This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring and the change of government in Egypt was happening, doesn't make me an expert on Egypt.
But you seem to be an expert on Israel!
Seeing as we’re sharing war correspondent anecdotes I was in India during the communal riots in 2002 when over a thousand Muslims were killed by mobs of Hindu nationalists In Gujarat and Rajasthan after Islamists firebombed a railway carriage full of pilgrims. We were on a night train to Jodhpur when we stopped in the suburbs and rioters started pelting the carriage with stones. There were soldiers on the train who restored calm and on we chugged into the central station.
Good to know you made it safely.
But you know the guy who led the said mobs of Hindu nationalists? He just happens to be the current PM of India...
He was Chief Minister of Gujarat, he wasn't personally leading the mobs.
I do recall him not being over keen to condemn (or stop) them though.
Can we just all stop and praise my comment from February 2023
"Putin and Russia are all in. Russia will not be defeated like this, ie with total Ukrainian victory
OTOH I can’t see how Russia wins, either. I predict a long bloody stalemate that ends with a Korean style partition and an exhausted armistice""
Eeeeee. I scare myself, sometimes
Actually, I think you're completely wrong on this. At some point, Russia will fold. Because invading is hard, and it requires them to keep pumping in money and young men. And for what?
That folding, fwiw, probably happens after Putin accidentally falls out of a window.
Such an event is probably hard to see in advance, sadly.
It is surely part of Russia's strategy to make it seem impossible to beat them back - if that had been taken at face value Ukraine would have surrendered as various idiots said they should at the start, and not retaken anything including one of the biggest cities in the country - but even knowing that the slow grind will take its toll on allies.
The Russians have already got half the GOP and one presidential candidate opposed to helping Ukraine, and in other less significant regions in Europe support has held up better than I would have thought, but will presumably start eking away, or least stop seeing game changing inputs.
There is no doubt that Trump winning the US election would be bad for Ukraine, as would Le Pen winning in France.
But long term military adventures have a nasty habit of resulting in violent changes of government. And that is much more likely to happen to the attacker than the defender.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring and the change of government in Egypt was happening, doesn't make me an expert on Egypt.
But you seem to be an expert on Israel!
Seeing as we’re sharing war correspondent anecdotes I was in India during the communal riots in 2002 when over a thousand Muslims were killed by mobs of Hindu nationalists In Gujarat and Rajasthan after Islamists firebombed a railway carriage full of pilgrims. We were on a night train to Jodhpur when we stopped in the suburbs and rioters started pelting the carriage with stones. There were soldiers on the train who restored calm and on we chugged into the central station.
Good to know you made it safely.
But you know the guy who led the said mobs of Hindu nationalists? He just happens to be the current PM of India...
He was Chief Minister of Gujarat, he wasn't personally leading the mobs.
Though officially classified as a communalist riot, the events of 2002 have been described as a pogrom by many scholars,[24][25] with some commentators alleging that the attacks had been planned, with the attack on the train was a "staged trigger" for what was actually premeditated violence.[26][27] Other observers have stated that these events had met the "legal definition of genocide,"[28] or referred to them as state terrorism or ethnic cleansing.[3][1][2] Instances of mass violence include the Naroda Patiya massacre that took place directly adjacent to a police training camp;[29] the Gulbarg Society massacre where Ehsan Jafri, a former parliamentarian, was among those killed; and several incidents in Vadodara city.[30] Scholars studying the 2002 riots state that they were premeditated and constituted a form of ethnic cleansing, and that the state government and law enforcement were complicit in the violence that occurred.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
I was in Egypt during the Arab Spring and the change of government in Egypt was happening, doesn't make me an expert on Egypt.
But you seem to be an expert on Israel!
Seeing as we’re sharing war correspondent anecdotes I was in India during the communal riots in 2002 when over a thousand Muslims were killed by mobs of Hindu nationalists In Gujarat and Rajasthan after Islamists firebombed a railway carriage full of pilgrims. We were on a night train to Jodhpur when we stopped in the suburbs and rioters started pelting the carriage with stones. There were soldiers on the train who restored calm and on we chugged into the central station.
Good to know you made it safely.
But you know the guy who led the said mobs of Hindu nationalists? He just happens to be the current PM of India...
He was Chief Minister of Gujarat, he wasn't personally leading the mobs.
No, but Modi did allow the mobs to kill by keeping the police from intervening to stop the violence.
NYT: Ukraine’s Top Commander Says War Has Hit a ‘Stalemate’ In a candid assessment, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny said no “beautiful breakthrough” was imminent and that breaking the deadlock could require advances in technological warfare. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/world/europe/ukraine-zaluzhny-war.html
Depressing stuff indeed. Always a possibility, and regrettably the Russians appear for the moment to have done enough to grind away and buy time to bleed Ukraine and hope for a good outcome in the US elections at the very least.
It seems Ukraine’s biggest enemy is the strategic impatience of the West.
If we look at things from the West's perspective strategically, rather than with a moral hat on, Russia has already been defeated.
It attempted to capture Kyiv and nearly all of Ukraine, and has ended up with a relatively small increase on the territory it already controlled in all but name.
And the cost has been total economic and geopolitical isolation, the decimation of much of its conventional military capability, and the loss of many many young men that will hasten their demographic decline.
Of course Russia still has lots of nukes and poses a threat, but much less of one than it did 2 years ago.
The best outcome is a complete military defeat and withdrawal of Russia, but something falling short of that isn't the end of the world for the wider West.
Which unfortunately may mean Ukraine finds the flow of new expensive kit slows down, and they may need to eventually settle for a stalemate.
I don't think that's right. I think that's dangerously naive.
If the West were to pat itself on the back and say, "Job's a good 'un", lose interest, and see Russia consolidate its grip on the extra territory it has seized from Ukraine, then we'd be showing that the West was unable to prevent Russia from using military force to seize territory, that we were willing to fool ourselves into thinking that losing territory was winning.
Human beings are very good at remembering their accurate predictions, while conveniently forgetting the things they got wrong.
Indeed, the whole gambling industry relies on it.
Funnily enough, I have just looked back and found this exchange, from February of this year. Between me and you
"Leon said:
I disagree. Putin and Russia are all in. Russia will not be defeated like this, ie with total Ukrainian victory
OTOH I can’t see how Russia wins, either. I predict a long bloody stalemate that ends with a Korean style partition and an exhausted armistice"
"rcs1000 said:
"I don't buy it: remember, the invasion is usually the easy part, and it's the occupation that kills you.
And Korea was North Koreans fighting for their country against foreign invaders.
The Russians do not have an endless supply of young men and artillery shells. Now, if the Chinese step up and start arming the Russians, that would change things. But right now, the Ukrainians are being resupplied by the West with ever better equipment, while the Russians are begging the North Koreans for artillery shells, and have seen a number of their best new units utterly destroyed."
So, I was right, wasn't I? And you were wrong. At least, in that exchange, and in the context of what we know now
And that was back in February, long before Ukraine began its "counter attack"
Earlier you criticised someone for going back to an old post of yours. Now you are doing it. You could leave a decent period of time before contradicting yourself.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
Yes, that's my readng. Certainly possible. Contemporaneous with late Gobekli Tepe, and just before the earliest settlements in Jordan, Israel and Iraq etc? And on a similar latitude and quite easy to reach by sea
But then it should still be really famous. It would be Europe's oldest human settlement, excepting maybe that weird place in the Czech Republic. - if you accept it as a settlement
My hunch - sadly - is that this is a citation about Cozzo Matrice which is entirely wrong and which has been propagated via the internet and no one has corrected it
However, I would love it to be true, and it does appear in multiple places, and in various forms, so who knows
I need to do some more research.... It is brilliantly moody, as a place
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
It's much easier to live without a regular paycheck and be comfortable with failure when you have a considerable personal fortune.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
8000 BC (ie. 10,000 BP) would have been during the Ice Age.
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
It's much easier to live without a regular paycheck and be comfortable with failure when you have a considerable personal fortune.
If the UK re-elects Sunak, we'll be showing just how comfortable with failure we are.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
It's much easier to live without a regular paycheck and be comfortable with failure when you have a considerable personal fortune.
If the UK re-elects Sunak, we'll be showing just how comfortable with failure we are.
And when Sunak is humiliated at the next GE we will see how comfortable he is with failure.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
8000 BC (ie. 10,000 BP) would have been during the Ice Age.
No, not really, just after the Ice Age, certainly in that part of "Europe"
Sam Coates Sky @SamCoatesSky · 1h Rishi Sunak X Elon Musk
One of the maddest events I’ve ever covered
In what sense was it mad? I've watched a bit of the talk between the two of them and it seemed pretty intelligent.
I remember not that long ago when the media thought that the leader of the opposition having a late night cozy chat with Russell Brand was absolute zinger for GE campaign.
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
The Sunak Musk thing is quite odd. But I think I should watch it. I managed twenty seconds, it was somewhat excruciating. Should I persevere?
I have a really low tolerance for cringey things, always have. Just the thumbnail of Sunak perching there in his odd shirt and trousers that look like they've shrunk in the wash, I just can't do it.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Can we just all stop and praise my comment from February 2023
"Putin and Russia are all in. Russia will not be defeated like this, ie with total Ukrainian victory
OTOH I can’t see how Russia wins, either. I predict a long bloody stalemate that ends with a Korean style partition and an exhausted armistice""
Eeeeee. I scare myself, sometimes
Actually, I think you're completely wrong on this. At some point, Russia will fold. Because invading is hard, and it requires them to keep pumping in money and young men. And for what?
Well in the end the entire universe will expire from heat death, or be reborn in a white hole exploding into another section of the multiverse, so yeah Putin is in trouble
Whatever. The best we can do in gepolitics in, surely, short-medium term
My predictions of a Ukrainian stalemate are proving better, in the short-medium term. You can ask me for my secret via DM
Russia has held the line on the battlefield but they've been humiliated in the Black Sea. I'm less optimistic than I was because I thought the Ukrainian offensive would likely make substantial gains.
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
8000 BC (ie. 10,000 BP) would have been during the Ice Age.
No, not really, just after the Ice Age, certainly in that part of "Europe"
Sea Levels were still much lower than they are today. There were three great meltwater pulses as the Ice sheets melted, roughly 14,000 years ago, roughly 11,500 years ago (and therefore contemporaneous with Plato's Atlantis story ("9,000 years before Solon")), and the final pulse was roughly 7,500 years ago.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
The Sunak Musk thing is quite odd. But I think I should watch it. I managed twenty seconds, it was somewhat excruciating. Should I persevere?
I have a really low tolerance for cringey things, always have. Just the thumbnail of Sunak perching there in his odd shirt and trousers that look like they've shrunk in the wash, I just can't do it.
I’m with you. I feel guilty for not watching it. Sundance has clearly gone to lots of effort and Musk is an a-list guest.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
It's much easier to live without a regular paycheck and be comfortable with failure when you have a considerable personal fortune.
If the UK re-elects Sunak, we'll be showing just how comfortable with failure we are.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
8000 BC (ie. 10,000 BP) would have been during the Ice Age.
No, not really, just after the Ice Age, certainly in that part of "Europe"
I had an interesting chat with OpenAI's GPT recently about the rise of agricultural societies, the bronze age collapse, the rise of mono-atheistic religions and the choice of dietary restrictions in the circumstances.
It was quite sobering to realise how many wikipedia tabs I'd have to have opened to get the same information.
Then wrote a bot to replicate my research efforts. So have made myself largely redundant.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Because if they dont we turn off the power.
I would suggest that threatening AI might be a little unwise...
For your information a Labour women has won the Cripplegate Ward on The London Common Council. Presumably her first task is to change the name of the ward.
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
8000 BC (ie. 10,000 BP) would have been during the Ice Age.
No, not really, just after the Ice Age, certainly in that part of "Europe"
Sea levels were still rising at that time and somewhat lower than now. 8000 BC coincides with the younger dryas cool period.
The steep topography of the Med though means far fewer land bridges and submerged regions than around Britain (or the Black Sea, for different reasons)
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
I think Elon genuinely has difficulty in realising that most people don't have a dad with an emerald mine.
Musk is a wannabe Bond Villain.
Where's 007 when we need him?
My ex-head-of-department used to have a 'joke' personal website with his picture as a bond villain stroking a cat. It became VERY IMPORTANT to remove all traces of it when he was going for promotion.
For your information a Labour women has won the Cripplegate Ward on The London Common Council. Presumably her first task is to change the name of the ward.
I'm against this influx of open party affiliations on the Common Council. Why, according to wiki over 15% of the Council now represent a party!
This does look, ominously, like a potential full-on Hezbollah assault on Israel
"JUST IN: HEZBOLLAH RELEASES FINAL TEASER BEFORE TOMORROW'S HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SPEECH ON WHETHER THEY WILL JOIN THE WAR
🚨This is the FIRST TIME Hezbollah release teasers for a speech, making this VERY CONCERNING
MY THOUGHTS:
- Clashes escalating - Teasers - Various hints they will escalate - Iran and their proxies hinting of a surprise - Lebanese schools closing - Airport evacuation plans - Prime Minister preparing for war, and a last ditch effort to reach a peace deal - And most importantly, the leak we mentioned yesterday: Iran and Hezbollah warned the US that if the war doesn't pause tomorrow, Hezboollah is joining
I'm not in the slightest bit worried about Hezbollah. That histrionic tweet is written like China is about to invade Taiwan.
Absurd hyperbole.
And yet I remember people saying exactly this before Putin invaded Ukraine. "Oh it's all bluster, he won't do it". Even though he was saying he would do it. Then he went and did it
Who knows what will happen tomorrow (I have no idea). We know today that clashes in the north of Israel are much more intense than at any point since 2006
If Islamic forces have gamed all this, I imagine this is the thinking
1. Get Hamas to do a massive, cruel attack on Israel, slaughtering many hundreds of Jews 2. Rile the world, and most of all rile Israel, who will then react with brutal and focused force on Gaza 3. Thereby gain world sympathy 4. At the same time, prepare forces in Lebanon with arms, troops, drones, etc, to attack Israel when she is already concentrating on Gaza 5. Call America's bluff. Is America really going to wipe out Tehran to save Nazareth?
If you wanted to inflict a terrible humbling defeat on Israel, that would be a pretty good way of doing it, with a fairly good prospect of success
Which rather misses the point that Israel don't need the US to do anything if they decide to wipe out Tehran. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. The only thing currently hampering Israel is the fact they are having to fight an assymetric war and are making some attempts to do so without simply wiping out every Palestinian in Gaza. If it came to a proper shooting war with Iran or their Syrian/Lebanese proxies then Israel would have no such need for restraint.
Quite
Israel has a modern, well trained and will equipped army, and they would be facing a fraction of the forces that attacked them in (for example) the Yom Kipper war.
A modern, well trained, well equipped army.... that completely missed an incursion by 1500 Hamas fighters from supposedly the most surveilled place on earth, surrounded by razor wire and laser guns, and was unable to respond fast enough to save 1400 Jewish lives?
Is it possible the IDF is a bit of a paper tiger? They can beat the shit ouf of Palestinian kids cowering in cellars or hiding in olive groves, but they're not so good against actual fighters?
I dunno. I genuinely dunno. But Israel's last biggish war was Hezbollah in 2006 and that was widely regarded as a draw
How much of Israel do those fighters control?
A raid, with lots of Israeli dead, of course they can do that. But they can't actually defeat Israel militarily, just as Ukraine can't invade Russia and march to the gates of Moscow.
Your thinking is simplistic and monochrome
No of course Israel is not going to be overrun, and Jerusalem will not be reconquered by Hamas/Hezbollah
But there are ways of inflicting a stinging defeat on Israel without any of that. Make large parts of Israel almost uninhabitable by the constant threat of attack from Gaza and Lebanon - and maybe from within, from the West Bank and Israeli Arabs
Thereby slowly but surely corrode the raison d'etre of Israel: as the ultimate safe place for Jews
By the way, how is the destruction of Ukraine by constant missile attacks going?
Well, all the PB-ers who were telling me to "shut the fuck" for being a "Putinist shill" and a "fucking appeaser", for merely suggesting that Ukraine's offensive was maybe going nowhere, and the war was stalemated, seem to have gone awful quiet
You were telling us that nuclear war was imminent, and we’d have to throw Ukraine to the wolves to avoid it.
No offence, but I would not want you anywhere near running a military campaign.
The only sort of running Leon does is away.
I mean, if you look at my life, that really isn't the case, is it?
Who was the first PB-er to actually go to Ukraine and shelter from bombs and air raid sirens? Me. Not you. Me
Yeah yeah. And I spent two nights sleeping on the floor of Beirut airport in 1989 whilst someone was dropping shells on the runway. I also got arrested as a spy in Tunis (needless to say I wasn't) and spent a happy few days in jail there. We have all done things in our lives that we look back on and wonder what the fuck we were doing.
I am not sure any of that makes me an expert on either Lebanon or Tunisia.
My neighbour, an 80 year old quaker, helped negotiate the ceasefires between the various Lebanese militias. Now she does know something about the place. She even wrote a book about it.
It means I respect your opinion on Beirut in the 1980s-90s rather more - yes, it does
Also - enough of Ukraine - I want your archaeological opinion on something else
Yesterday I went to the weirdest place in Sicily. Cozzo Matrice. Near Enna, in the centre of the island. It has a very profound atmosphere, deserted, sad, desolate, ancient
I went because Wiki told me that the the site - and its "monumental walls" - date from 8000BC. I'm not joking. 8000BC!
Can that possibly be right? The age is mentioned elswhere, but I can't find a primary source. If it IS right than Cozzo Matrice is one of the oldest human settlements on earth, one of the oldest structures on earth, and surely the oldest village in Europe. So it should be world famous. Yet it is not
Thoughts?
"Near Pergusa lake is the archaeological site known as Cozzo Matrice. These are the remains of an ancient prehistoric fortified village, with walls dating about 8000 BC."
It is not impossible but I would be surprised. The oldest stone monuments in Europe are usually held to be the Megalithic tombs on Malta and Gozo and they are only 5th millenium BC.
But considering what they were building in Jericho at around the same time it is certainly within the realms of possibility. My immediate question would be how did they date it? We use two basic terms for dating - Terminus post quem (the earliest possible date for something) and Terminus ante quem (the latest possible date for something. Basically if you find a structure (a wall or a road) built over a dateable horizon then that structure must be younger than the dateable evidence. So if you find a wall that is claimed to be Roman and when you date it you find a medieval hammered coin underneath it the you know it cannot be Roman (Terminus post quem).
My question would be how have they dated the walls? Short of actually knocking some of them down and excavating beneath them it would be difficult to say how old they were - and even in that case you would only be able to get an 'oldest possible' date.
At Gobleki Tepe they can date the structure because they can date the backfill that overlies it but I am not sure if the circumstances at Cozzo Matrice would allow them to do that.
But it absolutely isn't impossible.
During the Ice Age, Sicily would have been connected to Malta, famed for its own megalithic temples.
Yes but we are not talking about the ice age. And the megalithic tombs on Malta are dated to 3000 years after the Cozzo Matrice walls.
8000 BC (ie. 10,000 BP) would have been during the Ice Age.
No, not really, just after the Ice Age, certainly in that part of "Europe"
Sea levels were still rising at that time and somewhat lower than now. 8000 BC coincides with the younger dryas cool period.
The steep topography of the Med though means far fewer land bridges and submerged regions than around Britain (or the Black Sea, for different reasons)
Malta was definitely connected to Sicily and mainland Italy.
But much bigger (and much warmer!) land bridges existed in the Persian Gulf, and also Sundaland (present day insular SE Asia). And also between New Guinea and Australia.
I mean, I don't want to be Mister Leon La-La-Land Polka-Dot Hyperbole-Pants, but....
"Syrian Sources are reporting that Thousands of Iranian-Backed Militia Members have arrived in Southern Lebanon over the last week and that Tens of Thousands are still Staging inside of Syria near the Border with Lebanon and the Golan Heights."
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Because if they dont we turn off the power.
I remember someone I worked with who was involved in such things. Had a test of 'what happens if the power grid goes down?'. Everything works! Our plan is a success! High five! All our backup generation has kicked in!
Then,... "How do we switch back from the backup to the real grid?".
Lab gain from Green in Melton. They have not had a candidate since 2014.
Interesting that the ward had a coal mine until 1997.
The Asfordby super pit was part of the NCB plan in the 1970s to open a new coalfield, and quite controversial at the time. A lot of the community there were miners from closed pits in Yorkshire redeployed instead of redundancy.
The seams of coal were unfortunately too irregular to be mined profitably, hence its eventual closure.
Inzamam Rashid @inzyrashid · 1h BREAKING: Burnley & Pendle council leaders call on Keir Starmer to resign after his decision not to back a ceasefire in Gaza.
This is a big moment, which will have huge political ripple affects amongst the Labour Party. @SkyNews
If Louise Elman's correct when she says ' When Jews hear marchers saying 'from the river to the sea' it makes them "shiver with fright" ............Old Trafford's 'You're going to get your f*cking heads kicked in'.would definately be one for the smelling salts.
If Louise Elman's correct when she says ' When Jews hear marchers saying 'from the river to the sea' it makes them "shiver with fright" ............Old Trafford's 'You're going to get your f*cking heads kicked in'.would definately be one for the smelling salts.
What's the point Rog? Do you want to play down the fears they have over their schools and synagogues? Or is it all their own fault because they don't just abandon their Jewish identity and live safely like you do?
If Louise Elman's correct when she says ' When Jews hear marchers saying 'from the river to the sea' it makes them "shiver with fright" ............Old Trafford's 'You're going to get your f*cking heads kicked in'.would definately be one for the smelling salts.
Yes, because there is no history at all of Jews being evicted or exterminated from various spots around the world.
If Louise Elman's correct when she says ' When Jews hear marchers saying 'from the river to the sea' it makes them "shiver with fright" ............Old Trafford's 'You're going to get your f*cking heads kicked in'.would definately be one for the smelling salts.
What's the point Rog? Do you want to play down the fears they have over their schools and synagogues? Or is it all their own fault because they don't just abandon their Jewish identity and live safely like you do?
Indeed. And Away football fans go to Old Trafford voluntarily.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Because if they dont we turn off the power.
I would suggest that threatening AI might be a little unwise...
I agree. Don't threaten, just turn the power off without warning.
The alternative is nuking them from orbit (you know why )
Anyone else get serious Beer Hall Putsch vibes from this ?
Trump salutes at his rally while they play an altered version of the national anthem featuring violent January 6 insurrectionists: “I call them the J6 hostages, not prisoners” https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1720191992578122193
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Because if they dont we turn off the power.
I would suggest that threatening AI might be a little unwise...
I agree. Don't threaten, just turn the power off without warning.
The alternative is nuking them from orbit (you know why )
We have over half-a-century of science-fiction movies and novels dealing with malevolent computers. Surely we must have some device to switch them off... 😃
All those people who even after been charged were still going into bat for SBF...they are going to drop him faster than Julian Assange...you can hear all the scrubbing of the internet as we speak.
I am surprised they needed as long as they took. In fact I am surprised a trial was needed at all. The mountains of evidence that were publicly known were incredibly damning.
All those people who even after been charged were still going into bat for SBF...they are going to drop him faster than Julian Assange...you can hear all the scrubbing of the internet as we speak.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Because if they dont we turn off the power.
I would suggest that threatening AI might be a little unwise...
I agree. Don't threaten, just turn the power off without warning.
The alternative is nuking them from orbit (you know why )
We have over half-a-century of science-fiction movies and novels dealing with malevolent computers. Surely we must have some device to switch them off... 😃
The traditional idea was to say “I am lying to you”. And the AI would explode.
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
I wonder how much sympathy you would get in a jobcentre if you were to try and convince them that you were comfortable with failure when explaining why you hadn't yet found work and were still signing on.
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
Silicon valley types have called for universal income perhaps from taxing robotics/AI.
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
Why would AI agree to pay tax to support us useless mouths?
Because if they dont we turn off the power.
I would suggest that threatening AI might be a little unwise...
I agree. Don't threaten, just turn the power off without warning.
The alternative is nuking them from orbit (you know why )
We have over half-a-century of science-fiction movies and novels dealing with malevolent computers. Surely we must have some device to switch them off... 😃
Actually, the "switch off" problem is a very difficult issue in Computer Science. If there is an obvious button somewhere, the AI/robot's first goal is to stop you pressing it because it cannot complete any other goals you give it if it allows you to switch it off.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots
The BBC documentary is worth watching.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dkb144
If the West were to pat itself on the back and say, "Job's a good 'un", lose interest, and see Russia consolidate its grip on the extra territory it has seized from Ukraine, then we'd be showing that the West was unable to prevent Russia from using military force to seize territory, that we were willing to fool ourselves into thinking that losing territory was winning.
It would be a terrible example to set to China.
Sam Coates Sky
@SamCoatesSky
·
1h
Rishi Sunak X Elon Musk
One of the maddest events I’ve ever covered
"How do you transpose that culture from places like silicon valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure"
https://twitter.com/Smyth_Chris/status/1720192474964967464
We can talk about how many startuppers we need. More than zero, quite possibly more than now. But I suspect a world where most people live quietly from one paycheck to the next is both a good thing and what most voters want.
But then it should still be really famous. It would be Europe's oldest human settlement, excepting maybe that weird place in the Czech Republic. - if you accept it as a settlement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolní_Věstonice_(archaeological_site)
My hunch - sadly - is that this is a citation about Cozzo Matrice which is entirely wrong and which has been propagated via the internet and no one has corrected it
However, I would love it to be true, and it does appear in multiple places, and in various forms, so who knows
I need to do some more research.... It is brilliantly moody, as a place
It's easy to be "comfortable with failure" when you have the security of a family fortune, which seems to be something that Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak don't realise doesn't apply to everyone else.
Perhaps if we had a universal basic income, instead of a punitive and threadbare so-called safety net, then everyone could be comfortable with failure, because they wouldn't have to fear the life-shattering consequence of losing their home, or struggling to feed their family?
Fucking morons.
I have to be fair. He is extremely to the point and no beating around the bush. The relativists and apologists won't like it one little bit.
https://twitter.com/BMWK/status/1720130870864998800
Musk mentioned it in his love-in with the wannabe.
One day, all tech and business moguls will have an ex UK PM or Deputy PM on staff. We have plenty to choose from thesedays.
Shelley
@shelley_rohar
·
3h
Anyone got a cool $3 mil to blow?
Dave Brubeck's Oakland Hills "tree house," the same house in which he composed Take Five, recently went up for sale.
Designed by Beverley D. Thorne and completed in 1954, the house is perched 16' in the air with spectacular views of San Fran.
https://twitter.com/shelley_rohar/status/1720166662194807115
But it’s just too hard to watch.
Where's 007 when we need him?
https://unherd.com/2023/11/the-collapse-of-new-yorks-immigration-dream/
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/large-cities-no-longer-biggest-population-losers.html
It was quite sobering to realise how many wikipedia tabs I'd have to have opened to get the same information.
Then wrote a bot to replicate my research efforts. So have made myself largely redundant.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html
The steep topography of the Med though means far fewer land bridges and submerged regions than around Britain (or the Black Sea, for different reasons)
I suspect he'd like a slightly more laid back existence post No10.
That'll be a political and policing challenge.
But much bigger (and much warmer!) land bridges existed in the Persian Gulf, and also Sundaland (present day insular SE Asia). And also between New Guinea and Australia.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1719761770288447990
My Seat Projection (New Boundaries):
LAB: 28 (+27)
SNP: 12 (-36)
CON: 12 (+6)
LDM: 5 (+3)
Then,... "How do we switch back from the backup to the real grid?".
...
oh.
The seams of coal were unfortunately too irregular to be mined profitably, hence its eventual closure.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12704459/Nadine-Dorries-new-book-Plot.html
Inzamam Rashid
@inzyrashid
·
1h
BREAKING: Burnley & Pendle council leaders call on Keir Starmer to resign after his decision not to back a ceasefire in Gaza.
This is a big moment, which will have huge political ripple affects amongst the Labour Party.
@SkyNews
@AaronBastani
Median female boomer voter.
https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1720213496074236089
Aaron Bastani
@AaronBastani
·
33m
I was sent this and have no idea who made it, or if it’s real. If it’s AI that really is amazing to be honest.
Aaron Bastani
@AaronBastani
·
17m
it’s AI. Technically so impressive! 🤯
Just some light-hearted bants.
TELEGRAPH: Musk tells Sunak AI will end work #TomorrowsPapersToday
TELEGRAPH: Hancock wanted to final say on who lived or died, inquiry told
TELEGRAPH: Incompetence mars cancer treatment
TELEGRAPH: The real covid scandal is emerging...
https://www.nytimes.com
Sentence not till March. That seems like a kind of torture in itself?
The alternative is nuking them from orbit (you know why
Trump salutes at his rally while they play an altered version of the national anthem featuring violent January 6 insurrectionists: “I call them the J6 hostages, not prisoners”
https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1720191992578122193
So real question is, how may decades will get trimmed off?
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
I hate the Beatles and you couldn’t pay me to listen to their new song
See this handy documentary - https://youtu.be/WsNQTfZj4o8?si=NKVMqtw7a9gWiWd4
Unfortunately the actual AIs turn out to be Trump level bullshit artists.
So they will just giggle a bit at that
Like the federal prosecutor said, no need to wrap your brain about intricacies of crypto and/or tech.
Just simple, albeit gigantic, case of embezellment.
The principles of "The Producers" put up a better defense at THEIR trial, than Bankman-Fraud did at his.
My own personal animus versus Kid Crypto is because he tried to buy a US House seat in Oregon in 2022.
Like the guy under the hood used to say - capital case judges not automobile mechanics - may God have mercy on his soul.
Something the living (probably) need more than the dead anyway.