DB

I can't stand the continual beat of "hang on, where the heck did my team go?" moments. It's always been the case that MM could hand you a bad case of the ROFLStomp, but it seems to me that this is now the norm rather than an occasional thing. I think I'm down to averaging about a game a week recently, in bursts of 3-5 games.

Could have been far worse, like Las Ketchup, or Tatu.

Classically, one should ask Odysseus.

Sorry, Stuart, but I don't believe in secret trials. They go with secret police and police states. Justice must be seen to be done. it's not as though there was a need to leak more information during a trial. I don't think Snowden is a hero, but he's not in the same class as Ames and Hanssen, or any one of a double handful of others. I believe that Snowden and Manning's leaks caused *embarrassment* more than *harm*, and, at least in the UK, the guidance on protective marking is that it is not there to protect governments and their ministers from embarrassment, it's to protect the national interest. if governments don't want to be embarrassed, they shouldn't do embarrassing things, like spying on allies, or using legal "loopholes" to spy on their own citizens. That my government allowed its security organisations to be used by the US government to spy on its own people is shameful, and needed to be known.

So that looks like two views of the same incident from opposite directions. There appear to be two helicopters flying after the one was shot down. I do hope that the ejectee landed clear of the fire, nobody deserves that kind of end.

As I understand it, Rybar is aligned on the Pro-Russian side. I wonder how it feels to be reporting the events of the last few weeks. If I'm mistaken, of course, someone will correct me.

The only pressure on Russia is manufactured by itself, so my argument stands. The Russians simply do not appear to have a mindset that encompasses mutual benefit as a concept. If the "West" is "winning", then they think that they must be "losing". It's the same bullshit that sees the argument that if rich people getting richer then less rich people must be getting poorer - a manifest untruth that is a core of left wing dependency politics. I see the Russian leadership using exactly this approach, playing to a carefully cultivated national inferiority complex to keep people in line. unfortunately, it seems that 35 years of exposure to a more Western lifestyle wasn't sufficient to overcome the indoctrination. Until Russians see that they can win without the need for someone else to lose, they will always be losers.

They're talking bollocks, as usual, just like the City people who were shorting the pound crying crocodile tears whilst making money hand over fist. Sadly, I can't see a less worse way of running things.

And the pound bounced back on Friday after some intervention and a revision to GDP figures that indicated the UK wasn't in recession in the last quarter. If the markets didn't run in cocaine-fuelled hysteria, the world might be a better place.

This may be your subtlest satire yet. Equating modern Russia with Afghanistan, best described as a tribal shithole with useful mineral reserves. Priceless.

Strange definition - trying to be a bit too clever, I think. Fascism that does not include government direction of production priorities seems like a serious omission, and including "mass-based parties", which applies to all political parties in a democracy, cannot reasonably be considered a marker of a particular political flavour. Not sure that it's reasonable to call the US government a communist one on the basis that it was in favour of decolonisation, despite tanknet's usual confusion between FDR's policies and communism.

I think that you're forgetting the underlying Russian premise that every relationship is a zero-sum game. There is no concept of mutually beneficial relationships, one is the master that takes and the other is the slave that must give. Personally, I think they misunderstood their basic thermodynamics lectures, but we know that the closer one gets to understanding statistical mechanics, the closer one gets to suicide, so perhaps it's a self-protection mechanism, with exceptions to the rule having to throw themselves out of windows lest they discover enlightened self interest, or, heaven forfend, teamwork.

Better for the barrel to fail than the breech. I wonder if it's possible to fit a new barrel without having to replace the whole of the gun itself, or whether this sort of damage would lead to the breech being condemned as well. (Which presupposes that the breech and barrel would be independently lifed in the first place, I suppose.)

i can't see Afghanistan and Ukraine having any parallels at all, so not sure why discussion of that is considered relevant here. I will suggest that Afghanistan was amenable to a military solution, but the modern expression of morality in Western nations would not countenance it - the Malaya and Kenya campaigns show that conventional forces can win against "insurgents", but the methods used are no longer acceptable. One can make up one's own mind as to whether that's a good or bad thing.

Whilst this is true, I would suggest that the need to do some kind of knee-wiggle to steer the thing means that he doesn't actually fit at all. Even if I was thinner there's no way on earth you'd get me trying the passenger seat, for the reasons stated.