mistermack

6 minutes ago, iNow said:

We wouldn't be etc etc

No? It was good enough for Iraq. Horrendous stuff done by the US.

I'm sure Mexico would "have" weapons of mass destruction. They would construct their excuses. 

56 minutes ago, MSC said:

Why the hijack basically?

No hijack intended. I was replying to a post about the confiscation of Oligarch's assets, citing the example of Roman Abramovitch. 

I made the mistake of putting a joke in it, about the Ironic nature of the rich oligarchs getting the worst end of the deal. Bit too subtle it seems. 

31 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

The USSR collapses, you expect its ex-satellite countries not to exercise autonomy who they collaborate with, regardless of whatever the US told Gorbachev? 

That's the stock argument, but it doesn't work both ways does it? When Cuba exercised it's autonomy, the USA threatened a nuclear world war three, and forced most of the world to impose sanctions on them for fifty years.

I asked some time ago, what do you think the USA would do, if Mexico was arranging to join in a mutual anti-USA military pact with China and Russia, and nobody had an anwer. Because everybody knows that the USA military would be down Mexico way like a shot, and all autonomy would be forgotten in an instant. 

Just posting this link again where it's relevant. 

She gives a balanced view of the Ukraine events, and NATO expansion, something people in the west will not be used to, being constantly fed nothing but spin and propeganda. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgPJeYZaOU   

45 minutes ago, MSC said:

What makes you believe this? This is quite hyperbolic.

No, it's ironic.

8 minutes ago, swansont said:

If you are going to make such claims,

I never mentioned Texas. If you look back, you'll see I spoke about the UK and Roman Abramovitch. 

Texas deports law-breaking immigrants. The UK deports virtually nobody, and takes years over it. If you want to criticise such claims, do get it right. 

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/jul/22/murder-snatch-beshenivsky-pc   

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9501233/bulgarian-romanian-dipper-gangs-pickpocketing/   

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7668605/Woman-raped-Somali-migrant-tells-anguish-UK.html

1 hour ago, MigL said:

... and Mistermack might have it backwards.

The rich get the gravy and avoid incarceration; the poor get the blame and go to jail.

Knock knock..      Hello!  . . .  Hello . . .            

Is there anyone out there with a sense of irony, or the slightest sense of humour?          Apparently not. 

Here is the kind of thing that the western media will not allow you to see, if they can help it. They are keeping you nicely fed on spin :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgPJeYZaOU

Yeh, but it's one law for the rich, and another for the poor. 😄

Roman Abramovitch came to the UK, bought Chelsea Football Club, spent billions building it up into the top club in the whole world, and they jump on his assets without even trial.  

Meanwhile, people come from the gutter in Somalia, Eritrea and Lithuania, bring nothing with them, and they rape, rob and murder, and we shower them with lawyers, psychiatrists and benfits. 

It's always the poor what gets the gravy, and the rich what gets the blame ! 

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

I'm thinking it's time to stop confiscating oligarch superyachts and start moving them to deep water, drain all engine fluids, and then sink them. 

Not really original though. Confiscate the property of people if you don't like their religion or politics? Hitler thought of that years ago. But why waste them by sinking them? Hand them out as favours, to party cronies. 

It used to be simple to find out if you have a current leak that's draining you battery. Take the +ve terminal off the battery in the dark, and touch it to the terminal. ( with all electrical things turned off ). If you saw a tiny spark, you were losing current. 

Today, that doesn't work, with all the electronics and alarms, you will always get a little spark when you do that, it doesn't mean there is a leak. 

What you can do, is set up your multimeter as an ammeter, and disconnect the positive terminal. Then, with all electical items turned off, touch one probe to the +ve battery terminal, and the other to it's loose connection. If there is a constant current showing, that doesn't drop to zero, then you are losing charge somewhere in the car.

This shows how to set up the multimeter, it's very straightforward : 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P660hTqkGiY

4 minutes ago, TheVat said:

After Bucha, I'm thinking it's time to stop confiscating oligarch superyachts and start moving them to deep water, drain all engine fluids, and then sink them.  If any oligarchs then whine about international law, reply "look who's talking."

And Americans. Blow them up, for Hiroshima. And Germans. Starve them to death for Auschwitz. And the Irish. Blast them, for Mountbatten. And kill all the whites in South Africa. And the Welsh. For being Welsh. Makes a lot of sense.

It's no wonder there are so many school massacres :

16 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

(But I have to admit, I'm not sure I could depend on my own equanimity in the same room with Gervaise. So I just won't go there. ) 

No sense of humour. That's your trouble.

Chris Rock was a pussy cat at the Oscars.

Ricky Gervaise did the same job at the Golden Globes, and to be honest, I did find one of his jokes a little close to the bone : 

The heating effect of tidal forces will affected by how close together the two bodies are. The heating effect might be negligible now, but the Moon was once much closer to the Earth, so maybe some of the heat stored inside the Earth might be due to tidal effects from the past. 

Also, the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere must surely slow down the rate of conduction. 

The average surface temperature on Earth is 14 deg C, and it's been warmer for most of the past. That will slow down the flow of heat from below.

Fusion relies on slamming hydrogen atoms into another element at insanely high speeds, overcoming the natural repulsive forces. The usual approach to achieving these speeds through phenomenal temperatures, which accelerates the molecules in random directions, and hopefully, you get enough collisions to score enough fusion events, to pay for the energy you put in and more. Lazer/pellet approaches produce very high instantaneous pressures, that multiply the number of collisions.

This approach, as I read it, doesn't rely on temperature to acclerate the hydrogen. I don't know how, but they say that the lazers directly acclerate the hydrogen, rather than heating it to acclerate it. So presumably, the acceleration is in the direction of the lazer and can be focussed on the target. 

They also say that the fusion reaction produces Helium atoms that are positively charge, so instead of collecting heat from the reaction, you are directly collecting charge, which can produce a current without steam turbines and generators being necessary. That's not actually a new approach, others are working on something similar.

It's all great stuff if it works, but the language used sounds a bit hyper to me, and it's lacking in any detail. 

3 minutes ago, MigL said:

The Russians can't even re-supply the forces they have barely inside Ukraine's eastern and southern borders, how would they re-supply their forces on the other side of the country, without having control of the areas in between ?

I don't think you need a better news source; I think you need more critical thinking.

From Belarus in the north, and Crimea in the south. Have you not heard of maps?

32 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Do you seriously think 35 countries would be militarily aiding Ukrainian forces if Zelenskyy was supporting that?

Yes. It's his only option. And your BBC map is MOD spin, and a month old. 

The purpose of life is . . . .

It's better than the alternative. 

So far, anyway. 

2 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

You need better news sources

No, you need to be a bit more critical of spin. Mariupol doesn't block his land bridge. It's tiny, isolated and immobile. In his shoes, I would not have even bothered attacking it. 

6 hours ago, zapatos said:

Please continue with your line of reasoning. If the price he's paying has gone up tenfold, why is he now going to fight for more? Why doesn't he cut his losses and get the hell out?

Really, I would have thought that was obvious. Getting out doesn't cut his losses. It cuts his gains. The sanctions remain, and his military costs remain. 

As it stands, he has gained his land bridge to Crimea in the south, and controls the Russian-speaking areas. When it started, I thought that he would be probably going no further than that. 

I think invasion was his less favoured outcome. He wanted his deal, he gambled, thinking that only an idiot would choose invasion, over a no-cost deal. But Zelensky refused, so having threatened invasion, he had to go ahead. That's my reading of it, but of course, you would need to be a mind reader to actually know. 

As I posted earlier, if his intention all along was to take over Ukraine, the obvious way was to take over the WESTERN border, and Isolate the country. That would have been relatively easy, the only sizeable city is Lviv. Open land is easy to take with tanks etc. but cities are much harder, if you don't want to flatten the place. 

The reason that the Ukrainians have had the success that they have had is that they can use civilians as an effective shield. Out in the country, the Russians could just blast them with heavy weapons and air power, but in cities, as in Mariupol, the bigger force is hamstrung.

Of course, Stalin would just flatten the place in a day and not give a hoot. 

7 hours ago, MSC said:

Take my head out of the tigers mouth of course. I'm certainly not going to speak to it.

😂 Your imaginary tiger is a kindly pussy cat then. 

Of course Churchill was a liar and windbag. "WE will fight on the beaches etc. " ?? HE wasn't going to be fighting anyone. And if Hitler had managed to invade, he would have surrendered immediately. Or the Nazis would just wipe out town after town, until he did. 

2 minutes ago, iNow said:

Well, so long as YOU’RE sure. Yep, that’s good enough for me.

That's childish. Help yourself to a lollipop !

6 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Why?

Why? Because the price he's paying has gone up tenfold. That's why. 

1 hour ago, zapatos said:

You are making a pretty big assumption that all Putin wanted was a pledge of neutrality. If that were true Putin could grab it now and withdraw.

Owning a land bridge to Crimea, the Donbas region, and all the natural resources of eastern Ukraine are a pretty prize.

It's a new situation now, with sanctions being applied by most of the world, and blood having been spilt, he's not going to go back to his original offer. 

But before it kicked off, I'm sure that a commitment never to join NATO and a neutrality pledge would have been enough. After all, when you are negotiating, you normally start with your highest price, and come down a bit for a final deal. 

What they have now is a real mess for everybody, except maybe NATO, which was looking at flagging committment by members till this happened. Funny that. 

4 minutes ago, MSC said:

Quote

You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!

- Winston Churchill

Churchill was a lying windbag. What would you do, if a tiger had your head in it's mouth?

2 minutes ago, iNow said:

I still think Russia will ultimately take Kyiv.

I've got my doubts. I don't think Putin has the stomach for the total destruction of the capital. I wouldn't, in his shoes. 

I'm amazed and confused by the Russian tactics. I would have ignored the east, and taken the western borders, in a pincer from the north and the south. There are not many big cities in the west, and he would have totally isolated the country in a week or two. 

And I don't get the logic of attacking Mariopol. It's got nowhere to go, I would just surround it,  blockade it, and allow food and medicine in, and civilians out. 

It's the craziest of wars. Zelensky now says neutrality and abandoning the Nato membership ambition are up for grabs. If he'd had a bit of foresight, and offered that six weeks ago, it could all be forgotten by now. 

Some hits and misses from earlier posts. ( admittedly shots in the dark )

On 2/22/2022 at 3:22 AM, iNow said:

If his troops take Kiev, which they absolutely can do probably within less than a day or 2 given their size and capabilities and backend support from cyber teams, then Ukraine for all intents and purposes will be absorbed as part of Russia effective immediately. 

Alex's map below is eerily accurate. Has he got connections ?

On 2/22/2022 at 11:56 AM, Alex_Krycek said:

 

And on Feb 28 I posted "And the fall in the Rouble might be a problem for the Russian economy, but it's also a real oportunity for Russia to buy back it's own currency at a knockdown price. I'm not sure who wins in that situation."

And here's todays clip of the Ruble's fortunes. It's almost back to it's value from a year ago. If Putin had bought back Rubles as I posted, he'd have made a massive 50 to 60 %. Maybe they did.