The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
Definitions that are ridiculous should be changed, not enforced. And there is no indication on the size of the part required in the definition.
I’d rather redeploy the capital tied up in the business to build another school
If we permit that sort of lazy fungibility every spending argument reduces to We could buy another intensive care ward for really sick kiddies instead of [other thing]. Let's examine [other thing] on its own merits shall we?
I despise cameron for letting this argument be put over AV, and of course it led directly to 350m for the NHS.
Not at all. Government should do what government does best, not everything.
Taxes are raised for a purpose - to fund activities that society deems necessary and appropriate. Government should only accumulate assets that are necessary for those purposes (including a suitable reserve) not for the sake of owning assets.
Sure, but in 1982 it was the most brilliantly necessary and appropriate use of public money. Five Go Mad In Dorset single handedly justified the entire investment. If divesting is now the right thing to do make the specific case, not the Appeal to Our Wonderful NHS.
That’s where we disagree on principle.
Governments should own *nothing* unless it is necessary to achieve their objectives.
Channel 4 may well have been a necessary invention in 1982 and government played a valuable role. That is irrelevant in the context of 2022.
The question is whether it is necessarily owned by the government today - my view is not. How you redeploy the capital (debt repayment, a new hospital, whatever) is irrelevant to the decision on Channel4
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Ha, yes.
If you want to push a bike over the boulders in the Lairg Ghru then feel free, but eroding the very thin vegetation on the plateau seems like a bad idea.
The Cairngorm / Macdui plateau is pretty bad already, but at least Braeriach and Ben Avon are relatively unharmed. If it becomes 'easy' on an electric bike it might be a problem, although it is a bit of a niche activity.
Restricting free access to pedal power only would certainly discourage a large percentage of any problems.
My grandad was a keen cyclist in the 1930s. He once described riding from Derby to Edale with a friend on a tandem, and then trying to get up Jacob's Ladder onto Kinder. His description of their trying to get the bike up through the mud was hilarious.
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It was like the video of the 250 Ukranian soldiers surrendering yesterday. Even very smart people were pronouncing it as the end of the siege of Mariupol. But it now seems probable that it is a Russian fake.
Twitter fills an urgent and insatiable need for information without the filters and scrutiny of real journalism.
Be interesting to see if the Hundred manages to attract crowds this summer now being released from COVID restrictions aren't new and I presume the ECB / teams can't keep taking a massive bath on freebie tickets.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Ha, yes.
If you want to push a bike over the boulders in the Lairg Ghru then feel free, but eroding the very thin vegetation on the plateau seems like a bad idea.
The Cairngorm / Macdui plateau is pretty bad already, but at least Braeriach and Ben Avon are relatively unharmed. If it becomes 'easy' on an electric bike it might be a problem, although it is a bit of a niche activity.
Restricting free access to pedal power only would certainly discourage a large percentage of any problems.
My grandad was a keen cyclist in the 1930s. He once described riding from Derby to Edale with a friend on a tandem, and then trying to get up Jacob's Ladder onto Kinder. His description of their trying to get the bike up through the mud was hilarious.
Have been over most of the Isle of Wight on a tandem. There was only one bit of Brading Down that defeated us.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Ha, yes.
If you want to push a bike over the boulders in the Lairg Ghru then feel free, but eroding the very thin vegetation on the plateau seems like a bad idea.
The Cairngorm / Macdui plateau is pretty bad already, but at least Braeriach and Ben Avon are relatively unharmed. If it becomes 'easy' on an electric bike it might be a problem, although it is a bit of a niche activity.
Restricting free access to pedal power only would certainly discourage a large percentage of any problems.
My grandad was a keen cyclist in the 1930s. He once described riding from Derby to Edale with a friend on a tandem, and then trying to get up Jacob's Ladder onto Kinder. His description of their trying to get the bike up through the mud was hilarious.
A pioneer of the 'rough stuff' brigade? Good effort! Was it part of the mass trespass?
It is funny how off-road cycling was 'discovered' by mountain bikers in the 80s, when people had been using or taking bikes off road ever since they were invented.
Jacob's Ladder is probably still a 'black run' even on a modern full-suspension bike.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It didn't move on for me
I stayed on Twitter an extra few hours, and filtered the info, and discovered that it was, indeed, two "local" Italian dudes out on a spin
'For all the kind of moral posturing that Hollywood has... I think all Hollywood's moral posturing are always commercial decisions and if they're moral, they're dressed up as moral but they are always bottomline decisions'
'I think it's appalling arrogance. The epitome of all that is twisted and horrible about Hollywood.'
This is the same Steve Coogan who used to do masses of coke and hookers then phone up the News of the World demanding their spike every story reporting this appalling behaviour? And then when finally they said no we won't, we are going to print it, he went absolutely mental....becoming this huge advocate for ethical press behaviour.
And a man who railed against the disgusting behaviour of everything Murdoch, then took a massive pay cheque to put Alan Partridge on Sky.
Some might say that he is moral posturing over the moral posturing of Hollywood.
Bloody genius in The Trip, though.
And as he himself points out, there is a commercial motive for most things in showbiz.
'For all the kind of moral posturing that Hollywood has... I think all Hollywood's moral posturing are always commercial decisions and if they're moral, they're dressed up as moral but they are always bottomline decisions'
'I think it's appalling arrogance. The epitome of all that is twisted and horrible about Hollywood.'
This is the same Steve Coogan who used to do masses of coke and hookers then phone up the News of the World demanding their spike every story reporting this appalling behaviour? And then when finally they said no we won't, we are going to print it, he went absolutely mental....becoming this huge advocate for ethical press behaviour.
And a man who railed against the disgusting behaviour of everything Murdoch, then took a massive pay cheque to put Alan Partridge on Sky.
Some might say that he is moral posturing over the moral posturing of Hollywood.
Bloody genius in The Trip, though.
And as he himself points out, there is a commercial motive for most things in showbiz.
Hugh Grant was great in the Gentleman, still doesn't take away he is also a massive hypocrite.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
In the Peaks they've started to bury the major powerlines on an effort to reduce the visual impact.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
Definitions that are ridiculous should be changed, not enforced. And there is no indication on the size of the part required in the definition.
I think you are a bit harsh on the draftsmen. This is a major convention from 1948 when genocide was quite a hot topic, so probably a reasonable amount of thought went into it. You have to avoid both the situation where Russia wipes out all 37 inhabitants of Foggy Bottom and Ukraine says "genocide" and where Russia wipes out all the Ukrainians except the 37 and says "not genocide." What is your edge-case-free solution? Fixed percentage?
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
Firstly envious that you have a small vineyard. I am similar to you. I find wind turbines attractive whereas I hate pylons. I don't dislike our wooden telephone and electricity poles whereas I hate the French concrete ones.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
What expert opinion did Brian Johnston have.
That's my point....Agnew is saying well we are much better now, much more diverse and would be a disaster if TMS lost the rights....when in fact, they aren't. Modern sport has evolved, proper fans expect much more insight, which can be gained via the internet....and all the BBC have done is made the cast more ethnically diverse, but not actually improved the level of insight / analysis.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly high level analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
The BBC insight into the modern game reminds when they still covered cricket with only one camera, so you had to look at the wicketkeepers arse for half the overs....while other broadcasters had moved to cameras behind the bowler for both ends.
'For all the kind of moral posturing that Hollywood has... I think all Hollywood's moral posturing are always commercial decisions and if they're moral, they're dressed up as moral but they are always bottomline decisions'
'I think it's appalling arrogance. The epitome of all that is twisted and horrible about Hollywood.'
This is the same Steve Coogan who used to do masses of coke and hookers then phone up the News of the World demanding their spike every story reporting this appalling behaviour? And then when finally they said no we won't, we are going to print it, he went absolutely mental....becoming this huge advocate for ethical press behaviour.
And a man who railed against the disgusting behaviour of everything Murdoch, then took a massive pay cheque to put Alan Partridge on Sky.
Some might say that he is moral posturing over the moral posturing of Hollywood.
Bloody genius in The Trip, though.
And as he himself points out, there is a commercial motive for most things in showbiz.
Hugh Grant was great in the Gentleman, still doesn't take away he is also a massive hypocrite.
Yep and Picasso was a grade 1 shit. Nice pictures though.
France's election is fascinating. I could see a number of different options - from a thumping Macron win over Melanchon, through both victory and defeat against Le Pen.
What's interesting is that Macron is being blamed for the cost of living increases - which are principally petrol/diesel. France's electricity prices are among Europe's lowest and are still essentially set by the government, in that they own the majority of generator EDF. Average electricity bills will rise just EUR38 this year, which is a level that we in the UK (or those in other European countries) can only dream of*.
But people still really still care about petrol prices, and the war in Ukraine (and France's sanctions on Russia) are seen as being responsible for this. And Le Pen has played this skillfully: both distancing herself from Putin and hinting that she would bring petrol prices down by (something, something) Russia/Ukraine.
So... what happens next?
Well, I like to think that the French will not vote solely based on lower petrol prices. But what do I know?
I think the most likely scenario is that Macron is around five points clear of Le Pen in the first round, and then limps to a 5 or 6 point win in the second. But that isn't something I'd like to bet my house on (unless the odds were *really* attractive). And things are very fluid right now: a defeat for Russia, and an inevitable collapse in energy prices, would probably seal the deal for Macron. But if the conflict is grinding on, and Le Pen appears to offer relief to French wallets, then it will likely be very close.
* We have petrol, heating and electricity prices rises to hit our wallets.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
There are certainly campaigns against pylons in mid and north Wales.
And there is ongoing work to remove the eyesore pylons over the Dwyryd Estuary in Eryri.
The National Grid claims that this is the "Third major project to start construction as part of wider initiative to reduce the visual impact of existing high-voltage lines in AONBs and National Parks"
So, I don't think your claim about pylons stands up. There are plenty of people who would like to see them completely removed from AONB and National Parks.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
In the Peaks they've started to bury the major powerlines on an effort to reduce the visual impact.
As an aside (and I'm sure this has been mentioned), the chart of first round polling is a month old. The latest polls (from late April and early March) basically have three percentage points taken off Pecresse and given to Le Pen.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It was like the video of the 250 Ukranian soldiers surrendering yesterday. Even very smart people were pronouncing it as the end of the siege of Mariupol. But it now seems probable that it is a Russian fake.
Twitter fills an urgent and insatiable need for information without the filters and scrutiny of real journalism.
TBF, the moment the Ukrainian marines surrender video went up, there were doubts cast by many commentators. The only thing we can do in the moment is to take note and keep an open mind until those with more knowledge and time can provide a more definitive assessment.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Yeah, I went in 2000 during my USN exchange. I saw Chuck Yeager threaten to "beat the shit" out of somebody who cut in front of him at a buffet. He was in his late 70s at the time.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
What expert opinion did Brian Johnston have.
That's my point....Agnew is saying well we are much better now, much more diverse....when in fact, they aren't. Modern sport has evolved, proper fans expect much more insight, which can be gained via the internet....and all the BBC have done is made the cast more ethnically diverse, but not actually improved the level of insight / analysis.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
Well cricket is a no go zone for me so I will not comment too much further save to say I'm not too sure what your point is. People might expect "expert" commentary but for me it is a balance between that and an enthusiastic observer. Some of the best commentators had no further expertise than commentating.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Can you get a 2CV up to 111mph by dropping it out of an aircraft?
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Ha, yes.
If you want to push a bike over the boulders in the Lairg Ghru then feel free, but eroding the very thin vegetation on the plateau seems like a bad idea.
The Cairngorm / Macdui plateau is pretty bad already, but at least Braeriach and Ben Avon are relatively unharmed. If it becomes 'easy' on an electric bike it might be a problem, although it is a bit of a niche activity.
Restricting free access to pedal power only would certainly discourage a large percentage of any problems.
My grandad was a keen cyclist in the 1930s. He once described riding from Derby to Edale with a friend on a tandem, and then trying to get up Jacob's Ladder onto Kinder. His description of their trying to get the bike up through the mud was hilarious.
A pioneer of the 'rough stuff' brigade? Good effort! Was it part of the mass trespass?
It is funny how off-road cycling was 'discovered' by mountain bikers in the 80s, when people had been using or taking bikes off road ever since they were invented.
Jacob's Ladder is probably still a 'black run' even on a modern full-suspension bike.
He talked about a mass trespass he was involved with, but it wasn't the first Kinder one. Never asked him for more details. As far as I am aware he was not a socialist, but then he never talked about poltiics.
He once road with a friend (on separate bikes) from Derby to Blackpool on a Saturday. Spent the night in a hotel there, then cycles back the next day. Said he was knackered to do much in Blackpool except sleep!
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
Wind turbines are massively more of an eyesore than pylons (although those are bad enough), for the very simple reason that they move. In beautiful scenery, it's akin to having a flashing advert next to painting in a gallery. Plus the particular way in which the blades rotate is particularly unpleasant - too fast to be gentle, too slow for the movement to be lost in a blur.
Pushing them offshore was an absolute stroke of genius of the Cameron government; because of the clarity and focus it provided, it meant lots of wind turbines were installed, without all the opposition and planning delays, not to mention the environmental damage. We should do more offshore installation, and leave what's left of our beautiful scenery unwrecked by them.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
In the Peaks they've started to bury the major powerlines on an effort to reduce the visual impact.
Should they bury the wind turbines as well?
It would increase the predictability of their output!
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
What expert opinion did Brian Johnston have.
That's my point....Agnew is saying well we are much better now, much more diverse....when in fact, they aren't. Modern sport has evolved, proper fans expect much more insight, which can be gained via the internet....and all the BBC have done is made the cast more ethnically diverse, but not actually improved the level of insight / analysis.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
Well cricket is a no go zone for me so I will not comment too much further save to say I'm not too sure what your point is. People might expect "expert" commentary but for me it is a balance between that and an enthusiastic observer. Some of the best commentators had no further expertise than commentating.
There is no balance with the BBC....none of those people have any expert insight. And the supposed expert "summarisers" they have aren't much better. Vaughan, Stewart, Tufnell, Marks...absolutely clueless about modern cricket.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Wave goodbye to the Ptarmigan of so.
And much of the arctic/montane flora too. The John Muir Trust will be interesting to watch. They've had to insist on not having certain activities on Ben Nevis (e.g. no scattering of human cremation remains).
Pagel's feed is a dark place indeed. There are people on there who claim never to have left the house in 600+ days. I assumed they were spoofs. But with Twitter, one never knows.
I have a colleague who says exactly that (except she says two years). She has a medical condition which makes her much more likely than most of us to die if she catches Covid, and she feels she can have a pleasant life at home, and that it beats the hell out of being dead. She is exceptionally productive with really high-quality work, and seems quite happy too.
It's one extreme of the personal choices that we're all making, and I don't think we can really judge each others' decisions, any more than the other extreme of someone going clubbing every night and accepting that they'll catch Covid at frequent intervals. We grow so attached to the way we live that it's hard to imagine living quite differently, but people do. Somehow the passion has gone out of the argument, now that it's basically being left up to us.
The problem is most peoples perception of how much risk they are actually in is totally warped, especially with not only vaccines, but anti-virals and much improved covid treatments.
Some people are clearly still scaring themselves to death and are never going to leave the house without worrying they are only a slip-up away from death, when it isn't true.
I recall one of the first opinion polls when COVID broke 2 years ago. 8% replied that they thought they would die of COVID.
There has been all a number of polls and all consistently showed people have been way way out with their perception of the actual dangers.
Now the vast majority of the public have moved on from this, trusting vaccines (and the fact they have had it), but there are still a minority who clearly worry themselves to death and some of the "heroes" of the zero covid movement keep pushing a misleading narrative e.g. the classic long COVID misinformation, by careful omission / twisting of exactly what long covid they are talking about.
Again some people are convinced long covid = organ failures, life long disability, etc, when yes (especially before vaccines) there was this, but the vast bulk they are referring to are people stating they still don't feel 100% after 8-12 weeks, which isn't the same thing at all.
Thats my beef too. If you refer to long covid you need to define what you mean by it. Just feeling like you are not quite 100% yet after a couple of months is not the same as being unable to work/get out of bed/have chronic organ failure, yet too often thats the image given.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Can you get a 2CV up to 111mph by dropping it out of an aircraft?
What's the wind resistance of a 2CV versus terminal velocity?
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
What expert opinion did Brian Johnston have.
That's my point....Agnew is saying well we are much better now, much more diverse....when in fact, they aren't. Modern sport has evolved, proper fans expect much more insight, which can be gained via the internet....and all the BBC have done is made the cast more ethnically diverse, but not actually improved the level of insight / analysis.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
Well cricket is a no go zone for me so I will not comment too much further save to say I'm not too sure what your point is. People might expect "expert" commentary but for me it is a balance between that and an enthusiastic observer. Some of the best commentators had no further expertise than commentating.
There is no balance with the BBC....none of those people have any expert insight. And the supposed expert "summarisers" they have aren't much better. Vaughan, Stewart, Tufnell, Marks...absolutely clueless about modern cricket.
I defer to your cricketing knowledge although even to me those names do seem to be reasonably cricket-y.
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
Wind turbines are massively more of an eyesore than pylons (although those are bad enough), for the very simple reason that they move. In beautiful scenery, it's akin to having a flashing advert next to painting in a gallery. Plus the particular way in which the blades rotate is particularly unpleasant - too fast to be gentle, too slow for the movement to be lost in a blur.
Pushing them offshore was an absolute stroke of genius of the Cameron government; because of the clarity and focus it provided, it meant lots of wind turbines were installed, without all the opposition and planning delays, not to mention the environmental damage. We should do more offshore installation, and leave what's left of our beautiful scenery unwrecked by them.
Moving turbines always look, at a distance, like they are desperately trying to signal that something is terribly wrong, but they are just too far away to explain what it is
It is unsettling. We are probably hard wired to find urgent signals from far away quite alarming
I agree: put them offshore. They actually look quite beautiful in the North Sea, enlivening cold grey waves, and the movement is much less distressing, because the sea moves anyhow
I also loathe pylons, mind. They ruin too much of Britain. I once read that for the price of the Millennium Dome we could have buried every pylon/cable in the country. I have no idea if this is or was true, but it seemed a terrifically good deal. Lose the Dome, entomb the pylons
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
Moving turbines always look, at a distance, like they are desperately trying to signal that something is terribly wrong, but they are just too far away to explain what it is
It is unsettling. We are probably hard wired to find urgent signals from far away quite alarming [snip]
I hadn't thought of it like that, but you are right: 'unsettling' is the mot juste.
Why privatise Channel 4? Just seems like ideological dogma to me
Privatising the BBC/Channel 4 is one of the few issues that I’ve completely changed my mind over, over the last few years.
I used to be completely against privatisation, now I don’t see what the problem is. I’m in favour of a smart state, flexible about moving things in and out of private/public ownership.
Generally - If there’s a market, genuine competition and space for innovation, it should be private.
Essential service &/or a natural monopoly? Public.
I’d bring water, energy and trains into public ownership - and privatise the BBC/Channel 4.
Not convinced about public ownership - the problem is that high capex unsexy activities such as investing in the electricity grid will always lose out to schools’n’hospitals if they are run by government.
But there should be a creative alternative model to finance the investment - perhaps owned by a mutual or public sector pension funds for example.
High capex unsexy activities don’t do great when reliant on private investment. Look at how water and energy companies have let infrastructure degrade.
They’ve been spending bucket loads on it because of the RAB return model the regulators apply.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
What expert opinion did Brian Johnston have.
That's my point....Agnew is saying well we are much better now, much more diverse....when in fact, they aren't. Modern sport has evolved, proper fans expect much more insight, which can be gained via the internet....and all the BBC have done is made the cast more ethnically diverse, but not actually improved the level of insight / analysis.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
Well cricket is a no go zone for me so I will not comment too much further save to say I'm not too sure what your point is. People might expect "expert" commentary but for me it is a balance between that and an enthusiastic observer. Some of the best commentators had no further expertise than commentating.
There is no balance with the BBC....none of those people have any expert insight. And the supposed expert "summarisers" they have aren't much better. Vaughan, Stewart, Tufnell, Marks...absolutely clueless about modern cricket.
I defer to your cricketing knowledge although even to me those names do seem to be reasonably cricket-y.
Being crickety and knowing about modern cricket is two different things. Same way as MOTD team are f##king clueless of modern football tactics, they just found the idea of xG, which a) they use incorrectly (its worthless on a game level) and b) the elite teams don't really use anymore.
You listen to an elite T20 cricketer and then BBC commentary team and you would think they are playing two totally different games.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
What expert opinion did Brian Johnston have.
That's my point....Agnew is saying well we are much better now, much more diverse....when in fact, they aren't. Modern sport has evolved, proper fans expect much more insight, which can be gained via the internet....and all the BBC have done is made the cast more ethnically diverse, but not actually improved the level of insight / analysis.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
Well cricket is a no go zone for me so I will not comment too much further save to say I'm not too sure what your point is. People might expect "expert" commentary but for me it is a balance between that and an enthusiastic observer. Some of the best commentators had no further expertise than commentating.
There is no balance with the BBC....none of those people have any expert insight. And the supposed expert "summarisers" they have aren't much better. Vaughan, Stewart, Tufnell, Marks...absolutely clueless about modern cricket.
I defer to your cricketing knowledge although even to me those names do seem to be reasonably cricket-y.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Ha, yes.
If you want to push a bike over the boulders in the Lairg Ghru then feel free, but eroding the very thin vegetation on the plateau seems like a bad idea.
The Cairngorm / Macdui plateau is pretty bad already, but at least Braeriach and Ben Avon are relatively unharmed. If it becomes 'easy' on an electric bike it might be a problem, although it is a bit of a niche activity.
Restricting free access to pedal power only would certainly discourage a large percentage of any problems.
My grandad was a keen cyclist in the 1930s. He once described riding from Derby to Edale with a friend on a tandem, and then trying to get up Jacob's Ladder onto Kinder. His description of their trying to get the bike up through the mud was hilarious.
Have been over most of the Isle of Wight on a tandem. There was only one bit of Brading Down that defeated us.
Cycle path son the IOW are far too floody.
I had to go over the top at Brading with full luggage in a late evening rainstorm because of that. Even my sealskinz waterproof socks did not really help.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Can you get a 2CV up to 111mph by dropping it out of an aircraft?
What's the wind resistance of a 2CV versus terminal velocity?
Assuming sea level, a coefficient of drag of 0.51 and a frontal area of 1.65m2 a 2CV will experience a drag force of 1.26kN at 110mph. Hence the departing body panels.
Given the tactics are pretty obvious, they lie down and some glue themselves to the road, you would have thought the plod would have formulated some sort of tactics to ensure their prompt removal and do so such they can't just get up and walk back to where they were.
I’ve always liked the idea of a well located sprinkler system
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
The turnout for the first round has traditionally been much much lower than the runoff and that makes this sort of speculation even harder.
Is this true? Looks the other way around for 2017 to me.
I agree with you Farooq. Last time Fillion and Melenchon scored high teens, they gave some voters to le pen, more to mscron, and, the bit that proves you right, a good chunk of their vote abstained second round.
I reckon Macron has helped himself to the Fillion/pecrasse vote, or most he will likely get of it now less than half fillion got, early this time. One of the reasons why he is in trouble. A lot of abstentions may go to the anti establishment challenger (which I am still fully expecting to be Melenchon actually) for as Willian Glen said he is running on a record this time. The other difference from last time is Zemmour, not many of hits votes will go to macron, and they might well be very motivated to vote.
I can’t see Macron getting within 10 of Melenchon or 5 of le pen in a second round.
Macron would easily beat Mélenchon in a second round as Le Pen and Zemmours voters aren’t going to vote in their droves for a pro immigration party . Le Pen could win but would need older people to stay home as the vast majority loathe her and aren’t so forgiving of her past .
Moving turbines always look, at a distance, like they are desperately trying to signal that something is terribly wrong, but they are just too far away to explain what it is
It is unsettling. We are probably hard wired to find urgent signals from far away quite alarming [snip]
I hadn't thought of it like that, but you are right: 'unsettling' is the mot juste.
Firm disagree. They are majestic. My favourite uplands walks are where you see wind turbines.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
I'm not a climate change sceptic, so count me out on that score.
It isn't quite the same thing in the North Downs as it is already an urban area, not somewhere with zero human constructions visible. I do agree about pylons and there is an argument that as many lines as possible should be buried for both visual and continuity reasons. I'll be interested to see what the new pylon design looks like in the landscape and whether it is less ugly (it resembles a small wind turbine upright with 'wings').
I've nothing against turbines in essentially urban areas. In fact, our piece of wild land in the Flatlands had no structures at all visible once the pit heads had been removed, but there's now 127 (I counted them) turbines visible on a clear day. Even that I can get used to as the turbines are mostly sited on farmland or brownfield sites and in a flat landscape they just sit on the horizon.
The problem is that these urban sites aren't really the best for power generation. For better wind conditions you need to be on top of a hill...or...out at sea. I know which I prefer.
'For all the kind of moral posturing that Hollywood has... I think all Hollywood's moral posturing are always commercial decisions and if they're moral, they're dressed up as moral but they are always bottomline decisions'
'I think it's appalling arrogance. The epitome of all that is twisted and horrible about Hollywood.'
This is the same Steve Coogan who used to do masses of coke and hookers then phone up the News of the World demanding their spike every story reporting this appalling behaviour? And then when finally they said no we won't, we are going to print it, he went absolutely mental....becoming this huge advocate for ethical press behaviour.
And a man who railed against the disgusting behaviour of everything Murdoch, then took a massive pay cheque to put Alan Partridge on Sky.
Some might say that he is moral posturing over the moral posturing of Hollywood.
Bloody genius in The Trip, though.
And as he himself points out, there is a commercial motive for most things in showbiz.
Indeed and he appeared on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway in the character of Alan Partridge just to plug his upcoming tour, for which I have a ticket.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Can you get a 2CV up to 111mph by dropping it out of an aircraft?
What's the wind resistance of a 2CV versus terminal velocity?
Assuming sea level, a coefficient of drag of 0.51 and a frontal area of 1.65m2 a 2CV will experience a drag force of 1.26kN at 110mph. Hence the departing body panels.
What is the drag force of a top hat while driving over a ploughed field is the only metric you need here (assuming the eggs are incidental to the process).
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It was like the video of the 250 Ukranian soldiers surrendering yesterday. Even very smart people were pronouncing it as the end of the siege of Mariupol. But it now seems probable that it is a Russian fake.
Twitter fills an urgent and insatiable need for information without the filters and scrutiny of real journalism.
I posted a link to it here only doing so as it was from a reputable source.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
Definitions that are ridiculous should be changed, not enforced. And there is no indication on the size of the part required in the definition.
I think you are a bit harsh on the draftsmen. This is a major convention from 1948 when genocide was quite a hot topic, so probably a reasonable amount of thought went into it. You have to avoid both the situation where Russia wipes out all 37 inhabitants of Foggy Bottom and Ukraine says "genocide" and where Russia wipes out all the Ukrainians except the 37 and says "not genocide." What is your edge-case-free solution? Fixed percentage?
It's not a ridiculous definition at all. Proving intent to destroy a religious or national group is not at all a low burden of proof. There is no way it could be applied to "every intentional murder".
France's election is fascinating. I could see a number of different options - from a thumping Macron win over Melanchon, through both victory and defeat against Le Pen.
What's interesting is that Macron is being blamed for the cost of living increases - which are principally petrol/diesel. France's electricity prices are among Europe's lowest and are still essentially set by the government, in that they own the majority of generator EDF. Average electricity bills will rise just EUR38 this year, which is a level that we in the UK (or those in other European countries) can only dream of*.
But people still really still care about petrol prices, and the war in Ukraine (and France's sanctions on Russia) are seen as being responsible for this. And Le Pen has played this skillfully: both distancing herself from Putin and hinting that she would bring petrol prices down by (something, something) Russia/Ukraine.
So... what happens next?
Well, I like to think that the French will not vote solely based on lower petrol prices. But what do I know?
I think the most likely scenario is that Macron is around five points clear of Le Pen in the first round, and then limps to a 5 or 6 point win in the second. But that isn't something I'd like to bet my house on (unless the odds were *really* attractive). And things are very fluid right now: a defeat for Russia, and an inevitable collapse in energy prices, would probably seal the deal for Macron. But if the conflict is grinding on, and Le Pen appears to offer relief to French wallets, then it will likely be very close.
* We have petrol, heating and electricity prices rises to hit our wallets.
Following up my previous post below with interesting graph from last time, I am going to go with a bit more depth into the reasons why Macron has lost this.
I think what proves me right, that it’s a changed Landscape and Macrons policies don’t fit it, is staring us in the face in that old graph I just pasted and how we know landscape has changed during his presidency to convert abstentions and macron votes last time now to stop Macron votes.
Fillion 20, Hamon 6.4 that’s 26 minus 9 for pecrasse = 17 That’s 17 from moderates to the anti establishment block from last time. Why? how? the main thing that us creating this bloc against Macron is Macron himself. He has been unable to straddle a foot in the social reform/nationalism/EU sceptic positions, with a foot in the pro business and establishment bloc, his positioning, posturing and policies during this term is his biggest problem. Macron, through a stubbornness or arrogance in his personality type, set out on a mission to be resolute and change things his way in 2014, like a French thatcher, the result is the bloc thot defeats him.
But it didn’t have to happen, that’s the take out. Text books will be written how he could have won, but didn’t have the imagination to be a good political strategist and serial election winner.
I’ll give you an example by contrasting with a serial election winner, agile enough to keep the opposition out of power. Bismark kept winning. He done this by adopting the social economics of the Austrian School. Where you would think the socialists would need to win to give Germany the beginnings of welfare state, Bismark stole that, thus bestridding everything like a colossus a foot in both camps.
Macron has done the opposite. The shared policies that unite the country from left to right against him stem from Macron’s stubbornness to reach out to other policy platforms, whilst integrating his own.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
Definitions that are ridiculous should be changed, not enforced. And there is no indication on the size of the part required in the definition.
I think you are a bit harsh on the draftsmen. This is a major convention from 1948 when genocide was quite a hot topic, so probably a reasonable amount of thought went into it. You have to avoid both the situation where Russia wipes out all 37 inhabitants of Foggy Bottom and Ukraine says "genocide" and where Russia wipes out all the Ukrainians except the 37 and says "not genocide." What is your edge-case-free solution? Fixed percentage?
It's not a ridiculous definition at all. Proving intent to destroy a religious or national group is not at all a low burden of proof. There is no way it could be applied to "every intentional murder".
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Can you get a 2CV up to 111mph by dropping it out of an aircraft?
What's the wind resistance of a 2CV versus terminal velocity?
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
The turnout for the first round has traditionally been much much lower than the runoff and that makes this sort of speculation even harder.
Is this true? Looks the other way around for 2017 to me.
I agree with you Farooq. Last time Fillion and Melenchon scored high teens, they gave some voters to le pen, more to mscron, and, the bit that proves you right, a good chunk of their vote abstained second round.
I reckon Macron has helped himself to the Fillion/pecrasse vote, or most he will likely get of it now less than half fillion got, early this time. One of the reasons why he is in trouble. A lot of abstentions may go to the anti establishment challenger (which I am still fully expecting to be Melenchon actually) for as Willian Glen said he is running on a record this time. The other difference from last time is Zemmour, not many of hits votes will go to macron, and they might well be very motivated to vote.
I can’t see Macron getting within 10 of Melenchon or 5 of le pen in a second round.
Plenty of Fillon voters have gone to Zemmour not Pecresse this time and they will now go en masse to Le Pen in the runoff.
Melenchon voters will be decisive however in deciding if Macron or Le Pen win
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It didn't move on for me
I stayed on Twitter an extra few hours, and filtered the info, and discovered that it was, indeed, two "local" Italian dudes out on a spin
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Isn't T20 tactics smack the ball as hard as possible? Does it get more nuanced than that?
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Well they need to understand it and then communicate this in an understandable form to explain things e.g. I noted on Sky last season (the WI I can't remember name of) explaining ok so the batting team will now be reducing their risk to reward for the remainder of the powerplay...why asked Nick Knight....well it is known that first batting team, if you lose more than 3 wickets in the powerplay you will only win a game 18.7% of the time, thus 2 down already, the risk / reward now has shifted to where they need to ensure for the next x balls that further wickets aren't lost, so we won't see any attempted six hitting....the bowling team will also know this so....
The simple stuff BBC did even really get was the idea of engineering match-ups. Its still very much like ohhhh he's a dangerous batsman, they should bring him in next, or they need to bring on insert star bowler. And they kept quoting Strike Rate....which for T20, totally irrelevant. Its the xG of cricket. None of the serious T20 teams use strike rate in formulating plans. It is about match-ups and also about the innings progression....they want certain types of players in against certain bowlers at certain times of the game. Not, well he has a strike rate of 160, get him in now.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
Definitions that are ridiculous should be changed, not enforced. And there is no indication on the size of the part required in the definition.
I think you are a bit harsh on the draftsmen. This is a major convention from 1948 when genocide was quite a hot topic, so probably a reasonable amount of thought went into it. You have to avoid both the situation where Russia wipes out all 37 inhabitants of Foggy Bottom and Ukraine says "genocide" and where Russia wipes out all the Ukrainians except the 37 and says "not genocide." What is your edge-case-free solution? Fixed percentage?
It's not a ridiculous definition at all. Proving intent to destroy a religious or national group is not at all a low burden of proof. There is no way it could be applied to "every intentional murder".
it's "in whole or in part" that is the issue.
Wikiepdia says:
Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic ... addressed the issue of in part and found that "the part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole." The Appeals Chamber goes into details of other cases and the opinions of respected commentators on the Genocide Convention to explain how they came to this conclusion.
The judges continue in paragraph 12, "The determination of when the targeted part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations. The numeric size of the targeted part of the group is the necessary and important starting point, though not in all cases the ending point of the inquiry. The number of individuals targeted should be evaluated not only in absolute terms but also in relation to the overall size of the entire group. In addition to the numeric size of the targeted portion, its prominence within the group can be a useful consideration. If a specific part of the group is emblematic of the overall group or is essential to its survival, that may support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial within the meaning of Article 4 [of the Tribunal's Statute]."
In paragraph 13 the judges raise the issue of the perpetrators' access to the victims: "The historical examples of genocide also suggest that the area of the perpetrators' activity and control, as well as the possible extent of their reach, should be considered. ... The intent to destroy formed by a perpetrator of genocide will always be limited by the opportunity presented to him. While this factor alone will not indicate whether the targeted group is substantial, it can—in combination with other factors—inform the analysis."
With that in mind, I have little doubt that had Putin succeeded in capturing Ukraine, we might have seen a genocide.
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
Wind turbines are massively more of an eyesore than pylons (although those are bad enough), for the very simple reason that they move. In beautiful scenery, it's akin to having a flashing advert next to painting in a gallery. Plus the particular way in which the blades rotate is particularly unpleasant - too fast to be gentle, too slow for the movement to be lost in a blur.
Pushing them offshore was an absolute stroke of genius of the Cameron government; because of the clarity and focus it provided, it meant lots of wind turbines were installed, without all the opposition and planning delays, not to mention the environmental damage. We should do more offshore installation, and leave what's left of our beautiful scenery unwrecked by them.
There are many places that wind turbines can be put up completely harmlessly. The 'ban' was not helpful. More generally, lots of the countryside has little or no aesthetic value. The madness of this country is that there is vast amounts of underutilised and empty land which is awaiting political direction as to its future use. Particularly the London Green Belt. If you spend time there, outside the country parks and golf courses, as I have, you can see it is just full of flytipped rubbish, degraded hedgerows, unused fields, abandoned equestrian enterprises, informal builders yards, barbed wire, cctv and deafening motorway noise.
Valued landscapes should be protected, but we need to be clear about what these are.
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It didn't move on for me
I stayed on Twitter an extra few hours, and filtered the info, and discovered that it was, indeed, two "local" Italian dudes out on a spin
Maybe I'm just better at Twitter....
Nice one
Remember the Glasgow bin lorry? Some PBers absolutely convinced it was a religious extremist attack (and not a Protestant or Catholic one).
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
Definitions that are ridiculous should be changed, not enforced. And there is no indication on the size of the part required in the definition.
I think you are a bit harsh on the draftsmen. This is a major convention from 1948 when genocide was quite a hot topic, so probably a reasonable amount of thought went into it. You have to avoid both the situation where Russia wipes out all 37 inhabitants of Foggy Bottom and Ukraine says "genocide" and where Russia wipes out all the Ukrainians except the 37 and says "not genocide." What is your edge-case-free solution? Fixed percentage?
It's not a ridiculous definition at all. Proving intent to destroy a religious or national group is not at all a low burden of proof. There is no way it could be applied to "every intentional murder".
it's "in whole or in part" that is the issue.
Why ?
The limited case law existing is fairly clear that the test is whether it constitutes a "substantial part". https://www.icty.org/en/press/icty-convicts-ratko-mladić-for-genocide-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity ...The Chamber further found by majority (Judge Orie dissenting), that the physical perpetrators in several municipalities intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in those Municipalities as a part of the protected group. However, the judges concluded that the Bosnian Muslims targeted in each municipality formed a relatively small part and were not in other ways a substantial part of the protected group. Consequently, the Chamber was not satisfied that the only reasonable inference was that the physical perpetrators possessed the required intent to destroy a substantial part of the protected group of Bosnian Muslims....
Mladić himself, of course, was convicted of genocide.
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
Yes - there are tons of examples of that. Difficult to strike the right balance in response. I immediately reject a lot of stuff if it's not mainstream respected media and it's a story that I sense will have the softhead wing of the culture war right punching the air with glee. Not a bad approach, since it normally is nonsense and I've saved time not bothering to check, but of course there is the downside that just occasionally I'll be discounting something that I ought not to be. This, I have had to learn to live with.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Isn't T20 tactics smack the ball as hard as possible? Does it get more nuanced than that?
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
Modern elite T20 is a game 4D chess. Each team now has a team of highly qualified mathematical analytical number crunchers, that formulating extremely detailed models, which update on the fly during the game...which they then signal to their team who to adjust their decisions e.g. different bowler to bowl the next over or a change to which batsman will be sent in next...even such and such a batsman is instructed to get themselves out (its basically you need to hit out now, and we don't care if you are out doing so, your match up is so poor, we are better getting the next person in).
I believe that Macron will win easily, albeit by a smaller margin than last time. I think those looking at the polls today are overlooking four key points:
1. In an opinion poll about a hypothetical (albeit expected) second round, those who strongly prefer one of the candidates whom the question assumes will be eliminated are loathe to admit that they will, after all, vote for the lesser of two evils. This is particularly important for the soft-left currently saying they'll vote Mélenchon.
2. Whilst it's true that Le Pen has benefitted from a smart campaign and especially by Zemmour making her look comparatively less toxic, she is still toxic to a lot of voters.
3. The grandees of all the various factions and other parties (excluding Zemmour's lot) are likely to come out strongly and urge their supporters to hold their noses and vote for Macron, irritating though he is.
4. The final week won't take place in a vacuum. Expect Le Pen's record of being a bit too chummy with Putin to feature strongly - at exactly the same time that the full horrors of Putin are being splashed across French TV screens.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
You been to the event in Oshkosh? Sounds up your street.
Can you get a 2CV up to 111mph by dropping it out of an aircraft?
What's the wind resistance of a 2CV versus terminal velocity?
Assuming sea level, a coefficient of drag of 0.51 and a frontal area of 1.65m2 a 2CV will experience a drag force of 1.26kN at 110mph. Hence the departing body panels.
There you go again, explaining away shoddy French workmanship....
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
The turnout for the first round has traditionally been much much lower than the runoff and that makes this sort of speculation even harder.
Is this true? Looks the other way around for 2017 to me.
I agree with you Farooq. Last time Fillion and Melenchon scored high teens, they gave some voters to le pen, more to mscron, and, the bit that proves you right, a good chunk of their vote abstained second round.
I reckon Macron has helped himself to the Fillion/pecrasse vote, or most he will likely get of it now less than half fillion got, early this time. One of the reasons why he is in trouble. A lot of abstentions may go to the anti establishment challenger (which I am still fully expecting to be Melenchon actually) for as Willian Glen said he is running on a record this time. The other difference from last time is Zemmour, not many of hits votes will go to macron, and they might well be very motivated to vote.
I can’t see Macron getting within 10 of Melenchon or 5 of le pen in a second round.
Plenty of Fillon voters have gone to Zemmour not Pecresse this time and they will now go en masse to Le Pen in the runoff.
Melenchon voters will be decisive however in deciding if Macron or Le Pen win
So where have the Pécresse voters come from then?
Fillon but she is polling barely half what Fillon got in 2020, with the rest going to Zemmour
Pagel's feed is a dark place indeed. There are people on there who claim never to have left the house in 600+ days. I assumed they were spoofs. But with Twitter, one never knows.
I have a colleague who says exactly that (except she says two years). She has a medical condition which makes her much more likely than most of us to die if she catches Covid, and she feels she can have a pleasant life at home, and that it beats the hell out of being dead. She is exceptionally productive with really high-quality work, and seems quite happy too.
It's one extreme of the personal choices that we're all making, and I don't think we can really judge each others' decisions, any more than the other extreme of someone going clubbing every night and accepting that they'll catch Covid at frequent intervals. We grow so attached to the way we live that it's hard to imagine living quite differently, but people do. Somehow the passion has gone out of the argument, now that it's basically being left up to us.
The problem is most peoples perception of how much risk they are actually in is totally warped, especially with not only vaccines, but anti-virals and much improved covid treatments.
Some people are clearly still scaring themselves to death and are never going to leave the house without worrying they are only a slip-up away from death, when it isn't true.
I recall one of the first opinion polls when COVID broke 2 years ago. 8% replied that they thought they would die of COVID.
There has been all a number of polls and all consistently showed people have been way way out with their perception of the actual dangers.
Now the vast majority of the public have moved on from this, trusting vaccines (and the fact they have had it), but there are still a minority who clearly worry themselves to death and some of the "heroes" of the zero covid movement keep pushing a misleading narrative e.g. the classic long COVID misinformation, by careful omission / twisting of exactly what long covid they are talking about.
Again some people are convinced long covid = organ failures, life long disability, etc, when yes (especially before vaccines) there was this, but the vast bulk they are referring to are people stating they still don't feel 100% after 8-12 weeks, which isn't the same thing at all.
Thats my beef too. If you refer to long covid you need to define what you mean by it. Just feeling like you are not quite 100% yet after a couple of months is not the same as being unable to work/get out of bed/have chronic organ failure, yet too often thats the image given.
I haven't been able to find a decent source for the risk from long Covid: What probability (given age and vaccine status), for what duration, for what severity? It makes it very hard to reassure my wife.
She's terrified of long Covid. She already struggles with a long-term condition (hypermobility syndrome) that was curtailing her activities before the pandemic. She's worried that even relatively mild long Covid would reduce what she's able to do to zero - and that if I get it then she's not confident she could do what I was no longer able to.
I have no idea what the level of risk is. Does anyone have any links to useful data?
There are fewer sights more majestic than the blades of a wind turbine arcing through low cloud cover on a Scottish hillside.
There plenty potential sites alongside motorways or railways which would have little negative visual impact, which can't currently be developed. Likewise all the exiting turbines are strictly limited in size by the stupid onshore limit. We might quadruple onshore output just by removing that restriction.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Isn't T20 tactics smack the ball as hard as possible? Does it get more nuanced than that?
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
Modern elite T20 is a game 4D chess. Each team now has a team of highly qualified mathematical analytical teams crunching data and formulating extremely detailed models, which update on the fly during the game...which they then signal to their team who to adjust their decisions e.g. different bowler to bowl the next over or a change to which batsman will be sent in next...even such and such a batsman is instructed to effectively get themselves out.
So if I may ask how are you able to understand it when all the old, clueless, er, Test cricketers don't?
One of the harms of Twitter is also its speed. A couple of weeks ago, after that car was crashed into a carnival in Belgium, Twitter was alive with speculation: North Africans, religion of peace, authorities covering it up, BBC not reporting it, all that shit. Later it emerges that it's two local guys who'd been out on the sauce, but by then the story's moved on and people have had their biases confirmed. You know when people say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its shoes on? Twitter is the main vector for that these days.
It didn't move on for me
I stayed on Twitter an extra few hours, and filtered the info, and discovered that it was, indeed, two "local" Italian dudes out on a spin
Maybe I'm just better at Twitter....
Nice one
Remember the Glasgow bin lorry? Some PBers absolutely convinced it was a religious extremist attack (and not a Protestant or Catholic one).
Did it turn out to be staffer speeding to get away from Alex Salmond's advances?
No; the fatalities were due to physical illness in the driver. I never did follow the ins and outs of that story, though.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I tend to agree with you on the shorter forms of the game, but I think test cricket hasn't really changed that much, other than batsmen not being able to bat any more (English ones at least). I don't really mind the commentators roster either, I was brought up on Brian Johnson, CMJ, Aggers latterly etc. The newer crop are either ex players (such as Daggers - solid county career), Isa Guha (ex England) or very enthusiastic amateurs who bring a love and extensive knowledge to the table such as Dan Norcross and Henry Moeran.
The biggest issue I found recently was where the WI series was broadcast. Not TMS. And Talk Sport 2 seems not to be on my DAB radios (car or house) so online only. Now I could have streamed it from my phone to the car via blue tooth but WTF - why should I have too? There should be a commitment to have it broadcast in a way that the public can receive it.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
1. Each turbine may have a small base but they are often a visual eyesore for tens of miles around.
2. The concrete pad won't be dug up and will still provide a water sink for the surrounding peat. It will permanently affect the hydrology.
3. Nobody wants to walk on a 10m wide 'road' up to a 120m high turbine in what was open country. Worn paths through peat made by walkers are usually only apparent on popular routes which if they become bad enough are repaired by a 1m wide (at most) stone track laid on top.
I wonder what Cyclefree would make of a power station on Black Combe - an "ideal" site for one if you are only interested in power. It won't happen because "Lake District" but move it across the Solway and...
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
In the Peaks they've started to bury the major powerlines on an effort to reduce the visual impact.
Should they bury the wind turbines as well?
It would increase the predictability of their output!
Very quick. You have to admit I set that up nicely for you.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Isn't T20 tactics smack the ball as hard as possible? Does it get more nuanced than that?
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
Modern elite T20 is a game 4D chess. Each team now has a team of highly qualified mathematical analytical teams crunching data and formulating extremely detailed models, which update on the fly during the game...which they then signal to their team who to adjust their decisions e.g. different bowler to bowl the next over or a change to which batsman will be sent in next...even such and such a batsman is instructed to effectively get themselves out.
So if I may ask how are you able to understand it when all the old, clueless, er, Test cricketers don't?
Because I made a living betting this stuff at one point and have continued to read / listen to those that are involved in the elite side of the game....also it isn't are they able to understand it, it is they don't appear to choose to do so. It requires doing your homework.
Same as the football pundits, if they did some proper research about the modern game they would know spouting the likes of xG and possession stats is Farage down the pub stuff.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
The turnout for the first round has traditionally been much much lower than the runoff and that makes this sort of speculation even harder.
Is this true? Looks the other way around for 2017 to me.
I agree with you Farooq. Last time Fillion and Melenchon scored high teens, they gave some voters to le pen, more to mscron, and, the bit that proves you right, a good chunk of their vote abstained second round.
I reckon Macron has helped himself to the Fillion/pecrasse vote, or most he will likely get of it now less than half fillion got, early this time. One of the reasons why he is in trouble. A lot of abstentions may go to the anti establishment challenger (which I am still fully expecting to be Melenchon actually) for as Willian Glen said he is running on a record this time. The other difference from last time is Zemmour, not many of hits votes will go to macron, and they might well be very motivated to vote.
I can’t see Macron getting within 10 of Melenchon or 5 of le pen in a second round.
Plenty of Fillon voters have gone to Zemmour not Pecresse this time and they will now go en masse to Le Pen in the runoff.
Melenchon voters will be decisive however in deciding if Macron or Le Pen win
So where have the Pécresse voters come from then?
Fillon but she is polling barely half what Fillon got in 2020, with the rest going to Zemmour
We are all guessing, without this years study’s to give us facts. Alternatively, From her high teens high point before Macrons bounce began, I think some of those votes went from pecresse to macron. how do you square they went from her high point to Zemmour when he’s gone from his high point to identical low point. If you look at what happened to Fillions 20% vote in the chart below, abstentions, little bit to le pen, great chunk to macron. He ate his chunk early when pecresse bombed is my analysis. In mikes header (disowned by his own family, but I like it) she was as high as 15 early March, quite a bit higher earlier. Zemour also high at that time, Macron and Le Oen and Melenchon have risen, pecresse and Zemmour dropped. Macron ate pecresse, Le Pen munched Zemmour, and Melenchon nibbled a bit of both as well as the rest of the left.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
We have it from his own mouth that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian people or Ukrainian state - and he has invaded their country and is killing, and forcibly deporting thousands to impose that view. I'd say that's a pretty strong prima facie case.
I see the argument. But if we are invited to invade Russia on the back of it, the fact that it might meet the test for genocide is not convincing. Better to rely on the commission of war crimes.
No one is inviting anyone to invade Russia. Proving genocide in court would take years.
There is an international obligation to prevent it, as you suggest. Absent a UN resolution, such actions could be justified only if there's a reasonable expectation that the harm done is outweighed by the harm prevented.
You might make a case for direct intervention in the Ukraine conflict (though as we've seen there's a strong belief on the part of all western leaders that this would risk a nuclear WWIII) - but invading Russia would obviously fail any such test.
I have a small vineyard in the middle of a pretty section of the North Downs. It's in an AONB. In the valley there are two large electricity lines with a pylon every couple of 100 metres. There is also a large mobile phone mast directly opposite the field, which emits a constant quite loud whirring. The neighbours might not like these - at a guess, I would say you can see 8 such structures from most of the houses on the valley sides - but they have never been particularly controversial or debated at central government level. Companies just go ahead and erect them.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
Wind turbines are massively more of an eyesore than pylons (although those are bad enough), for the very simple reason that they move. In beautiful scenery, it's akin to having a flashing advert next to painting in a gallery. Plus the particular way in which the blades rotate is particularly unpleasant - too fast to be gentle, too slow for the movement to be lost in a blur.
Pushing them offshore was an absolute stroke of genius of the Cameron government; because of the clarity and focus it provided, it meant lots of wind turbines were installed, without all the opposition and planning delays, not to mention the environmental damage. We should do more offshore installation, and leave what's left of our beautiful scenery unwrecked by them.
There are many places that wind turbines can be put up completely harmlessly. The 'ban' was not helpful. More generally, lots of the countryside has little or no aesthetic value. The madness of this country is that there is vast amounts of underutilised and empty land which is awaiting political direction as to its future use. Particularly the London Green Belt. If you spend time there, outside the country parks and golf courses, as I have, you can see it is just full of flytipped rubbish, degraded hedgerows, unused fields, abandoned equestrian enterprises, informal builders yards, barbed wire, cctv and deafening motorway noise.
Valued landscapes should be protected, but we need to be clear about what these are.
But the shit bits of the Green Belt - and they do exist, if not to the extent you describe - are a buffer zone protecting the really nice chunks of Green Belt. That is to say, if you allow proper building on the Green Belt, then the shit bits will be shunted further out into the nice chunks, and so we lose another huge tranche of genuinely lovely British countryside
Put it differently: Russia taking the Donbas did not remove the Russian threat to the rest of Ukraine. It made it worse
So Russia is London. The Donbas is the shit bit of the Green Belt. I apologise for the tastelessness of this analogy
The other thing about wind turbines is, of course, there is a whole generation who've grown up with them. They aren't eyesores, unsettling, or beautiful to my kids. They are just part of the landscape.
The other thing about wind turbines is, of course, there is a whole generation who've grown up with them. They aren't eyesores, unsettling, or beautiful to my kids. They are just part of the landscape.
I remember in the 80's there was an experimental turbine in North Devon, near Ilfracombe. Kind of inspiring. Never believed that there would be days in my lifetime when most of our electricity came from them.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I tend to agree with you on the shorter forms of the game, but I think test cricket hasn't really changed that much, other than batsmen not being able to bat any more (English ones at least). I don't really mind the commentators roster either, I was brought up on Brian Johnson, CMJ, Aggers latterly etc. The newer crop are either ex players (such as Daggers - solid county career), Isa Guha (ex England) or very enthusiastic amateurs who bring a love and extensive knowledge to the table such as Dan Norcross and Henry Moeran.
The biggest issue I found recently was where the WI series was broadcast. Not TMS. And Talk Sport 2 seems not to be on my DAB radios (car or house) so online only. Now I could have streamed it from my phone to the car via blue tooth but WTF - why should I have too? There should be a commitment to have it broadcast in a way that the public can receive it.
Disagree. Test Match cricket is undergoing exactly the same revolution. Where as the commentary is too much ohhhh bring on such and such he's a good bowler. The level of analysis now is down to looking at exact field placement of every player for every ball in addition to all the Hawkeye stats about the actual delivery.
C4's extremely highbrow lineup today we must preserve from privatisation to the lowest common denominator of populism.
Includes Kitchen Nightmares, Undercover Boss, Steph's Packed Lunch, A Place in the Sun, New Life in the Sun, Sun, Sea and Selling Houses, Hollyoaks, the Simpsons and a Gogglebox double bill
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Isn't T20 tactics smack the ball as hard as possible? Does it get more nuanced than that?
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
Modern elite T20 is a game 4D chess. Each team now has a team of highly qualified mathematical analytical teams crunching data and formulating extremely detailed models, which update on the fly during the game...which they then signal to their team who to adjust their decisions e.g. different bowler to bowl the next over or a change to which batsman will be sent in next...even such and such a batsman is instructed to effectively get themselves out.
So if I may ask how are you able to understand it when all the old, clueless, er, Test cricketers don't?
Because I made a living betting this stuff at one point and have continued to read / listen to those that are involved in the elite side of the game....also it isn't are they able to understand it, it is they don't appear to choose to do so. It requires doing your homework.
Same as the football pundits, if they did some proper research about the modern game they would know spouting the likes of xG and possession stats is Farage down the pub stuff.
In 2017 first round vote Mélenchon took 37% of the Muslim vote followed by Macron on 24%.
It was a case of anybody but Le Pen.
In 2022 the second round was a foregone conclusion , this time not so .
This is likely to see the abstention rate fall as we head towards Election Day especially in the Muslim community who make up a crucial 8% of the population .
Pécresses voters currently break 65 to 35 towards Macron . What’s left of her vote is more centre right , the far right parties have already hovered up the more far right voters who jumped ship .
As in the UK older voters are more likely to turnout and Macron is winning this by a huge majority in the second round .
Le Pen can win but the current polling is over inflating her popularity in the second round . And she needs a perfect storm of events to deliver that .
The other thing about wind turbines is, of course, there is a whole generation who've grown up with them. They aren't eyesores, unsettling, or beautiful to my kids. They are just part of the landscape.
Hmm. Some of the comments on PB today remind me of reactions - very mixed - to electricity pylons (the lattice steelwork ones) in the 1930s or thereabouts. Novelty must be a factor.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I enjoyed Carlos Brathwaite on TMS.
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Isn't T20 tactics smack the ball as hard as possible? Does it get more nuanced than that?
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
Modern elite T20 is a game 4D chess. Each team now has a team of highly qualified mathematical analytical teams crunching data and formulating extremely detailed models, which update on the fly during the game...which they then signal to their team who to adjust their decisions e.g. different bowler to bowl the next over or a change to which batsman will be sent in next...even such and such a batsman is instructed to effectively get themselves out.
So if I may ask how are you able to understand it when all the old, clueless, er, Test cricketers don't?
Because I made a living betting this stuff at one point and have continued to read / listen to those that are involved in the elite side of the game....also it isn't are they able to understand it, it is they don't appear to choose to do so. It requires doing your homework.
Same as the football pundits, if they did some proper research about the modern game they would know spouting the likes of xG and possession stats is Farage down the pub stuff.
What do you think of MOTD pundits?
Crap....next....if you spend anytime reading the likes of the Athletic or listening to the guys from StatsBomb (although they don't do their podcast anymore) you will realise again the level of sophistication of modern football analysis.
While MOTD of the day are going oh yeah he needs to get it wide and whip more crosses in...the pros have heat maps which tell them from any position on the pitch, given the opposition position, the % chance of the current move leading to a shot on goal depending on where they move the ball to next. They are literally told passing to ball to x here 30 yards from goal leads to a goal scoring opportunity 8.45% of the time, instead the ball to y was 9.97%.
The other thing about wind turbines is, of course, there is a whole generation who've grown up with them. They aren't eyesores, unsettling, or beautiful to my kids. They are just part of the landscape.
I remember in the 80's there was an experimental turbine in North Devon, near Ilfracombe. Kind of inspiring. Never believed that there would be days in my lifetime when most of our electricity came from them.
Yeah. They aren't exactly new. There are loads round here. They don't seem to bother anyone. There is a quite remarkable fear of the unknown, change, and modernity in a significant tranche of the population at the moment.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew Simon Mann Alison Mitchell Kevin Howells Charles Dagnall ("Daggers") Daniel Norcross Isa Guha Henry Moeran Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
But the commentator is usually paired with an ex player - e.g. Michael Vaughn (pre-cancelling), Phil Tuffnell etc. You can argue that they are too long out the game, and need refreshing, but they do usually still understand test cricket.
They really don't though, thats the problem. Tuffnell knows as much about modern cricket as the Nigel Farage type down the pub. I remember the T20 coverage they did last year, they really were totally clueless about what the tactics being deployed were.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
I tend to agree with you on the shorter forms of the game, but I think test cricket hasn't really changed that much, other than batsmen not being able to bat any more (English ones at least). I don't really mind the commentators roster either, I was brought up on Brian Johnson, CMJ, Aggers latterly etc. The newer crop are either ex players (such as Daggers - solid county career), Isa Guha (ex England) or very enthusiastic amateurs who bring a love and extensive knowledge to the table such as Dan Norcross and Henry Moeran.
The biggest issue I found recently was where the WI series was broadcast. Not TMS. And Talk Sport 2 seems not to be on my DAB radios (car or house) so online only. Now I could have streamed it from my phone to the car via blue tooth but WTF - why should I have too? There should be a commitment to have it broadcast in a way that the public can receive it.
Disagree. Test Match cricket is undergoing exactly the same revolution. Where as the commentary is too much ohhhh bring on such and such he's a good bowler. The level of analysis now is down to looking at exact field placement of every player for every ball in addition to all the Hawkeye stats about the actual delivery.
Also: Kathleen Stock can REALLY write. Lovely phrasing; elegant and articulate
Also also: there should be a word for once-leftwing writers, thinkers, academics, etc, who have been in some way cancelled or abolished by the Woke, and end up working for rightwing journals - see also Suzanne Moore, Tanya Gold, Julie Bindel, &c
Comments
Governments should own *nothing* unless it is necessary to achieve their objectives.
Channel 4 may well have been a necessary invention in 1982 and government played a valuable role. That is irrelevant in the context of 2022.
The question is whether it is necessarily owned by the government today - my view is not. How you redeploy the capital (debt repayment, a new hospital, whatever) is irrelevant to the decision on Channel4
https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1511098952933945347
And stunning analysis of Russia's losses (high and low end estimates) as percentages of total theoretical capacity and committed resources:
Thread:
https://twitter.com/HelloMrBond/status/1510787954213625857
For just the graphic:
https://twitter.com/HelloMrBond/status/1510787954213625857/photo/1
Twitter fills an urgent and insatiable need for information without the filters and scrutiny of real journalism.
Yet wind turbines, which my almost all accounts are much less of an eyesore than an electricity pylon (and don't have ugly high tension wires strung between them), seem to attract much attention from a small group of right wing backbenchers who just happen also to include in their number several climate change sceptics and oil industry artisans. I wonder why.
It is funny how off-road cycling was 'discovered' by mountain bikers in the 80s, when people had been using or taking bikes off road ever since they were invented.
Jacob's Ladder is probably still a 'black run' even on a modern full-suspension bike.
Plus when I started [on TMS], I was 31 and easily the youngest member of the team. Everyone was an old white bloke. It is a much more diverse commentary team now - I mean it's a rarity now when a woman isn't commentating - which makes it more appealing to more people.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2022/04/05/jonathan-agnew-exclusive-frustrates-bbc-loses-cricket-rights/
Yes, but totally clueless about modern international test cricket....
Jonathan Agnew
Simon Mann
Alison Mitchell
Kevin Howells
Charles Dagnall ("Daggers")
Daniel Norcross
Isa Guha
Henry Moeran
Aatif Nawaz
None of these people have any expert insight into it. Aatif Nawaz is a stand-up comedian.
I stayed on Twitter an extra few hours, and filtered the info, and discovered that it was, indeed, two "local" Italian dudes out on a spin
Maybe I'm just better at Twitter....
And as he himself points out, there is a commercial motive for most things in showbiz.
The coverage of the England T20's they did last year was embarrassingly bad. Totally clueless about the tactics of modern T20s, which is an incredibly high level analytics based game.
The only person they had as part of their team with any idea was Tymal Mills, who they let speak for all of about 2 seconds during the whole broadcast.
The BBC insight into the modern game reminds when they still covered cricket with only one camera, so you had to look at the wicketkeepers arse for half the overs....while other broadcasters had moved to cameras behind the bowler for both ends.
What's interesting is that Macron is being blamed for the cost of living increases - which are principally petrol/diesel. France's electricity prices are among Europe's lowest and are still essentially set by the government, in that they own the majority of generator EDF. Average electricity bills will rise just EUR38 this year, which is a level that we in the UK (or those in other European countries) can only dream of*.
But people still really still care about petrol prices, and the war in Ukraine (and France's sanctions on Russia) are seen as being responsible for this. And Le Pen has played this skillfully: both distancing herself from Putin and hinting that she would bring petrol prices down by (something, something) Russia/Ukraine.
So... what happens next?
Well, I like to think that the French will not vote solely based on lower petrol prices. But what do I know?
I think the most likely scenario is that Macron is around five points clear of Le Pen in the first round, and then limps to a 5 or 6 point win in the second. But that isn't something I'd like to bet my house on (unless the odds were *really* attractive). And things are very fluid right now: a defeat for Russia, and an inevitable collapse in energy prices, would probably seal the deal for Macron. But if the conflict is grinding on, and Le Pen appears to offer relief to French wallets, then it will likely be very close.
* We have petrol, heating and electricity prices rises to hit our wallets.
And there is ongoing work to remove the eyesore pylons over the Dwyryd Estuary in Eryri.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/major-pylon-removal-project-gets-underway-snowdonia
The National Grid claims that this is the "Third major project to start construction as part of wider initiative to reduce the visual impact of existing high-voltage lines in AONBs and National Parks"
So, I don't think your claim about pylons stands up. There are plenty of people who would like to see them completely removed from AONB and National Parks.
He once road with a friend (on separate bikes) from Derby to Blackpool on a Saturday. Spent the night in a hotel there, then cycles back the next day. Said he was knackered to do much in Blackpool except sleep!
Pushing them offshore was an absolute stroke of genius of the Cameron government; because of the clarity and focus it provided, it meant lots of wind turbines were installed, without all the opposition and planning delays, not to mention the environmental damage. We should do more offshore installation, and leave what's left of our beautiful scenery unwrecked by them.
It is unsettling. We are probably hard wired to find urgent signals from far away quite alarming
I agree: put them offshore. They actually look quite beautiful in the North Sea, enlivening cold grey waves, and the movement is much less distressing, because the sea moves anyhow
I also loathe pylons, mind. They ruin too much of Britain. I once read that for the price of the Millennium Dome we could have buried every pylon/cable in the country. I have no idea if this is or was true, but it seemed a terrifically good deal. Lose the Dome, entomb the pylons
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
They're buying gas-fired electricity from the UK when we've normally bought their nuclear.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/late-frost-ices-french-vineyards-threatens-fruit-crops-83858595
You listen to an elite T20 cricketer and then BBC commentary team and you would think they are playing two totally different games.
I had to go over the top at Brading with full luggage in a late evening rainstorm because of that. Even my sealskinz waterproof socks did not really help.
Its the blind leading the blind, but its more ethnically diverse, so TMS must stay is Agnew's argument.
Sky on the other hand have taken serious steps. Botham, Holding, Bumble, Gower all gone. The likes of Key and Sangakkara in. I am trying to remember the West Indian international (who is still playing) they had come in last season, and it was totally eye opening have him explain what the tactics are.
It isn't quite the same thing in the North Downs as it is already an urban area, not somewhere with zero human constructions visible. I do agree about pylons and there is an argument that as many lines as possible should be buried for both visual and continuity reasons. I'll be interested to see what the new pylon design looks like in the landscape and whether it is less ugly (it resembles a small wind turbine upright with 'wings').
I've nothing against turbines in essentially urban areas. In fact, our piece of wild land in the Flatlands had no structures at all visible once the pit heads had been removed, but there's now 127 (I counted them) turbines visible on a clear day. Even that I can get used to as the turbines are mostly sited on farmland or brownfield sites and in a flat landscape they just sit on the horizon.
The problem is that these urban sites aren't really the best for power generation. For better wind conditions you need to be on top of a hill...or...out at sea. I know which I prefer.
Obviously not as reputable as I thought.
Proving intent to destroy a religious or national group is not at all a low burden of proof. There is no way it could be applied to "every intentional murder".
I think what proves me right, that it’s a changed Landscape and Macrons policies don’t fit it, is staring us in the face in that old graph I just pasted and how we know landscape has changed during his presidency to convert abstentions and macron votes last time now to stop Macron votes.
Fillion 20, Hamon 6.4 that’s 26 minus 9 for pecrasse = 17 That’s 17 from moderates to the anti establishment block from last time. Why? how? the main thing that us creating this bloc against Macron is Macron himself. He has been unable to straddle a foot in the social reform/nationalism/EU sceptic positions, with a foot in the pro business and establishment bloc, his positioning, posturing and policies during this term is his biggest problem. Macron, through a stubbornness or arrogance in his personality type, set out on a mission to be resolute and change things his way in 2014, like a French thatcher, the result is the bloc thot defeats him.
But it didn’t have to happen, that’s the take out. Text books will be written how he could have won, but didn’t have the imagination to be a good political strategist and serial election winner.
I’ll give you an example by contrasting with a serial election winner, agile enough to keep the opposition out of power. Bismark kept winning. He done this by adopting the social economics of the Austrian School. Where you would think the socialists would need to win to give Germany the beginnings of welfare state, Bismark stole that, thus bestridding everything like a colossus a foot in both camps.
Macron has done the opposite. The shared policies that unite the country from left to right against him stem from Macron’s stubbornness to reach out to other policy platforms, whilst integrating his own.
What policy platforms? These
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_French_labor_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–2020_French_pension_reform_strike
he was too pure on his mission, too stubborn to compromise
On topic, and I hope it helps with your betting. 💇♀️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcS4rEE8dIU
I think the point is quite subtle. I don't need TMS to be cutting edge numerical analysis, but I think you are correct about their T20 coverage when it comes to tactics and such.
Melenchon voters will be decisive however in deciding if Macron or Le Pen win
(Again, not that I know anything about it - my one trip to see T20 I was too busy ingesting the curry and beer to notice what was happening on the pitch.)
The simple stuff BBC did even really get was the idea of engineering match-ups. Its still very much like ohhhh he's a dangerous batsman, they should bring him in next, or they need to bring on insert star bowler. And they kept quoting Strike Rate....which for T20, totally irrelevant. Its the xG of cricket. None of the serious T20 teams use strike rate in formulating plans. It is about match-ups and also about the innings progression....they want certain types of players in against certain bowlers at certain times of the game. Not, well he has a strike rate of 160, get him in now.
Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic ... addressed the issue of in part and found that "the part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole." The Appeals Chamber goes into details of other cases and the opinions of respected commentators on the Genocide Convention to explain how they came to this conclusion.
The judges continue in paragraph 12, "The determination of when the targeted part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations. The numeric size of the targeted part of the group is the necessary and important starting point, though not in all cases the ending point of the inquiry. The number of individuals targeted should be evaluated not only in absolute terms but also in relation to the overall size of the entire group. In addition to the numeric size of the targeted portion, its prominence within the group can be a useful consideration. If a specific part of the group is emblematic of the overall group or is essential to its survival, that may support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial within the meaning of Article 4 [of the Tribunal's Statute]."
In paragraph 13 the judges raise the issue of the perpetrators' access to the victims: "The historical examples of genocide also suggest that the area of the perpetrators' activity and control, as well as the possible extent of their reach, should be considered. ... The intent to destroy formed by a perpetrator of genocide will always be limited by the opportunity presented to him. While this factor alone will not indicate whether the targeted group is substantial, it can—in combination with other factors—inform the analysis."
With that in mind, I have little doubt that had Putin succeeded in capturing Ukraine, we might have seen a genocide.
Valued landscapes should be protected, but we need to be clear about what these are.
The limited case law existing is fairly clear that the test is whether it constitutes a "substantial part".
https://www.icty.org/en/press/icty-convicts-ratko-mladić-for-genocide-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity
...The Chamber further found by majority (Judge Orie dissenting), that the physical perpetrators in several municipalities intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in those Municipalities as a part of the protected group. However, the judges concluded that the Bosnian Muslims targeted in each municipality formed a relatively small part and were not in other ways a substantial part of the protected group. Consequently, the Chamber was not satisfied that the only reasonable inference was that the physical perpetrators possessed the required intent to destroy a substantial part of the protected group of Bosnian Muslims....
Mladić himself, of course, was convicted of genocide.
https://twitter.com/Gerjon_/status/1511335713291255811/photo/1
1. In an opinion poll about a hypothetical (albeit expected) second round, those who strongly prefer one of the candidates whom the question assumes will be eliminated are loathe to admit that they will, after all, vote for the lesser of two evils. This is particularly important for the soft-left currently saying they'll vote Mélenchon.
2. Whilst it's true that Le Pen has benefitted from a smart campaign and especially by Zemmour making her look comparatively less toxic, she is still toxic to a lot of voters.
3. The grandees of all the various factions and other parties (excluding Zemmour's lot) are likely to come out strongly and urge their supporters to hold their noses and vote for Macron, irritating though he is.
4. The final week won't take place in a vacuum. Expect Le Pen's record of being a bit too chummy with Putin to feature strongly - at exactly the same time that the full horrors of Putin are being splashed across French TV screens.
She's terrified of long Covid. She already struggles with a long-term condition (hypermobility syndrome) that was curtailing her activities before the pandemic. She's worried that even relatively mild long Covid would reduce what she's able to do to zero - and that if I get it then she's not confident she could do what I was no longer able to.
I have no idea what the level of risk is. Does anyone have any links to useful data?
Likewise all the exiting turbines are strictly limited in size by the stupid onshore limit. We might quadruple onshore output just by removing that restriction.
The biggest issue I found recently was where the WI series was broadcast. Not TMS. And Talk Sport 2 seems not to be on my DAB radios (car or house) so online only. Now I could have streamed it from my phone to the car via blue tooth but WTF - why should I have too? There should be a commitment to have it broadcast in a way that the public can receive it.
Same as the football pundits, if they did some proper research about the modern game they would know spouting the likes of xG and possession stats is Farage down the pub stuff.
Proving genocide in court would take years.
There is an international obligation to prevent it, as you suggest. Absent a UN resolution, such actions could be justified only if there's a reasonable expectation that the harm done is outweighed by the harm prevented.
You might make a case for direct intervention in the Ukraine conflict (though as we've seen there's a strong belief on the part of all western leaders that this would risk a nuclear WWIII) - but invading Russia would obviously fail any such test.
Put it differently: Russia taking the Donbas did not remove the Russian threat to the rest of Ukraine. It made it worse
So Russia is London. The Donbas is the shit bit of the Green Belt. I apologise for the tastelessness of this analogy
They aren't eyesores, unsettling, or beautiful to my kids.
They are just part of the landscape.
15 point lead nailed on.
Includes Kitchen Nightmares, Undercover Boss, Steph's Packed Lunch, A Place in the Sun, New Life in the Sun, Sun, Sea and Selling Houses, Hollyoaks, the Simpsons and a Gogglebox double bill
https://twitter.com/WalkerMarcus/status/1511328157873418253?s=20&t=s6feJWI45tuI18Ty1aVFnQ
It was a case of anybody but Le Pen.
In 2022 the second round was a foregone conclusion , this time not so .
This is likely to see the abstention rate fall as we head towards Election Day especially in the Muslim community who make up a crucial 8% of the population .
Pécresses voters currently break 65 to 35 towards Macron . What’s left of her vote is more centre right , the far right parties have already hovered up the more far right voters who jumped ship .
As in the UK older voters are more likely to turnout and Macron is winning this by a huge majority in the second round .
Le Pen can win but the current polling is over inflating her popularity in the second round . And she needs a perfect storm of events to deliver that .
While MOTD of the day are going oh yeah he needs to get it wide and whip more crosses in...the pros have heat maps which tell them from any position on the pitch, given the opposition position, the % chance of the current move leading to a shot on goal depending on where they move the ball to next. They are literally told passing to ball to x here 30 yards from goal leads to a goal scoring opportunity 8.45% of the time, instead the ball to y was 9.97%.
There is a quite remarkable fear of the unknown, change, and modernity in a significant tranche of the population at the moment.
While funny I wouldn't exactly call either highbrow too
Nothing more necessary.
https://unherd.com/2022/04/how-philosophy-gave-up-on-the-truth/
Also: Kathleen Stock can REALLY write. Lovely phrasing; elegant and articulate
Also also: there should be a word for once-leftwing writers, thinkers, academics, etc, who have been in some way cancelled or abolished by the Woke, and end up working for rightwing journals - see also Suzanne Moore, Tanya Gold, Julie Bindel, &c