I was planning to go for a run yesterday evening but after visiting my family in Dunstable , which was in large parts underwater and a scary drive home, where we nearly became a stranded in a flood car family… I managed a bodyweight workout

I did the route on my own a few years ago, was on a 100mm forked hardtail and that was fine, was bone dry and gloriously sunny day,probably overbiked for most of it, but did stop for a play in hurtwood which was fun (before I remembered I had another 70k to do)

Skatepark with the kids this morning

Well that’s another 2 major Russian ammo dumps gone up in spectacular fireballs last night

Anyone else think they might be using the storm shadows already, amongst drone swarms?

IIRC the first Reverb droppers (back when if you wanted to drop your seat post you had to stop and loosen your seat collar) was only $300

gravity droppers came out in 2003, I think I got one around 2008 and it was £200

https://www.bikeradar.com/reviews/components/seatposts/seatpost-and-seat-pin/gravity-dropper-turbo-seatpost-review

for £730 Id want that dropper to gently caress my perineum at all times

reeksy wins for riding a segment named after a blackadder quote

I think people around Trump will definitely have a plan to try and contest the vote if he loses

but Trump himself is looking old & tired compared to 2020 even, if he lost this time I dont think he’d be as desperate to get the job, especially now he has that immunity decision from the Supreme Court

Bodyweight workout tonight

We all know Russia won’t accept any criminal acts but the West needs to stop Netanyahu as these are crimes. It has to stop.

These attacks are war crimes, they will no doubt inflame tensions, but Hezbollahs rockets are even more indescriminate and 30,000+ Israelis have been evacuated from homes in northern Israel since Hezbollah started their latest wave of attacks.

I still stand by my statement that is a very precisely targeted strike against their enemies.

Innocent civilians including kids have been wounded and killed by the pagers, you can’t send 1000s of explosive stuffed gadgets into a country and not expect collateral damage.
What’s bonkers is that by nenetnayhus standards it was restrained

some bonkers footage and it seems that 5 nearby villages have been cut off and probably destroyed

theres apparently another depot with almost as much ammo, 14 miles away too thats probably on very high alert right now

fires still burning

https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1836264389122347259

why don’t they make PHEV vans? Seems to work really well for my mum’s Jazz.

A PHEV van like this…?

https://www.motoringnz.com/tested/2022/11/7/vxwj7xvfgqpqxgp0fv1mydsuf1qddx

I’d have to sell all my kids and bikes to buy it tho

At which point I may as well just get a Honda jazz

Acolyte, despite some flaws really did get better and some of the lightsaber fights were awesome

Ahsoka you really have to have watched Rebels, in fact a lot of the animated stuff is great, but there’s a lot of it!

Having younglings has given me an excuse to watch the lego star wars stuff too, some of which is very funny

So what happens next?

Hezbollah must be in disarray, seems like golden opportunity for Israel to move in?

First run in a while tonight, 5K & definitely felt it

Should have worn a headtorch, but the supermoon helped

Hammered home how important exercise is with the news that my very overweight footy & beer loving younger brother had a heart arythmia and was rushed to A&E today, he’s fine for now, but the tragedy is he used to love playing football not just watching it

I just bought my wife a Motorola phone (its a very good phone tbf)  is there a self-destruct code?

This shouldn’t be a big surprise, the Stuxnet attack happened nearly 15 years ago and might have been in play for several years before that.

its not the hack thats the surprise, its that they somehow managed to get 100s, 1000s? of pagers with explosives distributed to 1000s ? of hezbollah members

NHS doctors definitely still use them

I wonder if Motorolla were involved at any stage, because I suspect theyve just lost a lot of business!

its an absolute hellfest, but stuff usually breaks there first

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7xnelvpepo

also seems that Israeli ambassador to UK also had an explodey hezbollah pager on him

I have a strong suspicion he is high as fk most of the time he tweets

Spurred on by Biden’s Chips act, Intel are also dropping some serious money on the next generation of lithographic tech coming out of the Netherlands and setting up to manufacture in the US.

It won’t be online for at least a few years yet but if (big IF!) it works as planned it could mark a huge shift in the balance of global power in the Semi-conductor space.

America keeps production of a lot of manufacturing onshore, so that in the event of war they can build their own tanks, planes etc (cant remember what the act is called, but it costs a lot of money to subsidise it all)  Britain just doesnt seem to do this, economies of scale suggest that we should probably be aligning with Europe on some sort of similar act,, but…. EU (army) bad etc

After 3 hours of cubs and scouts tonight

I’ve managed some yoga this evening

Does anyone else think this latest attempt might be fabricated

Leave the conspiracy theories to the MAGAs

There’s plenty enough nutters with guns in America

Anyway, back on thread topic, as much as I hope he doesn’t win, I’m really not happy to hear of another possible assassination attempt has been made. It isn’t clear it is that,

sounds ike it was 2 people shooting at each other and nothing to do with trump

but you can absolutely guarantee his cult will be saying it was an attempt

Fork crowns/stanchion interface?
Freehub?

Harris has seen a decent poll bump post-debate,
But in the swing states she needs NC, WI, MI it’s
still looking tough and a few polls have shown a Trump boost
It’s reminiscent of brexit and the 350m lie, most people see the eating cats & dog rambling as a disgraceful manipulation of the truth & corrosive of trust in politics, but it has people talking about immigration in a small working class town and that resonates with a lot of the swing state voters suffering from inflation and job losses

It didn’t end the 2 state solution, it was also reaffirmed in the senate with a unanimous vote by both sides of the house.

It absolutely did end it and those empty words did nothing to convince the Palestinians, after Trump gave away a huge concession to Israel and got nothing back.

Netenyahu played him perfectly and the consequences have been disastrous

How the peace process killed the two-state solution

Never understand the concern about Trump, the man himself is just an empty suit, he wants to be president,

Recognising the Israeli embassy in Jerusalem effectively ended the 2 state solution, the legacy of that has not been great….

And this time round the far right line that back him have a much better plan to get what they want
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

Not to mention that he plans to gift a huge chunk of Ukraine to putin

If Trump wins (and latest polls in swing states, even a few post debate ones) show some good numbers for Trump

Then the GOP will be stuck with him until he finally has his Elvis moment on his gold plated crapper

Good writeup here on why in spite of everything that makes him the worst possible person for the job, he’s got a very good chance

https://www.natesilver.net/p/this-was-trumps-election-to-lose

I dint really know much about her but let’s hope she brings down the whole of the GOP with her

What a lovely person ?

Laura Loomer seems to be very close to Trump and has muscled out other advisors(rumours shes riding the tiny mushroom) and was involved in his debate prep.

If she’s the reason he’s doing so badly, let’s hope she continues

Last few polls are showing Harris national poll lead gone, with Trump leading in several , she needs to to be +4 nationally to take the electoral college and is an uphill slog

latest poll has 3 point swing to Trump just giving him the lead in Michigan ( a place where his talk of tariffs on foreign cars goes down well)

That would give Harris the tiniest of leads and just 1 more state to flip for Trump and it’d be over

Its going to be a loooong 8+ weeks and Harris will have to work her arse off to keep in the race, nits absolutely hers to lose, the worry is she has peaked too early and doesnt have much higher to go.

 Harris got a slight bump after the debate on electionbettingodds.com but I would expect that to tail off over time.

clips from the debate take a while to percolate through to those that didnt see it

That will help Harris as she got the better of him

you can hope that the Loomer/MTG scrap is indicative of the Trump campaign knowing they are blowing it, having been a shoe -in just a few months ago, and that this will precipitate more angry off message Trump

still going to be very close and its hard to be optimistic

It seems like Laura Loomer- Trumps current confidant and debate prep mastermind is having a very public smackdown with Marjorie Taylor Greene after MTG called her out for this racist tweet

This is one of the lunatics Donald called on to prep for the debate. pic.twitter.com/dzHl5QKUM5

— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) September 12, 2024

It’s always been about his ego

He hates thought of losing, the polls are still 50/50 but he’s rattled
I wonder what dead cat he’ll throw up to distract from this

The idea up there that his dynasty might persist in politics is laughable.

I think ivanka is canny enough to make it work, but what happens to the GOP after Trump that will determine that, they’ll want to keep his MAGA fans somehow (but it will destroy them)

Sounds like Russian counteroffensive in Kursk has been quite succesful & costly for Ukranians

lifting those weapons restrictions could be very helpful right about now

It was looking pretty certain that Trump would win when he was up against Biden, now it really is a lot closer, Harris still has a mountain to climb Im still not sure that America is ready for a female president, theres so much casual sexism (fundamentalist christian influence) that even the Tories would balk at, but Trump just gets weirder as he gets older and the likes of Vance & co dont help him

Im cautiously optimistic, though a close win for Harris will be open day for accusations of fraud and Jan 6th mk2, Trump wont go quietly and will no doubt try and anoint one of his kids as heir to MAGA, but Im not sure how that will sit with the GOP

interesting times

Trump’s ill-discipline cost him, he cant stay on message, just gets ranty and Harris was able to exploit that (he really is too old)

His thing about immigrants eating cats just weird (tho will probably work with the more far gone MAGA)

This debate was Harris’s to lose and she didnt

also an aside Taylor Swift has come out for Harris, not really a surprise as she’d endorsed biden last time round, but shes friends with some MAGA influencers and  been supicously quiet about who she might endorse lately.

From a sales point of view she will alienate some Republicans by supporting Harris and she’s obviously a  smart business woman

The funniest thing is that she was forced to speak out by the likes of JD Vance slagging her off (she signed off as a childless cat lady) and Trump using AI fakes saying she endorsed him, which she also referenced in her post

(predictably musk spat his dummy and replied in a predictably creepy way!)

this was an interesting it of research, though obviously trump vs biden not trump vs harris

https://english.elpais.com/usa/elections/2024-03-03/who-do-taylor-swift-fans-vote-for-a-breakdown-of-swifties-by-gender-age-and-ideology.html#

Based on the previous data, and also from this survey: 15% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans directly recognize that if Taylor Swift supports someone, it will make them more likely to vote for that person.