Like a malevolent Fred Dibnah tribute act.

Fun with numbers

From last week's City AM:

Re: Trump claims Nato spending win after US President warned over US membership

As Donald Trump calls for Nato members to spend more on defence, it is important to consider where the US currently spends its 3.5 per cent of GDOP.

According to figures from the US Department of Defense [sic], even the flagship European Defence Initiative only accounts for 0.67 per cent of the US defence budget, the majority being spent at home or in the Pacific. Only five per cent of US personnel are stationed in Europe - it is Japan that hosts the largest number.

By contrast, almost all defence expenditure by European Nato members occurs in the North Atlantic area. All Nato members should meet the two per cent target but it must be noted that a large proportion of the US's 3.5 per cent is spent elsewhere.

TH Dempster.

Fun Online Polls: USA military spending & "gifts for Islamists"

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Without Googling first, how much is the USA's annual military spending?

$100 billion - 3%
$200 billion - 4%
$300 billion - 7%
$400 billion - 14%
$500 billion - 19%
$600 billion - 52%

You are surprisingly well informed, more than half got it correct. When I first read that figure in an article or reader's letter somewhere, I assumed the person was wildly exaggerating for effect, I had to look it up to believe it.

IF you want to put that sort of insanely large figure in context, it's about equal to the entire military spending of the rest of the world put together, or three-quarters as much as the UK's entire government spending in a year (schools, hospitals, pensions, welfare, the lot).
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This week's made-to-order Trumpage was the travel ban.

Did he do this purely as an ineffective stunt or does he genuinely think it will reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks? The thinking man's Katie Hopkins points out that Trump was merely enacting something that the previous president had already set in motion.

The vocal minority promptly jumped on their chairs and started shouting. Britain's leading Muslim politician (or the Muslims' leading British politician, as they like to see it) said the international community must show “moral leadership” by speaking out against Donald Trump’s travel ban and even the normally temperate Amber Rudd said Trump travel ban is a 'propaganda opportunity' for Isis.

Ho hum. What bothers me is the asymmetry of all this.

Mrs Merkel in Germany tried the opposite tactic and welcomed in a million Muslims. She was rewarded with an overall increase in crimes against women and spate of terror attacks, culminating in the Berlin Christmas Market attack.

Merkel's policy looks like a "gift to Islamists" to me, so how can Trump's polar opposite policy also be a "gift to Islamists"? Or is the world so f---ed up that both are?

It's a tricky question, so I will turn it round for this week's Fun Online Poll and ask which policy people would prefer for this country.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Group think & USA military spending

The results to last fortnight's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who is most in thrall to group think?

Tabloid readers 33 votes
Academics 67 votes
Journalists generally 57 votes
the BBC in particular 79 votes
Economists 56 votes
Other, please specify 10 votes

114 voters in total, over half chose the BBC and academics. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have include "climate scientists" as a category.

Suggestion for other included: non-smokers, smokers, actors, politicians, Students/SJWs/#GenerationSnowflake* and visitors to this blog.

* I dislike SJWs as much as the next man, but what worries me is that the term "snowflake" is being extended to everybody under 40 who don't own their own home and realise somewhere that they are being conned.
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This week's Fun Online Poll, in the context of the general Donald Trump tomfoolery:

"Without Googling first, how much is the USA's annual military spending?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Refuelling Russian warships & That Article 50 judgment.

The results to last week-and-a-half's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Would it particularly bother you if Spain allowed a Russian warship to refuel in a Spanish-controlled port?

Yes - 7%
No - 89%
Other, please specify - 4%

Good, it appears that I'm with the majority on that one.

Top comment:

SlightlyChilly: War Back in the GODs there was a face off between two Superpowers. Nowadays, arguing about who should refuel a museum piece rustbucket from an economically irrelevant backwater is a transparent nonsense.
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And on to that Court decision on whether the govt can trigger Article 50 without a vote in the House of Commons or a new Act of Parliament, about which millions of words have been written, mainly by non-experts which includes me so I wont bother adding to it. I did one or two units of constitutional law on my law degree and AFAICS they just make it up as they go along.

What is interesting is that the decision itself appears to be unclear what the government is now supposed to do.

Let's see if we can guess what will happen next…

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: The 'price' of Single Market access & Refuelling the Admiral Kuznetsov

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which 'price' is worth paying to retain tariff and quota free access to the EU Single Market?

Freedom for EU workers to come to the UK to work - 15%
A market access fee of about £5 billion a year - 8%
Both - 2%
Either/or but not both - 1%
Neither. I prefer Hard Brexit - 72%
Other, please specify - 2%

Good, that's that settled then. I hope the government is on message. Exactly 100 people took part (thanks all) so no 'differences due to rounding' this week either :-)
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A strange quandary again today. From the BBC:

Spain has said it will review the permit for refuelling it gave to Russian warships expected to support a bombing campaign against rebel-held eastern Aleppo, in Syria.

The decision to allow the use of the port of Ceuta was criticised. Nato expressed concern that the ships could be used to bomb civilians...

That's more than a tad hypocritical of 'Nato' (when did it stop being called 'NATO'?) if you ask me, and it  serves the Russians right for not having seen this coming and built a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (lack of easy access to the oceans was always the Russian Navy's Achilles' Heel), but hey.

The whole concept of allowing foreign warships to use your ports has always puzzled me, there is a very strange legal status to all these things and it's always surrounded with diplomatic flummery, but AFAIAA, Spain is not in any way at war with Russia and it's entirely up to Spain whether they want to allow it or not.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Would it particularly bother you if Spain allowed a Russian warship to refuel in a Spanish-controlled port?"

Vote HERE or use the widget in the side bar.

The BBC channels its inner Daily Mail

From the BBC:

Harry Redknapp's wife was seriously injured when she was run over by a Range Rover driven by the former football boss. Witnesses described seeing Sandra Redknapp, 69, get her coat caught under the car as her husband pulled away…

Mr Redknapp, also 69, had been dropping his wife off in Westbourne, which is four miles away from the couple's £5m home in Sandbanks and reportedly didn't realise that his wife was stuck and drove away.

Either his wife was unlucky, he's a poor driver or that was the most badly planned murder attempts of all time. Reminds of the famous quote: … as a German commander said later, and the Allies learnt the hard way, "if you’re going to invade Italy, don’t start at the bottom".

If you push your luck too often, you will get shot down.

From The Telegraph, 13 September 2015:

RAF jets were last week scrambled for the seventh time this year to intercept Russian bombers near the UK. Flights by Russian long-range nuclear bombers skirting British airspace routinely spy on UK air defences, but should not be considered provocative, a senior former Russian officer has told the Telegraph…

We Brits are far too civilised to just shoot them down. We'd measure to an inch whether they really were within 'British airspace and would stand politely to one side if they were outside it. And there'd be all sorts of unpleasantness afterwards for those involved.

We can safely assume that the Russians take the piss over or near dozens of other countries as well, most of whom also tolerate them being such arse holes.

Turkey warned Russia in early October that it would no longer endure violations of Turkish airspace, and last week they snapped and shot one down.

So that while that one overflight last week might have been an innocent mistake, in terms of the bigger picture, the Russians got what they deserved.

Instead of whining and asking for an apology, what the Russians might try is a tactic called "not violating other people's airspace" or "politely asking for permission first". That often works, how do you think civil aviation functions?

Fun Online Polls: When you heard the news & Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What were you doing when you heard the news?

Listening to the news - 12 votes
Other, please specify - 11 votes

Top "other" answers:

Bayard: I think I was sawing a piece of wood

TDK: Running away from the Grassy Knoll trying to hide my rifle
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It's seventy years since they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "What would you have done if you had been US President in August 1945?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

“Armchair generals must share blame – Hammond”

From the BBC:

"Armchair generals" who support British foreign military interventions are partly responsible for violence in the Middle East, Philip Hammond has said...

Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in London, Mr Hammond said:

"One sided coverage by the tabloids which unfailingly refer to British soldiers as 'Our Boys' has resulted in politicians chasing an easy vote by sending them off to take part in one badly judged adventure after another.

"We are absolutely clear; the duty to attack foreign countries is with the soldiers. But a huge burden of responsibility also lies with the politicians who send them there and the armchair generals who act as apologists for them."

ManagementSpeak

From the BBC, 2 minutes 20 seconds into the video clip:

"We're taught to... think on our feet and to think outside the box, and to step up to the plate when you have to."

The Queen's Speech: The Christmas Truce

The Queen's Speech this year managed to plumb new depths of hypocrisy:


She was waffling on about 'reconciliation' and highlighted the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in 2014.

Well, hang about here. It was her extended family which started this war in the first place, the land-owning aristocracy in Germany, Russia and the UK all pitted their minions against each other (to distract them from radical ideas like Land Value Tax or Socialism). As it happens, the Russian aristocracy came off worst, being largely killed and/or dispossessed in the aftermath.

The German Junkers didn't do so badly, their Kaiser abdicated and the country became a republic, but apart from some Prussian landowners in the east whose land was transferred to Poland, the system of landownership remained largely intact (and exacerbated the effects of the Great Depression etc). British landowners got off more or less Scot free, although to be fair, they were the least-worst of the three groups.

The Christmas Truce itself was outright mutiny against the ruling classes, the poor sods in the trenches just said "we've had enough" and it didn't last long, the powers-that-be soon saw to that. The Queen's direct ancestors had plenty of mutinous minions pulled out of the front line and shot, no doubt the Germans and Russians did the same.

Fun Online Polls: Bank holiday weather; bombing raids on Iraq and Syria

Apologies for blogging hiatus, we went on a last minute holiday to Legoland Billund, all good fun and very interesting from a town planning/land value perspective, more anon.
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The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Is it more likely to rain on a Bank Holiday?

No - 3%
Probably not, but you notice it more - 69%
Definitely - 27%
Other, please specify - 2%

Derek neatly squared the circle with this: "In the UK April and May tend to be drier months; August, December and January tend to be wetter. Since more bank holidays fall in the wetter months, there's a greater chance of rain on a bank holiday than on other days of the year."
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The Independent reports a ComRes poll with the headline: "Majority of Britons opposed to bombing Isis in Iraq and Syria but David Cameron leaves the door to action open".

Ho hum, what ComRes actually reported was that opinions were evenly divided between attack; support anti-IS forces; leave well alone; and 'don't know'.

But let's do our own Fun Online Poll on the same topic anyway and see.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Loving This, Admit Israel And Hamas"

From The Daily Mash, six years ago (but just as valid sixty years ago and will probably still be relevant in sixty years' time):

ISRAEL and Hamas last night admitted the latest wave of deadly violence was one of the best they had seen in years.

As the international community condemned Palestinian rocket attacks against southern Israel and the corresponding Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip, both sides agreed it was ‘more fun than a barrel of heavily-armed suicide monkeys’.

Israeli prime minister ... said: “You’ve got to hand it to Hamas, they are the dog’s bollocks when it comes to unrelentingly insane terrorist opponents..."

"Teachers-to-troops scheme attracts 102 recruits"

From the BBC:

A £2m scheme to fast-track ex-teachers to the frontline has sent 41 trainees to England's army bases in its first year. A further 61 trainees will start in September on the Teachers to Troops programme which offers two years' on-the-job training for ex-teachers. Trainees are paid a £12,000-£16,000 yearly salary.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said entry requirements were deliberately high to ensure top-quality recruits. Candidates on the officer programme need GCSEs at grade C in English and maths and a degree in an academic subject. Would-be squaddies need a science GCSE.

An MoD spokesman said: "We expect the Teachers to Troops programme to go from strength to strength and train exceptional soldiers for many years. Ex-teachers have invaluable skills and experiences to bring in to the armed forces. They know how to earn respect, motivate and communicate.

"As long as they don't start throwing bits of chalk at the enemy or asking them to sit down and be quiet, they'll be fine."

History of the 21st Century, part II

From the BBC, the BBC and the BBC:

Ukrainian government forces have retaken the rebel stronghold in the Syrian city of Homs in the south-eastern oil hub of Bentiu from pro-Russia separatists, officials, activists and UN chief Ban Ki-moon have said.

The Kiev interior ministry says the evacuation of rebels from is under way, but some local reports later said that Mr Machar has mobilised a rebel force to fight the government.

The first Pro-Russia buses left the Old City on Wednesday after South Sudan government troops were forced back amid heavy gunfire. Separatists have captured official buildings in dozens of towns in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks and at least two buses have arrived in rebel-held territory to the north, carrying a number of armed fighters.

President Bashar al-Assad's government in Kiev has sent South Sudanese troops to restore its authority under a deal brokered by the United Nations and the Red Crescent in Ethiopia. In a separate development, the US imposed sanctions targeting military commanders from several sides.

Fun Online Polls: British troops in Germany & Michael Stipe's Jaguar

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Would stationing 3,000 extra British troops in Germany make any difference to Russian expansionism in Ukraine?

Yes - 2%
No - 21%
Oh come off it, did somebody really suggest that? - 76%
Other, please specify - 1%

A reasonable counter-question, and the answer is yes:

Britain should station 3,000 troops in Germany to avoid appearing weak in the eyes of 'resurgent Russia', says former Army chief
* Lord Dannatt says troops would underpin diplomacy with Russia
* He said the West must not be 'weak in resolve and muscle'
* Retaining 3,000 troops in Germany would show Britain is 'serious'

Go figure.
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For a bit of light relief, this week's Fun Online Poll:

"Which model Jaguar would Michael Stipe out of R.E.M drive?"

Use the widget in the sidebar.

"Sir, I think I've spotted the enemy, sir...

... over in that forest, trying to hide among the trees."

"Are you sure? How can you tell it's them?"

"Easy sir, they're wearing high-viz jackets over their uniforms. Health and safety, sir. Battlefields are pretty dangerous places, y'know."

"My God! I'd forgotten all about that! I let the men out in camouflage! Top brass will have me court martialled for this!"

Fun Online Polls: Flight MH370 and British troops in Germany

The results to last week's episode of We're all experts now:

Where, if ever and anywhere, will they find [the wreckage of] Flight MH370?

The Asian mainland, probably somewhere ending in -stan - 35%
Some remote island - 4%
Arabian Sea - 0%
Bay of Bengal - 4%
Andaman Sea, Straits of Malacca - 3%
Gulf of Thailand - 3%
South China Sea, Java Sea - 0%
Indian Ocean - 27%
Other, please specify - 24%

I set up the poll last Tuesday morning and my initial expert opinion was Indian Ocean, which now appears to be the consensus. I'm surprised that so few other experts went for that one.

All very sad.

What is interesting about this story is how all these countries were so unwilling to admit that they spy on each other using satellites and radar, it took Thailand, PR China, Australia etc. days or weeks to come up with a cover story and only then did they drop some vague veiled hints about where they might just possibly happen to have spotted the flight, entirely coincidentally of course, rather then passing on the information straight away.
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From today's Daily Telegraph:

Britain should make a “military statement” to Russia by retaining 3,000 soldiers in Germany in a reverse of planned defence cuts, the former head of the Army says on Monday.

Firstly, that's sort of up to the Germans and secondly, does anybody seriously think that the Russians could care less whether how many soldiers the British Army has in Germany in months' or years' time?

If Ukraine invited NATO to man up and station half a million troops in Ukraine, together with tanks and planes, plus a few battleships and aircraft carriers in the Black Sea, then yes, it might put a dampener on Russian expansionism in Ukraine, i.e. discourage them from annexing the eastern half, but an extra 3,000 Brits, thousands of miles and two or three international borders away..?

Methinks not. If you want to "send Putin a message" you might as well use the Royal Mail.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll, vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Military skills could help in business, report finds"

From the BBC:

Skills learnt in the military could help ex-service personnel succeed in business, according to a new report.

The research, commissioned by Time Reboot, found 40% of FTSE 100 companies had senior directors with a former military background.

Chris Blackford, co-founder of drone-running firm Sky Future, said there were numerous transferable skills which helped him succeed in business.

He told BBC Radio 5 Live's Wake Up to Money that these included:

"Dealing with pressure, risk versus reward... simple things like covert assassinations of my business rivals, laying land mines at the entrance to competitors' premises, hacking into my customers' phone and email messages, launching drone strikes on warehouses used to store competing products and seeing something through."