'The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.'
No serious commentator is suggesting a NFZ. The reason is obvious, and has been stated on this forum clearly and frequently.
NFZ is simply fluffy words to mean the West bombing Russia, which is a major escalation that gives Putin cover for his own escalation.
Far, far better to keep shoveling all those Stinger ground-to-air missiles over into Ukraine. Get enough of them in theatre, and you end up with a no-fly zone by default.
I am not an expert on war but in regard to the 30 or so cruise missiles that hit near the Polish border are there defence systems that can intercept them and are there any deployed in Ukraine ?
It was reported last week that a missile defence system has been set up close to the Polish border, using the US Patriot system. Presumably it’s going to be used to stop stray missiles heading for Poland, rather than to take out Russian missiles in Ukraine.
It’s interesting how, with the exception of the attack on this base at the weekend, Russia has been quite sparing with the long-range missiles. My suspicion is that they have only a few hundred of them.
Kh55/101 uses a Ukrainian made engine... apparently 575 Kh55 were transferred to Russia in the big transfer of weapons and equipment from Ukraine to Russia in 1999.
I do wonder what it actually takes to service these, but think it’s unlikely to be a simple as checking oil levels once a year, saying a prayer that a 40-year-old jet engine will light its fire on command, and that the navigation and avionics will all wake up and find the correct target.
not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a documentary about submarines. In the UK segment, some work was being done on the reactor of a British submarine. Serious men discussed the situation (seriously) before commanding a robotic tool to move around the area of the reactor, an inch at a time. The submarine was entirely covered in an (empty) building. All very high tech.
In Russia, meanwhile, a couple of guys were de-fueling a submarine. They used a chain hoist to line up a big metal tube over the reactor and hoisted some fuel assemblies out. By hand.
I suspect the Kh55 maintenance works a bit like the stories of Long Lance maintenance in the Japanese Navy - the least valuable conscript gets a spanner and everyone else watches from a distance.
Just finally getting round to watching Chernobyl (Mrs P thought it might cheer us up!)
I appreciate it's a dramatised account but, my God, what blatant disregard for basic safety.
It does slowly get better with time, but the next few weeks will be difficult, and your parents will need you for support. Sadly, death comes to us all, but think of the happy times you had together and be grateful for the time you spent with her.
“ Clausewitz describes the "culminating point" as when an attacking force hits strong resistance, runs out of energy, and can no longer continue. Russia is running out of manpower, asking Syria to send troops. Sanctions are working. Russia may culminate in 10-14 days if we press.”
So what happens then ?
Who knows?
But who knows what happens if we withdraw all help from Ukraine, and Russia rolls over them and gets a nice, compliant pro-Russian government in Kiev?
In my mind it's quite simple: it is right versus wrong, good versus evil. The evil is easy to identify: Putin and his cronies. They are the ones who have invaded another country; they are the ones who are killing innocent civilians. They are the ones threatening smaller democracies with invasion. They are the ones who are threatening the world with chemical weapons, or nuclear oblivion.
Those on the side of evil talk about how it is our fault, how we caused this mess, rather than concentrate their ire on the evil.
We have to be on the side of good. And that means supporting Ukraine.
Which we are doing.
The time to think about the causes of this is after the mess is over - and I think many of their arguments are bogus anyway, purposeful distractions away from evil.
The final clause is the sort of thing we should avoid writing. I don't know people who are 'purposefully' distracting away from evil, at least not on here. I don't frequent other political or social media sites.
The reason why the causes are pertinent is that they are also so relevant to both the present and the future.
We were powerless to stop Putin because we are powerless to stop Putin and we will be powerless to stop Putin. We are so frit of him, of the nuclear threat, that we're not prepared to stand up and defend Ukraine with the only language Putin will pay attention to: military force.
Biden is a wet blanket. His ghastly withdrawal from Afghanistan, aided and abetted by Johnson, greenlit Putin's invasion of Ukraine and has shown Putin that NATO is not going to stand up and defend them.
And, yes, Putin and his invasion are utterly evil.
I utterly disagree. In other places, the 'we caused tis by x, y and z' are being used as distractions away from the Russian's folly. Whenever anyone criticises Russia, the voices cry that it is 'our' fault.
"Russians are doing these things." "Remember that we guaranteed we would not expand NATO eastwards, and Ukraine is filled with Nazis. Besides, we 'poked' them into it."
It is classic maskirovka, performed by either knowing or unknowing fools.
The Russian government is not the victims in this. They are the aggressor, the bully. The victims are the Ukrainian people and, to a lesser extent, the Russian people.
If we see what is happening as akin to rape, then these people are saying that Ukraine should not have been wearing such a short skirt.
Twitter is full of such comments.
Twitter is part of the poison that has got us to the place of Russia invading Ukraine. .
I read your posts on here with interest (Chris, again, take note). I've seen Greta Thurnberg blamed on here for starting the Ukraine war but now Twitter is responsible for it? It's an interesting thesis but I'm not on twitter so I wouldn't know.
I think if we believe in democracy it's really important that we continue to debate in as friendly a way as possible, even when profoundly disagreeing with someone's perspective or suggestion. I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. That's a shame because this is a decent site and the only one I frequent. When someone is rude to me I tend to disappear as I have better things to do than be insulted by someone from the comfort of their chair whom I've never met.
So keep playing the ball, folks. Not the man or woman.
". I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. "
You weren't here in 2016. Or 2017. Or 2014. Or 2019. Or 2020. In fact, it's pretty much always been like this...
I'd argue PB is a rather decorous place compared to the Internet in general, especially as politics is being discussed. It's also more informative than most places.
There are more women than ever before, but still by no means enough.
It's not exactly a welcoming place for women tbh.
There's far too much male aggression and downright rudeness, a failure to debate issues and always a tendency to attack the person.
This place is like being on a rugby field of 30 men. And not in a pleasant fantasy way
I shall be off for a bit. The personal rudeness is tiresome and I have a life outside that feels a lot more wholesome.
There's nothing stopping women from posting as many comments as they like on here. The fact is women are always less interested in obsessive political commentary than men. On the VoteUK forum it's about 95% male even though every effort has been made to encourage more women to join and post comments.
I was once told by a business owner, apparently in all seriousness, that "we don't have a ramp here because we never get any people in wheelchairs visit us."
My point is, if you make it uncomfortable or unwelcoming for particular demographics, don't be surprised if you don't get many attending/posting.
The willie-warmer thread was indeed...well, embarrassing.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Blimey. "deluded, rude, lesbian."
Where the fuck did you get that from. And this from a site that welcomes women.
And we do welcome women. Cyclefree, bev and moonrabbit in particular provide good posts and rarely if ever attack other posters.
Completely off topic, but I wanted to write something somewhere to express my emotions, but my nan died yesterday. As an adult this is the first death of a loved one I've really experienced, my last experience of death for someone I was close to was of a classmate at school who died when we were 10.
Its such a cliché to say, but at least she's not suffering anymore. She'd had a fall towards the end of lockdown that triggered a steep downfall in her health and dementia so she wasn't herself anymore and the NHS made her go into a care home, but still its very emotional now that she's gone.
I'm very fortunate to have had my grandparents so long into my adulthood, my wife lost all of hers many years ago, mainly when she was a teenager. It was nice yesterday to be looking back at photos of Nanna at our wedding, and with our children whom I'm glad she got to meet and get to know and love.
My one regret is that the combination of the virus and restrictions meant we lost the chance to see her in the last few years of her life. Our last full chance to see her as herself was in January 2020 - after that she wouldn't have any visitors until she was vaccinated. I saw her again once in December 2020 socially distanced from outside dropping off Christmas presents, coincidentally on the day she got the call to get her vaccine. Then there was lockdown again and my parents at least saw her regularly as her support bubble but we didn't get to see her again until lockdown was lifted by which time she'd had the fall and she was bedbound and a very pale shadow of herself from months earlier. She then got taken to a care home who refused to allow visitors and who STILL don't allow visitors - my parents and her husband could visit but not us. The home was still saying they'd start allowing visitors soon but still haven't yet and now its too late.
Lots of happy memories of a life well loved. I'm very grateful she got to know her great-grandkids who seem to be processing this OK hopefully. Rest in peace Nanna.
I am so sorry and you will feel your loss though wonderful that you say 'lots of happy memories of a life well loved'
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Blimey. "deluded, rude, lesbian."
Where the fuck did you get that from. And this from a site that welcomes women.
Rude - her story of yelling people not wearing a mask in shops, even to the point of threatening to hit them with a stick - at a time when masks are no longer a legal requitrement.
Deluded - she started on here banging on about new lockdowns, based it seems on people planning 'what if' sessions in government, you know, the kind a thing a sensible person would do. They were not evidence of imminent lockdowns. She is now claiming that the daily cases are what she predicted, when in fact they are totally down to a new variant that didnt exist when she made her predictions. Lesbian - happy to retract, but she doesn't seem to like the 'world of men'.
Get a grip man. That (the last) is one of the more ridiculous statements I've read on PB and, let's face it, there's plenty of competition.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Blimey. "deluded, rude, lesbian."
Where the fuck did you get that from. And this from a site that welcomes women.
Rude - her story of yelling people not wearing a mask in shops, even to the point of threatening to hit them with a stick - at a time when masks are no longer a legal requitrement.
Deluded - she started on here banging on about new lockdowns, based it seems on people planning 'what if' sessions in government, you know, the kind a thing a sensible person would do. They were not evidence of imminent lockdowns. She is now claiming that the daily cases are what she predicted, when in fact they are totally down to a new variant that didnt exist when she made her predictions. Lesbian - happy to retract, but she doesn't seem to like the 'world of men'.
Misandrist might have been easier to defend than lesbian.
'The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.'
No serious commentator is suggesting a NFZ. The reason is obvious, and has been stated on this forum clearly and frequently.
NFZ is simply fluffy words to mean the West bombing Russia, which is a major escalation that gives Putin cover for his own escalation.
Far, far better to keep shoveling all those Stinger ground-to-air missiles over into Ukraine. Get enough of them in theatre, and you end up with a no-fly zone by default.
I am not an expert on war but in regard to the 30 or so cruise missiles that hit near the Polish border are there defence systems that can intercept them and are there any deployed in Ukraine ?
It was reported last week that a missile defence system has been set up close to the Polish border, using the US Patriot system. Presumably it’s going to be used to stop stray missiles heading for Poland, rather than to take out Russian missiles in Ukraine.
It’s interesting how, with the exception of the attack on this base at the weekend, Russia has been quite sparing with the long-range missiles. My suspicion is that they have only a few hundred of them.
Kh55/101 uses a Ukrainian made engine... apparently 575 Kh55 were transferred to Russia in the big transfer of weapons and equipment from Ukraine to Russia in 1999.
I do wonder what it actually takes to service these, but think it’s unlikely to be a simple as checking oil levels once a year, saying a prayer that a 40-year-old jet engine will light its fire on command, and that the navigation and avionics will all wake up and find the correct target.
not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a documentary about submarines. In the UK segment, some work was being done on the reactor of a British submarine. Serious men discussed the situation (seriously) before commanding a robotic tool to move around the area of the reactor, an inch at a time. The submarine was entirely covered in an (empty) building. All very high tech.
In Russia, meanwhile, a couple of guys were de-fueling a submarine. They used a chain hoist to line up a big metal tube over the reactor and hoisted some fuel assemblies out. By hand.
I suspect the Kh55 maintenance works a bit like the stories of Long Lance maintenance in the Japanese Navy - the least valuable conscript gets a spanner and everyone else watches from a distance.
Just finally getting round to watching Chernobyl (Mrs P thought it might cheer us up!)
I appreciate it's a dramatised account but, my God, what blatant disregard for basic safety.
In which case I take it you have not seen Homer in charge of a nuclear plant yet.....
For the first time in years I bought a Sunday Times to see just what it had on the Lebedev connection. It was damning. If there were not a war on Boris would be out pronto just on the evidence of that one edition.
He will certainly have to go before the next election. Never mind the text, some of the pictures were lethal. Labour and the LibDems would only have to keep reprinting them in leaflet after leaflet to torpedo the Tory campaign below the water line. The Tories simply cannot go into battle with him as leader. This is not the USA, and he is not Trump. The voters won't back him blind, whatever success he may have in the war or esewhere.
So if he's toast, when does he actually pop out of the toaster?
His MPs clearly think 'not now - the war you know.' They can maybe get away with that a bit but it's not a great look. Then there's the locals. 'Wait for them' is another excuse for inaction. What then? 'Takes a while to change a leader, and he was a winner'. Not sure that will suffice for very long.
Regrdless of the odds, I would say some time this year seems most likely by a long way, but he could get lucky with the war if that drags on. So maybe Mike is right, and at the odds 2023 looks decent enough value for the momnet.
The people that matter in this, Tory MPs, members and even voters don't seem to care.
Virtually none of the Tory posters on here who weren't already critics of the PM when he was first elected will engage with issues of standards, whether about lying, finances, cronyism or security risks.
The responses are a mix of "all politicians are thieving nasty liars regardless", "what about Corbyn", "other things are more important", or "if he helps bring a blue win then anything goes".
He is staying on until he loses an election or it is blatantly clear he will lose the next one.
Couldn’t agree more. The silence is deafening. It’s fine that Russian money and bot farms helped to deliver Brexit, it’s no problem that Russian money has financed the Tory Party and it’s client media for decades. The end justifies the means.
The aims of the right chime with those of Putin, in as much as they both get hard for a strong, nationalist agenda, a return of Empire, of power, of prestige perceived to have been lost. Not collaboration with a weak, Woke, green EU. Fellow travellers on the anti-climate change bandwagon, for whom the profit available from digging up and burning fossil fuels is more important than the long-term health of the planet.
The right can’t face up to this yet. Perhaps with time they will do.
It’s only people on the left whoever mention the Empire…
But if the left suggests that the Empire might not have been an alloyed good, it always gets the right flocking. Just the BE of course, other empires were nasty, foreign muck.
Isn’t the common defence that the British Empire (“which the Scots ran”) was “the least bad of the lot”, rather than “an unalloyed good”?
Yes, I don't think even the empire's few unabashed enthusiasts claim it was an unalloyed good. Some will claim that the positives outweighed the negatives. Some will say that the negatives outweighed the positives, but that the alternative for colonised peoples wasn't serene independence but colonisation by a more malign power eg Germany, Belgium. Some will say it was a negative for colonised peoples, but a negative carried out without malign intentions.
I am somewhere between 1 and 2 on this scale. There was good - whether it was a net good I'm not sure. It certainly wasn't an unalloyed good and I've never heard anyone suggest it was. There is an interesting discussion of what the truth is but it's almost never had because any discussion of the British Empire quickly descends into squeals of rage.
'The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.'
No serious commentator is suggesting a NFZ. The reason is obvious, and has been stated on this forum clearly and frequently.
NFZ is simply fluffy words to mean the West bombing Russia, which is a major escalation that gives Putin cover for his own escalation.
Far, far better to keep shoveling all those Stinger ground-to-air missiles over into Ukraine. Get enough of them in theatre, and you end up with a no-fly zone by default.
I am not an expert on war but in regard to the 30 or so cruise missiles that hit near the Polish border are there defence systems that can intercept them and are there any deployed in Ukraine ?
It was reported last week that a missile defence system has been set up close to the Polish border, using the US Patriot system. Presumably it’s going to be used to stop stray missiles heading for Poland, rather than to take out Russian missiles in Ukraine.
It’s interesting how, with the exception of the attack on this base at the weekend, Russia has been quite sparing with the long-range missiles. My suspicion is that they have only a few hundred of them.
Kh55/101 uses a Ukrainian made engine... apparently 575 Kh55 were transferred to Russia in the big transfer of weapons and equipment from Ukraine to Russia in 1999.
I do wonder what it actually takes to service these, but think it’s unlikely to be a simple as checking oil levels once a year, saying a prayer that a 40-year-old jet engine will light its fire on command, and that the navigation and avionics will all wake up and find the correct target.
not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a documentary about submarines. In the UK segment, some work was being done on the reactor of a British submarine. Serious men discussed the situation (seriously) before commanding a robotic tool to move around the area of the reactor, an inch at a time. The submarine was entirely covered in an (empty) building. All very high tech.
In Russia, meanwhile, a couple of guys were de-fueling a submarine. They used a chain hoist to line up a big metal tube over the reactor and hoisted some fuel assemblies out. By hand.
I suspect the Kh55 maintenance works a bit like the stories of Long Lance maintenance in the Japanese Navy - the least valuable conscript gets a spanner and everyone else watches from a distance.
Just finally getting round to watching Chernobyl (Mrs P thought it might cheer us up!)
I appreciate it's a dramatised account but, my God, what blatant disregard for basic safety.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Even a Walter Mitty airline Captain like me, knows that you don’t jettison all of the fuel, at least not unless you want to make your initial emergency considerably more serious!
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Even a Walter Mitty airline Captain like me, knows that you don’t jettison all of the fuel, at least not unless you want to make your initial emergency considerably more serious!
To be fair, less risk of a fireball when your glider does hit the ground...
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Even a Walter Mitty airline Captain like me, knows that you don’t jettison all of the fuel, at least not unless you want to make your initial emergency considerably more serious!
To be clear, I only knew that because I heard a real pilot explaining it on r4 a couple of years ago. But it should be obvious from first principles.
Yes; my only sibling, my little sister is in a care home, and the only person allowed to see her is one of her daughters. It's to be hoped that the situation will ease shortly.
At least she's in SW London now, as opposed to Alderney!
Johnson's political recovery is no surprise. The war is a great opportunity for him to pretend he's a serious Prime Minister rather than a morally vacant charlatan and although most won't be fooled there will be some who are - enough to shift those polls.
I think of more relevance is that anger over partygate rightly fades into the background in the context of what's currently going on in Ukraine. Getting rid of him depended on a) agreement that the behaviour was wrong (which bar, I think, was passed) and b) continuous focus and anger on the issue. For entirely external reasons, this has moved on. People can only be really angry about one thing at a time. It's very hard to be angry about whether someone went to a party they said they didn't and said no-one else should be doing when a crazed madman is bombing maternity hospitals and threatening nuclear armageddon. I was cheerfully cross about partygate - everyone was. I was seething about the keenness of government for lockdown and this gave me a useful way to blame someone for it. But trying to think about it now it feels curiously abstract - I can't summon any emotion about it at all. And making people feel things is crucial to making things happen. That's why politicians make speeches. That's why Churchill was successful and - say - IDS was not. I'm not saying this is right, I'm just explaining it (as I see it at least).
That view will be shared widely. But the PM should not be expected to resign for making people feel angry but because it is dangerous for us to have a leader who has zero shame, a complete disregard for the truth, takes brazen security risks with contacts of enemy heads of state, and probably anyone else with a few quid they are willing to bung.
Oh, yes, I agree. As a PM, he's a tad sub-optimal. I was just putting forward my take for why he is now looking more secure. It's not because he's suddenly seen as the right man for the moment, it's because attention and emotion has moved on from the particular circumstances which were putting his job on the line.
I dislike these disputes about the credibility of posters. One thing that has troubled me about the internet is something that happened to me 20 years ago. I was wrongly accused of writing fake abusive posts on a messageboard because someone said that my 'way of writing' was very similar to the anonymous abusive poster. It was impossible for me to defend myself against these accusations, once the suspicions mounted there was a tsunami effect.
I've never looked in how Spam IP's are generated. But there are many reasons to try and hide behind a fake IP address. I was, for many years, in a job where I was prohibited from speaking freely on the Internet, and I still have to be extremely careful. In the end, I can be more honest posting under a pseudenoym. I think the owners of the site know who I am in real life (if they have ever looked in to me) and I trust them with that information, although of course there are risks about the safety of any data.
Its a sad state of affairs, but the world we live in.
“ Clausewitz describes the "culminating point" as when an attacking force hits strong resistance, runs out of energy, and can no longer continue. Russia is running out of manpower, asking Syria to send troops. Sanctions are working. Russia may culminate in 10-14 days if we press.”
So what happens then ?
Who knows?
But who knows what happens if we withdraw all help from Ukraine, and Russia rolls over them and gets a nice, compliant pro-Russian government in Kiev?
In my mind it's quite simple: it is right versus wrong, good versus evil. The evil is easy to identify: Putin and his cronies. They are the ones who have invaded another country; they are the ones who are killing innocent civilians. They are the ones threatening smaller democracies with invasion. They are the ones who are threatening the world with chemical weapons, or nuclear oblivion.
Those on the side of evil talk about how it is our fault, how we caused this mess, rather than concentrate their ire on the evil.
We have to be on the side of good. And that means supporting Ukraine.
Which we are doing.
The time to think about the causes of this is after the mess is over - and I think many of their arguments are bogus anyway, purposeful distractions away from evil.
The final clause is the sort of thing we should avoid writing. I don't know people who are 'purposefully' distracting away from evil, at least not on here. I don't frequent other political or social media sites.
The reason why the causes are pertinent is that they are also so relevant to both the present and the future.
We were powerless to stop Putin because we are powerless to stop Putin and we will be powerless to stop Putin. We are so frit of him, of the nuclear threat, that we're not prepared to stand up and defend Ukraine with the only language Putin will pay attention to: military force.
Biden is a wet blanket. His ghastly withdrawal from Afghanistan, aided and abetted by Johnson, greenlit Putin's invasion of Ukraine and has shown Putin that NATO is not going to stand up and defend them.
And, yes, Putin and his invasion are utterly evil.
I utterly disagree. In other places, the 'we caused tis by x, y and z' are being used as distractions away from the Russian's folly. Whenever anyone criticises Russia, the voices cry that it is 'our' fault.
"Russians are doing these things." "Remember that we guaranteed we would not expand NATO eastwards, and Ukraine is filled with Nazis. Besides, we 'poked' them into it."
It is classic maskirovka, performed by either knowing or unknowing fools.
The Russian government is not the victims in this. They are the aggressor, the bully. The victims are the Ukrainian people and, to a lesser extent, the Russian people.
If we see what is happening as akin to rape, then these people are saying that Ukraine should not have been wearing such a short skirt.
Twitter is full of such comments.
Twitter is part of the poison that has got us to the place of Russia invading Ukraine. .
I read your posts on here with interest (Chris, again, take note). I've seen Greta Thurnberg blamed on here for starting the Ukraine war but now Twitter is responsible for it? It's an interesting thesis but I'm not on twitter so I wouldn't know.
I think if we believe in democracy it's really important that we continue to debate in as friendly a way as possible, even when profoundly disagreeing with someone's perspective or suggestion. I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. That's a shame because this is a decent site and the only one I frequent. When someone is rude to me I tend to disappear as I have better things to do than be insulted by someone from the comfort of their chair whom I've never met.
So keep playing the ball, folks. Not the man or woman.
". I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. "
You weren't here in 2016. Or 2017. Or 2014. Or 2019. Or 2020. In fact, it's pretty much always been like this...
I'd argue PB is a rather decorous place compared to the Internet in general, especially as politics is being discussed. It's also more informative than most places.
There are more women than ever before, but still by no means enough.
It's not exactly a welcoming place for women tbh.
There's far too much male aggression and downright rudeness, a failure to debate issues and always a tendency to attack the person.
This place is like being on a rugby field of 30 men. And not in a pleasant fantasy way
I shall be off for a bit. The personal rudeness is tiresome and I have a life outside that feels a lot more wholesome.
There's nothing stopping women from posting as many comments as they like on here. The fact is women are always less interested in obsessive political commentary than men. On the VoteUK forum it's about 95% male even though every effort has been made to encourage more women to join and post comments.
I was once told by a business owner, apparently in all seriousness, that "we don't have a ramp here because we never get any people in wheelchairs visit us."
My point is, if you make it uncomfortable or unwelcoming for particular demographics, don't be surprised if you don't get many attending/posting.
The willie-warmer thread was indeed...well, embarrassing.
Just finally getting round to watching Chernobyl (Mrs P thought it might cheer us up!)
I appreciate it's a dramatised account but, my God, what blatant disregard for basic safety.
It's a good show, but they didn't show even half of what was done. I highly recommend the book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy (Plokhy is a Professor of Ukrainian History and read a lot of primary source material to write the book).
'The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.'
No serious commentator is suggesting a NFZ. The reason is obvious, and has been stated on this forum clearly and frequently.
NFZ is simply fluffy words to mean the West bombing Russia, which is a major escalation that gives Putin cover for his own escalation.
Far, far better to keep shoveling all those Stinger ground-to-air missiles over into Ukraine. Get enough of them in theatre, and you end up with a no-fly zone by default.
I am not an expert on war but in regard to the 30 or so cruise missiles that hit near the Polish border are there defence systems that can intercept them and are there any deployed in Ukraine ?
It was reported last week that a missile defence system has been set up close to the Polish border, using the US Patriot system. Presumably it’s going to be used to stop stray missiles heading for Poland, rather than to take out Russian missiles in Ukraine.
It’s interesting how, with the exception of the attack on this base at the weekend, Russia has been quite sparing with the long-range missiles. My suspicion is that they have only a few hundred of them.
Kh55/101 uses a Ukrainian made engine... apparently 575 Kh55 were transferred to Russia in the big transfer of weapons and equipment from Ukraine to Russia in 1999.
I do wonder what it actually takes to service these, but think it’s unlikely to be a simple as checking oil levels once a year, saying a prayer that a 40-year-old jet engine will light its fire on command, and that the navigation and avionics will all wake up and find the correct target.
not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a documentary about submarines. In the UK segment, some work was being done on the reactor of a British submarine. Serious men discussed the situation (seriously) before commanding a robotic tool to move around the area of the reactor, an inch at a time. The submarine was entirely covered in an (empty) building. All very high tech.
In Russia, meanwhile, a couple of guys were de-fueling a submarine. They used a chain hoist to line up a big metal tube over the reactor and hoisted some fuel assemblies out. By hand.
I suspect the Kh55 maintenance works a bit like the stories of Long Lance maintenance in the Japanese Navy - the least valuable conscript gets a spanner and everyone else watches from a distance.
Just finally getting round to watching Chernobyl (Mrs P thought it might cheer us up!)
I appreciate it's a dramatised account but, my God, what blatant disregard for basic safety.
A mate, back in the day, did a massive tour round the Soviet Union, after the fall - spent years there looking at various facilities etc. He even did the Soviet equivalents of accounting, so that he could try and understand the books.
One big finding was that in many areas, they simply hadn't advanced from the 1950s. Processes, tools, safety, management even - it was 1950s America/West
Think about the stories of the fire at Windscale, with people pushing the burning fuel out of the channels with scaffolding poles. Sounds kinda similar, doesn't it?
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
I actually experienced the loss of one engine on a 747 flight from Heathrow to Sydney one hour out of Bangkok
We circled for ages with fuel streaming from the wing and had a full emergency landing with fire engines etc back into Bangkok
It is self evident that all the fuel was not jettisoned
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Blimey. "deluded, rude, lesbian."
Where the fuck did you get that from. And this from a site that welcomes women.
Rude - her story of yelling people not wearing a mask in shops, even to the point of threatening to hit them with a stick - at a time when masks are no longer a legal requitrement.
Deluded - she started on here banging on about new lockdowns, based it seems on people planning 'what if' sessions in government, you know, the kind a thing a sensible person would do. They were not evidence of imminent lockdowns. She is now claiming that the daily cases are what she predicted, when in fact they are totally down to a new variant that didnt exist when she made her predictions. Lesbian - happy to retract, but she doesn't seem to like the 'world of men'.
Get a grip man. That (the last) is one of the more ridiculous statements I've read on PB and, let's face it, there's plenty of competition.
Still, Heathener suggesting that PB was a hotbed of sexist, stereotyping gammonry was obviously a vile slur.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Even a Walter Mitty airline Captain like me, knows that you don’t jettison all of the fuel, at least not unless you want to make your initial emergency considerably more serious!
“We need to land - jettison the fuel”.
“What, all of it? Ok, you’re the captain”.
“We had to. Coming in to land now - oh shit that’s quite a cross breeze I’m way off line”.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Agree with your post, but would like to add: AIUI, many passenger airliners don't actually have fuel jettison systems, as their max landing weight is very near their max take-off weight. The B757 and A320 are examples of planes that don't have fuel jettison systems.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
Thank you for the kind responses everyone. One thing that is great about the community is how much people care for each other here. I've tried to keep my emotions semi-together until I dropped the kids off at school this morning, so everything kind of hit this morning and your kind replies are helping thank you.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
Completely off topic, but I wanted to write something somewhere to express my emotions, but my nan died yesterday. As an adult this is the first death of a loved one I've really experienced, my last experience of death for someone I was close to was of a classmate at school who died when we were 10.
Its such a cliché to say, but at least she's not suffering anymore. She'd had a fall towards the end of lockdown that triggered a steep downfall in her health and dementia so she wasn't herself anymore and the NHS made her go into a care home, but still its very emotional now that she's gone.
I'm very fortunate to have had my grandparents so long into my adulthood, my wife lost all of hers many years ago, mainly when she was a teenager. It was nice yesterday to be looking back at photos of Nanna at our wedding, and with our children whom I'm glad she got to meet and get to know and love.
My one regret is that the combination of the virus and restrictions meant we lost the chance to see her in the last few years of her life. Our last full chance to see her as herself was in January 2020 - after that she wouldn't have any visitors until she was vaccinated. I saw her again once in December 2020 socially distanced from outside dropping off Christmas presents, coincidentally on the day she got the call to get her vaccine. Then there was lockdown again and my parents at least saw her regularly as her support bubble but we didn't get to see her again until lockdown was lifted by which time she'd had the fall and she was bedbound and a very pale shadow of herself from months earlier. She then got taken to a care home who refused to allow visitors and who STILL don't allow visitors - my parents and her husband could visit but not us. The home was still saying they'd start allowing visitors soon but still haven't yet and now its too late.
Lots of happy memories of a life well loved. I'm very grateful she got to know her great-grandkids who seem to be processing this OK hopefully. Rest in peace Nanna.
Sorry to hear that Bart. A lovely post in her memory and thank you for sharing. You've brought back memories for me of my grandmother, for which I'm grateful. How old was she? Any life in which you get to meet your great-grandchildren is a remarkable one. My grandmother met two of her great-granddaughters. She very old, and her mind was not really operating by this stage - but one of my favourite memories of her is when she met my middle daughter as a small baby, about a month before the end of her life, and briefly, for a few hours, she was lucid and with us again.
For the first time in years I bought a Sunday Times to see just what it had on the Lebedev connection. It was damning. If there were not a war on Boris would be out pronto just on the evidence of that one edition.
He will certainly have to go before the next election. Never mind the text, some of the pictures were lethal. Labour and the LibDems would only have to keep reprinting them in leaflet after leaflet to torpedo the Tory campaign below the water line. The Tories simply cannot go into battle with him as leader. This is not the USA, and he is not Trump. The voters won't back him blind, whatever success he may have in the war or esewhere.
So if he's toast, when does he actually pop out of the toaster?
His MPs clearly think 'not now - the war you know.' They can maybe get away with that a bit but it's not a great look. Then there's the locals. 'Wait for them' is another excuse for inaction. What then? 'Takes a while to change a leader, and he was a winner'. Not sure that will suffice for very long.
Regrdless of the odds, I would say some time this year seems most likely by a long way, but he could get lucky with the war if that drags on. So maybe Mike is right, and at the odds 2023 looks decent enough value for the momnet.
The people that matter in this, Tory MPs, members and even voters don't seem to care.
Virtually none of the Tory posters on here who weren't already critics of the PM when he was first elected will engage with issues of standards, whether about lying, finances, cronyism or security risks.
The responses are a mix of "all politicians are thieving nasty liars regardless", "what about Corbyn", "other things are more important", or "if he helps bring a blue win then anything goes".
He is staying on until he loses an election or it is blatantly clear he will lose the next one.
Couldn’t agree more. The silence is deafening. It’s fine that Russian money and bot farms helped to deliver Brexit, it’s no problem that Russian money has financed the Tory Party and it’s client media for decades. The end justifies the means.
The aims of the right chime with those of Putin, in as much as they both get hard for a strong, nationalist agenda, a return of Empire, of power, of prestige perceived to have been lost. Not collaboration with a weak, Woke, green EU. Fellow travellers on the anti-climate change bandwagon, for whom the profit available from digging up and burning fossil fuels is more important than the long-term health of the planet.
The right can’t face up to this yet. Perhaps with time they will do.
It’s only people on the left whoever mention the Empire…
But if the left suggests that the Empire might not have been an alloyed good, it always gets the right flocking. Just the BE of course, other empires were nasty, foreign muck.
Isn’t the common defence that the British Empire (“which the Scots ran”) was “the least bad of the lot”, rather than “an unalloyed good”?
I dislike these disputes about the credibility of posters. One thing that has troubled me about the internet is something that happened to me 20 years ago. I was wrongly accused of writing fake abusive posts on a messageboard because someone said that my 'way of writing' was very similar to the anonymous abusive poster. It was impossible for me to defend myself against these accusations, once the suspicions mounted there was a tsunami effect.
I've never looked in how Spam IP's are generated. But there are many reasons to try and hide behind a fake IP address. I was, for many years, in a job where I was prohibited from speaking freely on the Internet, and I still have to be extremely careful. In the end, I can be more honest posting under a pseudenoym. I think the owners of the site know who I am in real life (if they have ever looked in to me) and I trust them with that information, although of course there are risks about the safety of any data.
Its a sad state of affairs, but the world we live in.
With millions of people posting comments on the internet, there are bound to be similarities in writing style between different people who actually have nothing to do with each other.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
Oooo I’d forgotten about that. Where has the text got to? PM discretion? Just wondering about the process they get left with and the JR risk. Since you can’t reconstitute a prerogative power, it will end JR-able on “how was the decision made” grounds.
Interesting, and possibly explains why I have achieved the height of mediocrity in my lifetime, as on quite a few occasions I have come across people (usually in business) who I have enjoyed the company of and have impressed me and then something happens or they say something that as far as I am concerned is unacceptable. It might just be the other people they associate with for whom they should know better. I drop them like a stone at that point in every case. I won't knowingly associate with corrupt people, even politely.
That's an interesting difference from my approach (which perhaps partly reflects a lifetime involved with politics to a greater or lesser degree). My view is that nearly everyone slips up now and then - a dodgy joke, a racist or sexist assumption, a relationship that they didn't handle properly, a minor breach of the law. Some are worse - it's a sliding scale - but seeking perfection is hopeless, and not really fair. If someone's OK in 90% of their life, I'll shrug off the remainder if it's not too horrible.
Moreover, I'll talk professionally with absolutely anyone (yes, Nazis included, and people who have been personally unpleasant to me too), insofar as there is any element of common ground, though I won't pretend to regard anything abhorrent that they say as acceptable - if they accept that their view on X is something I find revolting, but they're still willing to discuss Y, fine. So I worked on a building preservation issue in a conservation group with someone who I discovered was an active BNP member. He never brought up his racist views in the discussion of the conservation product, so I didn't either. I think, on the whole, that it's better to try to find a civilised streak than to drop them altogether.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Even a Walter Mitty airline Captain like me, knows that you don’t jettison all of the fuel, at least not unless you want to make your initial emergency considerably more serious!
To be clear, I only knew that because I heard a real pilot explaining it on r4 a couple of years ago. But it should be obvious from first principles.
Yes, the larger modern planes have a maximum take-off weight quite a bit higher than maximum landing weight, by several dozen tonnes. The lighter MLW allows for engineering and weight saving on the aircraft structure itself. The A380 has an empty weight of 275 tonnes, a max landing weight of 390 tonnes, and a max takeoff weight of 575 tonnes.
While you can land overweight - if you’re on fire - doing so usually necessitates inspection and replacement of a lot of components, even if the airframe itself isn’t damaged. Dumping sufficient fuel to be under MLW is therefore good airmanship that makes a successful landing more likely.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
Oooo I’d forgotten about that. Where has the text got to? PM discretion? Just wondering about the process they get left with and the JR risk. Since you can’t reconstitute a prerogative power, it will end JR-able on “how was the decision made” grounds.
Oh for the days when the main news was a spat between the Gov't and supreme court.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Agree with your post, but would like to add: AIUI, many passenger airliners don't actually have fuel jettison systems, as their max landing weight is very near their max take-off weight. The B757 and A320 are examples of planes that don't have fuel jettison systems.
(All AIUI)
Wouldn't it be a tad rash to jettison all of your fuel? The storms last month highlighted how many planes get almost down to the runway before aborting and going around again once or twice, in some cases ending up somewhere totally different - not necessarily even in the same country. That's going to need some fuel.
For the first time in years I bought a Sunday Times to see just what it had on the Lebedev connection. It was damning. If there were not a war on Boris would be out pronto just on the evidence of that one edition.
He will certainly have to go before the next election. Never mind the text, some of the pictures were lethal. Labour and the LibDems would only have to keep reprinting them in leaflet after leaflet to torpedo the Tory campaign below the water line. The Tories simply cannot go into battle with him as leader. This is not the USA, and he is not Trump. The voters won't back him blind, whatever success he may have in the war or esewhere.
So if he's toast, when does he actually pop out of the toaster?
His MPs clearly think 'not now - the war you know.' They can maybe get away with that a bit but it's not a great look. Then there's the locals. 'Wait for them' is another excuse for inaction. What then? 'Takes a while to change a leader, and he was a winner'. Not sure that will suffice for very long.
Regrdless of the odds, I would say some time this year seems most likely by a long way, but he could get lucky with the war if that drags on. So maybe Mike is right, and at the odds 2023 looks decent enough value for the momnet.
The people that matter in this, Tory MPs, members and even voters don't seem to care.
Virtually none of the Tory posters on here who weren't already critics of the PM when he was first elected will engage with issues of standards, whether about lying, finances, cronyism or security risks.
The responses are a mix of "all politicians are thieving nasty liars regardless", "what about Corbyn", "other things are more important", or "if he helps bring a blue win then anything goes".
He is staying on until he loses an election or it is blatantly clear he will lose the next one.
Couldn’t agree more. The silence is deafening. It’s fine that Russian money and bot farms helped to deliver Brexit, it’s no problem that Russian money has financed the Tory Party and it’s client media for decades. The end justifies the means.
The aims of the right chime with those of Putin, in as much as they both get hard for a strong, nationalist agenda, a return of Empire, of power, of prestige perceived to have been lost. Not collaboration with a weak, Woke, green EU. Fellow travellers on the anti-climate change bandwagon, for whom the profit available from digging up and burning fossil fuels is more important than the long-term health of the planet.
The right can’t face up to this yet. Perhaps with time they will do.
It’s only people on the left whoever mention the Empire…
But if the left suggests that the Empire might not have been an alloyed good, it always gets the right flocking. Just the BE of course, other empires were nasty, foreign muck.
Isn’t the common defence that the British Empire (“which the Scots ran”) was “the least bad of the lot”, rather than “an unalloyed good”?
Xavier MacDuff @xvrmdf · 12h The rise in energy bills coming down the pipeline for UK households really is horrific. I'm not quite sure that people have gotten their heads around just how bad this is going to be.
That is 10% of household income that people won't be able to spend on other things.
There are going to be some huge cutbacks. Not great if you have a business selling discretionary goods and services to the UK consumer.
One other factor that I am not sure has quite sunk in, the economy over the past 5-10 years in places like the UK / US, has been growing lots of business areas that are exactly that e.g. people can get all the every day stuff from Tesco / Amazon / Ikea / etc, then they spend on one offs from Esty or they pay for the dog groomer, somebody to wash the car....things like festivals have become huge business, with people going to multiple ones throughout the summer (and with that all the staff, the food vendors), etc etc etc.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of the UK economy is now made up of what is essentially discretionary items / services / experiences.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Agree with your post, but would like to add: AIUI, many passenger airliners don't actually have fuel jettison systems, as their max landing weight is very near their max take-off weight. The B757 and A320 are examples of planes that don't have fuel jettison systems.
(All AIUI)
Wouldn't it be a tad rash to jettison all of your fuel? The storms last month highlighted how many planes get almost down to the runway before aborting and going around again once or twice, in some cases ending up somewhere totally different - not necessarily even in the same country. That's going to need some fuel.
Yes, if Heathener said that, then she was wrong. I was just pointing out that some planes physically cannot dump fuel. They just do it to get below the maximum landing weight.
Xavier MacDuff @xvrmdf · 12h The rise in energy bills coming down the pipeline for UK households really is horrific. I'm not quite sure that people have gotten their heads around just how bad this is going to be.
That is 10% of household income that people won't be able to spend on other things.
There are going to be some huge cutbacks. Not great if you have a business selling discretionary goods and services to the UK consumer.
One other factor that I am not sure has quite sunk in, the economy over the past 5-10 years in places like the UK / US, has been growing lots of business areas that are exactly that e.g. people can get all the every day stuff from Amazon / Ikea / etc, then they spend on one offs from Esty or they pay for the dog groomer, somebody to wash the car....things like festivals have become huge business, with people going to multiple ones throughout the summer (and with that all the staff, the food vendors), etc etc etc.
Just so long as you’re not implying that my Test Tickets are discretionary. Or at least if you are, don’t say it in front of my wife and give her ideas.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
Xavier MacDuff @xvrmdf · 12h The rise in energy bills coming down the pipeline for UK households really is horrific. I'm not quite sure that people have gotten their heads around just how bad this is going to be.
That is 10% of household income that people won't be able to spend on other things.
There are going to be some huge cutbacks. Not great if you have a business selling discretionary goods and services to the UK consumer.
One other factor that I am not sure has quite sunk in, the economy over the past 5-10 years in places like the UK / US, has been growing lots of business areas that are exactly that e.g. people can get all the every day stuff from Tesco / Amazon / Ikea / etc, then they spend on one offs from Esty or they pay for the dog groomer, somebody to wash the car....things like festivals have become huge business, with people going to multiple ones throughout the summer (and with that all the staff, the food vendors), etc etc etc.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of the UK economy is now made up of what is essentially discretionary items / services / experiences.
There's also the substitution-down effect - Dominoes, for instance, had quite a good Great Recession.
I'm afraid I really do think a lot of the back-slapping about how well we are doing is delusional borne of a need not to feel as powerless about what Putin is doing as we are.
The fact is, we stood by and let him invade and pulverise an entire nation. Slowly and inexorably that is what he is doing. Biden and NATO refused to pitch in because they were too scared of Putin's nuclear threats. Perhaps justifiably, but we've let him get away with it.
We all want this to be another Afghanistan. I fear we are deluding ourselves.
When you say "we", I don't think you're including yourself.
So perhaps you should be a little more precise in your language and say "you".
It would be a little more honest, no?
'We' meaning the west, not pb.com per se.
I think we in the west have been trying to convince ourselves that we're doing as much as we possibly can (we aren't), that we're united (we aren't) and that there's nothing further we can do without risking nuclear war (not true).
The reality is that we are ignoring Zelensky's pleas for a No Fly Zone and we're letting an entire country get pulverised.
You started here with some views on Covid cases and hospitalisations in Israel which turned out not to be - how to put this - entirely accurate. Then moved on to a story about BA pilots, which turned out to be... ah yes... not entirely accurate.
And now you're onto "oh yes, I'm on your side, one of *you*, and I know it's hard to accept, but it would be better for all of us if the Ukrainians just accepted the inevitable and laid down their arms... after all, what chance do they stand?"
It is a little tricky to take you seriously, and for that I apologise.
At least she’s a better class of Russian provocateur. PB should feel flattered
The faux reasonableness is very, very well done though.
I think, and I do mean this, you should take a look at yourself if you are 'really' going down that route because it's a very, very, dark place to go.
If you start to think that anyone with whom you disagree displays the signs of being something other than sincere, a phantasm, a spectre, who is merely 'faux' reasonable then you are disappearing into a rabbit hole void the end result of which is a dystopian nightmare of narcissistic individualism.
I don't agree with everything you post but I don't stoop to question your sincerity.
It's a strange phenomenon on PB, noted also by @Dura_Ace and @YBarddCwsc yesterday. Normally very thoughtful, enquiring minds have fallen into line over a preferred stance on Russia/Ukraine. Any deviation from that stance is met with disproportionate hostility.
Perhaps it stems from a sense of frustration at our powerlessness. Change your profile picture to the Ukrainian flag and shout down those who don't agree with the chosen line on Ukraine (Russia doing dreadfully, imminent collapse of their war effort, dissent maybe even revolution at home, etc).
It really is quite strange.
It's OK to have a dissenting opinion.
But it's also a little suspicious when you have a dissenting opinion, have a record of spreading falsehoods (about BA pilots and vaccines, for example), and have an IP address that's listed in the blacklists.
Absolutely and it's your site so them's the rules. Perhaps it is a mark of the sophistication of spammers that @Heathener's posts seem to me to be genuine and I could point to other posters who are equally contentious for many on PB, not to say equally provocative.
P Johnson and d-d were laughably obvious, but Heathener less so.
I thought she was stupid, but harmless. Guess she's gone now.
Thing is, we are, ahem, all grown up able to think for ourselves types on here. If they are super crass like @PJohnson was with lots of "mate"s and very bad at the spamming thing then fair enough - they clog up the site and take up bandwidth.
But from what I have read of @Heathener's posts (until recently one a day in the morning saying that's it I'm off) they have an opinion. I hadn't recalled the BA pilots or vaccines ones but even if it is the most egregious perceived rubbish then what harm does it do to respond to the points raised.
What's the difference between engaging with someone who genuinely believes, for example and I'm not saying this is her position, that Putin is entirely justified in his current actions, and engaging with a bot who says the same thing. It is the issue that is of interest. Somewhere there is someone who supports Putin - there are reports that say much of the Russian population, for example - so why not ignore the IP address and just discuss the issue.
When @Heathener arrived it was a blaze of glory about autumn lockdowns and the vaccines failing, which was challenged in a robust way, as it was shite. She/he/it objected to the unwelcoming atmosphere (which kind of indicates that they hadn't been a lurker).
Up to now I've regarded them as a deluded, rude, lesbian, who talked shit. Now perhaps she/he/it has been outed as something else entirely.
Her best moment was in her previous incarnation when she told the site that when a passenger jet has to make an emergency landing it jettisons *every last drop* of fuel before doing so. She knew this from her mate who is a Lufthansa pilot, who couldn't bear ill informed numpties who thought they only threw out part of it.
In fact, you reduce your fuel to get the plane's gross weight below maximum landing weight: jettisoning more creates pollution and jettisoning all of it would simply turn the plane into the world's most dangerous glider.
Draw your own conclusions.
Agree with your post, but would like to add: AIUI, many passenger airliners don't actually have fuel jettison systems, as their max landing weight is very near their max take-off weight. The B757 and A320 are examples of planes that don't have fuel jettison systems.
(All AIUI)
Wouldn't it be a tad rash to jettison all of your fuel? The storms last month highlighted how many planes get almost down to the runway before aborting and going around again once or twice, in some cases ending up somewhere totally different - not necessarily even in the same country. That's going to need some fuel.
Indeed. On days like that, the pilots earn their money and a lot of planning goes into where they might end up. Flying around at low level uses a lot more fuel than flying at altitude, they have to make sure they don’t get too low.
To reassure everyone, there’s several different reserves of fuel that pilots plan for. You have trip fuel, divert fuel, weather fuel, reserve fuel and then the final reserve fuel of 30 minutes. It’s a mandatory mayday call if you’re going to be down to that final reserve, at which point the air traffic controllers clear everyone else out of the way for you, and you finish the day having tea and biscuits with your boss, with no tea and no biscuits, but a lot of paperwork to fill out! I don’t think anyone came close to that, in the storms of a few weeks ago.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
Would be different in total war of course, but basically no, it would be off the line.
It has become apparent that whereas our stated “available kit” numbers are accurate and allow for this stuff, the Russians’ perhaps don’t. The benefits of an open democracy and things like PAC.
Xavier MacDuff @xvrmdf · 12h The rise in energy bills coming down the pipeline for UK households really is horrific. I'm not quite sure that people have gotten their heads around just how bad this is going to be.
That is 10% of household income that people won't be able to spend on other things.
There are going to be some huge cutbacks. Not great if you have a business selling discretionary goods and services to the UK consumer.
One other factor that I am not sure has quite sunk in, the economy over the past 5-10 years in places like the UK / US, has been growing lots of business areas that are exactly that e.g. people can get all the every day stuff from Tesco / Amazon / Ikea / etc, then they spend on one offs from Esty or they pay for the dog groomer, somebody to wash the car....things like festivals have become huge business, with people going to multiple ones throughout the summer (and with that all the staff, the food vendors), etc etc etc.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of the UK economy is now made up of what is essentially discretionary items / services / experiences.
One silver lining is that, so far as I can see this removes the need to raise interest rates to throttle demand (They might have to go up for other reasons but demand throttling isn't amongst them now). Gas and electric should see to that by themselves. The investment in wind and tidal needs to move further and faster with the competition now more expensive mind. I don't know about the nuclear case, the price of uranium ore must be on the up & up though - but I don't know if that's a large part of the cost mix - supply of material (Russia produces lots of it) and Chinese involvement might be more of a concern than strike price now.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
Although it had a mighty role in the confusion of Brexit 2016-2019.
Completely off topic, but I wanted to write something somewhere to express my emotions, but my nan died yesterday. As an adult this is the first death of a loved one I've really experienced, my last experience of death for someone I was close to was of a classmate at school who died when we were 10.
Its such a cliché to say, but at least she's not suffering anymore. She'd had a fall towards the end of lockdown that triggered a steep downfall in her health and dementia so she wasn't herself anymore and the NHS made her go into a care home, but still its very emotional now that she's gone.
I'm very fortunate to have had my grandparents so long into my adulthood, my wife lost all of hers many years ago, mainly when she was a teenager. It was nice yesterday to be looking back at photos of Nanna at our wedding, and with our children whom I'm glad she got to meet and get to know and love.
My one regret is that the combination of the virus and restrictions meant we lost the chance to see her in the last few years of her life. Our last full chance to see her as herself was in January 2020 - after that she wouldn't have any visitors until she was vaccinated. I saw her again once in December 2020 socially distanced from outside dropping off Christmas presents, coincidentally on the day she got the call to get her vaccine. Then there was lockdown again and my parents at least saw her regularly as her support bubble but we didn't get to see her again until lockdown was lifted by which time she'd had the fall and she was bedbound and a very pale shadow of herself from months earlier. She then got taken to a care home who refused to allow visitors and who STILL don't allow visitors - my parents and her husband could visit but not us. The home was still saying they'd start allowing visitors soon but still haven't yet and now its too late.
Lots of happy memories of a life well loved. I'm very grateful she got to know her great-grandkids who seem to be processing this OK hopefully. Rest in peace Nanna.
Sorry to hear that Bart. A lovely post in her memory and thank you for sharing. You've brought back memories for me of my grandmother, for which I'm grateful. How old was she? Any life in which you get to meet your great-grandchildren is a remarkable one. My grandmother met two of her great-granddaughters. She very old, and her mind was not really operating by this stage - but one of my favourite memories of her is when she met my middle daughter as a small baby, about a month before the end of her life, and briefly, for a few hours, she was lucid and with us again.
Touching story, Mr C; I only knew one set of my grandparents, but the grandmother I did know met all her five gt-grandchildren. However, my eldest grandchild met all her gt-grandparents and indeed has dim memories of some at least of them
Xavier MacDuff @xvrmdf · 12h The rise in energy bills coming down the pipeline for UK households really is horrific. I'm not quite sure that people have gotten their heads around just how bad this is going to be.
That is 10% of household income that people won't be able to spend on other things.
There are going to be some huge cutbacks. Not great if you have a business selling discretionary goods and services to the UK consumer.
One other factor that I am not sure has quite sunk in, the economy over the past 5-10 years in places like the UK / US, has been growing lots of business areas that are exactly that e.g. people can get all the every day stuff from Tesco / Amazon / Ikea / etc, then they spend on one offs from Esty or they pay for the dog groomer, somebody to wash the car....things like festivals have become huge business, with people going to multiple ones throughout the summer (and with that all the staff, the food vendors), etc etc etc.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of the UK economy is now made up of what is essentially discretionary items / services / experiences.
There's also the substitution-down effect - Dominoes, for instance, had quite a good Great Recession.
Absolutely. Also, all those outlets that now rely on UberEats etc. £5 a pop to have something delivered is not chump change, on top of the overpriced crap you are having delivered.
I wouldn't want to be in any business venture for the foreseeable that is relies on people having people of discretionary income.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log kept onboard is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
Tweet has video of him waving a huge Ukrainian flag from his "conquest"
Mateusz Sobieraj @MateuszSobiera3 Master French activist Pierre Afner entered the villa of the alleged daughter of Russian Federation head Katerina Tikhonova in Biarritz, changed the locks on the house and invited refugees from #Ukraine there #Ukraine #Russia #poland #BreakingNews #breaking #war #putin #StopPutin https://twitter.com/MateuszSobiera3/status/1503120886156644353
I suspect insurance premiums might be going up on oligarch-owned property in the West. Imagine being a displaced Ukrainian, home bombed, family killed, contemplating the gated residence of a Russian cosmopolitan.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
Although it had a mighty role in the confusion of Brexit 2016-2019.
So we'll go back to the status quo ante? PM's call?
Mainstream media seem to be accepting the Ukrainian numbers. Add on the number of injured and POWs and the initial 190,000 troops has been significantly more than decimated.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
I don't know about tanks as I didn't leave school at age 12 thus rendering me ineligible for service in heavy armour. In British military aviation we have the famous '700' form which details all of the components and subsystems you can expect not to function on the aircraft you are signing out.
Interesting, and possibly explains why I have achieved the height of mediocrity in my lifetime, as on quite a few occasions I have come across people (usually in business) who I have enjoyed the company of and have impressed me and then something happens or they say something that as far as I am concerned is unacceptable. It might just be the other people they associate with for whom they should know better. I drop them like a stone at that point in every case. I won't knowingly associate with corrupt people, even politely.
That's an interesting difference from my approach (which perhaps partly reflects a lifetime involved with politics to a greater or lesser degree). My view is that nearly everyone slips up now and then - a dodgy joke, a racist or sexist assumption, a relationship that they didn't handle properly, a minor breach of the law. Some are worse - it's a sliding scale - but seeking perfection is hopeless, and not really fair. If someone's OK in 90% of their life, I'll shrug off the remainder if it's not too horrible.
Moreover, I'll talk professionally with absolutely anyone (yes, Nazis included, and people who have been personally unpleasant to me too), insofar as there is any element of common ground, though I won't pretend to regard anything abhorrent that they say as acceptable - if they accept that their view on X is something I find revolting, but they're still willing to discuss Y, fine. So I worked on a building preservation issue in a conservation group with someone who I discovered was an active BNP member. He never brought up his racist views in the discussion of the conservation product, so I didn't either. I think, on the whole, that it's better to try to find a civilised streak than to drop them altogether.
I didn't refer to slip ups in life I referred to corruption. Having said that I won't associate with people who are overt racists, homophobes, sexists. If someone gets done for drunk driving I'm not going to dump them, but if the habitually drive while drunk I will and will probably report them to the police because they could kill someone.
Why would you want to have as a friend or associate with someone who is corrupt, or an overt racist or cares not a jot for anyone else that they habitually drive while drunk? Or in the original example are friends with known serious crooks. That was the context of the post.
PS I have employed ex-cons so have no issue with people who have made mistakes in life.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
Yeah, but Private Scroggins doesn’t need to know when he starts up his tank, he just need to know it’s in full working order. Different world. The log sits elsewhere.
For the first time in years I bought a Sunday Times to see just what it had on the Lebedev connection. It was damning. If there were not a war on Boris would be out pronto just on the evidence of that one edition.
He will certainly have to go before the next election. Never mind the text, some of the pictures were lethal. Labour and the LibDems would only have to keep reprinting them in leaflet after leaflet to torpedo the Tory campaign below the water line. The Tories simply cannot go into battle with him as leader. This is not the USA, and he is not Trump. The voters won't back him blind, whatever success he may have in the war or esewhere.
So if he's toast, when does he actually pop out of the toaster?
His MPs clearly think 'not now - the war you know.' They can maybe get away with that a bit but it's not a great look. Then there's the locals. 'Wait for them' is another excuse for inaction. What then? 'Takes a while to change a leader, and he was a winner'. Not sure that will suffice for very long.
Regrdless of the odds, I would say some time this year seems most likely by a long way, but he could get lucky with the war if that drags on. So maybe Mike is right, and at the odds 2023 looks decent enough value for the momnet.
The people that matter in this, Tory MPs, members and even voters don't seem to care.
Virtually none of the Tory posters on here who weren't already critics of the PM when he was first elected will engage with issues of standards, whether about lying, finances, cronyism or security risks.
The responses are a mix of "all politicians are thieving nasty liars regardless", "what about Corbyn", "other things are more important", or "if he helps bring a blue win then anything goes".
He is staying on until he loses an election or it is blatantly clear he will lose the next one.
Couldn’t agree more. The silence is deafening. It’s fine that Russian money and bot farms helped to deliver Brexit, it’s no problem that Russian money has financed the Tory Party and it’s client media for decades. The end justifies the means.
The aims of the right chime with those of Putin, in as much as they both get hard for a strong, nationalist agenda, a return of Empire, of power, of prestige perceived to have been lost. Not collaboration with a weak, Woke, green EU. Fellow travellers on the anti-climate change bandwagon, for whom the profit available from digging up and burning fossil fuels is more important than the long-term health of the planet.
The right can’t face up to this yet. Perhaps with time they will do.
It’s only people on the left whoever mention the Empire…
But if the left suggests that the Empire might not have been an alloyed good, it always gets the right flocking. Just the BE of course, other empires were nasty, foreign muck.
Isn’t the common defence that the British Empire (“which the Scots ran”) was “the least bad of the lot”, rather than “an unalloyed good”?
Today is Commonwealth Day apparently.
Does anyone else remember getting the afternoon off school for Commonwealth Day (early to mid 1960s)?
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
Yeah, but Private Scroggins doesn’t need to know when he starts up his tank, he just need to know it’s in full working order. Different world. The log sits elsewhere.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
That’s a good application for log books too!
Now that I think about it, I seem to recall military pilots ‘signing out’ their plane in the office, rather than taking the log book onto the aircraft.
@BarakRavid BREAKING: Israel announces publicly for the first time it will comply with the international sanctions against Russia. FM Lapid says "Israel won't be used as a means to bypass the sanctions on Russia"
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
I don't know about tanks as I didn't leave school at age 12 thus rendering me ineligible for service in heavy armour. In British military aviation we have the famous '700' form which details all of the components and subsystems you can expect not to function on the aircraft you are signing out.
That’s the difference I think. It’s assumed the pilot wants to know and might care. After all you might be surprised and that aircraft might not be leaking oil behind you because it has working seals rather than because there is no oil.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
Yeah, but Private Scroggins doesn’t need to know when he starts up his tank, he just need to know it’s in full working order. Different world. The log sits elsewhere.
Barak Ravid @BarakRavid · 12m BREAKING: Israel announces publicly for the first time it will comply with the international sanctions against Russia. FM Lapid says "Israel won't be used as a means to bypass the sanctions on Russia"
Completely off topic, but I wanted to write something somewhere to express my emotions, but my nan died yesterday. As an adult this is the first death of a loved one I've really experienced, my last experience of death for someone I was close to was of a classmate at school who died when we were 10.
Its such a cliché to say, but at least she's not suffering anymore. She'd had a fall towards the end of lockdown that triggered a steep downfall in her health and dementia so she wasn't herself anymore and the NHS made her go into a care home, but still its very emotional now that she's gone.
I'm very fortunate to have had my grandparents so long into my adulthood, my wife lost all of hers many years ago, mainly when she was a teenager. It was nice yesterday to be looking back at photos of Nanna at our wedding, and with our children whom I'm glad she got to meet and get to know and love.
My one regret is that the combination of the virus and restrictions meant we lost the chance to see her in the last few years of her life. Our last full chance to see her as herself was in January 2020 - after that she wouldn't have any visitors until she was vaccinated. I saw her again once in December 2020 socially distanced from outside dropping off Christmas presents, coincidentally on the day she got the call to get her vaccine. Then there was lockdown again and my parents at least saw her regularly as her support bubble but we didn't get to see her again until lockdown was lifted by which time she'd had the fall and she was bedbound and a very pale shadow of herself from months earlier. She then got taken to a care home who refused to allow visitors and who STILL don't allow visitors - my parents and her husband could visit but not us. The home was still saying they'd start allowing visitors soon but still haven't yet and now its too late.
Lots of happy memories of a life well loved. I'm very grateful she got to know her great-grandkids who seem to be processing this OK hopefully. Rest in peace Nanna.
I'm so sorry to hear this. I lost all my grandparents by the time I was a teenager - three of them when I was still in school - so I'm glad you appreciate what you had. I'm so sorry that you were prevented from seeing her for so long.
For the first time in years I bought a Sunday Times to see just what it had on the Lebedev connection. It was damning. If there were not a war on Boris would be out pronto just on the evidence of that one edition.
He will certainly have to go before the next election. Never mind the text, some of the pictures were lethal. Labour and the LibDems would only have to keep reprinting them in leaflet after leaflet to torpedo the Tory campaign below the water line. The Tories simply cannot go into battle with him as leader. This is not the USA, and he is not Trump. The voters won't back him blind, whatever success he may have in the war or esewhere.
So if he's toast, when does he actually pop out of the toaster?
His MPs clearly think 'not now - the war you know.' They can maybe get away with that a bit but it's not a great look. Then there's the locals. 'Wait for them' is another excuse for inaction. What then? 'Takes a while to change a leader, and he was a winner'. Not sure that will suffice for very long.
Regrdless of the odds, I would say some time this year seems most likely by a long way, but he could get lucky with the war if that drags on. So maybe Mike is right, and at the odds 2023 looks decent enough value for the momnet.
The people that matter in this, Tory MPs, members and even voters don't seem to care.
Virtually none of the Tory posters on here who weren't already critics of the PM when he was first elected will engage with issues of standards, whether about lying, finances, cronyism or security risks.
The responses are a mix of "all politicians are thieving nasty liars regardless", "what about Corbyn", "other things are more important", or "if he helps bring a blue win then anything goes".
He is staying on until he loses an election or it is blatantly clear he will lose the next one.
Couldn’t agree more. The silence is deafening. It’s fine that Russian money and bot farms helped to deliver Brexit, it’s no problem that Russian money has financed the Tory Party and it’s client media for decades. The end justifies the means.
The aims of the right chime with those of Putin, in as much as they both get hard for a strong, nationalist agenda, a return of Empire, of power, of prestige perceived to have been lost. Not collaboration with a weak, Woke, green EU. Fellow travellers on the anti-climate change bandwagon, for whom the profit available from digging up and burning fossil fuels is more important than the long-term health of the planet.
The right can’t face up to this yet. Perhaps with time they will do.
It’s only people on the left whoever mention the Empire…
But if the left suggests that the Empire might not have been an alloyed good, it always gets the right flocking. Just the BE of course, other empires were nasty, foreign muck.
Isn’t the common defence that the British Empire (“which the Scots ran”) was “the least bad of the lot”, rather than “an unalloyed good”?
Today is Commonwealth Day apparently.
Does anyone else remember getting the afternoon off school for Commonwealth Day (early to mid 1960s)?
I remember a rhyme about it. 24th May is Empire Day/if we don't a holiday we'll all run away.
Never had either the day or part of it off, though.(40's-50's)
Anyone think cancelling the NI rise might be on the agenda for the next budget now ?
Or is that more wishful thinking. Perhaps the old favourite of the employee side being nixxed will be used.
It really can't be done in time.
Remember the reason why it's an increase in the current NI rates from April and is separated only next year is because the software can't be updated in time - changing the rates now for April 6th would be tight...
“ Clausewitz describes the "culminating point" as when an attacking force hits strong resistance, runs out of energy, and can no longer continue. Russia is running out of manpower, asking Syria to send troops. Sanctions are working. Russia may culminate in 10-14 days if we press.”
So what happens then ?
Who knows?
But who knows what happens if we withdraw all help from Ukraine, and Russia rolls over them and gets a nice, compliant pro-Russian government in Kiev?
In my mind it's quite simple: it is right versus wrong, good versus evil. The evil is easy to identify: Putin and his cronies. They are the ones who have invaded another country; they are the ones who are killing innocent civilians. They are the ones threatening smaller democracies with invasion. They are the ones who are threatening the world with chemical weapons, or nuclear oblivion.
Those on the side of evil talk about how it is our fault, how we caused this mess, rather than concentrate their ire on the evil.
We have to be on the side of good. And that means supporting Ukraine.
Which we are doing.
The time to think about the causes of this is after the mess is over - and I think many of their arguments are bogus anyway, purposeful distractions away from evil.
The final clause is the sort of thing we should avoid writing. I don't know people who are 'purposefully' distracting away from evil, at least not on here. I don't frequent other political or social media sites.
The reason why the causes are pertinent is that they are also so relevant to both the present and the future.
We were powerless to stop Putin because we are powerless to stop Putin and we will be powerless to stop Putin. We are so frit of him, of the nuclear threat, that we're not prepared to stand up and defend Ukraine with the only language Putin will pay attention to: military force.
Biden is a wet blanket. His ghastly withdrawal from Afghanistan, aided and abetted by Johnson, greenlit Putin's invasion of Ukraine and has shown Putin that NATO is not going to stand up and defend them.
And, yes, Putin and his invasion are utterly evil.
I utterly disagree. In other places, the 'we caused tis by x, y and z' are being used as distractions away from the Russian's folly. Whenever anyone criticises Russia, the voices cry that it is 'our' fault.
"Russians are doing these things." "Remember that we guaranteed we would not expand NATO eastwards, and Ukraine is filled with Nazis. Besides, we 'poked' them into it."
It is classic maskirovka, performed by either knowing or unknowing fools.
The Russian government is not the victims in this. They are the aggressor, the bully. The victims are the Ukrainian people and, to a lesser extent, the Russian people.
If we see what is happening as akin to rape, then these people are saying that Ukraine should not have been wearing such a short skirt.
Twitter is full of such comments.
Twitter is part of the poison that has got us to the place of Russia invading Ukraine. .
I read your posts on here with interest (Chris, again, take note). I've seen Greta Thurnberg blamed on here for starting the Ukraine war but now Twitter is responsible for it? It's an interesting thesis but I'm not on twitter so I wouldn't know.
I think if we believe in democracy it's really important that we continue to debate in as friendly a way as possible, even when profoundly disagreeing with someone's perspective or suggestion. I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. That's a shame because this is a decent site and the only one I frequent. When someone is rude to me I tend to disappear as I have better things to do than be insulted by someone from the comfort of their chair whom I've never met.
So keep playing the ball, folks. Not the man or woman.
". I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. "
You weren't here in 2016. Or 2017. Or 2014. Or 2019. Or 2020. In fact, it's pretty much always been like this...
I'd argue PB is a rather decorous place compared to the Internet in general, especially as politics is being discussed. It's also more informative than most places.
There are more women than ever before, but still by no means enough.
It's not exactly a welcoming place for women tbh.
There's far too much male aggression and downright rudeness, a failure to debate issues and always a tendency to attack the person.
This place is like being on a rugby field of 30 men. And not in a pleasant fantasy way
I shall be off for a bit. The personal rudeness is tiresome and I have a life outside that feels a lot more wholesome.
There's nothing stopping women from posting as many comments as they like on here. The fact is women are always less interested in obsessive political commentary than men. On the VoteUK forum it's about 95% male even though every effort has been made to encourage more women to join and post comments.
I was once told by a business owner, apparently in all seriousness, that "we don't have a ramp here because we never get any people in wheelchairs visit us."
My point is, if you make it uncomfortable or unwelcoming for particular demographics, don't be surprised if you don't get many attending/posting.
Not exactly sure why, but your post reminded me of something my late Grandad said. His fire alarm was beeping so he rang my dad to ask why.
‘Battery needs changing’ my dad said.
‘Battery needs changing?’ he replied, ‘but I’ve never bloody used it!’
Because he’d not had a fire, so the alarm hadn’t sounded, he couldn’t fathom why it would have used up the battery. The business owner you mention seems to operate on similar logic.
Who knows if he really is though, also is Zelensky actually there now ?
Kadyrov. Hmm. I'd vaguely heard of him but knew little of him. So looked him up on Wiki.
There I found a picture of surprisingly young-looking grinning oaf with a scamp haircut and a Brigham Young type beard. The offspring of a horror. Reminiscent of North Korea's Kim.
Then there's a list of his crimes and depravities beginning from about 2006. The list is very long, indeed.
And then, right at the bottom of the entry, you find this:
"On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others".
I'm only surprised that Donald Trump was reported to be present.
Interesting, and possibly explains why I have achieved the height of mediocrity in my lifetime, as on quite a few occasions I have come across people (usually in business) who I have enjoyed the company of and have impressed me and then something happens or they say something that as far as I am concerned is unacceptable. It might just be the other people they associate with for whom they should know better. I drop them like a stone at that point in every case. I won't knowingly associate with corrupt people, even politely.
That's an interesting difference from my approach (which perhaps partly reflects a lifetime involved with politics to a greater or lesser degree). My view is that nearly everyone slips up now and then - a dodgy joke, a racist or sexist assumption, a relationship that they didn't handle properly, a minor breach of the law. Some are worse - it's a sliding scale - but seeking perfection is hopeless, and not really fair. If someone's OK in 90% of their life, I'll shrug off the remainder if it's not too horrible.
Moreover, I'll talk professionally with absolutely anyone (yes, Nazis included, and people who have been personally unpleasant to me too), insofar as there is any element of common ground, though I won't pretend to regard anything abhorrent that they say as acceptable - if they accept that their view on X is something I find revolting, but they're still willing to discuss Y, fine. So I worked on a building preservation issue in a conservation group with someone who I discovered was an active BNP member. He never brought up his racist views in the discussion of the conservation product, so I didn't either. I think, on the whole, that it's better to try to find a civilised streak than to drop them altogether.
The problem is that interesting and engaging people can quickly drag you in to the shit, and get you involved in stuff which is routine to them but you are incapable of dealing with. A friends dad went from having a very respectable job and professional position to prison for peripheral involvement in drug running because he started associating with dangerous people in a mid life crisis.
Overall, it is best to keep people at arms length and not be too judgemental until you really know them.
@BartholomewRoberts, sorry to hear of your loss. I'm very close to my own Grandmother, indeed despite our political differences, she is the one who inspired and nurtured my interest in politics and current affairs (you can all blame her ). Like you, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had her for so long in my life. That very blessing makes the end that much harder to bare, but the memories of the moments in a long life well lived are treasures. You have my condolences.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
Oooo I’d forgotten about that. Where has the text got to? PM discretion? Just wondering about the process they get left with and the JR risk. Since you can’t reconstitute a prerogative power, it will end JR-able on “how was the decision made” grounds.
The Lords amendment (section 2 (2-3)) is that an early election can only be called with a Commons motion passed with a simple majority.
Once that gets thrown out, it's back to PM discretion - section 2 (1) reconstitutes the prerogative power by making the FTPA a Dallas-style "it was all a dream". And section 3 rules our judicial review (in theory).
Who knows if he really is though, also is Zelensky actually there now ?
Kadyrov. Hmm. I'd vaguely heard of him but knew little of him. So looked him up on Wiki.
There I found a picture of surprisingly young-looking grinning oaf with a scamp haircut and a Brigham Young type beard. The offspring of a horror. Reminiscent of North Korea's Kim.
Then there's a list of his crimes and depravities beginning from about 2006. The list is very long, indeed.
And then, right at the bottom of the entry, you find this:
"On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others".
I'm only surprised that Donald Trump was reported to be present.
Barak Ravid @BarakRavid · 12m BREAKING: Israel announces publicly for the first time it will comply with the international sanctions against Russia. FM Lapid says "Israel won't be used as a means to bypass the sanctions on Russia"
That meeting the Israelis had with Putin the other day obviously went well.....
Fury over Covid study scrapping The government has been accused of “turning off the headlights at the first sign of dawn” over the decision to scrap nationwide Covid surveillance programmes, said The Guardian. One such study, which is called React and randomly tests about 150,000 people across England each month, will be abandoned at the end of March. Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, said the move is “symptomatic of a policy-driven movement to ignore the fact that the pandemic is not over” and warned that “losing these programmes will almost certainly end up costing more in terms of disruption than saved”.
“ Clausewitz describes the "culminating point" as when an attacking force hits strong resistance, runs out of energy, and can no longer continue. Russia is running out of manpower, asking Syria to send troops. Sanctions are working. Russia may culminate in 10-14 days if we press.”
So what happens then ?
Who knows?
But who knows what happens if we withdraw all help from Ukraine, and Russia rolls over them and gets a nice, compliant pro-Russian government in Kiev?
In my mind it's quite simple: it is right versus wrong, good versus evil. The evil is easy to identify: Putin and his cronies. They are the ones who have invaded another country; they are the ones who are killing innocent civilians. They are the ones threatening smaller democracies with invasion. They are the ones who are threatening the world with chemical weapons, or nuclear oblivion.
Those on the side of evil talk about how it is our fault, how we caused this mess, rather than concentrate their ire on the evil.
We have to be on the side of good. And that means supporting Ukraine.
Which we are doing.
The time to think about the causes of this is after the mess is over - and I think many of their arguments are bogus anyway, purposeful distractions away from evil.
The final clause is the sort of thing we should avoid writing. I don't know people who are 'purposefully' distracting away from evil, at least not on here. I don't frequent other political or social media sites.
The reason why the causes are pertinent is that they are also so relevant to both the present and the future.
We were powerless to stop Putin because we are powerless to stop Putin and we will be powerless to stop Putin. We are so frit of him, of the nuclear threat, that we're not prepared to stand up and defend Ukraine with the only language Putin will pay attention to: military force.
Biden is a wet blanket. His ghastly withdrawal from Afghanistan, aided and abetted by Johnson, greenlit Putin's invasion of Ukraine and has shown Putin that NATO is not going to stand up and defend them.
And, yes, Putin and his invasion are utterly evil.
I utterly disagree. In other places, the 'we caused tis by x, y and z' are being used as distractions away from the Russian's folly. Whenever anyone criticises Russia, the voices cry that it is 'our' fault.
"Russians are doing these things." "Remember that we guaranteed we would not expand NATO eastwards, and Ukraine is filled with Nazis. Besides, we 'poked' them into it."
It is classic maskirovka, performed by either knowing or unknowing fools.
The Russian government is not the victims in this. They are the aggressor, the bully. The victims are the Ukrainian people and, to a lesser extent, the Russian people.
If we see what is happening as akin to rape, then these people are saying that Ukraine should not have been wearing such a short skirt.
Twitter is full of such comments.
Twitter is part of the poison that has got us to the place of Russia invading Ukraine. .
I read your posts on here with interest (Chris, again, take note). I've seen Greta Thurnberg blamed on here for starting the Ukraine war but now Twitter is responsible for it? It's an interesting thesis but I'm not on twitter so I wouldn't know.
I think if we believe in democracy it's really important that we continue to debate in as friendly a way as possible, even when profoundly disagreeing with someone's perspective or suggestion. I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. That's a shame because this is a decent site and the only one I frequent. When someone is rude to me I tend to disappear as I have better things to do than be insulted by someone from the comfort of their chair whom I've never met.
So keep playing the ball, folks. Not the man or woman.
". I've noticed an increasing amount of anger and abuse on here. "
You weren't here in 2016. Or 2017. Or 2014. Or 2019. Or 2020. In fact, it's pretty much always been like this...
I'd argue PB is a rather decorous place compared to the Internet in general, especially as politics is being discussed. It's also more informative than most places.
There are more women than ever before, but still by no means enough.
It's not exactly a welcoming place for women tbh.
There's far too much male aggression and downright rudeness, a failure to debate issues and always a tendency to attack the person.
This place is like being on a rugby field of 30 men. And not in a pleasant fantasy way
I shall be off for a bit. The personal rudeness is tiresome and I have a life outside that feels a lot more wholesome.
There's nothing stopping women from posting as many comments as they like on here. The fact is women are always less interested in obsessive political commentary than men. On the VoteUK forum it's about 95% male even though every effort has been made to encourage more women to join and post comments.
I was once told by a business owner, apparently in all seriousness, that "we don't have a ramp here because we never get any people in wheelchairs visit us."
My point is, if you make it uncomfortable or unwelcoming for particular demographics, don't be surprised if you don't get many attending/posting.
The willie-warmer thread was indeed...well, embarrassing.
As the proud progenitor of that debate, I object. It was a deliberately silly, surreal discussion, about the advantages of keeping your bits warm, aired at about 11pm, and it went on for two minutes.
Talking meaningless, even cringeworthy rubbish late at night is a noble PB tradition. If a commenter is dissuaded by something as daft as that, then they are probably not suited to PB
ANYWAY, and more seriously, what's this about BR? All I can see is condolences, but I can't find his original post.
Who knows if he really is though, also is Zelensky actually there now ?
Kadyrov. Hmm. I'd vaguely heard of him but knew little of him. So looked him up on Wiki.
There I found a picture of surprisingly young-looking grinning oaf with a scamp haircut and a Brigham Young type beard. The offspring of a horror. Reminiscent of North Korea's Kim.
Then there's a list of his crimes and depravities beginning from about 2006. The list is very long, indeed.
And then, right at the bottom of the entry, you find this:
"On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others".
I'm only surprised that Donald Trump was reported to be present.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
That’s a good application for log books too!
Now that I think about it, I seem to recall military pilots ‘signing out’ their plane in the office, rather than taking the log book onto the aircraft.
It depends. In the RAF it was done while drinking a cup of tea and leafing through Razzle, Shoot or Practical Angling in the ops room. The documentation proffered usually only had a tenuous relationship with the actual state of the aircraft on the flightline. Hence "Brief as 4. Walk as 2. Fly as 1."
At sea in the RN it was done anywhere there was space and quiet to enough to make the shouts of THIS FUCKER'S FUCKING FUCKED! audible. In the USN we did it on deck with some ceremony. The plane captain officially hands over the jet when they give the seat and weapons pins to the crew after the walkaround.
Who knows if he really is though, also is Zelensky actually there now ?
Kadyrov. Hmm. I'd vaguely heard of him but knew little of him. So looked him up on Wiki.
There I found a picture of surprisingly young-looking grinning oaf with a scamp haircut and a Brigham Young type beard. The offspring of a horror. Reminiscent of North Korea's Kim.
Then there's a list of his crimes and depravities beginning from about 2006. The list is very long, indeed.
And then, right at the bottom of the entry, you find this:
"On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others".
I'm only surprised that Donald Trump was reported to be present.
I won't name any, but some 'western' pop groups have been making a lot of money over the last twenty years doing 'private' concerts in Russia for Very Rich People. It is therefore funny to see them now talk about the horror they feel about the situation in Ukraine.
Many sympathies. At least it was a long life well lived, but Covid has made these things so much crueller
My elderly dad - 87 - has been shielding for TWO YEARS - I have not hugged him since late 2019. And I have only met him outside, never in a room, during that time. I seriously fear that he might pass away without my hugging him ever again, except maybe on his death bed.
Many sympathies. At least it was a long life well lived, but Covid has made these things so much crueller
My elderly dad - 87 - has been shielding for TWO YEARS - I have not hugged him since late 2019. And I have only met him outside, never in a room, during that time. I seriously fear that he might pass away without my hugging him ever again, except maybe on his death bed.
Potential game changer, I imagine the Chinese are rather good at drones
I believe they have a similar (but better) drone than the Turkish one that the Ukrainian have been using that they are normally happy to sell to anybody with the money. Seems surprising Russian hadn't bought a load already.
The other thing is that the Americans/allied forces put in sustained campaign to knockout the air defences. They started hitting other ground targets at the first, but the majority of missions were against air defences, until they'd taken out a considerable portion. Then moved more and more effort into the other targets.
The Russians simply haven't done that - they seem to have flown occasional sorties against missile sites and radars, but nothing over whelming.
It is incomprehensible.
For the first few days of the war I was going back and forth between "they really are as crap as it appears" and "this is the greatest military deception in history". I've settled on the first opinion now, the Russian military may be big and brutal, but it is a generation or more behind Western militaries. Now big and brutal might still be enough to destroy Ukraine, but whatever aura the Russian military once had is now gone.
It helps if you consider that, while Russia has a huge conscript army, and a huge pile of rust weapons....
The actual reality is a moderate sized European nation worth of military capability with a huge shed full of sometimes working stuff that Granddad owned.
Even the stuff that isn't rusty doesn't seem all that capable. I go back to the Russian tanks, even days before the war started there was so many stories about how good Russian tanks are, and their ERA, and the bird cages they welded on top. Does anyone still believe that Russian tanks are competitve with their Western equivalents?
The T-90 was always a slight warmed over T-72.
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
It has also been reported (*) that the defects lists found in captured kit are rather long.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
A tech log is normal in aviation and marine, wouldn’t be surprised to see them in other complex machines such as tanks.
One company I worked at had them for prototype boards, bring-up boards, and new chips. Every one had their own little red book, in which everything done to the board/chip had to be documented. They had to go everywhere with the hardware.
That’s a good application for log books too!
Now that I think about it, I seem to recall military pilots ‘signing out’ their plane in the office, rather than taking the log book onto the aircraft.
It depends. In the RAF it was done while drinking a cup of tea and leafing through Razzle, Shoot or Practical Angling in the ops room. The documentation proffered usually only had a tenuous relationship with the actual state of the aircraft on the flightline. Hence "Brief as 4. Walk as 2. Fly as 1."
At sea in the RN it was done anywhere there was space and quiet to enough to make the shouts of THIS FUCKER'S FUCKING FUCKED! audible. In the USN we did it on deck with some ceremony. The plane captain officially hands over the jet when they give the seat and weapons pins to the crew after the walkaround.
If the crew did a formal walkaround at least there would be a fighting chance someone would notice that the engine covers were still on the jet.
Happy Dissolution And Calling Of Parliament Bill Ping-Pong Day!
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
Oooo I’d forgotten about that. Where has the text got to? PM discretion? Just wondering about the process they get left with and the JR risk. Since you can’t reconstitute a prerogative power, it will end JR-able on “how was the decision made” grounds.
The Lords amendment (section 2 (2-3)) is that an early election can only be called with a Commons motion passed with a simple majority.
Once that gets thrown out, it's back to PM discretion - section 2 (1) reconstitutes the prerogative power by making the FTPA a Dallas-style "it was all a dream". And section 3 rules our judicial review (in theory).
Fascinating. Technically grants Her Majesty a new power. Who would have thought we’d do that in 2022…..?
Who knows if he really is though, also is Zelensky actually there now ?
Kadyrov. Hmm. I'd vaguely heard of him but knew little of him. So looked him up on Wiki.
There I found a picture of surprisingly young-looking grinning oaf with a scamp haircut and a Brigham Young type beard. The offspring of a horror. Reminiscent of North Korea's Kim.
Then there's a list of his crimes and depravities beginning from about 2006. The list is very long, indeed.
And then, right at the bottom of the entry, you find this:
"On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others".
I'm only surprised that Donald Trump was reported to be present.
Barak Ravid @BarakRavid · 12m BREAKING: Israel announces publicly for the first time it will comply with the international sanctions against Russia. FM Lapid says "Israel won't be used as a means to bypass the sanctions on Russia"
Numerous nations headed for the exit. The US/China meeting today will be vital. Thank the Lord it isn't Team Trump.
Potential game changer, I imagine the Chinese are rather good at drones
The US National Security Adviser has also warned China against aiding Russia in Ukraine, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry dismissing US talk they had received requests for military help from Russia as 'fake news'
I don't think that the Chinese government are fools. I suspect that Russian requests will be ignored. Wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese up the "need to de-escalate" rhetoric and subtly signal a more disapproving stance against Russia.
Comments
I appreciate it's a dramatised account but, my God, what blatant disregard for basic safety.
It does slowly get better with time, but the next few weeks will be difficult, and your parents will need you for support. Sadly, death comes to us all, but think of the happy times you had together and be grateful for the time you spent with her.
Best wishes to you and your family at this time
Some will claim that the positives outweighed the negatives.
Some will say that the negatives outweighed the positives, but that the alternative for colonised peoples wasn't serene independence but colonisation by a more malign power eg Germany, Belgium.
Some will say it was a negative for colonised peoples, but a negative carried out without malign intentions.
I am somewhere between 1 and 2 on this scale. There was good - whether it was a net good I'm not sure. It certainly wasn't an unalloyed good and I've never heard anyone suggest it was.
There is an interesting discussion of what the truth is but it's almost never had because any discussion of the British Empire quickly descends into squeals of rage.
At least she's in SW London now, as opposed to Alderney!
I've never looked in how Spam IP's are generated. But there are many reasons to try and hide behind a fake IP address. I was, for many years, in a job where I was prohibited from speaking freely on the Internet, and I still have to be extremely careful. In the end, I can be more honest posting under a pseudenoym. I think the owners of the site know who I am in real life (if they have ever looked in to me) and I trust them with that information, although of course there are risks about the safety of any data.
Its a sad state of affairs, but the world we live in.
One big finding was that in many areas, they simply hadn't advanced from the 1950s. Processes, tools, safety, management even - it was 1950s America/West
Think about the stories of the fire at Windscale, with people pushing the burning fuel out of the channels with scaffolding poles. Sounds kinda similar, doesn't it?
We circled for ages with fuel streaming from the wing and had a full emergency landing with fire engines etc back into Bangkok
It is self evident that all the fuel was not jettisoned
“What, all of it? Ok, you’re the captain”.
“We had to. Coming in to land now - oh shit that’s quite a cross breeze I’m way off line”.
“It’s ok, we can come round again”.
“……..”
(All AIUI)
It shouldn't take long. Based on how the debates have gone so far, I expect the Commons will quickly throw out the Lords amendment (it's effectively a wrecking amendment anyway), and the timetable motion allows only an hour for debate. I then expect that the Lords won't insist on its amendment.
FTPA is soon to be merely a part of history.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/commanders-among-12-000-russian-war-dead-q6f332k3w
T-14 might or might not be better - if they get round to building more than a handful.
One thing that has been noticed is that many of the tanks seen in the Ukraine are missing ERA, sighting systems and other upgrades....
Any life in which you get to meet your great-grandchildren is a remarkable one.
My grandmother met two of her great-granddaughters. She very old, and her mind was not really operating by this stage - but one of my favourite memories of her is when she met my middle daughter as a small baby, about a month before the end of her life, and briefly, for a few hours, she was lucid and with us again.
Who knows if he really is though, also is Zelensky actually there now ?
Moreover, I'll talk professionally with absolutely anyone (yes, Nazis included, and people who have been personally unpleasant to me too), insofar as there is any element of common ground, though I won't pretend to regard anything abhorrent that they say as acceptable - if they accept that their view on X is something I find revolting, but they're still willing to discuss Y, fine. So I worked on a building preservation issue in a conservation group with someone who I discovered was an active BNP member. He never brought up his racist views in the discussion of the conservation product, so I didn't either. I think, on the whole, that it's better to try to find a civilised streak than to drop them altogether.
While you can land overweight - if you’re on fire - doing so usually necessitates inspection and replacement of a lot of components, even if the airframe itself isn’t damaged. Dumping sufficient fuel to be under MLW is therefore good airmanship that makes a successful landing more likely.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of the UK economy is now made up of what is essentially discretionary items / services / experiences.
Apparently all Russian armoured kit have lists of issues logged inside it, so anyone getting in the tank can see what works and what does not - better than finding it out in the middle of battle.
Is this correct? It makes sense. Does the British Army do the same?
(*) Take this as you want...
To reassure everyone, there’s several different reserves of fuel that pilots plan for. You have trip fuel, divert fuel, weather fuel, reserve fuel and then the final reserve fuel of 30 minutes. It’s a mandatory mayday call if you’re going to be down to that final reserve, at which point the air traffic controllers clear everyone else out of the way for you, and you finish the day having tea and biscuits with your boss, with no tea and no biscuits, but a lot of paperwork to fill out! I don’t think anyone came close to that, in the storms of a few weeks ago.
It has become apparent that whereas our stated “available kit” numbers are accurate and allow for this stuff, the Russians’ perhaps don’t. The benefits of an open democracy and things like PAC.
https://twitter.com/exodiackiller/status/1503085800187219973?s=21
However, my eldest grandchild met all her gt-grandparents and indeed has dim memories of some at least of them
I wouldn't want to be in any business venture for the foreseeable that is relies on people having people of discretionary income.
Or is that more wishful thinking. Perhaps the old favourite of the employee side being nixxed will be used.
Why would you want to have as a friend or associate with someone who is corrupt, or an overt racist or cares not a jot for anyone else that they habitually drive while drunk? Or in the original example are friends with known serious crooks. That was the context of the post.
PS I have employed ex-cons so have no issue with people who have made mistakes in life.
Now that I think about it, I seem to recall military pilots ‘signing out’ their plane in the office, rather than taking the log book onto the aircraft.
@Dura_Ace will fill us in I’m sure.
BREAKING: Israel announces publicly for the first time it will comply with the international sanctions against Russia. FM Lapid says "Israel won't be used as a means to bypass the sanctions on Russia"
https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1503316397773971463
https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1503316397773971463
Barak Ravid
@BarakRavid
·
12m
BREAKING: Israel announces publicly for the first time it will comply with the international sanctions against Russia. FM Lapid says "Israel won't be used as a means to bypass the sanctions on Russia"
Never had either the day or part of it off, though.(40's-50's)
Remember the reason why it's an increase in the current NI rates from April and is separated only next year is because the software can't be updated in time - changing the rates now for April 6th would be tight...
‘Battery needs changing’ my dad said.
‘Battery needs changing?’ he replied, ‘but I’ve never bloody used it!’
Because he’d not had a fire, so the alarm hadn’t sounded, he couldn’t fathom why it would have used up the battery. The business owner you mention seems to operate on similar logic.
There I found a picture of surprisingly young-looking grinning oaf with a scamp haircut and a Brigham Young type beard. The offspring of a horror. Reminiscent of North Korea's Kim.
Then there's a list of his crimes and depravities beginning from about 2006. The list is very long, indeed.
And then, right at the bottom of the entry, you find this:
"On 5 October 2011, he celebrated his 35th birthday in a lavish fashion in the presence of several Hollywood stars, including actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and actress Hilary Swank as well as British violinist Vanessa-Mae, singer Seal and many others".
I'm only surprised that Donald Trump was reported to be present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzan_Kadyrov
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1503296077801349122?s=21
Overall, it is best to keep people at arms length and not be too judgemental until you really know them.
The Lords amendment (section 2 (2-3)) is that an early election can only be called with a Commons motion passed with a simple majority.
Once that gets thrown out, it's back to PM discretion - section 2 (1) reconstitutes the prerogative power by making the FTPA a Dallas-style "it was all a dream". And section 3 rules our judicial review (in theory).
The government has been accused of “turning off the headlights at the first sign of dawn” over the decision to scrap nationwide Covid surveillance programmes, said The Guardian. One such study, which is called React and randomly tests about 150,000 people across England each month, will be abandoned at the end of March. Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, said the move is “symptomatic of a policy-driven movement to ignore the fact that the pandemic is not over” and warned that “losing these programmes will almost certainly end up costing more in terms of disruption than saved”.
https://www.theweek.co.uk/daily-briefin
Covid is over because it is government policy that it's over
numpties
As the proud progenitor of that debate, I object. It was a deliberately silly, surreal discussion, about the advantages of keeping your bits warm, aired at about 11pm, and it went on for two minutes.
Talking meaningless, even cringeworthy rubbish late at night is a noble PB tradition. If a commenter is dissuaded by something as daft as that, then they are probably not suited to PB
ANYWAY, and more seriously, what's this about BR? All I can see is condolences, but I can't find his original post.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/03/14/russia-ukraine-war-latest-news-putin-refugees-zelensky/
Potential game changer, I imagine the Chinese are rather good at drones
At sea in the RN it was done anywhere there was space and quiet to enough to make the shouts of THIS FUCKER'S FUCKING FUCKED! audible. In the USN we did it on deck with some ceremony. The plane captain officially hands over the jet when they give the seat and weapons pins to the crew after the walkaround.
Many sympathies. At least it was a long life well lived, but Covid has made these things so much crueller
My elderly dad - 87 - has been shielding for TWO YEARS - I have not hugged him since late 2019. And I have only met him outside, never in a room, during that time. I seriously fear that he might pass away without my hugging him ever again, except maybe on his death bed.
Which would be pretty brutal.
1. The war is easier to win for Russia
2.The potential for escalation has just gone up several notches
Not good
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2ypMewDmIQw
The US/China meeting today will be vital.
Thank the Lord it isn't Team Trump.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-60732486