There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
No I think it's a pretty safe bet that they won't. Unless you think that 85% of the thousands of people attending the ERP events were willing to commit manslaughter.
Pretty bizarre point of view.
85% tested positive? Edit: oh, you mean 85% hadn't been tested? My comment was only about people who test positive and go and infect people anyway.
And mine was that there is no incentive to take the test.
When people have the flu and go out and about no one has ever previously talked of them being guilty of manslaughter.
Well, you'd agree, I think, that Covid will kill a small proportion of vaccinated people and (unlike flu) a significant proportion of unvaccinated people. It will also cause very serious illness for a larger proportion, without killing them. If you decide to go on holiday while knowing that you're infectious, especially abroad where you probably have little data on the proportion who have been vaccinated, you're willingly taking the risk of killing some of the people you meet.
It doesn't seem at all like going out with flu, more like having AIDS and sleeping with strangers without warning them.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
None of which had even a quarter of the deathrate of 9/11.
We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 2 for 20 years
I am not sure it is possible to make a claim that invading Afghanistan made any difference to terrorism except in helping to remove one particularly successful terrorist. The main country which supported 9/11 and from which all but one of the terrorists came has been allowed to continue exactly as before with full support of the West. If they had chosen to repeat the attack - although probably in a different way given the changes to aircraft security after the Twin Towers - then our having invaded Afghanistan and Iraq would have done absolutely nothing to prevent it.
9/11's success relied upon catching the West unawares and being so audacious that our security services were completely sidestepped. And even then it was far more successful than the terrorists ever imagined possible. That we have not had a similar attack since is not due to whatever we have done in the countries we invaded but due to our security services completely recalibrating their threat profiles. That does not mean another attack of similar magnitude is not possible but it does make it more difficult. Hence the reason we have seen smaller but still very deadly attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Paris amongst others.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
Picking this up from earlier - had a chance briefly to check some numbers for light-rail in England.
The "teeny tiny" thing is only where the investment is teeny tiny. Our small number of small light rail systems carry just under 270m journeys a year, 150m if we ignore DLR. That is only Manchester / Nottingham / Tyne and Wear / Croydon-Beckenham / Midland Metro / Blackpool.
Checking Nottingham, the trams do 60 journeys per year per resident in the region, and the system does not even cover the whole city. Not teeny-tiny.
Tesla etc have made some progress on emissions, though it depends on supply mix, and they are strangely reticent about their own environmental credentials, unless it has changed recently. The elephant in the room is congestion.
On the £100bn on roads - some investment, yes. The one that gets my goat is greenies demanding that places where road accidents put cars in gardens or front rooms get no investment on a universal principle.
A few more or bigger roads as a complete alternative to a proper rail network? That's for the birds imo.
What's for the birds is a rail network to get HGVs off the road, when HGVs carry billions of tonnes of goods while rails carry millions.
The roads as an alternative to rail is already what the market overwhelmingly chooses despite rail getting so much investment and roads getting so much tax instead.
When the roads are moving billions of tonnes of goods, and having billions of passenger journeys, then is a hundred billion for rail really the best option out there? What could be done with £100bn for roads instead?
Every HGV they get off the road is a benefit. They won't get every HGV off the road, but we should aim to get every one off the road we can - and that's great for large, frequent point-to-point loads.
One issue is that railfreight got addicted on trainload coal. Routes were designed to take coal from Merthyr to Swansea, or Kellingly to Willington. We're now in a world where the point-to-point endpoints are very different. This problem is typified by the Shaftholme Flyover near Doncaster, which was designed to mainly take coal trains off the route. Except it opened in 2014, after most of that traffic had disappeared ...
And the point-to-point routes for other railfreight tends to be longer distance than the old pit-to-power routes.
Why is every HGV off the road a benefit? Especially at £100bn cost.
There's an anti-car, anti-HGV religious like fervour sometimes but HGVs are quite frankly fantastic at taking goods directly from where they are, to where they need to be. Why is removing them off the road a benefit? And how many are you talking about removing?
In the unlikely event that HS2 were to increase freight volumes by 50%, then that wouldn't even see a 1% reduction in HGV volumes.
No offence, but yours is Independent SAGE Zero Covid style logic. Saying every HGV off the road is a benefit, thus we should spend £100bn is like saying every Covid case prevented is a benefit, thus we should go back into lockdown.
No, it really isn't - and it's a bit crass for you to say so.
HGVs are terrible at taking things from point to point, in bulk. They're great for taking 38 or 44 tonnes from a distribution centre to my local Morrisons; they're terrible at taking 1,000 tonnes from a local port across the country to the distribution centre. That's where railfreight comes in.
As for your HS2 point: HS2 isn't mainly being designed for freight. Extra freight paths is a positive side effect, not the main reason. Your attempt to put the entire cost of HS2 onto the railfreight benefits is laughable.
You were the crass one with your IndySage/XR religious claim that "every HGV" off the road is a benefit.
Its not crass its realistic. The overwhelming majority of the economy wants to move 38 to 44 tonnes of goods at a time. Since the death of coal, there simply aren't that many businesses that are looking to move thousands of tonnes from point to point - and those that are, can use rail as it stands.
You sometimes on the motorway see 2 or even 3 HGVs with the same branding following each other which may have come from the same point, or maybe going to the same one - or may not. I have never seen 76 of the same branded HGVs following each other in a convoy, have you?
Moving thousands of tonnes at a time is not how much of the economy works in the 21st century. Coal worked that way, not much else does, which is why the demand isn't there for rail and is there for roads and is why investing in our road networks would be more economically beneficial.
Extra freight is a frequent farcical claimed benefit of the extra capacity, but its a bad joke for £100bn. If you want to switch the discussion to passengers then fine, but the same thing applies. Again what proportion of people travel via roads, and what proportion via rail. Again to pro-rata £100bn in rail we ought to see trillions invested into our road network but we won't because too many busybodies have a "cars are bad", "HGVs are bad", "trains are good" mentality that is not economically justifiable.
You might want to look up the massive distribution centres that have been developed, such as Hams Hall (which I helped clear, including a pigeon sandwich), iPort at Doncaster, to the new East Midlands hub near East Midlands airport. Then think about the way they work and their traffic flows.
If that's a problem, then you may also want to look into those ships that call into Antwerp, Felixstowe, Southampton and elsewhere with thousands of TEUs on. Those containers are not all for the same company; or destination. The port acts as a hub. Rail then takes it onto another hub. They, in turn, may take it onto another hub (say, the Co-Op hub in Godmannchester), before it goes to the store a few minutes down the road from me. The lorry delivering to my local store is smaller than the one going to the hub in Godmanchester.
And again, *no-one* is saying that we're building HS2 *just* for freight. Advantages for freight are a positive side-effect.
Not sure they are a side effect. One part of the puzzle yes, but more than just a side effect
Biden recovery in the polls continuing - 8 points clear of Trump in Florida, where DeSantis is lagging for Governor (though Rudio is in good shape). Interesting poll of GOP preference in Florida if choosing Trump or de Santis - Trump wins, but not by a huge margin (9).
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
None of which had even a quarter of the deathrate of 9/11.
We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 2 for 20 years
I am not sure it is possible to make a claim that invading Afghanistan made any difference to terrorism except in helping to remove one particularly successful terrorist. The main country which supported 9/11 and from which all but one of the terrorists came has been allowed to continue exactly as before with full support of the West. If they had chosen to repeat the attack - although probably in a different way given the changes to aircraft security after the Twin Towers - then our having invaded Afghanistan and Iraq would have done absolutely nothing to prevent it.
9/11's success relied upon catching the West unawares and being so audacious that our security services were completely sidestepped. And even then it was far more successful than the terrorists ever imagined possible. That we have not had a similar attack since is not due to whatever we have done in the countries we invaded but due to our security services completely recalibrating their threat profiles. That does not mean another attack of similar magnitude is not possible but it does make it more difficult. Hence the reason we have seen smaller but still very deadly attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Paris amongst others.
Yes the improved and necessary ever improving intelligence of our security services is key to containing future terrorist attacks.
However Bin Laden launched his terrorist training camps in Sudan and then Afghanistan, that was where action was needed and when after he fled to Pakistan that is where special forces had to be sent to kill him.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
The reliability of the things is a significant issue, evidently - I hadn't been up to date on it.
Which has also been calling out some so-called approved testing services, as I recall.
They are a more reliable test than PCR for whether you’re infectious.
PCR is extremely accurate (far more so than LFTs) at telling if you have any virus in your system, but that isn’t the same thing at all.
I really think too little has been made of this with PCR. As part of my leukaemia monitoring I had frequent bone marrow biopsies, which were analysed by PCR. Never returned a zero score, always some level of the relevant signal detected. There is a cut off, below which you are regarded as in molecular remission (as opposed to just symptom based). But the point is you can never get to zero. In my case people speculate about residual proteins that are not disease related. So I wonder how many positive PCR tests are actually people who are no longer ill and no longer infectious.
I have bet on Labour poll lead by the end of the year.
And I have laid a Tory majority.
I think the result in 2024 will fall somewhere between 2010 but in reverse and 2015 repeated. We have reached peak Tory and it is downhill from here, IMHO
It would be a welcome event. This government displays an arrogance only matched by its incompetence. They certainly need something to shake them up.
Hi Richard, hope you are well Sir - glad to see you posting more regularly.
Much like Labour, I think it would benefit the entire population long term to have Boris Johnson and this lot of Tories out. Then they can go back to being sensible again.
Evening sir and many thanks. The only thing that has been keeping me away has been sheer volume of work although sadly I think that might end soon as one of my main contracts looks like being rolled up after a merger amongst clients. Somewhat worrying but to be expected and to be honest that is one of the reasons companies have contractors so they have that flexibility. But right now I need to make sure I have everything wrapped up before the likely end of contract.
Hi Richard, good to see you back.
Thanks for the excellent recommendation of Food and Fire by Marcus Bawdon. A superb book.
Locking everyone in their house and closing the pubs isn't "unpopular-but-necessary?"
No, it had overwhleming public support. Odd, perhaps, but true.
I still think the lockdown in years 1-2 vs no lockdowns in years 3-4 will play out as bad stuff front loaded, with goodies near GE
The crux of the matter is Labour supporters/Boris haters have to find some excuse to be being optimistic, when the polls are worse for them at this stage than any other time in opposition since the 79s ,bar the Corbyn years. I just don’t think there is any real logic to it
Lockdown has, overall, been popular.
Rishi's financial support has been very popular indeed. That's on its way out.
Pumping funny money into the economy for the last 18 months has been the right thing to do. But going cold turkey on it is not going to be painless for us or for the government.
Maybe you're right- after all "this time is different" often turns out not to be true.
But I'd set two things against that. One is that the economic cycle is out of synch with the electoral cycle in a way that can't do the government much good. The other is that, in the end, everyone who has dealings with Boris Johnson ends up thinking "what a b@^&##?!". That could take 10 years, sure. But it could take 10 days.
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
Controversial and unpopular opinion - 4,700 teens and early 20 somethings catching Covid is not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Exactly. @FrancisUrquhart is regressing to his curtain twitching days.
I made no curtain twitching-esque comment on this story, just linked to it....as it has been suggested by others on here that they wondered if boardmasters caused the big spike in cases in the SW and now the authorities are saying they think so.
Pretty impressive result for Delta considering 4700 is nearly 10% of the attendees, and they all had to have a lateral flow test before and during.
Although you wonder we’ll enforced the tests were. I did one to attend a chilli festival. Took a photo with me. No one checked.
Julia HB claimed iirc on radio this morning that one could claim to have done a LFT test at home and it was negative and the email would come to you to wave at people to gain entry. Without ever doing the test at all.
No idea if this is true.
Yes. All you need is an actual LFT, for the barcode, because while you scan the barcode you enter the result you don’t scan it.
I see the festival organisers are saying 'they "went above and beyond what was asked of us".
A spokesperson said: "Because of these measures, over 450 people who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus did not attend or left the festival early."'
Bit like the Fuehrer pointing out the enemy hadn't occupied Norway in 1945.*
*Apart possibly from a little bit at the top, I can't quite remember.
I honestly do not see what LFTs were designed to achieve. Given the bizarre way they are administered, recorded and monitored, they haven’t really been on the front line in stopping Covid out with medical settings. All they’ve done is create a huge industry for the likes of Dido Hardi…ah, now I get it.
They were designed to detect those who are currently infectious - which they are very good indeed at doing. The government administration of their use has been pretty hopeless. But their current availability is very useful if you want to avoid infecting other people at work, or at home.
Yes, quite handy for visiting grandma.
I have to do them weekly for work, and wouldn't fake them there.
I use them at work too, as we cannot afford all being off at the same time. Which with Delta is a genuine risk.
There are plenty of disincentives to tell the truth. Let's take one hypothetical example.
You are due to fly on holiday on Monday. Your carrier needs to see proof of a negative LFT taken within 48 hrs before you can travel.
If you take it and it's positive you can't go away and will face the whole insurance/compensation battle.
Do you take it or not take it and just report a negative test using the serial number on the test. If you do take it and it's positive do you report it as such? Etc.
Yes...that does depend on people being willing to risk committing manslaughter in order to go on holiday. But I know not everyone will see it like that.
No I think it's a pretty safe bet that they won't. Unless you think that 85% of the thousands of people attending the ERP events were willing to commit manslaughter.
Pretty bizarre point of view.
85% tested positive? Edit: oh, you mean 85% hadn't been tested? My comment was only about people who test positive and go and infect people anyway.
And mine was that there is no incentive to take the test.
When people have the flu and go out and about no one has ever previously talked of them being guilty of manslaughter.
Well, you'd agree, I think, that Covid will kill a small proportion of vaccinated people and (unlike flu) a significant proportion of unvaccinated people. It will also cause very serious illness for a larger proportion, without killing them. If you decide to go on holiday while knowing that you're infectious, especially abroad where you probably have little data on the proportion who have been vaccinated, you're willingly taking the risk of killing some of the people you meet.
It doesn't seem at all like going out with flu, more like having AIDS and sleeping with strangers without warning them.
You are talking about numbers. I am talking about principle. The flu will kill someone vulnerable. So will Covid. Covid might kill more.
But the principle is the same. Going out with either is being willing to commit manslaughter or it is not.
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
It closed a couple of years ago sadly. Opposite the entrance to Warwick Avenue on KHS
HSK Charles, HSK.
Not to locals
Yes to locals (of which I was one for many years). No one says KSH.
Of course not.
They say Ken High Street.
NO THEY DON'T.
They say High Street Ken. That is just what they say. Ken High Street is not something anyone says.
To reiterate in case you ( @Charles ) thought I was meaning the initials: for out-of-towners and others types it is whatever they want. For locals it is High Street Ken. Always has been High Street Ken and always will be High Street Ken. Until High Street Ken is taken over by out of towners and denizens of No. 1 Hyde Park and ne'er do wells in which case it will probably become something ghastly like Ken High Street.
You're right. I was a young northern oik - as opposed to an old one - when I lived there and I called it Ken High Street. So that must be bad and wrong. Explains some of the muted reaction of the high born locals to my eager overtures back then.
You are not an old northern oik that is ridiculous. 61 is hardly old.
Ho ho. Seriously, though, it feels it. Age is not just a number. And even more seriously, re HSK vs KHS, it's clearly a class issue. You and your type say HSK, whereas me and my type say KHS. It's a marker. A tell. Like when you have fish for tea and use a special knife with special handles.
Indeed. People like you and me say KHS.
Snobs get very worked up about shit that doesn’t matter
@PoliticsForAlI NEW: Downing Street do not believe Boris Johnson broke the ministerial code by using taxpayers money to jet to Hartlepool to campaign for the Tories, as they say the PM can use his official cars for whatever, despite a car not being a plane
There used to be a showroom in Kensington when I first moved to London. Holland Road is what the inter web thingy is telling me, although for some reason I remember it as being on Piccadilly.
It closed a couple of years ago sadly. Opposite the entrance to Warwick Avenue on KHS
HSK Charles, HSK.
Not to locals
Yes to locals (of which I was one for many years). No one says KSH.
Of course not.
They say Ken High Street.
NO THEY DON'T.
They say High Street Ken. That is just what they say. Ken High Street is not something anyone says.
To reiterate in case you ( @Charles ) thought I was meaning the initials: for out-of-towners and others types it is whatever they want. For locals it is High Street Ken. Always has been High Street Ken and always will be High Street Ken. Until High Street Ken is taken over by out of towners and denizens of No. 1 Hyde Park and ne'er do wells in which case it will probably become something ghastly like Ken High Street.
You're right. I was a young northern oik - as opposed to an old one - when I lived there and I called it Ken High Street. So that must be bad and wrong. Explains some of the muted reaction of the high born locals to my eager overtures back then.
You are not an old northern oik that is ridiculous. 61 is hardly old.
Ho ho. Seriously, though, it feels it. Age is not just a number. And even more seriously, re HSK vs KHS, it's clearly a class issue. You and your type say HSK, whereas me and my type say KHS. It's a marker. A tell. Like when you have fish for tea and use a special knife with special handles.
Indeed. People like you and me say KHS.
Snobs get very worked up about shit that doesn’t matter
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
None of which had even a quarter of the deathrate of 9/11.
We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 2 for 20 years
We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 for thousands of years before 9/11 too.
9/11 was the wakeup call as to what terrorists who can hijack planes, have access to deadly bombs or gas can do.
We must remain eternally vigilant
Well precisely and the vigilance for that has been in airport security and airport theatre - and the willingness for passengers to tackle suspicious passengers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
That vigilance doesn't end because of the fall of Kabul.
Just to add on product certifications: pretty much all free trade agreements have specific provisions about the use of product standards as non tariff barriers.
If we have standards that are not subsets of FCC/CE, then people will regard those standards as NTBs.
Why are we setting up a new body rather than using BSI?
OMFG. I did not realise how badly the Dems are fucking up in California.
Newsom will probably be recalled and the Dems don't have a solid backup candidate and because California's recall law is uterly idiotic the GOP candidate had a great chance of winning.
This could lead to the Dems losing the Senate because if Feinstein drops dead the Govenor fills the post with their pick.
This is astoundingly shit politics by the stupidest party in America.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
This may be why public feelings are as raw as they were 20 years ago, and today’s arguments are even more furious and vexed, as we rehash the same positions – on the one hand invoking the moral responsibility to defend “western values”, and on the other pointing out the inevitable failures of intervention. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons have been learned, no meaningful assessment of the war on terror has been passed.
The war on terror is still ongoing and will likely continue for the rest of the century at least.
We are not near the end nor even the beginning of the end, at most we are at the end of the beginning to quote Churchill.
Jihadists want to put the whole world under a global Caliphate and Sharia Law, they were there before the Afghan invasion, hence 9/11 and will be there after we have withdrawn.
The Afghan invasion by removing Al Qaeda training camps from the country simply bought us more time
The “War on Terror” is and always has been meaningless. It’s like a war on tanks, or a war on hand grenades, it declares war on a method of fighting war. You can’t beat a method FFS.
You can, the method is terrorism and it has to be beaten or at least its impact reduced
None of which had even a quarter of the deathrate of 9/11.
We avoided a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 2 for 20 years
I am not sure it is possible to make a claim that invading Afghanistan made any difference to terrorism except in helping to remove one particularly successful terrorist. The main country which supported 9/11 and from which all but one of the terrorists came has been allowed to continue exactly as before with full support of the West. If they had chosen to repeat the attack - although probably in a different way given the changes to aircraft security after the Twin Towers - then our having invaded Afghanistan and Iraq would have done absolutely nothing to prevent it.
9/11's success relied upon catching the West unawares and being so audacious that our security services were completely sidestepped. And even then it was far more successful than the terrorists ever imagined possible. That we have not had a similar attack since is not due to whatever we have done in the countries we invaded but due to our security services completely recalibrating their threat profiles. That does not mean another attack of similar magnitude is not possible but it does make it more difficult. Hence the reason we have seen smaller but still very deadly attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Paris amongst others.
Yes the improved and necessary ever improving intelligence of our security services is key to containing future terrorist attacks.
However Bin Laden launched his terrorist training camps in Sudan and then Afghanistan, that was where action was needed and when after he fled to Pakistan that is where special forces had to be sent to kill him.
But only till they get caught out for looking the wrong way, at the moment they are focussed on islamic terror groups. In the next ten years or so it will change significantly and they will once again be caught with their trousers round their ankles
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It doesn't seem at all like going out with flu, more like having AIDS and sleeping with strangers without warning them.
9/11's success relied upon catching the West unawares and being so audacious that our security services were completely sidestepped. And even then it was far more successful than the terrorists ever imagined possible. That we have not had a similar attack since is not due to whatever we have done in the countries we invaded but due to our security services completely recalibrating their threat profiles. That does not mean another attack of similar magnitude is not possible but it does make it more difficult. Hence the reason we have seen smaller but still very deadly attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Paris amongst others.
However Bin Laden launched his terrorist training camps in Sudan and then Afghanistan, that was where action was needed and when after he fled to Pakistan that is where special forces had to be sent to kill him.
https://twitter.com/gem_abbott/status/1429731330888245252?s=21
- age, obesity rates, ethnic mix of population, background health, propensity to hospitalise, etc etc
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/926410/Understanding_Cycle_Threshold__Ct__in_SARS-CoV-2_RT-PCR_.pdf
Thanks for the excellent recommendation of Food and Fire by Marcus Bawdon. A superb book.
Rishi's financial support has been very popular indeed. That's on its way out.
Pumping funny money into the economy for the last 18 months has been the right thing to do. But going cold turkey on it is not going to be painless for us or for the government.
Maybe you're right- after all "this time is different" often turns out not to be true.
But I'd set two things against that. One is that the economic cycle is out of synch with the electoral cycle in a way that can't do the government much good. The other is that, in the end, everyone who has dealings with Boris Johnson ends up thinking "what a b@^&##?!". That could take 10 years, sure. But it could take 10 days.
Glad we’ve cleared that up
But the principle is the same. Going out with either is being willing to commit manslaughter or it is not.
Snobs get very worked up about shit that doesn’t matter
That vigilance doesn't end because of the fall of Kabul.