That is utter rubbish. You can quote people from the 1990s onwards saying precisely that.

Well isn’t it remarkable then, that after 5 years of de facto Russian invasion and occupation, Ukraine made the first moves to seek membership. They sought NATO. NATO had not sought them.

Think about it- Ukraine could have entered the EU in 2014 and never have changed its 2010 law forbidding NATO membership and maintaining its non-aligned status. But Vlad had to keep control.

Those poor Russians brought about their own ‘Red Line’ moment themselves by their own attitudes and behaviour.

Looks like the Ukies finally had a win.

Lots of tooing and froing around Snake Island in the last month or so. I know of about four Russian vessels sunk or heavily damaged (with video from drones). The Russians have been working very hard to get AA tracks in place and the Ukrainians have been working equally hard destroying them. The location is far enough from core Russian air assets that the Ukie air force has been doing missions, plus of course those Turkish stealth drones and ASMs.

It all suggests Russia has a serious strategy for which the island is a keystone. I don’t know what the strategy is, but the combat over it has been pretty intense.

Yes Hawke was a loathsome little man and I don’t know why so many give him a free pass.

Rex – I was surmising to myself it might be about supporting the three battalions in Transshitistan. You have to wonder when the Ukies and Moldova get fed up with that place and do something about it.

I suspect the best practice would be let them wither on the vine there.

But having a fortified island to protect ships supplying them from any conceivable Moldovan, Ukrainian or other threat would make sense.

Hawkie was faking being an Aussie?
I’m shocked!
Here’s Mike Tyson on smoking Toad Venom.

I’m shocked!

That’s why you don’t put your fork in the powerpoint, Grigory…

#BasicElectricalSafety101

One thing I do know about the conflict in Eastern Europe is that Australia should stay right out of it.

+1000

Was there ever a working Class Labour Leader?

haha, don’t be silly.
Anyhow, i’ve googoogoogled Lionel James Callaghan, who mighta gone fairly close, and found this on the Labour Party’s win at the 1964 Election after 13 years out of Office:

The new Labour government under Harold Wilson immediately faced economic problems; … and an immediate sterling crisis. Both Wilson and Callaghan took a strong stance against devaluation of sterling, partly due to the perception that the devaluation carried out by the previous Labour government in 1949 had contributed to that government’s downfall.

The alternative to devaluation, however, was a series of austerity measures designed to reduce demand in the economy in order to reduce imports, and to stabilise the balance of payments and the value of sterling.

Just ten days after taking up his post, Callaghan immediately introduced a 15% surcharge on imports, with the exception of foodstuffs and raw materials. This measure was intended to tackle the balance of payments deficit; however, it caused an uproar amongst Britain’s international trading partners.

The outcry was so intense that it caused the government to announce that the surcharge was a temporary measure. Callaghan later admitted in his autobiography that he could have handled the matter better, and in his haste to tackle the balance of payments problem, had failed to consult foreign governments.

On 11 November, Callaghan gave his first budget and announced increases in income tax, petrol tax and the introduction of a new capital gains tax, actions which most economists deemed necessary to take the heat out of the balance and sterling deficit. In line with Labour’s manifesto commitments, the budget also contained social measures to increase the state pension and the widows pension; measures which were disliked by the City and speculators, causing a run on the pound.

On 23 November, it was decided to increase the bank rate from 2% to 7%, which generated a large amount of criticism.

In other words, Britain went from stability to utter fucking chaos in ten days.
By the way, Callaghan’s story of his early life isn’t too different to Albanese’s.

On 11 November, Callaghan gave his first budget and announced increases in income tax, petrol tax and the introduction of a new capital gains tax, actions which most economists deemed necessary to take the heat out of the balance and sterling deficit.

Taking the heat out of the Economy by soaking the workers, eh?

Funny how the Coalition never has to take the heat out of the economy, just Labo[u]r Governments.

No, I’m not sure we should stay out of it at all.

I am.

The Democratic Party is more of a threat to us here in Oz than Putin.

Manly has thrown away this game.

But I have been wondering, where’s the shuttle diplomacy?

Good question. It’s almost is if these degenerates in Washington are rather pleased that this war is happening.

feelthebernsays:
June 17, 2022 at 7:15 pm
Today I learned that 65% of all gun deaths in the US are suicide.

Take those away from the total, take away the very many gangbangers killed in inner-city stoushes, and what is the gun death rate in the US?

Following Susskind.

Check it out.

Dr Mike McCulloch is based!

https://twitter.com/memcculloch

He’s actually quite a Greenie (and pro nuke), but he obviously actually believes in civil liberties.

His other website:

https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/

His latest blog post:

The Black Hole Information Paradox
The cosmos, empty space, is known to be full of virtual particles. They appear in pairs to conserve momentum and then recombine after a short while. In 1976 Hawking showed that black hole event horizons can separate these pairs by trapping the one on the wrong side of the horizon. The star-crossed lovers are unable to recombine, so one of them becomes real and is emitted as Hawking radiation. This means that whereas black holes can hoover up information-full objects such as flowers and manuscripts (see below left), they can only emit thermal, random, Hawking radiation (see below right). This means the information in the flower and the manuscripts has been lost.

Hawking, Kip Thorne and Roger Penrose were perfectly happy to have information destroyed, but Leonard Susskind and Gerard t’Hooft published a manuscript called The Black Hole War saying that Hawking was violating one of the laws of the universe: the conservation of information. Since when has that been a law? They argued that in quantum mechanics the wavefunction at any one time is supposed to be predictable from the wavefunction at any other time and if you lose information then you can’t do that. You lose what they call the unitarity of the wavefunction. They suggested that the information that goes into the black hole survives and proposed the holographic principle which says that information is stored in horizons (a nice idea). Hawking conceded he had lost but Penrose and Thorne did not concede. In my opinion, there may be some merit to both approaches, if combined right.
The debate is at the heart of physics, which has still not come to grips with the new concept of information, but let us see what empiricism and a little logic can offer. Landauer’s principle (reference 1) argues that when computer memory is erased say from the complex 11010 to the uniform 00000, then this is a loss of information, and a reduction of disorder or entropy, which cannot be allowed, so heat must be released. This heat has now been observed (ref 2) whereas the ‘unitarity of the wavefunction’ has not. One point for information loss. Another point is that quantised inertia (QI) and therefore the observed galaxy rotation without dark matter can be derived beautifully by assuming information loss (ref 3).

The picture is not complete though. In QI, if you accelerate, a horizon obscures your backwards view of the world, erasing information and providing, via Landauer, exactly the right amount of energy to fuel the inertial back-push (ref 3). However, if you stop accelerating, then that information comes back again. Where was it hiding in the meantime? The QI approach may offer a compromise here since accelerating objects see Unruh radiation that inertial (unaccelerating) observers do not. In QI information is in the eye of the beholder. Each object has its own informational universe, and what has been deleted in one may be retrieved by negotiation from another.

We have a mouldering desalination plant in Sydney right now thanks to the green loonies who had convinced themselves the rain would never fall again.

Just about everyone now is forecasting a third la Nina in a row. Children won’t know what dry weather is!

The La Niña conditions that have contributed to the ongoing drought in the southwest United States is likely to continue into a third year, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Our dams will never empty again, even if US ones will.

In other news my currawongs have been enthusiastically washing themselves in the water containers like dusty dogs. Having to refill the containers several times a day. The nice result of this is they no longer smell of mushrooms, which they did after months of dank autumn. Very strongly. It would really suck to have to fly around in mouldy feathers all day.

I can’t take the current leaders of the West seriously anymore.

It’s not so much a case of being incompetent as being on the other side. Makes more sense at least if you look at it that way.

Russia has already ‘strategically lost’ the war for Ukraine, head of Britain’s Armed Forces insist

I can’t take the current leaders of the West seriously anymore. Sorry, I just can’t.

A Mr Pyrrhus would disagree with you Dover.

This is really looking like Iran-Iraq War, where both sides wouldn’t accept loss of face in a peace deal. So it dragged on for 8 long years.

‘Crimea is our goal’ Zelensky sets sights on devastating turnaround with weapons from West (16 Jun)

Z is just reacting to polls and focus groups: the Ukrainian on the street is thinking like this.

‘Crimea is our goal’ Zelensky sets sights on devastating turnaround with weapons from West (16 Jun)

Just like Hitlers ‘wunderwaffe’ – to turn defeat into victory at the last minute?

Damn

Mike McCulloch retweeting PJW and Tulsi, then throwing shade on dark matter.

#basedphysics

Bruce of Newcastlesays:
June 17, 2022 at 8:43 pm
Flyingduk – At the moment the war is a brutal stalemate, very nearly. The Russians have concentrated pretty much every BTG they can free up in the SD area to overwhelm the defenders on a narrow frontage, which massive artillery support. Yet the Ukrainians have fought the Russian offensive to a near standstill.

They will capture SD, since they’ve finally managed to destroy all the bridges to it, which means the Ukrainians are out of supply. But this is like taking Coogee. It’s a pyrrhic victory of a place no one heard of before a few weeks ago, which has almost no value except symbolically. And that’s required pretty much everything Russia has had (and it still hasn’t quite been taken).

I really don’t know what will happen with this stupid war. It’s egos at ten paces, no one wins.

From what I’ve read, the Russians are regularly rotating their troops, and generally keeping them mobile while artillery flattens any concentrations of Ukrainian troops. It looks a lot like they’ve opted to grind the military capacity of Ukraine to dust, rather than capture anything much beyond the separatist areas. But who knows, we don’t know the plans of the commanders of either side really.

I’ve still yet to get anyone tell me why there couldn’t have been a serious attempt at rapprochement with Russia in the last 30 years. You know, bring them into the fold like any number of other authoritarian and corrupt places across the world. Why the particular antagonistic attitude toward them? As far as I can tell the answer always ends up being some variant of “muh wussia bad”.

Although I suppose, like I said above, it’s too late now.

Eyriesays:
June 17, 2022 at 8:49 pm
Saffers had the bomb, Israeli has the bomb, Taiwan and South Africa had close co-operation at the time as “pariah” nations on the outer with the international community (from a friend who was a South African living there at the time) and Israel also was on the outer to some extent and was co-operating with both. The US carefully looked the other way as Israel acquired nuclear weapons and denied that the Vela (nuclear detection) satellites had seen a nuclear explosion south of South Africa. All three countries had good reason to get nukes. I do not believe the Israelis would rely on theory alone to get nukes.

Meanwhile we can barely keep the lights on.

*sigh*

“Shacks” for sale in North Melbourne, Victoria.

https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/in-north+melbourne,+vic+3051/list-1?activeSort=price-desc

Speaking of which, whatever happened to those biolabs?

40.

The USA owned up to 40.

Don’t be so sure about English ladies behaving better at the races

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/pics/pictures/gallery/boobs-bums-champers-ladies-day-18759021

Beaugy – you don’t have to gloat about it.

He’s more entertaining and much more intelligent than Bird, so it wasn’t too bad, rabz.
We both think that Kuhn’s stuff is crap, in fact we agree on a fair amount of the basic stuff. Up to the point where he goes off his head.