... the 'working class Tory vote' was in terminal decline, that class was becoming more important in politics, not less.
Because I am an absolutely massive nerd I watched part of the 1970 BBC election broadcast recently, two things struck me:
1) Pundits believing the Tories having success in a developed industrial economy was a counterintuitive phenoma needing to be explained.
2) The probably related belief that...
This entire fucking war has been a comedy of errors, as far as wars go
ok so now what the fuck are the Iranians doing? Don't THEY have a plan for this? What have THEY been doing for the past 45 years?
Source: (TS/NOFORN) It came to me in a dream.
source: (U) A visibly intoxicated stranger who read my palm at my cousin’s cats quinceañera
The Gehlen Org and later the BND were so brutally penetrated by Karlshorst. They were extremely capable at exploiting former RSHA officers who were looking to avoid prosecution and frankly needed to make a living.
These ground based defenses are directed using INCREDIBLY dense acoustic and radar coverage, supplemented by electronic warfare, and interceptor aircraft to pretty effectively intercept and knock down Shahed, the issue for UKR has been that the Russians have been launching several thousand per month
The Ukrainians are using everything from random guns on pickup trucks (including 115 year old Maxim machine guns) to cold war Gepards, modern Skyranger/Skynex, and interceptor drones
you can engage a LOT of shaheds with an AH-1Z full up on APKWS guided, or utility helicopters with door guns and APKWS, or even light aircraft with door guns can effectively defeat Shahed! We just didn't deploy those, and haven't stood up dedicated teams for this, just like the ground based AAA
Anti-Aircraft guns aren't insanely expensive, but they're not cheap and you need a LOT of them because you've got limited effective range. You can use airborne assets, but that requires good airspace control, deconfliction and a LOT of radar coverage and spare armed aircraft, which we didn't deploy.
Notably, the US has been ahead of the curve on C-UAS for a while, it just hasn't scaled and integrated for a variety of reasons from cost to cultural / institutional issues with the air defense mission in the Army, and the de-prioritization of 'heavy' systems like anti-aircraft guns during GWOT.
It's actually a solved problem, it just requires time, money, resources, personnel and commitment that we don't have and aren't in the region. These are not hard targets to shoot down, we just haven't hired people and bought guns with which to shoot them in nearly the required quantities.
nice strait you’ve got there. is it dire?
More details on its construction, from a long since deleted footnote in the MS
My rough timeline:
If the Strait reopens in the coming week, we have weeks of energy market disruption ahead but things have settled by the Autumn.
If the Strait is closed for another 3/4 weeks we have months of disruption.
If the Strait is closed for longer things get very bad, very quickly.
it is sort of funny to me that there is a genuine case in academic biblical history that argued Joseph went to bethlehem was to get a lower tax rate
The fossil record. The impossibility of the census to get Jesus to Bethlehem (also really obvious IMO that the Nativity story is something you only invent if there is a real, historic Jesus who you need to contrive to move around the map somehow).
A fun manifestation of Christianity's cultural influence are the atheists who have decided that 'the historic existence of this particular claimed Messiah' is important or fruitful to attack, and not, you know, 'you can't change water into wine like that'.
This is true of most people in general prior to about 1700 or so
"Gulf disruption chokes sulphur flows supporting swaths of global industry" www.ft.com/content/dd24...
A man who does not read theory
Jonn's right and it'll annoy a lot of people but defining someone's national identity as inherently regressive is just not going to end well for anyone involved
You can read about her exploits here, pages 148 to 151.
archive.org/details/in.e...
No extra funnel needed, Manxman already had three, they were trying to look like the three-funneled Chacal class contre-torpilleur Leopard.
Britain is, Canada, possibly excepted, the place I as a low-caste Sikh heritage Punjabi am the least discriminated against on Earth, India VERY MUCH included. This is not an unimportant thing to emphasise!
Also… I know where it comes from and Brexit is stupid but as a non white person who’s experienced passport control at Heathrow and in Italy and Greece I really do cringe at the idea Britishness is less racist than Europeanism
Caroline Lucas has written a good book about England, as a Green politician leaving parliament, speaking to a broader audience of progressives and others. Zack Polanski sounds more attracted by Scottish/Welsh independence, but not so much by English independence itself, or even English identity.
Once again, the culture warriors deeply misunderstand the deep underlying psyche of the British people. The British people were offered nice animals and they overwhelmingly favoured nice animals.
