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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Kherson is going to be the poster city for New Russia. There is little evidence for war crimes or damage to infrastructure and there will shortly be a referendum confirming that the remainng population want (those that don't will be fleeing if they have not already fled) to be part of New Russia. There is however a small problem, how will the Russians support New Kherson? The answer is of course the railways and grab Odessa. On the regional maps it looks fine, on the bigger maps you do wonder if this is worth Finland and Sweden joining Nato and having a raging counterinsurgency on your border because all those railway lines that the Russias have kept intact won't be there for long. It's the Crimea problem again. You grab land, but in order to support it you need to grab some more and some more. Then your neighbours turn against you.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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It seems to Wiley that Putin might have been poisoned, if he has a nervous disease like MS it has got worse rapidly. He is constantly biting his lip, hanging onto furniture, his eyes look weird, staged conferences, slurring.

As the first person in the west to diagnose Putin with Pompidou Disease (I've got a letter of commendation from my CIA handler) I have been watching Putin very closely. I have decided that everybody is judging his health on the basis of hating the man and disagreeing violently with his actions.

As a trained Doctor of Applied Epistemology (I've got a diploma personally signed by the head of the AEL) I have decided Putin is as fit as a fiddle for a man of his age and under such severe burdens of command. And I'm not referring to the Stradivarius that Gnasher Heifetz reduced to matchsticks after watching a Who concert.
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Mick Harper
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Kherson is going to be the poster city for New Russia.

The irony is that the population of those parts would have voted for Russia before this latest brouhaha. Odessa (or Odesa) for example has always had a Russian-speaking mayor on account of the population being largely made up of Russian ex-pats seeking sunnier climes. Rather like the New York Yankees always having the crowd on their side whenever they play away to the Florida Marlins.
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Mick Harper
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New Tory Sleaze, Government Rocks

I must confess to being something of innocent when it comes to mobile phone porn, or indeed internet porn generally, but can someone give me some guidance? Is watching it on your phone supposed to be in itself a reprehensible act? As I understand it, vast numbers of both men and women do it and, like sex itself, it is meant to be done in private, but after that... so what? Each to his own. Her own.

But now we come to the work situation, especially the public life work situation. Damien Green, then the second most important person in the government, was forced to resign after pornography was found on his office computer. He denied it was his (OK, that's bollocks), he denied watching it in the office (OK, that's bollocks) but how is it a sackable offence? If he had downloaded, at government expense, a Sky footie match and watched it during office hours, would anyone have cared? Strewth, the hours they work, it was the least he was entitled to. How is that different from porn?

This poor MP bloke is getting the Nuremburg treatment for watching it while waiting for a vote. "It's yet another example of the blatant misogyny of parliament," they all screamed. If it was naked women being driven over by tractors, I suppose it was. But if it was a farmer's wife caught in compromising situation with belted Galloway scenario, I can't see it. Cruelty to animals maybe. Perhaps sex itself is considered misogynistic these days. Though funnily enough it is. It's built into the act. If I was a woman I'd resent being put in such a position. How do you mean, there are other positions?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:

This poor MP bloke is getting the Nuremburg treatment for watching it while waiting for a vote. "It's yet another example of the blatant misogyny of parliament,"


He was bored. Very few MPs do anything other than cast votes the way they have been told to, and attend constituency surgeries where they act as poor quality advice workers, if strong advocates for their constituents. They get a few trips abroad, and generous salaries and pensions, but this is not why they entered parliament, they wanted to govern, to do good, to exercise power, but they can't, can they? They are bored intellectuals who gossip, plot, and bully their staff, they get drunk and watch porn, it's anything to stop the boredom.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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A very shrewd theory of (British) governance. The problem is if you give parliamentarians real powers, as in the Untied Sates or the past Republics of France, they get up to even more mischief. The truth is 'legislation' is not a very interesting arm of government, especially when it's 99% government legislation.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Germany is now no longer leading Europe but is, as Lenin or Anne Robinson would say, "the weakest link".

The Scholz problem is that he has announced a dramatic shift in trade and relations with Russia (the end of Ostpolitik), but he then is failing to deliver because of German dependence on Russian gas, and the nation's unwillingnes to sacrifice growth. Wiley can't help thinking that the Germans have miscalculated, they knew of course that Putin was seeking to weaken Ukraine economically, but it appears that they hadn't forseen the possibility of a long war. There is no way that Scholz will allow the Germans to suffer a reduction in living standards so he is now trying "to support the Ukranians" eg by taking in refugees, but still not selling them the heavy weapons (artillery) they actually need, whilst slowly reducing the buying of Russian gas. Wiley can't fault his motivation but it is not leadership. Scholz is a snowflake. You are the weakest link......
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Mick Harper
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But a pretty wise policy, all things considered, as you say. But what's all this Euro-leadership business you're prattling on about? Never heard of Boris Johnson?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Grant wrote:
The Russians never had any serious intentions to invade Kiev. They consider Kiev to be a Russian city and didn’t want to cause damage. In a brilliant feint they pretended they wanted it whilst isolating the neo-Nazi (as Pooty Poot calls them) militias in the East.
General Zhukov would have been proud.


Russia needs to start rushing. The Ukrainians are characterising the "Zhukovian" feint as a failed operation to take Kiev and this is giving a widespread impression to other nations that the Ukrainians can actually win. This wouldn't matter but these nations are now supplying the Ukrainians with more sophisticated weaponry and training, and soon there will be a rough parity in both tanks and artillery. The Unites States has revived Lend-Lease and this is very bad news for the Russians.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-congress-revives-world-war-two-era-lend-lease-program-ukraine-2022-04-28/

Nikita Khrushchev wrote:

"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html
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Mick Harper
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This amazes me. If true I will have to revise some fundamental opinions eg Lend-Lease meant the USSR won the war in the spring of 1945 rather than the autumn. But, hey, what does Stalin know?
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Grant



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I wish Wile would appreciate that Applied Epistemology rule 76 (or is it 77?) is just because you would like something to be true doesn’t make it so.

The Russians are carefully winning Eastern Ukraine street by street, a bit like they did in Chechnya and in Syria. We should be praising them for keeping civilian deaths as low as possible.

Those journalists reporting from Western Ukraine are just parroting propaganda from Zelensky’s PR department.
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Mick Harper
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I had this argument with an actual lawyer this weekend. He correctly pointed out how many thousands of crimes the Russians were committing, I correctly pointed out that, given it is a war, the Russians are model warmakers. I'm amazed at the low numbers (for everything, including Russian casualties) that Zelensky's PR department does put out.

My current perplexity is the hundred thousand civilians 'trapped' in Mariupol who have been starved of food, water and amenities for several weeks. Nobody has been pointing out that under various Conventions of War they are not trapped, they just live in a city under new administration. It is the Russians that are responsible for looking after them.

Mind you, I'd rather be trapped and besieged by Russians than be administered by them. Even if I was majority Russian-speaking as Mariupol's pre-war population was.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Grant wrote:

The Russians are carefully winning Eastern Ukraine street by street, a bit like they did in Chechnya and in Syria. We should be praising them for keeping civilian deaths as low as possible.


I don't think the Russians are that desperate, they are going to take the casualties that a strategy of street by street fighting would entail. They almost certainly want a conventional war, where they break through Ukranian lines and encircle the enemy forcing surrender. That way they can use their superior air power, and superior numbers of artillery and tanks, this will keep down their own casualties as well as civilian casualties. But they need to get on with it.

If it comes down to street fighting the Russians are going to want to employ mercenaries to do it, just as they did in Syria. I doubt they will want to risk ethnic Russians, as Putin made clear in not allowing them to storm the last Ukrainians at Mariupol.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Where do we stand on Starmer taking a swig from a beer bottle? Hanging's too good for him? Suspended animation for all eternity in one of those ice tubes as seen on Superman 1? Forced to lead the Labour Party until the next election? As Oscar Wilde said, "It's better people talk ill of you than they don't talk about you at all."
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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It's not a question of right or wrong, lawful or unlawful.

It's a lack of playground judgement.

Those in glass houses.......

He will simply lose all authority if fined, as he has called for BoJo to resign.
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