+1 for just buying a Fritz repeater, bought one and it works great.

Apologies for the double post but I’ve just finished the 2 videos that Chosen company from the international legion posted in the last week.

It’s a searing look at the realities of modern high-intensity combat and truly humbling when you think of the courage of those involved, STRONG viewer discretion is advised, it’s pretty raw stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/@ILDUkraine

Well…. that sucks, whilst those trails were always super duper cheeky there were some classics in there and many sessions were enjoyed on them.

…which is a real shame as the Taurus, from what I’ve read, would be pretty much the perfect weapon to drop the Kerch Strait Bridge

I’m not naive enough to think that the death of Putin would bring some kind of clog-wearing peacenik to power;

I do think the almighty fracas as various oligarchs, generals and officials scrabble to get their loyal forces back to the Kremlin in order to seize power and every breakaway province in the federation tries its luck could just cripple the Russian war effort to such a degree that Ukraine is able to start rolling up Russian troops and at least return to the 2022 borders.

Any new leader’s hold on power is then likely to be so tenuous that they’ll want every loyal man with a gun at home so they’ll want peace and sharpish.

Autocracies suck at succession, hence the whole idea of hereditary monarchy to produce an obvious heir. Russia doesn’t have anything like this so working out which goes next is likely to be very messy

Clutch mechs are the major factor, the force keeping the chain on a worn or dirty ring is now more than counteracted by the mech pulling it down and away.

Considering Ukraine have just marched boldly over the biggest, fattest red line imaginable and the Russian nukes have stayed in their silos, I suspect that the biggest long term effect of Ukraine’s little Kursk Road trip may be Western Allies taking the conditions off their aid now Putin’s bluff has been called in such spectacular fashion.

Russia having safe haven within its own borders was a huge strategic advantage for them on so many levels, losing it genuinely could alter the course of this war.

The other thing is all those barely trained conscripts from Moscow and St Petersburg who were put somewhere ‘safe’and are now being thrown infront of some of Ukraine’s most battle hardened units.

As far as the Russian public are concerned this was NOT part of the deal.

It’s the old superstar logo.

It’s a shame they stopped doing hardtails.

Agreed, have a few friends still riding around on Tarns, one of the first burly boost 29’ers with progressive geo and sensible money and still going strong. My own hardtail is lovely but basically just a ‘posh Tarn’

If sure that if the sales had been sufficient they’d have carried on making them, that’s capitalism baby.

Also… Bianchi had a 700c/29″ MTB range in the 90’s, Diamondback and Mountain Goat also played with the concept but, yeah the tyres to enable ‘proper’ 29ers came along later.

Saracen Ariel 60? Cheap, long, low, slack and with good shocks for the cash.

But there’s no possibility of that given her colossal arrogance.

So long as there’s a cadre of dodgy tax and regulation-averse billionaires happy to throw money at anyone happy to sell the ‘Small government, low taxes, no regulation’, anarcho capitalist message to the public there will be a conga line of grifters and chancers queuing up to cash in.

The trouble is Truss is so utterly discredited as a messenger that not even the Peter Thiels, Robert Mercers, Chris Chandlers, Crispin Odeys and Koch Brothers of this world think she’s worth the expenditure.

It’s just a bit embarrassing that such a forlorn figure was ever our PM.

Good on ’em

The last few years it was nice in patches of April/May/June and then just rained all through the summer holidays (I distinctly recall almost drowning standing up at ‘Ard Rock 2023). And even when it wasn’t raining it was muggy, overcast and generally unispiring.

This year it basically rained right up until mid-July and got nice just as the kids broke up so they’re having a vintage summer holiday for once despite how rubbish it was for the first half of the year.

when trump wins.

3 weeks ago I’d have agreed, but now I feel it’s very much ‘If’ and not ‘When’.

If the USA had pulled its support a year or more it would have been existential, now the various EU parties have had time to (to various degrees) ‘Trump-proof’ their Ukraine assistance programs and to spool up their own production.

So now, whilst I think that a second Trump presidency will be very bad for Ukraine I don’t think it automatically means the end of their military resistance in the way it may have earlier in the war.

I also think that one thing that’s been under priced in the US election is just how many American jobs now rely on Ukrainian aid, all that kit has to be made somewhere.

A UAF attack on the Kinburn spit near Kherson in the south.

Just a special forces raid but the Kinburn spit is strategically significant due to it being THE very obvious place you’d land if you were attempting an amphibious assault to get behind Russia lines in Kherson and advance on Crimea so I’m surprised it wasn’t better defended.

I remain suspicious that the whole Kursk adventure was initially designed to draw as many Russians North as possible before launching a Ukrainian operation elsewhere, probably southwards but then it went much better than expected so they’re now just kinda running with it.

There’s a slight ‘Tet Offensive’ vibe to this, maybe not in terms of the detail or military strategy but in the overall vibe and intended result.

The main point of Tet was to dishearten the American public and to make them doubt their leaders’ assurances that victory was just around the corner. It was ruinously costly militarily to the North Vietnamese in the short term but it completely altered the tone of the discourse back in the States and whilst the war dragged on for another 5 years it  was the beginning of the end.

We all know that, unlike 1960’s America, Putin has a vicelike control on the Russian media but even he won’t be be able to keep a lid on a major incursion into the home nation. And how close to victory can you be if you’re getting invaded back?

Apparently the Morozovsk attack hit a large stockpile of those FAB glide bombs that Russia’s been lobbing at Ukraine for the last 6 months.

That’s a few less to end up in children’s hospitals and blocks of flats then.

More to the point, China have told him to not even think about using Strategic nukes and NATO have let it be known that if he nukes any Ukrainian city they’ll glass Moscow.

That doesn’t rule out tactical battfield nukes of course, but you’d think that if they were going to use them they’d have done it by now.

it could lead to WMD being used by Russia

Which makes the Kursk offensive even more awkward as deploying a battlefield nuke against it would effectively involve Russia nuking its own territory.

Problems upon problems

Apparently the right wing headbangers now think he’s trans.

It’s all toxic and horrid but…  as said before, sod him. This is squarely into ‘leopards eating faces’ territory.

Interesting, I missed that.

If the gloves are off regarding Kursk that could explain why things are progressing so fast, wonder if we’ll se the F16’s in action before long.

HIMARS causes a LOT more peripheral damage than that and is a finite resource.

More to the point, the US has still refused to permit the use of their weapons systems inside Russia and Ukraine so far has been very careful not to cross that line.

The dam seems to be cracking on that though, only yesterday the Bundeswehr Defense Committee confirmed that Ukraine could indeed use their kit inside Russia and we’ve already seen reports of German APC’s and even unconfirmed ones of Leopard II’s being used in Kursk.

If Biden wanted to give Vlad one last ‘screw you’ on his way out of the door, lifting that ban would be a great way to do it.

This one however was filmed yesterday.

Yeah, serious viewer discretion advised, that’s a lot of dead Russians. What’s more, since it was inside Russia they were probably conscripts with little choice about being there.

Poor buggers, I feel for their families and loved ones but it was Putin’s choice to have this war, the blame fundamentally lies with him.

I also don’t see road sweepers and litter pickers out as much as I used to.

Which is a direct result of the 40% reduction in Local government funding in real terms over the last 10 years and legislation capping council tax rises at below the rate of inflation, making them real terms cuts.

Street cleaning is a statutory service, but if your council is short on money they will employ fewer people and each area gets swept/cleaned less frequently.

Councils have entire teams of people whose job it is to find things they do, that they’re not required to by law, so they can stop spending money doing it.

Actual Councillor here, this year in my district we had to find £2.5 million of savings, almost entirely due to government cuts, council tax caps and inflation.

We legally cannot submit a budget that isn’t balanced and the majority of the money we spend are on statutory services that we legally have to provide (bin collections etc) we basically had 2 options.

A: Cut everything non-mandated to the bone and jack up fees for everything where we can, using that funding to try to keep popular major local facilities open so they can survive long enough to see a return of sensible government funding and we don’t lose them for good.

B: Go pop, which is considerably worse for everyone and will mean we do lose all those facilities.

I can assure you none of my colleagues (well, maybe the Tories) stood for election because they wanted to see public services get worse and things get tattier but there… is… no…. money. It’s all been spent on Brexit and dodgy PPE.

public services culture in the UK is the amount of ‘notices’ stuck all over doors, windows, walls

Yup, because when we don’t over communicate in this manner we get furious ‘you didn’t tell me you were going to do ‘x’!!’ type letters.

Even when we do stick notices up everywhere, put out press releases, mention things in our regular newsletters have all the info online etc we still get these objections but at least this way council officers can point out that here was was a physical notice up there for a regulation period.

It’s CYA behavior but entirely driven by some people’s tendency to have only two settings; Total Obliviousness and OUTRAGE!

We don’t know the motivations and long term plans for this and that’s part of the point. Is this a big raid or a genuine effort to hold turf, nobody knows and the Ukrainian opsec remains tight as always.

Last year Ukraine carried out a widely predicted assault in an area they were expected to try something and ran head first into the nastiest defences possibly in human history.

They’re now doing a totally unexpected assault in an area that almost no-one expected them to.

Good to see Ukraine getting its mojo back, the dickhead in the Kremlin must be having kittens.

It’s naive to think Russia isn’t getting around energy sanctions.

Of course, but it all grits up the gears and make things tougher, more awkward and less profitable for them so it’s far from a futile effort.

If Maduro falls in Venezuela then Russia loses a very helpful patsy in the Western Hemisphere and a whole new oil source for the ‘West’ opens up, we should watch that situation very closely.

The fun dilemma for Russia is that if the Ukrainians do manage to capture the Sudzha gas hub, how on earth do they dig them out?

Russia’s advances so far have all been achieved through the use of vast volumes of fairly inaccurate artillery basically depopulating the area before the Russian troops move in. If they try that this time they will almost certainly destroy a massive source of revenue for the Russian economy.

If they try and dig them out without artillery and glide bombs it will take ages and the casualties will be horrendous.

It could give Russia a really spicy problem.

Ukraine thinks that in 18-24 months the Russian war effort and support for it will decline.

I think it’s already happening but under the surface for now, I think that for at least the last year Putin has been betting almost everything on a 2nd Trump term.

If that doesn’t happen I think we’ll start to see a noticeable shift in Russia’s stance.

They’re just scrabbling because thier boys took a massive L last night.

And yes, this isn’t about migration, it’s about bigotry and hate.

Hypothetically if the UK stopped all inwards migration tomorrow these people would still be mad because they’d still be seeing brown faces about.

This is why appeasing headbangers never works.

Tonight has gone some way to rebuilding my faith in humanity, good work counter demonstators and all those from on here who went out there to show the fashy pricks just how unwelcome they are.

Extra points for making Elon sad.

How old is the wheel? May be time for a spoke retensioning.

I hear what he says about the local authority being short sighted, but from their side, their budgets are so squeezed right now,

*waves* Councillor here, I cannot really overstate how squeezed local government budgets are right now, we also have a huge swath of services that we are legally obliged to provide  (i.e. bin collections) so when the costs of all those go up and our funding doesn’t all the ‘nice to have but not legally mandated’ stuff is where the cuts have to fall.

The fact that many many more councils haven’t gone pop over the last year is testament to thousands of extremely tough decisions having to be made in city halls up and down the country, I sure as hell didn’t get elected to see public services get worse and I’m sure the Councillors who turned down additional support for Tweedlove weren’t either but this is where we are and until Westminster changes course this is where we’ll remain.

Actual Ukrianians or Freedom of Russia Legion troops?

Small detail but if Ukraine is using its actual troops in these incursions its a big deal, it was always Russians before now.

Walz is an incredibly rare combination of all American kindly uncle with pretty rock solid progressive credentials, he’s disarmingly retlatable but absolubtley not afraid to go for the GOP’s throat, he’s fantastic in interviews.

He has an old DUI conviction but it was ages ago and in the Mid-west that’s almost seen as a positive.

Right now he’s almost too perfect which is making me worried that there’s some massive skeleton in his closet that we have yet to learn about.

If you think all Brexit voters were thick and educated your also a fool.

I have made many wild statements on this forum but I can assure you I have never, ever, asserted that All Brexit voters were educated.

This whole post applies to Russell Brand as well.

Was going to mention him but was trying to keep it brief, he pretty much copied Elon’s method line by line with an disappointingly similar result.

I suspect he won’t be the last to at least try it.

not enough is made of Musk’s autism in trying to understand why he gets it wrong so repeatedly.

Autism, doesn’t make you sexually assault your employees, as Elon is currently accused of doing by multiple Female staff members. He’s also paid sizable hush money to other women who’ve accused him of similar in the past. you know, like innocent people do.

If it’s on Ali Express and 50% off then it’s almost certainly a knock-off.

In fact, if it’s on Ali Express at any price it’s probably a knock off, counterfeit producers now list the same exact product at different price points with different images as these will snag different customers with different mentalities.

Almost all brands forbid their Far Eastern distributors from listing genuine products on there to avoid this kind of confusion.

Your periodic reminder that Elon’s whole ‘coming out’ as a Right Winger  a few years back was prompted because he knew that sexual assault allegations from a former employee were about to go live and he knew this would lose him many of the progressive liberal supporters who bought his cars.

Sadly his calculation that this shift would win him a whole new crop of online sycophants who don’t really take offenses against ‘uppity’ women seriously and who will defend him to the hilt against ‘woke cancel culture’ has been proven depressingly accurate.

Yup, compare that to Llandegla where the cafe is hopping all day long on a Sunny weekend and everyone’s paid at least £5 to park.

I have full sympathy with anyone facing redundancy but the Cafe at the ‘new’ visitor centre has always been a bit rubbish, if the end result of this is that a 3rd party takes it over it could be the start of a Coedy revival. I too have fond memories of Sian and Daffyd’s set-up.

I love taking the Kids to Coedy, it’s in a truly glorious part of the world. However, by the time I actually get them round a loop the cafe has virtually nothing left so we spend hardly any money compared to Llandegla where we drop £50 in the cafe almost every time we go.

 

 

Amidst all the excitement I think we need to take a moment to appreciate the spacehopper sized balls/ovaries on the men and women who will be flying or working with those F16’s.

The planes themselves will heavily outnumbered and going into one of the most heavily contested air spaces in human history.

Beneath them a major industrialised nation’s military will be deployed en masse and a disproportionate section of that military will be hell-bent specifically on killing them.

Any location where there is even the faintest rumor that the F16’s are operating from it will be immediately blanketed with Russian missiles and Glide Bombs as they try to take them out on the ground and kill the support crews.

That’s a level of courage that I can barely comprehend.

Good luck to them all.

Last time we needed something  spaying we took it to the vet…but… you do you.