rabas

4 minutes ago, retarius said:

No I read, listen to, and watch both sides. Only then do I make ups my mind who, in my opinion is lying and who is telling the truth or at least amore rational explanation of what has occurred. Sometimes it is very difficult to make ups your mind as politicians and journalists, from both sides, habitually lie. According to US spokespeople the US never does anything wrong and is always on the right side of any issue. This serves for most people as the only misinformation they receive. I think it is dumb to ever listen too only one side of a story......try listening to your friend's divorce tales. 

OK, fair enough so far but you didn't reveal much, just that you listen and decide. I think most will say something similar including that the other 'side' is misinformed. Also agree most politicians and journalists have other priorities.

But my question is where do you get your information from, where does it originate? Another poster gave a great account of his sources of views on Russia. This is a critical because of Russia's historic weaponization of disinformation on a scale that most Westerners can't comprehend, as in it doesn't compute.

1 hour ago, retarius said:

Are you telling me that you watched to his 45 minute pod casts when you hate the guy. I'll be watching with bated breath. Can't wait.

So, you just listen to the 'true' side? 

I'm still waiting for you to reveal your special sources on Russia. Odd that you accuse others, whom you don't know, of listening to propaganda yet you won't reveal your own sources.  They say the make of a man is in how he views others.

2 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Perhaps you can inform us of the carrier capable fighters that the UK makes now then? Long range bombers? Supersonic fighter bombers?

Have to be designed and made entirely in the UK, like they used to be, not in some Mickey Duck arrangement with Euro nations.

Why does it "have to be"?  You thinking is out of date. That's not how modern industrial manufacturing works.  

Aside from British aerospace industry being no. 2 in the world, BAE makes a significant part of America's F35's fuselage along with two US companies [ref]. So even the US does not build everything. 

Also, performance matters. Today's top video shows Russians going berserk in an open field as their S400  missile system fails to shoot down multiple British Storm Shadows whizzing directly overhead. Lol. But Putin said it would work...

12 hours ago, roo860 said:

It says the truck was carrying oil which spilled onto the carriageway. That would make driving conditions more 'interesting ' 

Oil? Difficult driving?

Some may remember the LNG truck that sped off a highway exit onto New Phetchaburi Road, turned over blocking all lanes of evening rush-hour traffic, cracked, and poured LNG down the road under 100+ cars and seeped in to buildings for 10 minutes before it detonated. Explosions and fires burned for 24 hrs through 51 shop-houses destroying 67 cars and killing 88 people making it one of Thailand's deadliest man-made disasters (except the dynamite truck).  

Why? The gas tank was not secured to the truck.

The next morning my girlfriend, reading That Rat with a huge front page picture of a torso shaped black cinder on a white sheet, said "Lets go to the hospital and look at the dead burnt bodies!" 

That's when it really sank in that Thai do not think about death as we do, if at all.

Thailand Dynamite Truck Explosion.  LA Times.

Warning read  first:  Authorities said some police officers were believed among the dead and that other victims may have been passengers on a bus that was in the area at the time of the blast. (but they would never know for sure).

56 minutes ago, owl sees all said:

Original roots in the Middle East! According to Chris Hedges - and others - reckon it's well below 10%. Most Israelis have their roots in Europe, although a few come from the US.

 

The English, Spanish and others went across the Atlantic to take over the Americas. Mascaraing the locals as they went. Old habits die hard.

You figure?

Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages. Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE.  [ref]

How did an Afroasiatic  language come from Europe???

9 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

I wasn't suggesting jewellery, only bullion.

I suppose some smarty could come up with a layer of gold thickness that would defeat Mohs or Rockwell testing. Tungsten only costs $3.25 per pound, gold is more than USD 2000 an ounce.

Agree, that's why I said ordinary jewelry. I too would test a gold bar. 

I would be more worried about someone in Thailand making fake 23K gold jewelery out of spent Uranium, which is easier to work with, and, radioactive.

18 hours ago, Lacessit said:

There is another gold scam to be wary of.

Tungsten and gold have almost identical densities.

Gold-plate a tungsten bar, and it is suddenly far more valuable.

AFAIK small gold shops usually determine purity by density.

The scam can be detected quite quickly with a Rockwell hardness meter. However, they are expensive machines.

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-tungsten-gold-2012-9

 

Use a steel nail or file, won't touch tungsten. (Mohs harness)

gold 24K    2.5

gold 14K    3.5-3.8

iron nail   ~4-4

steel nail   5-7

steel file    ~7.5

tungsten    8-9

Though I doubt anyone would make ordinary jewelry from tungsten. It melts at 3422 °C (6,191.6 °F) and is so hard it will dent a steel hammer used to shape it.

5 hours ago, retarius said:

Britain has two aircraft carriers.....one is in the dock being fixed. It was supposed to go to NATO's scary war games that will make Russia shiver. It can't go. Will they send the one from the Red Sea or will it take too long to get there, or would they prefer it remain where it is and kill people not able to defend against it? The Americans are complaining that Britain is not ready for the next big conflict with XXXX fill in the space. 

BTW what does one call an armed person who kills people not able to defend against him?

Russia has one, it has been in repair since 2017. 

[ref]

Ship repairmen warned the military that the condition of Admiral Kuznetsov does not allow it to be deployed due to the high probability that it would sink or capsize. ... the metal structures below the third deck were significantly corroded. The holds are filled with muddy water, which makes it impossible to examine the ship in detail from the inside.

1 hour ago, beautifulthailand99 said:

That's not a conspiracy but a cold hard fact. Probably the most powerful lobby group in the world bar none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC

Cold hard claim: "IPAC is probably the most powerful lobby group in the world bar none.

From your reference "AIPAC spent $3.5 million on lobbying in 2018".

Can you find for me AIPAC's position in the graph of relative US lobby spending?  If not, how do they control the US? [source]

27 minutes ago, johng said:

Ahh those dastardly Russians did it again. 😋

Ahh, a quick sound byte quip versus reams of linked factual information.

7 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

You have a magic crystal ball that can see what I think then?

 

Never mind, carry on.

No one needs a crystal ball. 

If You can't see that western "civilisation" is rotten to the core, that's up to you. IMO it's all circuses for the mob now, just like Rome before it fell.

-- thaibeachlovers in post I responded to.  

25 minutes ago, ozimoron said:

 

Fair enough, it's certainly moot now. I wonder if Israel will decide to do another bombing run soon?

OK, agree to agree.

Not sure about bombing  but there have been a couple of recent mysterious explosions in their centrifuge plants.  Search this source for "damage".

2020 July 2 - A mysterious explosion extensively damaged Iran’s main nuclear enrichment site at Natanz. The blast damaged a factory producing advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges that enrich uranium faster than the IR-1 models allowed under the 2015 nuclear deal. 

[note: this is a factory making IR-6 centrifuges, whoever it is is targeting centrifuge manufacture.]

2021 April 11 - An explosion at Natanz hit the power supply for centrifuges and caused damage that could take up to nine months to fully repair, The New York Times reported. It was the second major attack to sabotage operations at Natanz in less than a year.

16 minutes ago, candide said:

According to the Reuters article  it has been build during negotiations, not during agreements.

Quote:

"Instead of building this factory in the next seven or eight years, we built it during the negotiations but have not started it," Salehi, said, according to state media."

What negotiations? You mean before the agreement? They lied and no one new? As for the agreement, same outcome.

3 minutes ago, ozimoron said:

 

Was it though? I would imagine they used some existing facility and installed the equipment. I don't know but I would think Iran would put a very high priority on it. I just think it's not a foregone conclusion that the factory was under construction during the agreement period. In fact, I recall the IAEA (?) reporting that Iran was in compliance through the agreement. I want a link.

The time to make such a factory is not for the building, it's the time to design, make, manufacture highly specialized tooling and equipment, including special control software, all of which is required to make the high prescription parts for advanced centrifuges. It is not trivial.

Anyway, it's a mute point. At least Iran claims it was not covered in the agreement. Whether they cheated or it was not covered is immaterial. Six of one, half dozen of the other. 

3 hours ago, ozimoron said:

 

Developing the capability (knowledge) is distinct from producing nuclear weapons. The US is constantly researching and simulation testing new nuclear weapons.

The Reuters link and I discussed having built the factory to make centrifuges. Not a learning thing. 

(Reuters) - Iran has built a factory that can produce rotors for up to 60 centrifuges a day, the head of its atomic agency said on Wednesday  [weeks after the deal  was broken]

The point you skip is the factory that defeats much of the agreement's purpose was built during the agreement. 

17 minutes ago, WDSmart said:

As I've said in early posts, my simple "half and half" map was mostly just suggestive. It could be done more proportionally to the population, which, I think, is about 60/40 (60% Israelis). But as I said earlier, whatever map is the result would have to have the two states separate but contiguous within their own state. It couldn't have two separate territories like now with Gaza and the West Bank. But yes, any map like that would inevitably involve the disruption of some Israeli establishments. I don't know how a fair and equitable map could be drawn without doing that. 

How about giving Israel the north where they are now and give Gazans and Palestinians the south? Seems vastly more practical. The hardest part of such agreements is getting parties to agree. 

1 hour ago, WDSmart said:

I do think they should negotiate a release of the hostages, but I think that needs to be part of a much larger agreement.

Here is a link to my more detailed proposal that I posted yesterday, which includes my proposal for a phased release of the hostages.
http://www.billsmart.com/writing/opinion/Israel_Palestine/Israel_Palestine Resolution v1.htm

While I understand the value of a minimal border, simply dividing Israel in half looks a bit like what's known as a spherical cow approximation, simple but not practical. 

Is your diagram a suggestion not meant to be taken literally, or do you mean to give the Palestinians  everything the State of Israel has built from day one, Tel Aviv, buildings, airports, factories, universities,military installations, and likely nuclear weapons infrastructure?  If so, it doesn't seem a legitimate attempt at peace. 

A detailed description of exactly what and who the first retaliatory strike targeted from PBS. 

https://twitter.com/NewsHour/status/175355681486659999

4 hours ago, candide said:

And how did it work? Iran increased its Uranium enrichment program 10fold, and was thrown into the arms of Russia and China.

A technical aside on Iran Uranium enrichment. The only hard part about enrichment is having many extremely high precision centrifuges. The only difference between 4% reactor grade and 90% bomb grade uranium is a simple valve, i.e., more or fewer centrifuges in parallel. "Arman, turn the valve, now."  

Iran has long known how to build a bomb^[ref].

Just weeks after the Iran deal was broken, Iran announced that it had already developed a factory capable of mass producing rotors (hard part) for 60 far more powerful centrifuges, per day. Each new IR-6 was equivalent to 6 of their current IR-1 centrifuges. IOW, Iran could produce the equivalent of 11,000 IR-1 centrifuges per month, every month, a staggering number. This capability was developed during the agreement.