exchemist

Except for the judges, at least in Britain.

I don't believe this is really about regime change at all. All these calls for the people to rise up and overthrow the regime are just smoke. Trump doesn't give a toss about them. This is about further weakening Iran as a regional power, regardless of the consequences for the Iranian people even if they end up with a protracted civil war or dismemberment of the country at vast cost in human lives, to the benefit of Israel. (And Jared Kushner's real estate plans for Gaza, naturally.) Collapsing Iran into chaos and thereby eliminating the sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah will remove the last practical obstacle to the annexation of Gaza. I suspect that is the real agenda here.

The latest The Rest Is Politics podcast on the new Iranian war. Like most podcasts it’s far too long because it hasn’t been edited, but the main points come across in the first half. I was struck by Stewart’s comments that several of the coups, wars and instabilities in Africa in recent years are the consequence of the destabilising of Libya brought about by decapitating the Gaddafi regime without doing anything to control the aftermath. I was also struck by what he says is the total lack of any idea what happens next, on the part of the American officials he has contacts with. Nobody he has spoken to could comment on any of the possible scenarios he put forward, all of them apparently just hoping someone clever in the Pentagon has thought it all through. The question is whether there is anyone clever in the Pentagon these days, headed as it is by a Fox TV presenter with no defence or foreign experience, and no tolerance for people with independent ideas.

Well SNAP!, then. Er, or something. The following summer was the summer of Lou Reed Walk on the Wild Side and Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, heard through open windows everywhere.🙂

Yes I remember that too. In the UK they were superseded by SI, by the time I got to uni in 1972.

1g = 10⁻³kg. c = 3 x 10⁸m/sec So E = 10⁻³ x (3 x 10⁸)² = 9 x 10¹³ J. So quite a lot! You may be aware of the "mass defect" in nuclear physics, by which the mass of a nucleus with several protons and neutrons is less than the mass of the equivalent number of free protons and neutrons that make it up. This is because of the extra stability (i.e. lower total energy) they have when bound together than they have separately. So when protons and neutrons fuse together to form a larger nucleus, this energy difference is released, powering the sun - and H bombs.

I have seen, on another forum, people making use of something called "GPT Zero". This I understand is an AI tool that returns a % likelihood that a given piece of text has been generated by an LLM. It was part of the evidence used in banning a recent tiresome contributor on that forum. I have no idea about videos or images, though.

If cassava is better for your digestion I recommend pāo de queijo. Any Brazilian community will have access to these. There are ready made varieties.

I got mine last year. Now I’m even more glad that I did.

Hmm citric acid eh? I'll need to look at the ingredients list, next time I buy a tin, and check. There's none in the house at the moment. All this talk makes me think it could be time to make cheese scones again. Or even have another stab at pāo de queijo, as I still have some cassava (a.k.a. tapioca, a.k.a. polvilho) flour from the last time I tried it. (It worked, sort of, but was very oily for some reason.)

The Parkin recipe reminds me of a curious feature of golden syrup. It corrodes the tin and can even leak through the joints if stored for many months, in spite of being so viscous. ( I often have some in the house for porridge in the winter months but the tin can sit untouched for 6 months over the summer.)

Can you not buy an oven thermometer? If your flapjacks don’t burn I expect you could make a cake or scones in it. 180C is good for most things.

Yes my son used to make those for munro expeditions. At my instigation he used to include chopped dried apricots, which add some balancing acidity and a bit more flavour.

I don't have a regular emergency stand-by, but occasionally I will bake a Victoria Sandwich cake and have a slice of that with my afternoon tea every day until it's gone. I normally bake a half cake and get 8 slices out of it. Alternatively I sometimes make cheese scones. These can be frozen and microwaved up at tea time, one at a time, so probably better for the waistline as one doesn't feel one has to use them up before they go stale. But I find if I eat too much at tea time I am not hungry at supper time so I try not to overdo it.

Thanks. I’ll know their names next time they crop up in news reports.🙂

Who are they?

Mandelson has now also been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. So the apparent unfairness as between the two suspects has been rectified, at least.

Yes he is a bad apple all right. The unwritten contract between the public and the Royal Family is that they should behave is a respectable manner, given that they get funded through the Civil List. He has broken that contract. At the same time, some of his treatment looks to me heavy-handed. For instance I now learn that while Andrew was arrested, presumably on the grounds of reasonable suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office, Mandelson was not. Yet Mandelson was a senior government minister at the time, so unquestionably in Public Office, whereas Andrew had an unpaid role as an informal trade envoy. So Andrew was not a government employee. Was he nevertheless in Public Office? Seems doubtful a charge would stick. One doesn't know what agreement he may have signed in relation to handing of confidential government information, but if he is suspected of breaking such an agreement I would have thought that would be a civil breach of contract and not a criminal matter. Unless it was the Official Secrets Act, I suppose. I wonder what the grounds for arrest were. The police need both reasonable suspicion of a crime and a reason to believe that arrest is necessary. Perhaps the police felt that, unlike Mandy, Andrew would not cooperate in the investigation, so they had to arrest him to get him into a cooperative frame of mind. Still seems a bit odd though.

Since these are all taken from Faecebook I can't see them. But there is at least one real device of this type, as pointed out by @Sensei . That one uses jet engines - and costs $0.8m a pop, so only of interest to broligarchs. Might be entertaining if if Zuckerberg bought one and crashed it, while wearing his creepy AI glasses............ 😁

Hahaha, yet more mad "pothu" shit.😆

Indeed, more about it here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2025/08/21/introducing-the-volonaut-airbike-a-futuristic-ride-built-for-superheroes/

Not when it works as it should. There is no reason to think the police arrest is because of some combined public pressure, regarding the combination of his sexual exploits and his behaviour as a trade envoy, as was being suggested. The Epstein files apparently suggest he may have passed a government document or its some of its contents (about business opportunities in Afghanistan) to Epstein, when perhaps he shouldn’t. That’s it. So he’s been arrested, questioned and released without a charge being brought at this point, while investigation continues.

That isn’t how the law works, though, is it?

I would be quite surprised if this goes anywhere. It is notoriously hard to prove the offence of Misconduct in Public Office. My guess is that on paper he may have done something arguably similar to what Mandy did. But then Mandy was a government minister, who would have signed the Official Secrets Act. And the material he passed to Epstein quite clearly gave him an opportunity to make money on the markets via insider trades. In Prince Andrew's case he probably had a loosely defined mission to grease the wheels of trade and all he passed on to Epstein seems to have been some piece of analysis of business opportunities in Afghanistan (good luck with that, eh?). I suspect the cops did what they did as a piece of due diligence and to avoid any accusation of special treatment for a member of the Royal Family. I expect the Director of Public Prosecutions will in due time find there is no prospect of securing a conviction and the whole thing will be dropped. As for the sex stuff, yes it's very sleazy but I cannot see that he has broken any law of England. This looks to me like a classic media feeding frenzy - always easily set off when the Royal Family is involved. There are even hysterical articles asking whether this could mean the end of Charles as king (why?), or possibly even of the end of the monarchy. What balls. 🙄

I don’t think so for a minute. He’s just had a lifetime of entitlement and is now trying to minimise as much as possible the opprobrium that has finally caught up him. Nor do I think Zuckerberg is on the spectrum. He’s just talking his own book, as these guys always do.