Early Risers.

[Ozexpatriate]

13 hours ago, enz said:

the losers ... excuse their defeat. Example reasons being ... "We lost because we turned from proper worship of our Gods/proper political policies/we weren't tough enough on public order (ie oppressive enough)".

This is usually repressed after the event so there is only one narrative.

 

With enough time, and presuming the existence of documentary evidence, a more balanced view is possible. Many people call this "revisionist" history, but it is often the uncovering of facts buried by the "winners".

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Ozexpatriate

[polybear]

2 hours ago, Two_sugars said:

The Doctor apologised for the smell in his room, which had me smiling . . . . It smelled like the previous patient had a large bag of , , , VERY GOOD GEAR . . .like man . . . .

 

Disgraceful...the Doc blaming it on some poor innocent Patient....

 

1 hour ago, KeithMacdonald said:

 

Is that some new slang for £100?

 

Close - £85, as Puppers has mentioned

 

[New Haven Neil]

Evening. despite being an ER today, no chance to get on here before orders were announced.  They weren't too bad, as Pilating was cancelled so a trip to Port Erin was suggested, and not using the car past Douglas but one of those Dihydro monoxygen vapour powered devices..  This was most agreeable.  Dare I post a photo?

 

Then some work in the garden, moving up logs to the chopping and sawing area, from the pile down the bottom of the garden, when it suddenly got very windy.  And windier. Now it's howling out there, Fraggle Rock will be moving over towards HRoth's gaff shortly.

 

Decided to risk it, Debs may have gone to bed early after having a reaction to her Covid jab.

 

[Ozexpatriate]

12 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

claim that Global Warming is a load of nonsense because "the science" doesn't make any sense...

There you go with critical thinking. Cognitive dissonance is the art of ignoring critical thinking.

 

Most people now accept that climate change is real. The deniers now claim that the change is a natural variation and not anthropogenically caused.

 

Certainly the planet has seen extremes - from "snowball earth" where it was an ice-ball to the CO2 greenhouse of the Carboniferous that created all the fossil fuels in the first place. Something "natural" did cause these changes.

 

What we are seeing now is a live experiment in terraforming - once the purview of science fiction - but the evidence is clear - as first postulated by Exxon scientists in the late 1970s.

[Debs.]

16 minutes ago, PupCam said:

£85      -  The Accurascale Deltic currency seems very stable which is interesting as you'd think it would rise now there are none in stock but there you go.

You mean there's been a run on Deltics!? 😱

 

The Govt. may have to step in, to support the Accurascale Deltic Standard. 🤔

[Tony_S]

29 minutes ago, PupCam said:

£85      -  The Accurascale Deltic currency seems very stable which is interesting as you'd think it would rise now there are none in stock but there you go.

I have been labouring under the misapprehension that the Deltics were the sound fitted version so all my “how much was @polybear’s pizza or Covid jab) was inflated. 

[Ozexpatriate]

9 hours ago, enz said:

I don't entirely agree with the idea that logistics wins wars but bad logistics can certainly lose them.

 

Quote

Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics

Gen. Robert H. Barrow, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1979.

[Tony_S]

33 minutes ago, PupCam said:

We definitely need an unboxing video (just to show we are hip and trendy)

I have heard about people receiving a couple of bags of flour or similar instead of their computer so for a joke I did ask Aditi to video me breaking the seals but we can delete it as the computer was just what I ordered. It looks completely unused, no scratches or  broken bits. Less than a sound fitted Deltic too. So a Dell tick then I suppose. 

[Ozexpatriate]

8 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

The only thing between us and the end of all we hold dear is 30,000 or so  voters in a couple of US swing states. 

What you overlook by emphasizing those stump speeches (and I apologize if this is even more frightening) is that voters won't necessarily be voting for him as an individual - but for the "vision" he creates along the lines of "America First" (aka America for Americans) and "MAGA" (aka hegemony for WASPs).

 

Even despite high profile "traditional" conservatives sounding a warning, most conservative voters will do what they always do and vote conservative.  Even his most ardent supporters probably see him as a blowhard - but they love what he represents himself as standing for.

 

It is that handful of independents who will decide.

 

Voting for that candidate is absolutely no different than voters who think along the lines of "Britain for Britons" or "Australia for Australians".

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Ozexpatriate

[PupCam]

14 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

I have been labouring under the misapprehension that the Deltics were the sound fitted version so all my “how much was @polybear’s pizza or Covid jab) was inflated. 

 

No the currency is a boggo standard one.     Sometimes the currency can be prefixed "Sound fitted" to represent the higher sum.    Think of it as the equivalent to Pounds Sterling and Guineas.

 

That's that sorted then 😀

[Ozexpatriate]

7 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Anyway, the 4th Light Horse charge had many interesting parallels with the Charge Of The Light Brigade - both had the word "Light" in their name, both were charging field guns and ummm, oh - both had a movie made about them!

One was a dramatic success in Allenby's Gaza campaign ultimately opening the way to Jerusalem. (Didn't that work out well in the long run?) The other was an unmitigated disaster fueled by aristocratic hubris, incompetence and poorly worded orders.

[Chris Snowdon]

8 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

The best comment I heard on Rommel was that he regarded logistics as a minor issue for the Quartermaster Sergeants to deal with, rather than something that you plan your war around. 

Other comments which aren't entirely unfavourable to our overall picture of the man include being a stamp-collector, sleeping with a photo of Mongomery at his bedside (and apparently Monty had one of Rommel by his), and being part of the Stauffenberg Plot...

[Barry O]

Spent a long time today visiting a model of a large railway station. It was great and I enjoyed it immensely.

 

Baz

[Ozexpatriate]

8 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

One of the oddities of 1930's and 1940's history is that Japanese observers of what was going on in Eastern Europe were disgusted by the brutality and inhumanity of what was happening just as German observers in China were nauseated by the brutality and inhumanity of the Japanese in China.

7 hours ago, enz said:

I wonder if that was because the people observing were either somewhat disgusted by their own governments' brutality and so went overseas ("I'm going to somewhere civilised"), or were sent overseas by their governments in order to sideline them ("can't have these bleeding hearts around").

I'd say "no". There's a racial component.

 

Japanese observations of "white on white" crime in Eastern Europe may well have been disgusting to them, but I would suggest they were blinded by their own prejudices of different Asian ethnicities as "other" and "less" - where they might have seen the remote combatants in Europe as equals of each other.

[Ozexpatriate]

6 hours ago, Sidecar Racer said:

4 years ago 74 + million did .

And 81 million didn't.

[Gwiwer]

5 hours ago, PupCam said:

 

Whoops!   Sorry DS!     You do have to watch those Emails though, you can pick up some very nasty viruses from them .... 😬

 

 

Is that how I got sick?

[BoD]

43 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

Less than a sound fitted Deltic too. So a Dell tick then I suppose. 

I always groan when people reply groan to a post but in this case - huge groan. 

[Debs.]

2 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

Is that how I got sick?

You might've picked up something dodgy from a proxy server. 🫣

[Ozexpatriate]

3 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

There is a belief that you just protect the vulnerable; however most cases of transmission are going to be between the socially active - school children, people who work in large groups, people who attend major events etc..  By allowing/encouraging the virus to spread among these socially active groups, it encourages spread to the vulnerable through their occasional but necessary links to the outside world.

Which is why (to be effective) the much misunderstood 'herd immunity' concept for highly communicable diseases requires immunization rates in the high 90% range.

[Sidecar Racer]

11 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

And 81 million didn't.

 

 As Kamala said to his face at he debate , 81 million people sacked you .

[Chris Snowdon]

4 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I'd say "no". There's a racial component.

 

Japanese observations of "white on white" crime in Eastern Europe may well have been disgusting to them, but I would suggest they were blinded by their own prejudices of different Asian ethnicities as "other" and "less" - where they might have seen the remote combatants in Europe as equals of each other.

I fear that there may be a sickening reality based in the simple fact that most societies, to a certain extent, define themselves by those they exclude.  Class-systems, families, racism, the professions and criminal justice are all equal in that.  "Sickening" because we all like to imagine that we are in some way "better" than that or in some way with "awareness" we can "beat" it, but we probably aren't and can't.  One of my tutors was both frank and broad-minded when he told us "Doesn't matter what your prejudice is, as long as you're honest and open about it".  The phrase "My enemy's enemy is my friend" is a pretty useless one, unless both enemies annihilate each other while you just watch.  The Greeks probably got it right with "xenophobia" - "fear of the other" (or in practical terms, "we don't trust those villagers down the road") and even if we now abuse the word "phobos" at least this still comes close to meaning what it should.

 

On the military stuff, I'll admit it's been a while since I last read either Sun Tzu, the Hagakure, von Clausewitz or BHLH.  But will recall that the last time I was exposed to Sun Tzu, his work was being used in an inconvenient but (in some ways) rather amusing online hack.

[jamie92208]

55 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

 

Gen. Robert H. Barrow, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1979.

I believe that Arthur Wellesley, later the Iron Duke, was rather good at Logistics, unlike his main opponent. 

 

Jamie

[pH]

Apologies for quoting a Canadian broadcast to explain an American situation, but it covered it clearly when I first watched it:
 

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6506957

 

So, if 21,461 American voters (a very specific 21,461 voters, admittedly) had voted differently in 2020, the result of that year’s presidential election would have been different.

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Just finished watching Abandoned Railways From The Air, can we have some more please?

[Ozexpatriate]

1 hour ago, pH said:

So, if 21,461 American voters (a very specific 21,461 voters, admittedly) had voted differently in 2020, the result of that year’s presidential election would have been different.

The maths of how 20,000 votes is more consequential than 10 million votes is well understood by campaigners. This isn't even states. It is at the voting precinct level.

 

Even candidates understand:

Quote

I just wanna find 11,780 votes.

 

Republican presidential nominees have won the popular vote in only one election since George H.W. Bush in 1988. (They're 1 for 7 since then.) It all comes down to the Electoral College.

 

This country is haunted by the three-fifths compromise, which led to the electoral college. The electoral college needs to be abolished but that won't happen. It requires two thirds of the states to ratify a constitutional amendment - only about 18 states have a Democratic-controlled state legislature.

 

Edited 52 minutes ago by Ozexpatriate