but I can't stand being late myself. This is more of a vice than a virtue, though, because the only way to avoid ever being late is to allow a big buffer in settling off, upshot being I'm absurdly early for most things.
Re the 'setting the watch wrong' trick, that'll only work if you don't know it's wrong. Haven't followed this particular piece of "Boris" myth-making nonsense but I'm assuming that's the idea. That his wife does this without telling him like he's some adolescent son to be managed.
Yes. I used to set my watch three minutes fast, but I found that I was continually adjusting for the inaccuracy, which made it pointless.
I then went through a phase of stubbornly sticking to GMT during the summer, but I've reverted to simply matching railway time as closely as possible.
No, none of these cute little time tricks make sense really. It just marches on at its one and only steady remorseless pace. Sorry Albert.
I have one, I'm not immune. When the clocks go back on a Sat/Sun I "save it" until the middle of Monday morning. Create an hour from nothing then, live it again, like a sort of temporal QE.
I like the fact it all happens automatically now. Pretty much. Down to a couple of items in the house that don't get their time via the internet...
My place is low tech. So I can choose what time it is.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
Interesting to see a couple of airbourne tankers around Kabul. At a guess, they’re taking off with minimum fuel for a faster climb and/or more cargo, then taking on mission fuel airborne when clear of danger. Not something ever seen in civvy street operations!
One I was watching looked like it took off from Qatar.
Yes, there’s a big US base there, from where most of their operation has been running. I’m in Dubai and can see the things flying overhead. Can sometimes hear them too! The UK ops are staging out of the UAE and Saudi, landing at Brize Norton.
This is pure anecdata but all my American friends who have expressed an opinion - and they are 100% anti-Trump, generally liberal - say they are ‘ashamed’ by the Afghan situation. That’s their word
Perhaps more interestingly, they are starting the conversation. eg ‘Are you watching the news from Afghanistan?’
This must hurt Biden? But my friends might be unrepresentative
Well, the situation is shaming. Western powers are leaving people in the lurch. Even if it's the least bad available option, it's shaming.
I'm kinda inclined to agree with Biden on this one and think that the greatest shame is that Afghans, with some exceptions, wouldn't fight for their own freedom from the Taliban.
This is not like the situation in Hong Kong, say, where they face the overwhelming might of the Chinese state. The Taliban have some outside assistance, they have unity of purpose, but they shouldn't have proven to be an irresistible foe for a country enjoying the invigorating impetus that generally comes with the achievement of freedom.
I think abandoning the Kurds in Syria to Turkey and Assad was far more shameful. I find it hard not to think that Biden is only doing what Obama should have done twelve years ago.
Tend to agree.
From the short snip I have seen of Biden justifying his position, he is coming across very hard-headed and unapologetic. I suspect his exasperation with Afghanistan and the Afghans (however wrong-headed) is shared by most Americans. He is putting America first.
I think Leon is wrong. This decision will do Biden no harm at all, and probably helps his chances of re-election.
Agree, I thought he came across very well last night and if still a basket case after 20 years and trillions spent , it was a total waste spending any more time on it for sure. Neither US or UK should be in countries with armies trying to prop up puppet governments.
I can think of one government I wish the UK would stop propping up with subsidy funding levels.
I can think of one government without the bottle to make it happen.
BJ, balls-ups not balls.
Bigger problem is SNP lack of bottle to call another vote, and Scottish people's lack of bottle to go it alone, but you can rest assured I heartily hope you get there eventually.
I shall let the the woad painted multitudes know that they have the hearty support of another right wing rando from Wangland. This might be the tipping point.
You know how we keep being told how great the Swedes are and how horrible the Brits are?
Swedish staff left the embassy as their Afghan colleagues worked. Then, they refused to answer calls from the Afghan staff and even blocked their official email accounts. Left the country.
From Dutch newspaper @NRC : When Afghan employees of the Dutch embassy in Kabul arrived at the office on Sunday, they were flabbergasted to find that the Dutch had all left without telling them anything. They just left.
But didn't you know? The English are EVIL and every other country, whatever they've done wrong in the past, have learnt from their lessons and do nothing wrong. Germany in particular has learnt from its past, and has no racial issues at all. Oh no.
Even North Korea is a paragon of openness and culture compared to England.
If those stories are true they are very depressing.
In their defence though, the Dutch / Swedes are unlikely to have anything like the military/diplomatic operation that the UK/US has (had) in Kabul. It is easier for the UK Ambassador to have taken the decision he has (to stay behind) when he is supported by thousands of British troops.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Blue Hydrogen is an environmental scam, it causes large releases of methane into the atmosphere which is bad and requires energy (which is still 60% from non-renewables) to crack it into base elements. Anyone proposing it as a solution to climate change is nothing more than a shyster.
On the energy for electrolysis, it would need a step change in our electricity generation. We'd have to scale the grid up by 3-4x our current capability to move to a hydrogen based infrastructure. That's something like £50-70bn in investment for offshore wind and tidal over the next 20 years to make it happen.
I don't think hydrogen will be a viable ecosystem until we have got a huge energy surplus which won't happen without a breakthrough in fusion or some other high density power source.
I actually do something similar. Just 5 mins ahead. I find it useful particular in my car.
My wife does that with her alarm clock, it’s about 10 minutes fast and she reckons it gives her extra time in the morning - as opposed to taking her a second to realise it’s the wrong time, and hitting snooze once more.
The car clock adjusts itself from the RDS data stream, and I’m pretty much always looking at a computer or phone with ntp time. I make a point of keeping the (old-fashioned, mechanical) wristwatch adjusted to the phone time evey few days.
For someone like the PM it’s perhaps not a bad idea, as his movements are all carefully choreographed and involve others. It would be rude to keep people waiting.
I don’t have any difficulty being on time with the watch set correctly. If I set my watch wrongly, I’d just make an adjustment in my mind.
Having a PM that cannot be trusted to arrive on time without trying to kid himself by setting his watch wrongly is not a good look.
I don't mind other people being late - so long as it's just a few minutes - but I can't stand being late myself. This is more of a vice than a virtue, though, because the only way to avoid ever being late is to allow a big buffer in settling off, upshot being I'm absurdly early for most things.
Re the 'setting the watch wrong' trick, that'll only work if you don't know it's wrong. Haven't followed this particular piece of "Boris" myth-making nonsense but I'm assuming that's the idea. That his wife does this without telling him like he's some adolescent son to be managed.
Yes. I used to set my watch three minutes fast, but I found that I was continually adjusting for the inaccuracy, which made it pointless.
I then went through a phase of stubbornly sticking to GMT during the summer, but I've reverted to simply matching railway time as closely as possible.
No, none of these cute little time tricks make sense really. It just marches on at its one and only steady remorseless pace. Sorry Albert.
I have one, I'm not immune. When the clocks go back on a Sat/Sun I "save it" until the middle of Monday morning. Create an hour from nothing then, live it again, like a sort of temporal QE.
My clock is the animals. They tell me when they need to eat, or go for a walk. Everything else is just fit in around that ... No need to adjust for Summer Time.
A life without clocks then. Quite like the sound of that. If I could find a way to do that without the animals aspect - difficult where I live - I probably would.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
Of course, we already have road pricing in the M6 toll, Dartmouth crossing, etc. And congestion charging is deeply unpopular, but we have it in a large swathe of Central London. Implementing this stuff in a piecemeal manner is very doable, if a government is willing to just do it and ignore the short term objections until it becomes a status quo people are used to. You could road price motorways I reckon, especially if you did it in pieces, without losing too many votes.
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
The Diadochi names are a bit pub hardman. Calling yourself "The Thunderbolt"?
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
Labour are a shambles. Even Raab's naive thinking over development aid is going to come back and bite us. The Taliban aren't to be trusted. Get everyone out, cut the aid and put sanctions on the Taliban and any country that treats with them.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
The key words there are 'so swiftly'.
The retaking appears to have been just a question of time.
.. retreat was only a matter of time. What is happening now is ghastly. Twenty years of dependency on lavish western taxpayers means that soldiers, interpreters, journalists, academics and aid workers are seeing friends threatened and killed. Years of assistance and training is at risk. A reputed trillion dollars of American money has been wasted. Britain alone has wasted £37bn.
How many times must it be drummed into British heads that the British empire is over? It is dead, finished, outdated, not to be repeated. Yet Boris Johnson has just sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Britain has no need, let alone right, to rule other countries, to “make the world a better place”. No soldier need die for it, let alone 454 British soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. The best Britain can now do is establish good relations with a new regime in Afghanistan – in liaison with Kabul’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran – to protect at least some of the good it has attempted to do this past 20 years. The world is not threatening Britain. Terrorism does not need state sponsors, nor will it be ended by state conquest.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
That is, apart from anybody reading the wikipedia page about what happened in 1996:
"On 26 September 1996, as the Taliban prepared for another major offensive, Massoud ordered a full retreat from Kabul to continue anti-Taliban resistance in the northeastern Hindu Kush mountains instead of engaging in street battles in Kabul. The Taliban entered Kabul on 27 September 1996 and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan."
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
The Diadochi names are a bit pub hardman. Calling yourself "The Thunderbolt"?
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
On the other hand, 'Vlad the Fairy' does not quite have the same impact as the pub hardman version.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
Mr. Malmesbury, he was briefly the most powerful man in the world. But also a bit of a treacherous imbecile, who manage to get himself offed by some marauding Celts/Gauls.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
The bigger question is how much support they have amongst the Pakistan Government in Islamabad. Are the Taliban again their proxies?
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
The Diadochi names are a bit pub hardman. Calling yourself "The Thunderbolt"?
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
On the other hand, 'Vlad the Fairy' does not quite have the same impact as the pub hardman version.
Not so sure - "Anyone wearing that hat is not afraid of anything" etc..
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
That is, apart from anybody reading the wikipedia page about what happened in 1996:
"On 26 September 1996, as the Taliban prepared for another major offensive, Massoud ordered a full retreat from Kabul to continue anti-Taliban resistance in the northeastern Hindu Kush mountains instead of engaging in street battles in Kabul. The Taliban entered Kabul on 27 September 1996 and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan."
Interesting what if re.Massoud if he hadn't been assassinated as an hors d'oeuvre to 9/11. He seemed almost uniquely capable of inspiring passion in his followers in the fight against the Taliban.
Mr. Malmesbury, he was briefly the most powerful man in the world. But also a bit of a treacherous imbecile, who manage to get himself offed by some marauding Celts/Gauls.
I liked the bit in "I Claudius" where he suggested that he was about to bring in an age of peace and love. After a wild 5 minutes.
Not too sure on the historicity of that, but.......
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
The Diadochi names are a bit pub hardman. Calling yourself "The Thunderbolt"?
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
I think modern monarchs have over generations discouraged sobriquets so they dont get remembered by history as another Charles the Fat.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
The key words there are 'so swiftly'.
The retaking appears to have been just a question of time.
Inference here is the best realistic outcome - ie the one hoped for - was a civil war in Afghanistan with the Taliban emerging victorious having had to really 'work for it'.
So cf what has actually happened, lots more bloodshed and destruction, and a country still in the hands of the Taliban.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
No but we should never have been aiming to set up a western liberal nirvana but a state that would have ensured terrorists and Al Qaeda never returned, which was the main reason we invaded.
If that meant putting warlords in charge not Ghani so be it, there could even have been a role for the Taliban if they promised to renounce Al Qaeda
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
The Diadochi names are a bit pub hardman. Calling yourself "The Thunderbolt"?
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
On the other hand, 'Vlad the Fairy' does not quite have the same impact as the pub hardman version.
Not so sure - "Anyone wearing that hat is not afraid of anything" etc..
One of our foals panicked and tried to jump out of her paddock. Being only half successful in that endeavour, she landed chest first on the fence post, taking out three boards. I renamed her Vlad. It stuck, to the extent that I can no longer remember her real name. (PS, she survived, incredibly, given the huge gash she gave herself, and is now a very nice and confident horse).
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
This is a bit of a canard. As that CIA vet says in the MSNBC interview (where he lacerates Biden) the Afghan army lost about 60,000 men in the last twenty years. Same as the USA in Vietnam
The problem was not cowardly Afghan troops on the ground, it was more widespread corruption, weak Afghan leadership and misplaced US strategies
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
We used to fill airships with it and that never went wrong at all.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
No but we should never have been aiming to set up a western liberal nirvana but a state that would have ensured terrorists and Al Qaeda never returned, which was the main reason we invaded.
If that meant putting warlords in charge not Ghani so be it, there could even have been a role for the Taliban if they promised to renounce Al Qaeda
The warlords *are* now in charge - mission accomplished!
Mr. Malmesbury, even Clodius (as in Milo and Clodius) is that, sort of (Joey rather than Joseph). His real name was Claudius, apparently, but he went for Clodius to make it sound more plebeian.
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
The Diadochi names are a bit pub hardman. Calling yourself "The Thunderbolt"?
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
On the other hand, 'Vlad the Fairy' does not quite have the same impact as the pub hardman version.
Was there not some Roman who was nicknamed for [edit] a nursery-euphemism for genitalia? But I can't remember if it was one of the Metelli or Licinii (perhaps).
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
No but we should never have been aiming to set up a western liberal nirvana but a state that would have ensured terrorists and Al Qaeda never returned, which was the main reason we invaded.
If that meant putting warlords in charge not Ghani so be it, there could even have been a role for the Taliban if they promised to renounce Al Qaeda
The warlords *are* now in charge - mission accomplished!
The Taliban are Islamic militants, not strictly tribal warlords like Dostum
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
We used to fill airships with it and that never went wrong at all.
Hydrogen was really the least of the problems with the airships.
An object the size of an office block which is neutrally buoyant and masses a few tons....
Labour are a shambles. Even Raab's naive thinking over development aid is going to come back and bite us. The Taliban aren't to be trusted. Get everyone out, cut the aid and put sanctions on the Taliban and any country that treats with them.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
The bigger question is how much support they have amongst the Pakistan Government in Islamabad. Are the Taliban again their proxies?
They are not just their proxies, but their creation. Part of the reason that the international response on Afghanistan has never coalesced. Pakistan is following its own agenda at odds with its erstwhile ally, the US. India is following a domestic policy whose sole aim is to undermine Pakistan's. China wants the US and India to fail, and the US and Russia are still playing the Great Game.
Tribalism can provide relatively stable government, but not with that much outside interference.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
Interesting take. Brexit - Trump - Taliban. Same theme, provincial vs metro with metro handed its ass. One hopes the trend stops here.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
Hydrogen is low-carbon? Well knock me down with a feather.
Also, doesn’t this turn your house into a ticking Hindenburg?
Unless you are operating a fusion reactor, yes, it's generally accepted that there is not a great deal of carbon in your average cylinder of hydrogen, before and after it is burnt. And it's perfectly possible to generate it without carbon (apart from the original plant construiction): renewable energy to electrolysis, for instance. But some of the methods being touted, oh my goodness me, lots and lots of carbon, not to mention greenhouse gases, as noted earlier in the discussion.
On point 2: quite so: it';d be like the good old days of the introduction of gas into the Victorian house, only more so.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
Interesting take. Brexit - Trump - Taliban. Same theme, provincial vs metro with metro handed its ass. One hopes the trend stops here.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
I simply don't know enough about Afghanistan to know whether this is true or not or whether the withdrawal of essential US air cover made it impossible or very difficult for the Afghans to fight effectively. And, once the withdrawal was announced and the deal with the Taliban made the US effectively made itself a lame duck ally and signalled to Afghanis that it was content for the Taliban to be in power. So why would anyone fight then.
But I find something frankly revolting in the way the US are justifying their actions which will have awful consequences for very many brave Afghanis by branding Afghanis cowards.
There is plenty of cowardice on display and quite a lot if it is coming from the US. Yesterday 56 schoolgirls were slaughtered. A female Afghani MP, interviewed yesterday on the Today programme, is staying to protect her people even though she knows the risks she faces. A female mayor is waiting for the knock on the door and expects to be killed.
How dare Biden call these people cowards.
Maybe the US should never have been in Afghanistan. But there are honourable ways of departing and dishonourable ones. Biden's apologia sought to justify the latter. Yuck.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
We used to fill airships with it and that never went wrong at all.
Hydrogen was really the least of the problems with the airships.
An object the size of an office block which is neutrally buoyant and masses a few tons....
Just taking off and landing was interesting, when you hjad to get the damned thing ijnto a hangar. And just parking them on a mast had its moments. Vide the USS Los Angeles - ended up parked vertically.
Labour are a shambles. Even Raab's naive thinking over development aid is going to come back and bite us. The Taliban aren't to be trusted. Get everyone out, cut the aid and put sanctions on the Taliban and any country that treats with them.
Sanctions on Saudi? Now you're talking.
Hasn't Raab said we have to be pragmatic about the Taliban and engage through “direct or indirect” means? Is the UK going to sanction itself?
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
Isn't "blue" Hydrogen CH4 + H2O ⇌ CO + 3 H2 ; & CO + H2O ⇌ CO2 + H2
Followed by the H2 piped to homes (Where it should burn cleanly to produce steam I'd guess)
And the burning of natural gas CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
Yup, blue hydrogen is a way for oil companies to market natural gas as a green energy solution. It's a scam.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
This is a bit of a canard. As that CIA vet says in the MSNBC interview (where he lacerates Biden) the Afghan army lost about 60,000 men in the last twenty years. Same as the USA in Vietnam
The problem was not cowardly Afghan troops on the ground, it was more widespread corruption, weak Afghan leadership and misplaced US strategies
I'm always loath to call other people cowards. Would we call Cambodians cowards, in 1975, for example? There's plenty of evidence that the Afghan army would fight, if they believed they were not being left in the lurch. Even the very best army will fall apart if they don't think those at the top have the will to lead them.
And, as I said, the USA cut the legs from under the counter-insurgency strategy which they had been trained to pursue.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
Isn't "blue" Hydrogen CH4 + H2O ⇌ CO + 3 H2 ; & CO + H2O ⇌ CO2 + H2
Followed by the H2 piped to homes (Where it should burn cleanly to produce steam I'd guess)
And the burning of natural gas CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O
CO2 output looks about the same to me.
But there is energy required in the first process which is at least 30-40% fossil fuel derived.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
Hydrogen is low-carbon? Well knock me down with a feather.
Also, doesn’t this turn your house into a ticking Hindenburg?
Any more than natural gas does?
Hydrogen will leak through some materials - much smaller molecules. Then there is the fun fun fun of hydrogen embrittlement.
So to start with, you'd need to qualify the domestic pipework for hydrogen. Well, since you can't test with a molecule as small as hydrogen, the standard method for doing hydrogen safe piping is to build it as hydrogen safe (materials/methods) in the first place. *Then* you can do a a pressure test.
Not sure that evacuate the premises while we pressurise your gas plumbing is gong to be a win win. Even if you leave out the bit about riping all the existing pipework out.
I think Starmer will perform significantly better than most think and has a good chance at being PM of a minority Government. My view is he would be a lot better at that than LOTO
He will not get anywhere near office so we will never know.
He's a lot more popular than Corbyn
I would rather suggest that he isn't as aggressively unpopular as Corbyn was, with a large chunk of the electorate.
Outside of a portion of Maomentum, Starmer isn't disliked, from what I can see in polling.
He needs to come up with a pitch as to why people should vote *for* him, though.
I concede.
But this a much better starting point than Corbyn, Ed M
Jeremy Corbyn went quickly from loved in 2017 to hated in 2019 and CCHQ will be hoping – and certainly planning – to effect the same transformation on the current leader. Soon after Starmer was elected, there were a number of posts here and elsewhere blaming his time as DPP for failure to prosecute or pursue various ne'er-do-wells and these may have been trial runs.
Interestingly, his opponents on the ultra-left in the Labour party are trying to use his time in DPP to make him out to be some kind of heartless oppressor of the poor/minorities.
There is only one area in the DPP thing that could really hurt him - but I don't think that he would have been stupid enough to be connected to it.
The “Rotherham problem”, or Jimmy Savile?
It does not really matter if Starmer was involved or not. If the suggestion is made on social media, under the radar, who will even know to refute it?
Unlike you to be so cynical. I think it does actually matter whether Starmer was involved or not. It would be nice to focus on the truth.
Lots of things should matter: few things do. I expect CCHQ's fact-checking service will give them a clean bill of health.
Yes, I know. I'm old-fashioned and naive, I guess. I'd rather follow Michelle Obama's edict, though: when they go low, we should go high.
Better in the long run. The eventual win counts for more then. The mandate is stronger. It's tempting to give some back, though, it really is. Eg the "Johnson Variant". Not great, but I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't hoping it would take off, like the "Surrender Act" did. But of course it didn't. In which case it's perhaps best not to go there in the 1st place.
Johnson variant was incredibly school playground stuff. If you are trying to portray yourself as the serious grown up professional, its totally off brand.
I agree. Almost as childish as calling Starmer Gordon Brittas.
Or Captain Hindsight? But why does this get a pass from that user?
That's exactly the point....Boris use of this, like it or not, is his brand. Starmer is trying to cast himself as exactly the opposite. Vote for me, the grown up serious slightly dull politician who doesn't resort to funny names..Mr Forensic Detail.
And then he does the silly wallpaper stunt and the Johnson variant. And its totally off brand. Where as Boris driving a JCB through a wall, is absolutely him.
But is Johnson as authentic as you claim? The Benny Hill salute tells me it is all a lie.
I am not claiming authentic, I said its a brand.....the reality of many brands aren't quite what they like to project via their PR / advertising.
He's a serious politician, not a can of baked beans surely?
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
I simply don't know enough about Afghanistan to know whether this is true or not or whether the withdrawal of essential US air cover made it impossible or very difficult for the Afghans to fight effectively. And, once the withdrawal was announced and the deal with the Taliban made the US effectively made itself a lame duck ally and signalled to Afghanis that it was content for the Taliban to be in power. So why would anyone fight then.
But I find something frankly revolting in the way the US are justifying their actions which will have awful consequences for very many brave Afghanis by branding Afghanis cowards.
There is plenty of cowardice on display and quite a lot if it is coming from the US. Yesterday 56 schoolgirls were slaughtered. A female Afghani MP, interviewed yesterday on the Today programme, is staying to protect her people even though she knows the risks she faces. A female mayor is waiting for the knock on the door and expects to be killed.
How dare Biden call these people cowards.
Maybe the US should never have been in Afghanistan. But there are honourable ways of departing and dishonourable ones. Biden's apologia sought to justify the latter. Yuck.
Yes. Fuck Biden. 60,000 Afghans died in the army the US trained; in the same 20 years about 2,000 Americans died. That is not cowardice
.. retreat was only a matter of time. What is happening now is ghastly. Twenty years of dependency on lavish western taxpayers means that soldiers, interpreters, journalists, academics and aid workers are seeing friends threatened and killed. Years of assistance and training is at risk. A reputed trillion dollars of American money has been wasted. Britain alone has wasted £37bn.
How many times must it be drummed into British heads that the British empire is over? It is dead, finished, outdated, not to be repeated. Yet Boris Johnson has just sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Britain has no need, let alone right, to rule other countries, to “make the world a better place”. No soldier need die for it, let alone 454 British soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. The best Britain can now do is establish good relations with a new regime in Afghanistan – in liaison with Kabul’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran – to protect at least some of the good it has attempted to do this past 20 years. The world is not threatening Britain. Terrorism does not need state sponsors, nor will it be ended by state conquest.
" A far away country of which we know little of nothing". Simon Jenkins is at least consistent in advocating a policy of total non-resistance in the face of aggression.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
No but we should never have been aiming to set up a western liberal nirvana but a state that would have ensured terrorists and Al Qaeda never returned, which was the main reason we invaded.
If that meant putting warlords in charge not Ghani so be it, there could even have been a role for the Taliban if they promised to renounce Al Qaeda
Yes - that is all very well. But how do you ensure that a country does not allow terrorists to operate from its territory? What kind of state can reliably ensure this? That is the problem.
Look at where terrorism arises and you will see that they are all - pretty much - failed or authoritarian states. So what do you do then?
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
I simply don't know enough about Afghanistan to know whether this is true or not or whether the withdrawal of essential US air cover made it impossible or very difficult for the Afghans to fight effectively. And, once the withdrawal was announced and the deal with the Taliban made the US effectively made itself a lame duck ally and signalled to Afghanis that it was content for the Taliban to be in power. So why would anyone fight then.
But I find something frankly revolting in the way the US are justifying their actions which will have awful consequences for very many brave Afghanis by branding Afghanis cowards.
There is plenty of cowardice on display and quite a lot if it is coming from the US. Yesterday 56 schoolgirls were slaughtered. A female Afghani MP, interviewed yesterday on the Today programme, is staying to protect her people even though she knows the risks she faces. A female mayor is waiting for the knock on the door and expects to be killed.
How dare Biden call these people cowards.
Maybe the US should never have been in Afghanistan. But there are honourable ways of departing and dishonourable ones. Biden's apologia sought to justify the latter. Yuck.
Yes. Fuck Biden. 60,000 Afghans died in the army the US trained; in the same 20 years about 2,000 Americans died. That is not cowardice
Brave soldiers wont win the day if poorly led and supported. I've no way of knowing what the average Afghan soldier thinks about anything, but that they were not capable of stemming the tide, for whatever reason, says a lot about the Afghan leadership and western efforts, regardless of the uncomfortable extent of pro Taliban (or insufficient anti taliban) sentiments among the wider population. Some if the soldiers will have been fighting the war for decades, that's not for the faint hearted.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
Why? Is hydrogen significantly more dangerous than natural gas?
I refer the Hon Member to the other replies: leakier, leaks through stuff that is OK with gas, damages the piping till it breaks.
Don't know if it's that much more or less explosive than methane, but engineers seem very, very wary of it. For another thing, you can't see a hydrogen flame in daylight. So that's another advantage of gas (for cooking) down the drain.
If I had the choice of leccy or H2 it'd be electricity any day, until I was quite sure how things were going. The saga of the smart meter doesnt' exactly fill me with hope, either.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
This is a bit of a canard. As that CIA vet says in the MSNBC interview (where he lacerates Biden) the Afghan army lost about 60,000 men in the last twenty years. Same as the USA in Vietnam
The problem was not cowardly Afghan troops on the ground, it was more widespread corruption, weak Afghan leadership and misplaced US strategies
Also it's not as simple here as the people fighting (or not) for their country. This supposes an external foreign enemy with designs on invasion and occupation. The Taliban are not really that.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
Hydrogen is low-carbon? Well knock me down with a feather.
Also, doesn’t this turn your house into a ticking Hindenburg?
Any more than natural gas does?
Much more flammable.
Both have a NFPA 704 flammability rating of 4, I believe.
That doesn't seem like a useful scale for comparing their relative flammability. In fact, it doesn't seem like a scale at all since rating 3 is for solids and liquids. Hydrogen can ignite at much lower levels than natural gas.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
This is a bit of a canard. As that CIA vet says in the MSNBC interview (where he lacerates Biden) the Afghan army lost about 60,000 men in the last twenty years. Same as the USA in Vietnam
The problem was not cowardly Afghan troops on the ground, it was more widespread corruption, weak Afghan leadership and misplaced US strategies
I'm always loath to call other people cowards. Would we call Cambodians cowards, in 1975, for example? There's plenty of evidence that the Afghan army would fight, if they believed they were not being left in the lurch. Even the very best army will fall apart if they don't think those at the top have the will to lead them.
And, as I said, the USA cut the legs from under the counter-insurgency strategy which they had been trained to pursue.
Accusations launched at others are often very accurate descriptions of those making the accusations. So it is here. It is a nasty dishonourable meme being developed by the US against Afghans. It is America which is being cowardly and unreliable. So be it. The rest of us - not just Afghanistan - will have to adjust our plans accordingly. This may not go well for America.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
Do you have ANY evidence of this? I'm not saying it is definitely untrue, but I have seen no proof
Violent revolutionary movements can seize countries very quickly even with limited support, if the populace is sufficiently indifferent/scared/despairing, and likewise the defending forces
When the USA said "We're quitting" I imagine a lot of Afghans shrugged in helplessness and gave up. That does not mean they actually wanted the Taliban bastards back
The Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia with lightning speed, not because they were massively popular (they had some modest rural support) but because the Cambodian people were numbed into submission by horrible American bombing, roiled politics, endless chaos with neighbouring Vietnam, and the resultant refugee flows
This is pure anecdata but all my American friends who have expressed an opinion - and they are 100% anti-Trump, generally liberal - say they are ‘ashamed’ by the Afghan situation. That’s their word
Perhaps more interestingly, they are starting the conversation. eg ‘Are you watching the news from Afghanistan?’
This must hurt Biden? But my friends might be unrepresentative
Well, the situation is shaming. Western powers are leaving people in the lurch. Even if it's the least bad available option, it's shaming.
I'm kinda inclined to agree with Biden on this one and think that the greatest shame is that Afghans, with some exceptions, wouldn't fight for their own freedom from the Taliban.
This is not like the situation in Hong Kong, say, where they face the overwhelming might of the Chinese state. The Taliban have some outside assistance, they have unity of purpose, but they shouldn't have proven to be an irresistible foe for a country enjoying the invigorating impetus that generally comes with the achievement of freedom.
I think abandoning the Kurds in Syria to Turkey and Assad was far more shameful. I find it hard not to think that Biden is only doing what Obama should have done twelve years ago.
Tend to agree.
From the short snip I have seen of Biden justifying his position, he is coming across very hard-headed and unapologetic. I suspect his exasperation with Afghanistan and the Afghans (however wrong-headed) is shared by most Americans. He is putting America first.
I think Leon is wrong. This decision will do Biden no harm at all, and probably helps his chances of re-election.
He is putting America first only if he thinks that being seen as an unreliable ally is not going to harm America. That remains to be seen.
There must be many governments right now, nominally Western allies, who are looking at the US, then back at China, then back at the US. And thinking, hmmmm.
Faced with the challenge of Coronavirus, cornerstone Western governments are adopting Chinese Communist Party policies wholesale
Strict lockdowns. Movement tracing. Restricted travel. Medical status-based freedoms. Arbitrary undemocratic policy-making.
Areas trying to adopt 'Western' solutions to problems are excoriated by the press in these countries.
How can we expect third party countries to follow a philosophy we have abandoned ourselves? All the ideas are coming from China. Where are our ideas? we have none.
And then when the crisis is over removing the same restrictions. At the moment for me the only restrictions are mask wearing, which I do at work as asked by the Uni and in Waitrose as they politely asked too. I think you are trying too hard to make the facts fit your narrative.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
Why? Is hydrogen significantly more dangerous than natural gas?
I refer the Hon Member to the other replies: leakier, leaks through stuff that is OK with gas, damages the piping till it breaks.
Don't know if it's that much more or less explosive than methane, but engineers seem very, very wary of it. For another thing, you can't see a hydrogen flame in daylight. So that's another advantage of gas (for cooking) down the drain.
If I had the choice of leccy or H2 it'd be electricity any day, until I was quite sure how things were going. The saga of the smart meter doesnt' exactly fill me with hope, either.
BritishVolt which looked very much like an investor scamming exercise has taken another step towards legitimacy by taking a large investment from Glencore in return for supply guarantees. I know there's a lot of scepticism over whether they will actually ever deliver a product but I am definitely becoming more convinced that they will.
What do you make of the government looking to push hydrogen?
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
Hydrogen - essentially, yes. The Hydrogen Economy thing just punts the "where to we get hydrogen from bit?" way down the road...
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
And the oil companies like it. Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production. And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
And lest we forget, hydrogen is entirely safe as long as you remember it is insanely dangerous....
I did blink at the implications of piping hydrogen into, say, my house when I saw this:
Why? Is hydrogen significantly more dangerous than natural gas?
I refer the Hon Member to the other replies: leakier, leaks through stuff that is OK with gas, damages the piping till it breaks.
Don't know if it's that much more or less explosive than methane, but engineers seem very, very wary of it. For another thing, you can't see a hydrogen flame in daylight. So that's another advantage of gas (for cooking) down the drain.
If I had the choice of leccy or H2 it'd be electricity any day, until I was quite sure how things were going. The saga of the smart meter doesnt' exactly fill me with hope, either.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
I simply don't know enough about Afghanistan to know whether this is true or not or whether the withdrawal of essential US air cover made it impossible or very difficult for the Afghans to fight effectively. And, once the withdrawal was announced and the deal with the Taliban made the US effectively made itself a lame duck ally and signalled to Afghanis that it was content for the Taliban to be in power. So why would anyone fight then.
But I find something frankly revolting in the way the US are justifying their actions which will have awful consequences for very many brave Afghanis by branding Afghanis cowards.
There is plenty of cowardice on display and quite a lot if it is coming from the US. Yesterday 56 schoolgirls were slaughtered. A female Afghani MP, interviewed yesterday on the Today programme, is staying to protect her people even though she knows the risks she faces. A female mayor is waiting for the knock on the door and expects to be killed.
How dare Biden call these people cowards.
Maybe the US should never have been in Afghanistan. But there are honourable ways of departing and dishonourable ones. Biden's apologia sought to justify the latter. Yuck.
Afghanistan as an entity has never been a unitary state. At best, it was a collection of fiefdoms paying tribute to a titular king. To the extent that rural Afghans have an identity, it is to family and tribe, rather than state.
That being the case, it is very hard to imagine what would inspire these people to fight for the state. Fight for the tribe, yes. Accept (as inevitable) any deal brokered by their tribal leaders with the Taliban, US, Kabul government, Russian, Iranians {insert your preferred third party here}, yes. Describing choices made in these contexts as brave or cowardly is meaningless.
Biden's key and most telling point was 'another 5, 10 or 20 years would make no difference'. That being the case, withdrawal is the only honest option - and the only option that is defensible to the members of our armed forces and their families. But I agree, there are honourable and dishonourable ways to withdraw. And this does not feel honourable.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
I simply don't know enough about Afghanistan to know whether this is true or not or whether the withdrawal of essential US air cover made it impossible or very difficult for the Afghans to fight effectively. And, once the withdrawal was announced and the deal with the Taliban made the US effectively made itself a lame duck ally and signalled to Afghanis that it was content for the Taliban to be in power. So why would anyone fight then.
But I find something frankly revolting in the way the US are justifying their actions which will have awful consequences for very many brave Afghanis by branding Afghanis cowards.
There is plenty of cowardice on display and quite a lot if it is coming from the US. Yesterday 56 schoolgirls were slaughtered. A female Afghani MP, interviewed yesterday on the Today programme, is staying to protect her people even though she knows the risks she faces. A female mayor is waiting for the knock on the door and expects to be killed.
How dare Biden call these people cowards.
Maybe the US should never have been in Afghanistan. But there are honourable ways of departing and dishonourable ones. Biden's apologia sought to justify the latter. Yuck.
Not just that.
Very very few of us alive in Western Europe today have been put in the sort of situation where our courage has been tested like that. That's a blessing we should all be thankful for. But given a choice between resisting ruthless killers and keeping my head down, I don't know what I would do- even thinking about my tweenage daughters watching Frozen in the next room. I might hope, but I can't know. And two things follow from that;
The first is to be grateful that I live here and now.
The second is to never condemn those who have been tested and found wanting.
It was impossible to predict the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so swiftly after the withdrawal of international troops, Dominic Raab has said, arguing “no one saw this coming”.
Hah
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
Interesting take. Brexit - Trump - Taliban. Same theme, provincial vs metro with metro handed its ass. One hopes the trend stops here.
It stopped in the US at the last election
I thought so and on balance I still do. But Trump at 7/1 for winning back power is a worry. I think it's a lay but it's a betting opportunity I'd rather not have.
A country is only as strong as the willingness of the people of that country to fight for it. It seems like ordinary Afghans weren't interested in fighting for the country the Americans and other western nations had been attempting to set up for the last 20 years.
This is a bit of a canard. As that CIA vet says in the MSNBC interview (where he lacerates Biden) the Afghan army lost about 60,000 men in the last twenty years. Same as the USA in Vietnam
The problem was not cowardly Afghan troops on the ground, it was more widespread corruption, weak Afghan leadership and misplaced US strategies
Cowardly doesn't come into it. We've been training half the country for a fight to the death with their countrymen, set them up with weapons and equipment, then said "we're off now...on you go and have that big war we've been training you for; with luck you'll hold them off for a year or so".
They've avoided a lot of bloodshed and grief by sensibly not sticking to the US-written script.
This is pure anecdata but all my American friends who have expressed an opinion - and they are 100% anti-Trump, generally liberal - say they are ‘ashamed’ by the Afghan situation. That’s their word
Perhaps more interestingly, they are starting the conversation. eg ‘Are you watching the news from Afghanistan?’
This must hurt Biden? But my friends might be unrepresentative
Well, the situation is shaming. Western powers are leaving people in the lurch. Even if it's the least bad available option, it's shaming.
I'm kinda inclined to agree with Biden on this one and think that the greatest shame is that Afghans, with some exceptions, wouldn't fight for their own freedom from the Taliban.
This is not like the situation in Hong Kong, say, where they face the overwhelming might of the Chinese state. The Taliban have some outside assistance, they have unity of purpose, but they shouldn't have proven to be an irresistible foe for a country enjoying the invigorating impetus that generally comes with the achievement of freedom.
I think abandoning the Kurds in Syria to Turkey and Assad was far more shameful. I find it hard not to think that Biden is only doing what Obama should have done twelve years ago.
Tend to agree.
From the short snip I have seen of Biden justifying his position, he is coming across very hard-headed and unapologetic. I suspect his exasperation with Afghanistan and the Afghans (however wrong-headed) is shared by most Americans. He is putting America first.
I think Leon is wrong. This decision will do Biden no harm at all, and probably helps his chances of re-election.
He is putting America first only if he thinks that being seen as an unreliable ally is not going to harm America. That remains to be seen.
There must be many governments right now, nominally Western allies, who are looking at the US, then back at China, then back at the US. And thinking, hmmmm.
Faced with the challenge of Coronavirus, cornerstone Western governments are adopting Chinese Communist Party policies wholesale
Strict lockdowns. Movement tracing. Restricted travel. Medical status-based freedoms. Arbitrary undemocratic policy-making.
Areas trying to adopt 'Western' solutions to problems are excoriated by the press in these countries.
How can we expect third party countries to follow a philosophy we have abandoned ourselves? All the ideas are coming from China. Where are our ideas? we have none.
And then when the crisis is over removing the same restrictions. At the moment for me the only restrictions are mask wearing, which I do at work as asked by the Uni and in Waitrose as they politely asked too. I think you are trying too hard to make the facts fit your narrative.
Besides which, contrarian is wrong. All those pandemic policies he describes originated from renaissance Venice, not communist China.
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45201308
EDIT: That report also contains the dread phrase
"Last month, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson announced...."
If you ever wondered what gave the Taliban such great hope to wait it out....
BJ, balls-ups not balls.
I don't know a massive amount of this, but my understanding is the tech to efficiently produce hydrogen doesn't exist and a lot of this will come from either processing natural gas and / or requires incredible amounts of energy.
I've definetly noticed that young/trendy professional types have a tendency to stick with masks on trains etc, whereas older people tend to not bother (with certain exceptions).
The Diadochi were very good for nicknames. Antigonus the One-eyed, Demetrius the Besieger, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt, Seleucus the Victor etc.
That’s quite the operation the US Mil have got going on there.
There is a faction in the civil service that has been pushing hydrogen for years - because of concerns about vehicle taxation and (the related) control of road usage.
Hydrogen would be much easier to tax..... At the moment, the polling show that road pricing is electorally incredibly toxic.
In their defence though, the Dutch / Swedes are unlikely to have anything like the military/diplomatic operation that the UK/US has (had) in Kabul. It is easier for the UK Ambassador to have taken the decision he has (to stay behind) when he is supported by thousands of British troops.
On the energy for electrolysis, it would need a step change in our electricity generation. We'd have to scale the grid up by 3-4x our current capability to move to a hydrogen based infrastructure. That's something like £50-70bn in investment for offshore wind and tidal over the next 20 years to make it happen.
I don't think hydrogen will be a viable ecosystem until we have got a huge energy surplus which won't happen without a breakthrough in fusion or some other high density power source.
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1427614188214624262?s=20
Whereas only a real hardcase would allow himself to get called "Little Boots" down the battlecruiser.
The retaking appears to have been just a question of time.
How many times must it be drummed into British heads that the British empire is over? It is dead, finished, outdated, not to be repeated. Yet Boris Johnson has just sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Britain has no need, let alone right, to rule other countries, to “make the world a better place”. No soldier need die for it, let alone 454 British soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. The best Britain can now do is establish good relations with a new regime in Afghanistan – in liaison with Kabul’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran – to protect at least some of the good it has attempted to do this past 20 years. The world is not threatening Britain. Terrorism does not need state sponsors, nor will it be ended by state conquest.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/20-years-invasion-afghanistan-unnecessary-post-imperial-fantasy
"On 26 September 1996, as the Taliban prepared for another major offensive, Massoud ordered a full retreat from Kabul to continue anti-Taliban resistance in the northeastern Hindu Kush mountains instead of engaging in street battles in Kabul. The Taliban entered Kabul on 27 September 1996 and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan."
Other than that, it's a niche product until/unless we come up with vastly improved catalysts for electrolytic production.
And in any event, it will quite likely be more economical to produce methane etc from water & CO2 as a means of storing renewable energy than it will hydrogen.
Taxing hydrogen is an utter non starter given how expensive it's likely to be in the first place.
The speed of the Taliban takeover points to massive tacit support for the group amongst ordinary afghans. All the great and the good in Kabul hated them. But outside of Kabul and the Panshjr valley they probably had as much support as Trump did in rural USA.
Not too sure on the historicity of that, but.......
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/17/uk-homes-low-carbon-hydrogen-economy-jobs
So cf what has actually happened, lots more bloodshed and destruction, and a country still in the hands of the Taliban.
Odd sort of calculus, on the face of it.
If that meant putting warlords in charge not Ghani so be it, there could even have been a role for the Taliban if they promised to renounce Al Qaeda
The problem was not cowardly Afghan troops on the ground, it was more widespread corruption, weak Afghan leadership and misplaced US strategies
'Prince Harry and Meghan Markle break silence on Afghanistan to say they are speechless'
https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/1427617968872169475?s=20
Also, doesn’t this turn your house into a ticking Hindenburg?
An object the size of an office block which is neutrally buoyant and masses a few tons....
Now you're talking.
Tribalism can provide relatively stable government, but not with that much outside interference.
On point 2: quite so: it';d be like the good old days of the introduction of gas into the Victorian house, only more so.
But I find something frankly revolting in the way the US are justifying their actions which will have awful consequences for very many brave Afghanis by branding Afghanis cowards.
There is plenty of cowardice on display and quite a lot if it is coming from the US. Yesterday 56 schoolgirls were slaughtered. A female Afghani MP, interviewed yesterday on the Today programme, is staying to protect her people even though she knows the risks she faces. A female mayor is waiting for the knock on the door and expects to be killed.
How dare Biden call these people cowards.
Maybe the US should never have been in Afghanistan. But there are honourable ways of departing and dishonourable ones. Biden's apologia sought to justify the latter. Yuck.
https://www.airships.net/blog/category/los-angeles/ (not a fake photo: it did happen)
CH4 + H2O ⇌ CO + 3 H2 ; &
CO + H2O ⇌ CO2 + H2
Followed by the H2 piped to homes (Where it should burn cleanly to produce steam I'd guess)
And the burning of natural gas
CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O
CO2 output looks about the same to me.
And, as I said, the USA cut the legs from under the counter-insurgency strategy which they had been trained to pursue.
So to start with, you'd need to qualify the domestic pipework for hydrogen. Well, since you can't test with a molecule as small as hydrogen, the standard method for doing hydrogen safe piping is to build it as hydrogen safe (materials/methods) in the first place. *Then* you can do a a pressure test.
Not sure that evacuate the premises while we pressurise your gas plumbing is gong to be a win win. Even if you leave out the bit about riping all the existing pipework out.
Why? Is hydrogen significantly more dangerous than natural gas?
Constantine Copronymus apparently means Constant Dung-named, which isn't great.
Look at where terrorism arises and you will see that they are all - pretty much - failed or authoritarian states. So what do you do then?
That is the dilemma to which there is no obvious or simple answer. Rory Stewart has tried to give one here - https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/08/16/afghanistan-biden-withdrawal-military/.
Don't know if it's that much more or less explosive than methane, but engineers seem very, very wary of it. For another thing, you can't see a hydrogen flame in daylight. So that's another advantage of gas (for cooking) down the drain.
If I had the choice of leccy or H2 it'd be electricity any day, until I was quite sure how things were going. The saga of the smart meter doesnt' exactly fill me with hope, either.
https://h2tools.org/bestpractices/hydrogen-flames
https://twitter.com/WoobieTuesday/status/1427367786544713729?s=20
Violent revolutionary movements can seize countries very quickly even with limited support, if the populace is sufficiently indifferent/scared/despairing, and likewise the defending forces
When the USA said "We're quitting" I imagine a lot of Afghans shrugged in helplessness and gave up. That does not mean they actually wanted the Taliban bastards back
The Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia with lightning speed, not because they were massively popular (they had some modest rural support) but because the Cambodian people were numbed into submission by horrible American bombing, roiled politics, endless chaos with neighbouring Vietnam, and the resultant refugee flows
Not unlike Afghanistan, in fact
That is despite her being the last person in the room with Biden when the policy and position was agreed
That being the case, it is very hard to imagine what would inspire these people to fight for the state. Fight for the tribe, yes. Accept (as inevitable) any deal brokered by their tribal leaders with the Taliban, US, Kabul government, Russian, Iranians {insert your preferred third party here}, yes. Describing choices made in these contexts as brave or cowardly is meaningless.
Biden's key and most telling point was 'another 5, 10 or 20 years would make no difference'. That being the case, withdrawal is the only honest option - and the only option that is defensible to the members of our armed forces and their families. But I agree, there are honourable and dishonourable ways to withdraw. And this does not feel honourable.
Very very few of us alive in Western Europe today have been put in the sort of situation where our courage has been tested like that. That's a blessing we should all be thankful for. But given a choice between resisting ruthless killers and keeping my head down, I don't know what I would do- even thinking about my tweenage daughters watching Frozen in the next room. I might hope, but I can't know. And two things follow from that;
The first is to be grateful that I live here and now.
The second is to never condemn those who have been tested and found wanting.
They've avoided a lot of bloodshed and grief by sensibly not sticking to the US-written script.