Now it's getting silly...

Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming says the Huffington Post quoting the National Geographic.

Hey, instead of waiting decades for climate change to make the world uninhabitable (which isn't going to happen anyway), let's do it in days with a nuclear war.

Testing Times: Whose Independent Missile Test Anyway?

Testing times again for a Defense Secretary over the latest Trident Program. It was never, ever simple though. Back in the 1960’s everybody understood that the British goal of Nato was to keep the American Empire in, the Germans down, and the Russian Empire out. But it was never clear how the British, sub-launched, ‘independent’, Doomsday weapons contributed to this system.

At that time the American’s made some deals with Russia (Salt 1,2) that they would limit methods of shooting down the incoming missiles. The Russian deployed what anti-ballistic missiles they were allowed to own around Moscow. The problem for the British, who had Polaris, was that it could only deliver 16x2 warheads. Not enough to wipe out the target.

But it may well have been the case that Britain, in Polaris, had an ‘independent’ system. Because we quickly made clever party balloons that would deploy in space and spoof the Soviet counter missile control systems around Moscow (Christ comrade! It looks like 16x10 ish warheads). So keeping the end of the world in our hands too. The Americans had to admit that we were very clever. But they had to make sure we couldn’t do that again.

Why? The British ‘independent’ system, Washington knew, was never designed to scare the Russians, but was always designed to scare them. We threated to trip the exchange between American and the USSR by making the attack look big enough to be the first American wave on Moscow. That’s it then: a 1960s ‘independent’ British system actually targets the American political elite, because, in the end, we did not trust them much more than we trusted the Russians.

Now Trident D3,4,5 does not need to spoof (I bet it does though). But is it independent? Thinking about the headlines; who really tested the missile? I conjecture, given the non-classified history above, that the British test was actually a deeper American test. The Americans were showing the Russians and the Chinese that there is no independent British deterrent, and that they will be the ones who decide the fate of the world not the British. 'All telemetery old chap, don't you know'.

So what is all the smoke and fire about an Independent Nuclear Deterrent? Simple. I suspect that, by chance, the British and Americans have alighted on this hugely expensive mechanism as our particular method of paying our tribute to the American Empire. We are just servants to the empire, but everybody in the US and UK Military Industrial complex is happy, are they not?

Fun Online Polls: Renewing Trident & Islamist attacks in Germany

The results to last week's poll were as follows:

Renewing Trident: Which statement do you agree with more?

Scrapping Trident would be an act of gross irresponsibility - 75%
The threat of mass murder is not a legitimate way to deal with international relations - 25%

You are a bloodthirsty bunch, I was in the minority on that one.

Top comment by Derek:

Meh.

As far as I can see, in the 1940 and 50s an independent British nuclear deterrent made sense. By the 1960s it was beginning to look a lot less independent of the Americans and by the 1990s it was beginning to look a lot less like a deterrent. In the 2010s it just looks like wasted effort to me. It's no longer independent and it doesn't seem to be deterring our current enemies. So I don't think it would be particularly irresponsible to scrap Trident. If we are going to replace it we need to do so with something independent and effective.

But then mass murder (or war as it is more commonly known) is a perfectly legitimate way to deal with international relations. Immoral, unethical and unjust but perfectly legitimate. There are plenty of laws governing what you can and can't do but killing lots of people is pretty much taken for granted, including civilians nowadays.

So I don't find I can pick either option.

Can't argue with that.
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I was on holiday in Karlsruhe - a hitherto sleepy, peaceful and prosperous university/tourist town - for the second time last year, just after Merkel had opened the floodgates and I got a bad feeling about it; there were gangs of them in full Islamic get up having loud discussions/arguments/prayer sessions in the park and behaving aggressively generally.

The inevitable has happened (despite what my auntie, the Green Party councillor in Karlsruhe, had to say about it last year), so that's this week's Fun Online Poll:

"How many more Islamist attacks will it take before Merkel realises it was wrong to let a million of them in?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Tony Blair & Renewing Trident

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

Which of the following revelations in the Chilcot report were NOT blindingly obvious back in 2002 or 2003?

Bush was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq - 5 votes
There was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam - 5 votes
Blair was Bush's poodle - 4 votes
The British Army was unprepared for a second war - 9 votes
MoD procurement is staggeringly incompetent - 10 votes
Saddam had no WMDs - 16 votes
There would be total chaos in the Middle East afterwards - 10 votes
Blair would mysteriously become very rich after leaving office - 28 votes
None of the above - 68 votes

Total - 114 voters

To me. all of those things were blindingly obvious except the last one - why Blair would mysteriously become so very rich afterwards. I did not see that coming.

Maybe Chilcot should have just followed the money and done a report into who channelled all those millions to Blair and why. That would have been much more interesting. Especially when Chilcot does a "David Kelly" half way through, of course.

What nobody else saw coming is that the Chilcot Report would be delayed for years and years and then 'released' two weeks after the EU Referendum, ensuring it would quickly disappear off the front pages. A coincidence? Was it fuck.
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This week's Fun Online Poll: should we renew Trident or not?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Hiroshima, Nagasaki & Jeremy Corbyn

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

If you had been the US President in August 1945, what would you have done?

Ended the war and allowed Japan to get away with it - 10%
Allowed the war to drag on for another few months or years - 1%
Dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima then given them a couple of weeks to surrender - 52%
Dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima and another one on Nagasaki out of spite - 36%

So a clear winner here, and I was with the majority on this. A good turnout of 77 voters, thank you everybody who took part.

My view is, as the US President, you have to think about
a) what's best for the American people as a whole (and sod the Japanese) and
b) what will get you elected President in a three years' time. Harry Truman was of course not elected President the first time, he took over when FDR died.
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This week's Fun Online Poll.

"Who will/would you vote for as new leader of the Labour Party?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar, multiple selections allowed if you're in two minds.

I'm in several minds about this (although luckily I am not registered vote so I'm not losing sleep over this).

On the one hand, he is likeable, has principles and I agree with some of his policies while the other three are just faceless mishmash self-promoting machine politicians. I don't agree with any of their policies for the simple reason they don't actually have any.

But Corbyn's policies miss the point and he will make life more difficult for the Young People's Party by offering superficially attractive solutions to our core voters which will not actually address the underlying issues.

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.

"Trident: Lib Dems and Conservatives at odds over nuclear future"

From the BBC:

The Conservatives and Lib Dems are at odds over the future of Trident after a government report set out options for the UK's nuclear weapons system.

The Lib Dems favour using three or four Vanguard submarines to attack a smaller "soft" target like Iceland or Norway. Saying the existing system was designed for the Cold War era, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said it would be "naive or reckless" not to attack something a bit bigger and more exciting, like Iraq or Argentina.

A final decision on which foreign country's major cities will be obliterated is to be made in 2016, after the next election.

The UK has had a continuous-at-sea nuclear weapons system, with at least one submarine on patrol at any given time, for more than 40 years but has not used the Trident system since the early 1990s, when a well-timed and well-aimed nuclear salvo helped to topple the Communist regime in the USSR...

Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy swiftly condemned both policies while refusing to confirm that an incoming Labour government would reverse whichever was chosen.

He added that Labour would issue full details of their own proposals as soon as opinion polls had been conducted to find out which strategy was most popular with the electorate, and that it was quite possible that Labour's plan would be to attack both Iraq and Argentina at the same time.