One (or perhaps more) Qatari mil C17 just crossed into the ‘Stan, looks to be headed straight for Kabul.
Doing a u-turn just past Kandahar.
I find it fascinating that military aircraft appear on FlightRadar24.
I assume that FR24 is mainly picking up transponder information... but military aircraft presumably don't always go around squawking their presence to all and sundry?
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
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.
The more I think about Afghanistan the worse it feels. A moral disaster
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
Not unlike Afghanistan, in fact
The extent of Taliban support seems hard to gauge. I doubt its even close to a majority, since fear and disunity can enable a minority to dominate, as you note.
That said, maintaining cohesiveness and effectiveness (not without splits orvups and downs admittedly) for 20 years after being ousted, most of that time on the back foot, improving their position in recent years and now retaling the country so swiftly suggests at least a significant level of genuine support. It's not like some fresh faced revolutionary group shocking their way through in a short period, it's in essence been an ongoing war and sustaining that fir so long ain't easy.
One wonders what would have happened had Mullah Omar not died of natural causes, would he be restored to position?
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.
One hundred percent agree. When the Russians made accusations in negotiations about Western intent, I always took that as a clear sign of what Russian intent was.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
One (or perhaps more) Qatari mil C17 just crossed into the ‘Stan, looks to be headed straight for Kabul.
Doing a u-turn just past Kandahar.
I find it fascinating that military aircraft appear on FlightRadar24.
I assume that FR24 is mainly picking up transponder information... but military aircraft presumably don't always go around squawking their presence to all and sundry?
That plane just turned theirs off. At least I hope that's what happened!
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.
The interesting thing is that it appears to be a great deal easier to use electrolysis to separate CO2 into CO + O than to generate hydrogen from water. And CO would far more usefully be employed for other things than generating the hard to handle hydrogen. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab7099
And how many of those who served in Afghanistan live in a $10 million mansion and get their views broadcast across the media?
Don't know how many live in a house that expensive, but quite a few servicemen have had their views broadcast. And of course the families of those who didn't come back.
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.
Well maybe. The fact that, when faced with a crisis, we resorted to CCP solutions, speaks volumes to me. Our leaders are completely bankrupt of any principles or faith in the Western way of life. They stand for nothing. They are nothing.
Next crisis? same solutions.
Raab said today that we do not talk to the Taliban because do not share our standards on human rights. Well what standards might those be Dominic? The standards that banned people saying goodbye to dying relatives? the standards that kept us under house arrest? the standards that bankrupted businesses by government fiat? the standards that prevented us meeting in groups of more than six for months on end? The standards that determine freedoms based on medical records?
Some standards those, Dominic.
'Safety' comes the answer. Well, if you went on the streets of Kabul today you would find the very same refrain being used by the Taliban to the inhabitants of that city. Give up your weapons in exchange for freedom. Obey and you will be safe. Stay at home and be safe. Women, cover up to be safe.
The West's influence is collapsing because its quite clear we do not believe what we preach. We have long since abandoned everything that we stood for. What we have now, is a void. People elsewhere in the world are not stupid. They can see this a mile off.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
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.
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.
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.
The interesting thing is that it appears to be a great deal easier to use electrolysis to separate CO2 into CO + O than to generate hydrogen from water. And CO would far more usefully be employed for other things than generating the hard to handle hydrogen. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab7099
That's interersting. Is that any good for smelting iron ore? one common justification for coal.
Also something of an adjuvant for greenhouse gases, it seems, by mopping up hydroxyl radicals which destroy them. No idea if this is a net disbenefit, mind.
And how many of those who served in Afghanistan live in a $10 million mansion and get their views broadcast across the media?
Don't know how many live in a house that expensive, but quite a few servicemen have had their views broadcast. And of course the families of those who didn't come back.
Of course we could just cancel the monarchy [edit] in the sense of going republican, which would solve your problem with Mr Windsor.
Would not make any difference at all to Mr Windsor as he is no longer a working royal, he is not the heir to the throne or the heir to the heir, just a multimillionaire private citizen in California.
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.
The more I think about Afghanistan the worse it feels. A moral disaster
It has taken twenty years for the truth, that the decision to go there in the first place was the dreadful mistake, to become clear to everyone.
The withdrawal itself, so far, has been relatively successful, with little bloodshed and no signs of the civil war we have been trying for years to create. The disaster is for the politicians who have had the hubris, corruption, incompetence and misjudgement of twenty years' foreign policy brutally exposed in just a few days.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
It's one of the things that separates the British Isles from continental Europe. We don't have the memory, even at a generation or two's remove, of facing the hideous choice of resist, collaborate or just keep your head down.
But you're absolutely right; people surprise themselves and each other in both directions. The most diffident can think themselves into acts of incredible courage once they conclude they're the only right thing to do.
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.
Cool photo. How on earth did they recover from it doing a handstand?
If they'd had helicopters, they might have been able to use down drafts. My guess would be partial deflation.
Ah, it appears it was never static in that position:
"On 25 August 1927, while Los Angeles was tethered at the Lakehurst high mast, a gust of wind caught her tail and lifted it into colder, denser air that was just above the airship. This caused the tail to lift higher. The crew on board tried to compensate by climbing up the keel toward the rising tail, but could not stop the ship from reaching an angle of 85 degrees, before it descended. The ship suffered only slight damage and was able to fly the next day."
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.
The more I think about Afghanistan the worse it feels. A moral disaster
It has taken twenty years for the truth, that the decision to go there in the first place was the dreadful mistake, to become clear to everyone.
The withdrawal itself, so far, has been relatively successful, with little bloodshed and no signs of the civil war we have been trying for years to create. The disaster is for the politicians who have had the hubris, corruption, incompetence and misjudgement of twenty years' foreign policy brutally exposed in just a few days.
Nope, for 20 years we avoided 9/11 2 after Bush and Blair removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda on 9/11.
Biden let the Taliban back in in just a matter of weeks.
It is the withdrawal which has been an utter disaster, abandoning people who helped us to the Taliban as Biden ran away. That will become even more clear if we get another major terrorist attack on the US thanks to Biden and Harris' ineptitude
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.
And how many of those who served in Afghanistan live in a $10 million mansion and get their views broadcast across the media?
Don't know how many live in a house that expensive, but quite a few servicemen have had their views broadcast. And of course the families of those who didn't come back.
Of course we could just cancel the monarchy [edit] in the sense of going republican, which would solve your problem with Mr Windsor.
Would not make any difference at all to Mr Windsor as he is no longer a working royal, he is not the heir to the throne or the heir to the heir, just a multimillionaire private citizen in California.
So we will keep the monarchy thanks
Nobody would be bothering with him if it weren't for the mystique of the monarchy, of course.
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.
Due to the (in)efficiency of the hydrogen production process, more natural gas is required to deliver the same energy to the users. Therefore, more CO2 produced.
However, this CO2 is all produced in one place, so you can implement carbon capture and storage.
If you supply natural gas to everyone's home you have millions of emission points of CO2, so no chance of CCS.
That's why we are going down the route of blue hydrogen.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
It's one of the things that separates the British Isles from continental Europe. We don't have the memory, even at a generation or two's remove, of facing the hideous choice of resist, collaborate or just keep your head down.
But you're absolutely right; people surprise themselves and each other in both directions. The most diffident can think themselves into acts of incredible courage once they conclude they're the only right thing to do.
PB pedantry: Channel Islands. But yes, with that exception.
And how many of those who served in Afghanistan live in a $10 million mansion and get their views broadcast across the media?
Don't know how many live in a house that expensive, but quite a few servicemen have had their views broadcast. And of course the families of those who didn't come back.
Of course we could just cancel the monarchy [edit] in the sense of going republican, which would solve your problem with Mr Windsor.
Would not make any difference at all to Mr Windsor as he is no longer a working royal, he is not the heir to the throne or the heir to the heir, just a multimillionaire private citizen in California.
So we will keep the monarchy thanks
Nobody would be bothering with him if it weren't for the mystique of the monarchy, of course.
Some would, he is married to a famous actress and remains the son of Princess Diana, who was one of the most famous women in the world.
He would also remain a multimillionaire regardless through his inheritance from Diana and Netflix deal
"ALEX Salmond’s Alba party is to wade into the potentially toxic debate over women’s rights and transgender rights at its first conference as it attempts to underscore its differences with the SNP.
"The new party will debate a motion demanding “female only spaces”, single sex sports and the right for women to refuse intimate services from males, including counselling."
Today's Scotland. Eck as the advocate of womens' rights.
Watch out for Telford. The Labour council is trying to gerrymander the constituency by getting the Boundary Commission move the Priorslee ward (probably 80% conservative) into the new Wellington and Newport consistuency.
When the election is held the deciding factor will be the 10-154 year itch, the desire for a change and lets face it after this lot in government that desire will be considerable.
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.
Cool photo. How on earth did they recover from it doing a handstand?
The full article says it continued going over, so ended up horizontal again on the other side of the tower (whole thing due to change in wind direction and it was moored upwind of the tower so ended up slowly flipping over the top rather than swining round while remaining horizontal.
And how many of those who served in Afghanistan live in a $10 million mansion and get their views broadcast across the media?
Don't know how many live in a house that expensive, but quite a few servicemen have had their views broadcast. And of course the families of those who didn't come back.
Of course we could just cancel the monarchy [edit] in the sense of going republican, which would solve your problem with Mr Windsor.
Would not make any difference at all to Mr Windsor as he is no longer a working royal, he is not the heir to the throne or the heir to the heir, just a multimillionaire private citizen in California.
So we will keep the monarchy thanks
Nobody would be bothering with him if it weren't for the mystique of the monarchy, of course.
Some would, he is married to a famous actress and remains the son of Princess Diana, who was one of the most famous women in the world.
He would also remain a multimillionaire regardless through his inheritance from Diana and Netflix deal
"Princess." Associated with the mystique over royalty.
When the election is held the deciding factor will be the 10-15 year itch, the desire for a change and lets face it after this lot in government that desire will be considerable.
I am convinced that in the minds of the public this government took over in 2019.
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.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
Without being cynical about the modern age, I feel like I, and many others, just expect others to take care of and protect us from threat. Which they do and is great. But I'm pretty confident I'd not mentally be capable of personal courage if it were needed.
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
Stuart, I have a sense that urban and rural Scotland are slowly drifting apart so far as politics are concerned. It's why I think the ScotTories may do better in actual seat returns than the bare figures indicate. The council elections next year will be very interesting in indicating regional trends.
You are correct that vote concentration is crucial in FPTP elections. However, I’m not sure how useful the locals are going to be: they’re done under STV and analysing the resulting boorach is often meaningless.
As for your urban/rural theory: what are you basing that on? The Tory vote in urban Scotland seems to be holding up very well, which would contraindicate a rural surge.
Based on performance in NE Scotland with strong trend particularly in Aberdeenshire and picking up extra seat in Highlands in May. Decline in Lothian, losing seat. Seem to be doing better with older demographic, as per rest of UK.
Perhaps it depends what you mean by urban? Large cities - Edinburgh/Glasgow with students etc, not so good. Smaller settlements rather better?
On the locals, you just need to look at the first prefs to get a pretty good impression. The Tory surge in the 2017 locals prefigured the gain of 12 Westminster seats a few weeks later.
Thanks. Fair points.
The East Lothian loss was pure cock-up by the Unionist parties. The local Labourites were furious with the Tories. Some bitter, bitter words were said. Maybe, in retrospect, the SCons worked so hard there because they realised they were going to lose a list seat? (But is East Lothian not in South list rather than Lothian list?)
One (or perhaps more) Qatari mil C17 just crossed into the ‘Stan, looks to be headed straight for Kabul.
Doing a u-turn just past Kandahar.
I find it fascinating that military aircraft appear on FlightRadar24.
I assume that FR24 is mainly picking up transponder information... but military aircraft presumably don't always go around squawking their presence to all and sundry?
That plane just turned theirs off. At least I hope that's what happened!
Yep, looks like they’re going ‘dark’ once they’re clear of any civvy traffic. They’ll have onboard radar and nav aids to know where they’re going. That tanker doing laps around the airport, is probably providing what us civvies would call an approach control service, from a primary radar, before handing them off to KBL Tower.
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.
The more I think about Afghanistan the worse it feels. A moral disaster
It has taken twenty years for the truth, that the decision to go there in the first place was the dreadful mistake, to become clear to everyone.
The withdrawal itself, so far, has been relatively successful, with little bloodshed and no signs of the civil war we have been trying for years to create. The disaster is for the politicians who have had the hubris, corruption, incompetence and misjudgement of twenty years' foreign policy brutally exposed in just a few days.
Nope, for 20 years we avoided 9/11 2 after Bush and Blair removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda on 9/11.
Biden let the Taliban back in in just a matter of weeks.
It is the withdrawal which has been an utter disaster, abandoning people who helped us to the Taliban as Biden ran away. That will become even more clear if we get another major terrorist attack on the US thanks to Biden and Harris' ineptitude
And how many of those who served in Afghanistan live in a $10 million mansion and get their views broadcast across the media?
Don't know how many live in a house that expensive, but quite a few servicemen have had their views broadcast. And of course the families of those who didn't come back.
Of course we could just cancel the monarchy [edit] in the sense of going republican, which would solve your problem with Mr Windsor.
Would not make any difference at all to Mr Windsor as he is no longer a working royal, he is not the heir to the throne or the heir to the heir, just a multimillionaire private citizen in California.
So we will keep the monarchy thanks
Nobody would be bothering with him if it weren't for the mystique of the monarchy, of course.
Some would, he is married to a famous actress and remains the son of Princess Diana, who was one of the most famous women in the world.
He would also remain a multimillionaire regardless through his inheritance from Diana and Netflix deal
"Princess." Associated with the mystique over royalty.
To which I have no problem, she also did royal duties for that fame (and she would still have been rich anyway through the Spencer family private fortune as indeed would Harry).
It is the claiming fame via royalty then abandoning the royal duties associated with it from Harry I have a problem with
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.
The more I think about Afghanistan the worse it feels. A moral disaster
It has taken twenty years for the truth, that the decision to go there in the first place was the dreadful mistake, to become clear to everyone.
The withdrawal itself, so far, has been relatively successful, with little bloodshed and no signs of the civil war we have been trying for years to create. The disaster is for the politicians who have had the hubris, corruption, incompetence and misjudgement of twenty years' foreign policy brutally exposed in just a few days.
Nope, for 20 years we avoided 9/11 2 after Bush and Blair removed the Taliban and Al Qaeda on 9/11.
Biden let the Taliban back in in just a matter of weeks.
It is the withdrawal which has been an utter disaster, abandoning people who helped us to the Taliban as Biden ran away. That will become even more clear if we get another major terrorist attack on the US thanks to Biden and Harris' ineptitude
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.
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.
The interesting thing is that it appears to be a great deal easier to use electrolysis to separate CO2 into CO + O than to generate hydrogen from water. And CO would far more usefully be employed for other things than generating the hard to handle hydrogen. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab7099
That's interesting. Is that any good for smelting iron ore? one common justification for coal.
Also something of an adjuvant for greenhouse gases, it seems, by mopping up hydroxyl radicals which destroy them. No idea if this is a net disbenefit, mind.
Well it's already an industrial feedstock, though on nothing like the scale envisaged.
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
Stuart, I have a sense that urban and rural Scotland are slowly drifting apart so far as politics are concerned. It's why I think the ScotTories may do better in actual seat returns than the bare figures indicate. The council elections next year will be very interesting in indicating regional trends.
You are correct that vote concentration is crucial in FPTP elections. However, I’m not sure how useful the locals are going to be: they’re done under STV and analysing the resulting boorach is often meaningless.
As for your urban/rural theory: what are you basing that on? The Tory vote in urban Scotland seems to be holding up very well, which would contraindicate a rural surge.
Based on performance in NE Scotland with strong trend particularly in Aberdeenshire and picking up extra seat in Highlands in May. Decline in Lothian, losing seat. Seem to be doing better with older demographic, as per rest of UK.
Perhaps it depends what you mean by urban? Large cities - Edinburgh/Glasgow with students etc, not so good. Smaller settlements rather better?
On the locals, you just need to look at the first prefs to get a pretty good impression. The Tory surge in the 2017 locals prefigured the gain of 12 Westminster seats a few weeks later.
Thanks. Fair points.
The East Lothian loss was pure cock-up by the Unionist parties. The local Labourites were furious with the Tories. Some bitter, bitter words were said. Maybe, in retrospect, the SCons worked so hard there because they realised they were going to lose a list seat? (But is East Lothian not in South list rather than Lothian list?)
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
It makes no difference to the conclusion that the DUP would have the balance of power even on the precise Scottish numbers.
However if you really want to be pedantic on those numbers the SNP would pick up Moray, Aberdeenshire West and Kincardine and Dumfries and Galloway from the Tories but the Tories would hold Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweedale and Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk and Banff and Buchan.
SLab would hold Edinburgh South and the SNP would pick up Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and Fife NE from the LDs but the LDs would hold Edinburgh West and Orkney and Shetland
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.
Real brown trouser moment - very lucky nobody was on the longitudinal corridor (or held on if they were).
I think it was Neville Shute who said that a very sharp knife was essential kit for an airship man - cutting your way out of a wreck, or using it to create a handhold etc 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....
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.
Cool photo. How on earth did they recover from it doing a handstand?
The full article says it continued going over, so ended up horizontal again on the other side of the tower (whole thing due to change in wind direction and it was moored upwind of the tower so ended up slowly flipping over the top rather than swining round while remaining horizontal.
That makes it an even better photo, if it were only there for a few seconds. Bloody lucky boys and girls aboard though, that could have finished very badly.
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.
I think this point applies (obviously on a lesser scale) to here and now too. Eg those incidents when somebody is attacked on the street, or on a train, a bus, somewhere where there are people, and none of those people intervene. It's common for them to be thought of as cowards (if they're men) and I always think that's harsh.
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.
The more I think about Afghanistan the worse it feels. A moral disaster
It has taken twenty years for the truth, that the decision to go there in the first place was the dreadful mistake, to become clear to everyone.
The withdrawal itself, so far, has been relatively successful, with little bloodshed and no signs of the civil war we have been trying for years to create. The disaster is for the politicians who have had the hubris, corruption, incompetence and misjudgement of twenty years' foreign policy brutally exposed in just a few days.
And for those who have grown up in Afghanistan in the last decade believing they have a degree of freedom which has now either disappeared or been severely constrained.
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.
He's strongly disliked by 2 groups. The Corbynite Left, as you say, and also a certain type of chippy Hard Leaver for whom he epitomizes the (imaginary but vividly real for them) Metropolitan Professional Remainer Class who tried to steal their Brexit.
But the critical thing is the perception of the Labour Party not just its leader. To get a majority that needs to be transformed or the Tories utterly self-destruct and things go very badly wrong in next few years.
There is just about no chance that LAB can win a majority. The loss of Scotland makes that almost impossible. The best for Starmer is a hung parliament with the Tories unable to find support
I do strongly suspect though that if the polls in 2023/2024 are similar - or better for Labour - than the last two Redfield & Wilton polls, Labour will recover somewhat in Scotland to the extent of at least matching its 2017 result there. Many voters who plump for the SNP for Holyrood would switch back to Labour at Westminster to defeat the Tories across GB.
Is that just a hunch? Or do you have some evidence for 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....
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.
Real brown trouser moment - very lucky nobody was on the longitudinal corridor (or held on if they were).
I think it was Neville Shute who said that a very sharp knife was essential kit for an airship man - cutting your way out of a wreck, or using it to create a handhold etc etc....
Indeed. Nevil Shute was one of the engineers on R100 (the one that didn't crash - it was R101 that did).
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
I would put the courage of SOE people and similar who spent months and longer evading and fearing the knock on the door (and in the worst case scenarios enduring torture to allow their comrades to again evade the knock on the door) pretty high on the scale. I tend to think I know how I'd have behaved in that situation, though you never know.
When the election is held the deciding factor will be the 10-154 year itch, the desire for a change and lets face it after this lot in government that desire will be considerable.
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
It makes no difference to the conclusion that the DUP would have the balance of power even on the precise Scottish numbers.
However if you really want to be pedantic on those numbers the SNP would pick up Moray, Aberdeenshire West and Kincardine and Dumfries and Galloway from the Tories but the Tories would hold Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweedale and Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk and Banff and Buchan.
SLab would hold Edinburgh South and the SNP would pick up Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and Fife NE from the LDs but the LDs would hold Edinburgh West and Orkney and Shetland
When the election is held the deciding factor will be the 10-15 year itch, the desire for a change and lets face it after this lot in government that desire will be considerable.
I am convinced that in the minds of the public this government took over in 2019.
That should really worry Labour. 'Time for a change' feeling can really make the difference a lot more than quality.
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.
Real brown trouser moment - very lucky nobody was on the longitudinal corridor (or held on if they were).
I think it was Neville Shute who said that a very sharp knife was essential kit for an airship man - cutting your way out of a wreck, or using it to create a handhold etc etc....
And he was a proponent. No wonder they never caught on.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
It's one of the things that separates the British Isles from continental Europe. We don't have the memory, even at a generation or two's remove, of facing the hideous choice of resist, collaborate or just keep your head down.
But you're absolutely right; people surprise themselves and each other in both directions. The most diffident can think themselves into acts of incredible courage once they conclude they're the only right thing to do.
PB pedantry: Channel Islands. But yes, with that exception.
Further PB pedant. CI occupation was huge ratio of troops to islanders compared to say France. Much harder for effective resistance, plus most of the chaps had gone to mainland. Madeleine Bunting made much of the islanders behaving about the same as the French just over the way, and she is probably right, although I would argue that resistance was harder in the CI, than say in the remote moutainous regions of France.
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
Stuart, I have a sense that urban and rural Scotland are slowly drifting apart so far as politics are concerned. It's why I think the ScotTories may do better in actual seat returns than the bare figures indicate. The council elections next year will be very interesting in indicating regional trends.
You are correct that vote concentration is crucial in FPTP elections. However, I’m not sure how useful the locals are going to be: they’re done under STV and analysing the resulting boorach is often meaningless.
As for your urban/rural theory: what are you basing that on? The Tory vote in urban Scotland seems to be holding up very well, which would contraindicate a rural surge.
Based on performance in NE Scotland with strong trend particularly in Aberdeenshire and picking up extra seat in Highlands in May. Decline in Lothian, losing seat. Seem to be doing better with older demographic, as per rest of UK.
Perhaps it depends what you mean by urban? Large cities - Edinburgh/Glasgow with students etc, not so good. Smaller settlements rather better?
On the locals, you just need to look at the first prefs to get a pretty good impression. The Tory surge in the 2017 locals prefigured the gain of 12 Westminster seats a few weeks later.
Thanks. Fair points.
The East Lothian loss was pure cock-up by the Unionist parties. The local Labourites were furious with the Tories. Some bitter, bitter words were said. Maybe, in retrospect, the SCons worked so hard there because they realised they were going to lose a list seat? (But is East Lothian not in South list rather than Lothian list?)
Actually, I think the Tories have always fancied their chances in E Lothian, probably due to its demographic profile, and they had a very active candidate (now a list MSP). The thinking probably was that if they could overtake SLAB then given its Unionist proclivities, it could well fall in a future election. However, didn't work out like that as the SLAB vote seems to be pretty sticky.
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.
He's strongly disliked by 2 groups. The Corbynite Left, as you say, and also a certain type of chippy Hard Leaver for whom he epitomizes the (imaginary but vividly real for them) Metropolitan Professional Remainer Class who tried to steal their Brexit.
But the critical thing is the perception of the Labour Party not just its leader. To get a majority that needs to be transformed or the Tories utterly self-destruct and things go very badly wrong in next few years.
There is just about no chance that LAB can win a majority. The loss of Scotland makes that almost impossible. The best for Starmer is a hung parliament with the Tories unable to find support
I do strongly suspect though that if the polls in 2023/2024 are similar - or better for Labour - than the last two Redfield & Wilton polls, Labour will recover somewhat in Scotland to the extent of at least matching its 2017 result there. Many voters who plump for the SNP for Holyrood would switch back to Labour at Westminster to defeat the Tories across GB.
It would be interesting to see SLab label the SNP as Tories' little helpers. Whether it would be effective is a separate question.
Huh? Scottish Labour have tried that wheeze at every election since the 1960s. It worked great! Until it didn’t.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
It's one of the things that separates the British Isles from continental Europe. We don't have the memory, even at a generation or two's remove, of facing the hideous choice of resist, collaborate or just keep your head down.
But you're absolutely right; people surprise themselves and each other in both directions. The most diffident can think themselves into acts of incredible courage once they conclude they're the only right thing to do.
PB pedantry: Channel Islands. But yes, with that exception.
Further PB pedant. CI occupation was huge ratio of troops to islanders compared to say France. Much harder for effective resistance, plus most of the chaps had gone to mainland. Madeleine Bunting made much of the islanders behaving about the same as the French just over the way, and she is probably right, although I would argue that resistance was harder in the CI, than say in the remote moutainous regions of France.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
One (or perhaps more) Qatari mil C17 just crossed into the ‘Stan, looks to be headed straight for Kabul.
Doing a u-turn just past Kandahar.
I find it fascinating that military aircraft appear on FlightRadar24.
I assume that FR24 is mainly picking up transponder information... but military aircraft presumably don't always go around squawking their presence to all and sundry?
That plane just turned theirs off. At least I hope that's what happened!
Yep, looks like they’re going ‘dark’ once they’re clear of any civvy traffic. They’ll have onboard radar and nav aids to know where they’re going. That tanker doing laps around the airport, is probably providing what us civvies would call an approach control service, from a primary radar, before handing them off to KBL Tower.
One of the tankers just turned its pinger back on before crossing the coast in to the gulf. Matches what you suggested about letting the civvies know it's there.
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.
Good post and agreed. I just don't see what else the US could have really done, because the collapse happened so fast. Even if the situation was managed better, and there was a more coherent plan to close down the embassy and airlift people out over a longer time period, there would still have been an endgame; and the endgame would be millions of desperate afghans associated with the regime desperately trying to find a way out; a situation which the UK/USA would be powerless to do anything about, because you simply can't rehouse several million afghans in the west, under the current circumstances.
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
It makes no difference to the conclusion that the DUP would have the balance of power even on the precise Scottish numbers.
However if you really want to be pedantic on those numbers the SNP would pick up Moray, Aberdeenshire West and Kincardine and Dumfries and Galloway from the Tories but the Tories would hold Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweedale and Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk and Banff and Buchan.
SLab would hold Edinburgh South and the SNP would pick up Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and Fife NE from the LDs but the LDs would hold Edinburgh West and Orkney and Shetland
As Rob D states you only need GB figures for Baxter, given the Tories have only 6 Scottish seats Scottish figures are completely irrelevant effectively unless they show an SCon surge on 2019 or there is literally less than 10 seats between the Tories and Labour and the LDs and all the other minor parties combined
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
I would put the courage of SOE people and similar who spent months and longer evading and fearing the knock on the door (and in the worst case scenarios enduring torture to allow their comrades to again evade the knock on the door) pretty high on the scale. I tend to think I know how I'd have behaved in that situation, though you never know.
Some of the greatest courage was displayed by people working in ship's engine rooms, knowing that if the ship was hit, they risked an absolutely dreadful prolonged death.
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.
Good post and agreed. I just don't see what else the US could have really done, because the collapse happened so fast. Even if the situation was managed better, and there was a more coherent plan to close down the embassy and airlift people out over a longer time period, there would still have been an endgame; and the endgame would be millions of desperate afghans associated with the regime desperately trying to find a way out; a situation which the UK/USA would be powerless to do anything about, because you simply can't rehouse several million afghans in the west, under the current circumstances.
I'd simply dispute the need for the pull out in the first place.
When the election is held the deciding factor will be the 10-154 year itch, the desire for a change and lets face it after this lot in government that desire will be considerable.
Please let it not be 154 years....
In the year 2173, what are the odds that it will still be Johnson facing off Starmer?
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
I would put the courage of SOE people and similar who spent months and longer evading and fearing the knock on the door (and in the worst case scenarios enduring torture to allow their comrades to again evade the knock on the door) pretty high on the scale. I tend to think I know how I'd have behaved in that situation, though you never know.
Some of the greatest courage was displayed by people working in ship's engine rooms, knowing that if the ship was hit, they risked an absolutely dreadful prolonged death.
As I believe Dura Ace has pointed out on occasion, the bond with your comrades and in your example shipmates can be an extraordinarily strong one, perhaps the strongest of all.
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
Stuart, I have a sense that urban and rural Scotland are slowly drifting apart so far as politics are concerned. It's why I think the ScotTories may do better in actual seat returns than the bare figures indicate. The council elections next year will be very interesting in indicating regional trends.
You are correct that vote concentration is crucial in FPTP elections. However, I’m not sure how useful the locals are going to be: they’re done under STV and analysing the resulting boorach is often meaningless.
As for your urban/rural theory: what are you basing that on? The Tory vote in urban Scotland seems to be holding up very well, which would contraindicate a rural surge.
Based on performance in NE Scotland with strong trend particularly in Aberdeenshire and picking up extra seat in Highlands in May. Decline in Lothian, losing seat. Seem to be doing better with older demographic, as per rest of UK.
Perhaps it depends what you mean by urban? Large cities - Edinburgh/Glasgow with students etc, not so good. Smaller settlements rather better?
On the locals, you just need to look at the first prefs to get a pretty good impression. The Tory surge in the 2017 locals prefigured the gain of 12 Westminster seats a few weeks later.
Thanks. Fair points.
The East Lothian loss was pure cock-up by the Unionist parties. The local Labourites were furious with the Tories. Some bitter, bitter words were said. Maybe, in retrospect, the SCons worked so hard there because they realised they were going to lose a list seat? (But is East Lothian not in South list rather than Lothian list?)
Actually, I think the Tories have always fancied their chances in E Lothian, probably due to its demographic profile, and they had a very active candidate (now a list MSP). The thinking probably was that if they could overtake SLAB then given its Unionist proclivities, it could well fall in a future election. However, didn't work out like that as the SLAB vote seems to be pretty sticky.
Yes, the East Lothian CLP is the largest and probably most active in the whole country. Deeply embedded into the local communities, social clubs etc. They have a tremendous history of holding on in the storms of politics. Of course their vote was “sticky”. These folk are not going to suddenly collapse to a bunch of poshos. If SLab do weaken further in EL a huge chunk would prefer SNP to SCon.
Having said earlier that I thought the decision to withdraw was probably the least worst option, I think I have to agree with those who say this will end up damaging Biden.
In years to come it will likely stand as a case study in why politicians kick the can on difficult decisions. Nothing that Bush II, Obama, or Trump did in Afghanistan has proved to be durable - yet the disaster resulting from the withdrawal will be credited solely to Biden's record as President. This surely explains why Trump didn't manage to complete the withdrawal during his four years in office - ultimately he delayed taking that step for fear of taking the blame for the consequences.
Kicking the can on difficult decisions is not the behaviour of an effective government, but that's the level at which our politics now operates.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
I would put the courage of SOE people and similar who spent months and longer evading and fearing the knock on the door (and in the worst case scenarios enduring torture to allow their comrades to again evade the knock on the door) pretty high on the scale. I tend to think I know how I'd have behaved in that situation, though you never know.
Some of the greatest courage was displayed by people working in ship's engine rooms, knowing that if the ship was hit, they risked an absolutely dreadful prolonged death.
As I believe Dura Ace has pointed out on occasion, the bond with your comrades and in your example shipmates can be an extraordinarily strong one, perhaps the strongest of all.
The "black gang" on the Titanic stayed at post, keeping the enough fire up to keep the electricity going and pumping ballast water between tanks to try and keep the ship on an even keel (which is part of why she stayed afloat so long)
Only when the rising water forced them out, did they come on deck. Where they were observed waiting quietly...
Colon had always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them them go out and die famously for god, country and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made.
It had never occurred to him that they might do it because theyd get yelled at if they didn't
Not exactly the most trustworthy of sources. The £10mn is not to replace this, it even says so in the article.
The UK Government has pledged to replace the amount lost with a Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF) but has yet to provide clear details about how this will work.
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.
I think this point applies (obviously on a lesser scale) to here and now too. Eg those incidents when somebody is attacked on the street, or on a train, a bus, somewhere where there are people, and none of those people intervene. It's common for them to be thought of as cowards (if they're men) and I always think that's harsh.
There is the well-documented Kitty Genovese effect, even if that effect was not really in play in Kitty's own case, after which the effect is named.
Namely, the more people who are around when action is required, the less likely the action is to be done, as everyone in a situation of uncertainty is thinking someone else will act, and looking at others' actions to address their own uncertainty. Thus, the more people who don't act, the less likely it is for anyone to act.
If you are in such a situation and need help, the answer is not to make a general appeal for help, but to fix one or two people in the eye and ask the individual(s) directly for their help.
If the best polls at this stage of Ed Milibands time as LotO had become reality, he’d have been PM too
But he had no pandemic to hold him back and hide him from public view. In reality , I suspect that midterm in this Parliament will begin in late 2022 - ie a year or so into the return to normal politics.
He hasn't been hidden from public view, he has had prime time tv specials to address the governments stance on Covid, as well as his Tears for Piers. Probably been on tv more than any other LotO, at a time where people were more invested in politics than ever, and couldnt leave the house!
What percentage of members of the public have ever met a LotO anyway? and what % of thaose have been so dazzled that they changed their vote???
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.
Real brown trouser moment - very lucky nobody was on the longitudinal corridor (or held on if they were).
I think it was Neville Shute who said that a very sharp knife was essential kit for an airship man - cutting your way out of a wreck, or using it to create a handhold etc etc....
Indeed. Nevil Shute was one of the engineers on R100 (the one that didn't crash - it was R101 that did).
One (or perhaps more) Qatari mil C17 just crossed into the ‘Stan, looks to be headed straight for Kabul.
Doing a u-turn just past Kandahar.
I find it fascinating that military aircraft appear on FlightRadar24.
I assume that FR24 is mainly picking up transponder information... but military aircraft presumably don't always go around squawking their presence to all and sundry?
That plane just turned theirs off. At least I hope that's what happened!
Yep, looks like they’re going ‘dark’ once they’re clear of any civvy traffic. They’ll have onboard radar and nav aids to know where they’re going. That tanker doing laps around the airport, is probably providing what us civvies would call an approach control service, from a primary radar, before handing them off to KBL Tower.
One of the tankers just turned its pinger back on before crossing the coast in to the gulf. Matches what you suggested about letting the civvies know it's there.
Everyone standardised on the same system (called ADS-B) after many too many mid-airs between different traffic types that didn’t see each other.
ATC can now see everyone from a glider to an A380 to a Typhoon. Hopefully with many miles between them. Larger planes equipped with a collision avoidance system (called TCAS) can also get traffic avoidance instructions from the plane itself.
Look over north Wales on Flightradar24 now, and you’ll see at least five Hawks flying out of RAF Valley. Hope they’re having fun!
The mil guys do their own thing when they have to, but they’re not going to send a plane full of refugees through the busy Gulf airspace at 30,000’
The latest Redfield voteshares of Tories 40%, Labour 36%, LDs 10% and SNP 5%, Greens 5% and Ref 3% gives Tories 317, Labour 246, SNP 55 and LDs 9.
So the Tories short by 9 of a majority but still largest party and still with more seats than Labour, the SNP, the LDs, the Greens and PC combined.
So it would really depend what the DUP decided to do and whether Jeffrey Donaldson was willing to make Starmer PM rather than Boris or not eg to accept or not closer alignment to the SM and CU for the whole UK with Starmer to remove the Irish Sea border
Stuart, I have a sense that urban and rural Scotland are slowly drifting apart so far as politics are concerned. It's why I think the ScotTories may do better in actual seat returns than the bare figures indicate. The council elections next year will be very interesting in indicating regional trends.
You are correct that vote concentration is crucial in FPTP elections. However, I’m not sure how useful the locals are going to be: they’re done under STV and analysing the resulting boorach is often meaningless.
As for your urban/rural theory: what are you basing that on? The Tory vote in urban Scotland seems to be holding up very well, which would contraindicate a rural surge.
Based on performance in NE Scotland with strong trend particularly in Aberdeenshire and picking up extra seat in Highlands in May. Decline in Lothian, losing seat. Seem to be doing better with older demographic, as per rest of UK.
Perhaps it depends what you mean by urban? Large cities - Edinburgh/Glasgow with students etc, not so good. Smaller settlements rather better?
On the locals, you just need to look at the first prefs to get a pretty good impression. The Tory surge in the 2017 locals prefigured the gain of 12 Westminster seats a few weeks later.
Thanks. Fair points.
The East Lothian loss was pure cock-up by the Unionist parties. The local Labourites were furious with the Tories. Some bitter, bitter words were said. Maybe, in retrospect, the SCons worked so hard there because they realised they were going to lose a list seat? (But is East Lothian not in South list rather than Lothian list?)
Actually, I think the Tories have always fancied their chances in E Lothian, probably due to its demographic profile, and they had a very active candidate (now a list MSP). The thinking probably was that if they could overtake SLAB then given its Unionist proclivities, it could well fall in a future election. However, didn't work out like that as the SLAB vote seems to be pretty sticky.
Yes, the East Lothian CLP is the largest and probably most active in the whole country. Deeply embedded into the local communities, social clubs etc. They have a tremendous history of holding on in the storms of politics. Of course their vote was “sticky”. These folk are not going to suddenly collapse to a bunch of poshos. If SLab do weaken further in EL a huge chunk would prefer SNP to SCon.
EL Westminster and Holyrood constituency areas were changed in 2005/2011 to exclude some of the very miner's welfare club-y western fringe - Musselburgh eg went to the next door constituency. Not sure if that made EL more or less Labour-y because of the growth of commuter housing in the same fringe.
Not exactly the most trustworthy of sources. The £10mn is not to replace this, it even says so in the article.
The UK Government has pledged to replace the amount lost with a Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF) but has yet to provide clear details about how this will work.
Nick Tolhurst is a grade A twat long since blocked. He spouts a lot of nonsense like the time he claimed Nissan were about to announce the closure of Sunderland site (based on a news report six months old). He’s the sort of diehard remainers who gets remain a bad name.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
I would put the courage of SOE people and similar who spent months and longer evading and fearing the knock on the door (and in the worst case scenarios enduring torture to allow their comrades to again evade the knock on the door) pretty high on the scale. I tend to think I know how I'd have behaved in that situation, though you never know.
Some of the greatest courage was displayed by people working in ship's engine rooms, knowing that if the ship was hit, they risked an absolutely dreadful prolonged death.
As I believe Dura Ace has pointed out on occasion, the bond with your comrades and in your example shipmates can be an extraordinarily strong one, perhaps the strongest of all.
Itd have to be to put up with the shenanigans he's described them all getting up to!
'A councillor has quit the SNP after claiming Nicola Sturgeon is the party’s worst leader in over 30 years.
David Baird blasted the SNP’s “lack of direction” on independence and hit out at parts of the Government’s “domestic agenda”, such as reforms making it easier to change gender.
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
The value of strong leaders right there.
One of the reasons I was briefly excited by Rory Stewart's short-lived independent political career is that he struck me as the sort of leader I would be willing to be inspired by (despite him being a Tory).
I can't think of any other British politician in recent decades who has approached that, but evidently very few other people agreed with me.
We need better leadership if we are to get through the century in decent shape.
O/T Opinion polls mean nothing now. Corbyn nearly turned around a 25% deficit within 5 weeks of campaigning in 2017.
Starmer has a good chance to be next PM just as Rishi has.
In my opinion, Corbyn turned the polls around because he was a good campaigner, & a conviction politician vs a PM with almost no charisma suffering from stage fright.
I think you have to factor that in before assuming Sir Keir could play that role vs Boris
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.
Absolutely. A thinking person's hindsight always hovers between how you hope you would have behaved in a particular situation and how you suspect you might have behaved.
I am quite sure I would not have been a hero in such a situation. I'd keep my head down and hope for the best.
I think we're all capable of surprising ourselves, on the good and bad side of the ledger of course.
In my life, I have done both. And both were a surprise to me.
I think most of us have it in us to be brave if other people are people are being brave. Conversely, if those around us are running away, we'll likely do so as well.
The value of strong leaders right there.
One of the reasons I was briefly excited by Rory Stewart's short-lived independent political career is that he struck me as the sort of leader I would be willing to be inspired by (despite him being a Tory).
I can't think of any other British politician in recent decades who has approached that, but evidently very few other people agreed with me.
We need better leadership if we are to get through the century in decent shape.
One on one I bet a surprising number of politicians could inspire us in that way, as many are more impressive intellectually and charismatically than we might expect.
But the whole process and culture is so bureaucratised it's hard to be unique and appeal to people, and those that do often do so destructively.
I'd settle for someone who seems to a vision that goes further than 5 minutes and vague platitudes, ability to enforce competence and who sets an example with personal and professional standards. The policies not so much an issue.
If they had genuine ideas to boot thatd be a bonus. Stewart was interesting as he knew he was an unlikely victor and so was prepared to be unconventional without seeming to rabble rouse, if such can be defined.
I dont think hed have beaten Khan, but it would have been more interesting.
Comments
I assume that FR24 is mainly picking up transponder information... but military aircraft presumably don't always go around squawking their presence to all and sundry?
That said, maintaining cohesiveness and effectiveness (not without splits orvups and downs admittedly) for 20 years after being ousted, most of that time on the back foot, improving their position in recent years and now retaling the country so swiftly suggests at least a significant level of genuine support. It's not like some fresh faced revolutionary group shocking their way through in a short period, it's in essence been an ongoing war and sustaining that fir so long ain't easy.
One wonders what would have happened had Mullah Omar not died of natural causes, would he be restored to position?
One hundred percent agree. When the Russians made accusations in negotiations about Western intent, I always took that as a clear sign of what Russian intent was.
And CO would far more usefully be employed for other things than generating the hard to handle hydrogen.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab7099
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/was-it-worth-it-veterans-of-afghan-conflict-reel-at-taliban-takeover
Of course we could just cancel the monarchy [edit] in the sense of going republican, which would solve your problem with Mr Windsor.
The closest I got was being annoyed by an anti-terror drill closing down Leeds bus station when I had an exam to get to.
Next crisis? same solutions.
Raab said today that we do not talk to the Taliban because do not share our standards on human rights. Well what standards might those be Dominic? The standards that banned people saying goodbye to dying relatives? the standards that kept us under house arrest? the standards that bankrupted businesses by government fiat? the standards that prevented us meeting in groups of more than six for months on end? The standards that determine freedoms based on medical records?
Some standards those, Dominic.
'Safety' comes the answer. Well, if you went on the streets of Kabul today you would find the very same refrain being used by the Taliban to the inhabitants of that city. Give up your weapons in exchange for freedom. Obey and you will be safe. Stay at home and be safe. Women, cover up to be safe.
The West's influence is collapsing because its quite clear we do not believe what we preach. We have long since abandoned everything that we stood for. What we have now, is a void. People elsewhere in the world are not stupid. They can see this a mile off.
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1427557666981830657
Also something of an adjuvant for greenhouse gases, it seems, by mopping up hydroxyl radicals which destroy them. No idea if this is a net disbenefit, mind.
So we will keep the monarchy thanks
The withdrawal itself, so far, has been relatively successful, with little bloodshed and no signs of the civil war we have been trying for years to create. The disaster is for the politicians who have had the hubris, corruption, incompetence and misjudgement of twenty years' foreign policy brutally exposed in just a few days.
But you're absolutely right; people surprise themselves and each other in both directions. The most diffident can think themselves into acts of incredible courage once they conclude they're the only right thing to do.
"On 25 August 1927, while Los Angeles was tethered at the Lakehurst high mast, a gust of wind caught her tail and lifted it into colder, denser air that was just above the airship. This caused the tail to lift higher. The crew on board tried to compensate by climbing up the keel toward the rising tail, but could not stop the ship from reaching an angle of 85 degrees, before it descended. The ship suffered only slight damage and was able to fly the next day."
Biden let the Taliban back in in just a matter of weeks.
It is the withdrawal which has been an utter disaster, abandoning people who helped us to the Taliban as Biden ran away. That will become even more clear if we get another major terrorist attack on the US thanks to Biden and Harris' ineptitude
https://www.airships.net/blog/today-1927-uss-los-angeles-handstand-august-25-1927/
Real brown trouser moment - very lucky nobody was on the longitudinal corridor (or held on if they were).
However, this CO2 is all produced in one place, so you can implement carbon capture and storage.
If you supply natural gas to everyone's home you have millions of emission points of CO2, so no chance of CCS.
That's why we are going down the route of blue hydrogen.
P.S. This is my day job!
And, I think it's easier to be brave, to the point of self-sacrifice, at a point of crisis, rather than if we have to cope with a climate of daily fear, dreading the knock on the door.
He would also remain a multimillionaire regardless through his inheritance from Diana and Netflix deal
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19518729.alex-salmonds-alba-party-wades-gender-debate-controversy/
"ALEX Salmond’s Alba party is to wade into the potentially toxic debate over women’s rights and transgender rights at its first conference as it attempts to underscore its differences with the SNP.
"The new party will debate a motion demanding “female only spaces”, single sex sports and the right for women to refuse intimate services from males, including counselling."
Today's Scotland. Eck as the advocate of womens' rights.
The East Lothian loss was pure cock-up by the Unionist parties. The local Labourites were furious with the Tories. Some bitter, bitter words were said. Maybe, in retrospect, the SCons worked so hard there because they realised they were going to lose a list seat? (But is East Lothian not in South list rather than Lothian list?)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2021/scotland/constituencies/S16000102
It is the claiming fame via royalty then abandoning the royal duties associated with it from Harry I have a problem with
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/k-ships-vs-u-boats
Carbon monoxide electroreduction as an emerging platform for carbon utilization
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1712667
Where are you getting those figures from?
Scotnat 47.5%
Scotcon 23.6%
Scotlab 19.2%
Scotlib 6%
Scotgreen 1.5%
Scotreform 0.3%
I assumed it was just a lighthearted gag about how they used a speechless cliche whilst speechifying.
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Slide_Rule/zNUgPffezJAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=nevil+shute+airship+knife&pg=PT103&printsec=frontcover
No wonder they never caught on.
Anyway, what if his statement were to condemn the withdrawal and go on to say that he favours installing a warlord, preferably Dostum?
You'd change your tune then.
(dates from a bit before AD79 eruption)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/human-remains-in-tomb-are-best-preserved-ever-found-in-pompeii
Wales set to se the biggest regional funds cuts as it loses £373 million of its EU funding.
The UK govt has earmarked £10 million from its “leveling up funds” to replace this.
https://twitter.com/nicktolhurst/status/1427538424173584385?s=21
In years to come it will likely stand as a case study in why politicians kick the can on difficult decisions. Nothing that Bush II, Obama, or Trump did in Afghanistan has proved to be durable - yet the disaster resulting from the withdrawal will be credited solely to Biden's record as President. This surely explains why Trump didn't manage to complete the withdrawal during his four years in office - ultimately he delayed taking that step for fear of taking the blame for the consequences.
Kicking the can on difficult decisions is not the behaviour of an effective government, but that's the level at which our politics now operates.
Only when the rising water forced them out, did they come on deck. Where they were observed waiting quietly...
It had never occurred to him that they might do it because theyd get yelled at if they didn't
Jingo
The UK Government has pledged to replace the amount lost with a Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF) but has yet to provide clear details about how this will work.
Namely, the more people who are around when action is required, the less likely the action is to be done, as everyone in a situation of uncertainty is thinking someone else will act, and looking at others' actions to address their own uncertainty. Thus, the more people who don't act, the less likely it is for anyone to act.
If you are in such a situation and need help, the answer is not to make a general appeal for help, but to fix one or two people in the eye and ask the individual(s) directly for their help.
What percentage of members of the public have ever met a LotO anyway? and what % of thaose have been so dazzled that they changed their vote???
ATC can now see everyone from a glider to an A380 to a Typhoon. Hopefully with many miles between them. Larger planes equipped with a collision avoidance system (called TCAS) can also get traffic avoidance instructions from the plane itself.
Look over north Wales on Flightradar24 now, and you’ll see at least five Hawks flying out of RAF Valley. Hope they’re having fun!
The mil guys do their own thing when they have to, but they’re not going to send a plane full of refugees through the busy Gulf airspace at 30,000’
Starmer has a good chance to be next PM just as Rishi has.
David Baird blasted the SNP’s “lack of direction” on independence and hit out at parts of the Government’s “domestic agenda”, such as reforms making it easier to change gender.
He also said he had joined Alex Salmond ’s rival pro-independence Alba party.'
'https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/nicola-sturgeon-snp-alex-salmond-24778411
I can't think of any other British politician in recent decades who has approached that, but evidently very few other people agreed with me.
We need better leadership if we are to get through the century in decent shape.
I think you have to factor that in before assuming Sir Keir could play that role vs Boris
But the whole process and culture is so bureaucratised it's hard to be unique and appeal to people, and those that do often do so destructively.
I'd settle for someone who seems to a vision that goes further than 5 minutes and vague platitudes, ability to enforce competence and who sets an example with personal and professional standards. The policies not so much an issue.
If they had genuine ideas to boot thatd be a bonus. Stewart was interesting as he knew he was an unlikely victor and so was prepared to be unconventional without seeming to rabble rouse, if such can be defined.
I dont think hed have beaten Khan, but it would have been more interesting.