Removing the convenient ‘a bigger parliament made me do it‘ excuse might actually force some accountability

Indeed; I see the prospect of the UK leaving the EU as a losing proposition for both parties, but there are upsides.

Firstly, it seems clear that the English people won’t throw off their shackles and awake to the crimes being perpetrated against them by eminently domestic forces (namely the Tories and the monied interests they represent) until they have nobody else to blame for their woes. In the meantime, the EU is just too good a punching bag.

And secondly, by dealing a considerable blow to an already rickety and deeply flawed insitution, namely the EU, it is at least one more step along the path – if not forwards along the path — to a truly just transnational institution, i.e. one that embodies radical democratic principles and doesn’t eat its own as happened with Greece. If the EU has to collapse and a lot of water pass under the bridge before that just institution can come to pass, so be it. I’m more of a reform-mined, work-within-the-system type myself, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Waiting on the rocket pods…

Whereas these days the only people who can be bothered to spy on the Brits are the French. 😉

Seldom have I seen such a large volume of nonsense condensed into such a short article.

It is often claimed that it is as difficult to find a submarine in the sea as it is a needle in a haystack. Both are achievable with the right equipment. A needle can be extracted with a very powerful magnet.

Now there’s an exercise for the reader: how powerful a magnet would one need to extract a 10,000 ton submarine operating 300m underwater to the surface? For the purposes of the exercise we can ignore hull demagnetisation measures. Bonus points will be awarded for consideration of the likely environmental side effects, power generation and logistical requirements of operating such a magnet. One would think that a ship-based solution would be the least impractical, but air- or spaceborne platforms may offer additional flexibility.

I suggest you all three could learn a lot from Spudmanwp: He has been around for a long time, like you three he has always been a F-35 “fanboy” and he has (to my knowledge) always responded in a constructive, cool, and mature manner..

Fair call. I’d put bring it on in the same category. Actually there are a number of American posters who persist in making measured and reasonable posts in response to often quite egregious provocations (including from yours truly). You have to respect that.

Actually I find that Americans are surprisingly tolerant of criticism. I like to think it is because they get more practice at receiving it than most — the USA is a big target, while nobody knows anything about, oh, Italy, to criticise in the first place — but in any case one can’t help but notice how strongly and reflexively folks from most places react to criticism directed at ‘their’ nation, institutions, policies, etc. It might also be a cultural thing. As writeth the inimitable Gary Brecher:

Even if you used this lame Brit slang right, you’d still be thinking like an American, with a totally different set of potholes in your brain, especially about how you use language. We Yanks (a word never used by any Yank in history, by the way) use language to lean into each other, to find the ol’ “consensus.” […..] Hitchens was a Brit; he’d been trained to use language to hurt people […..] In Hitch’s world, you smash people’s faces with words, and when someone from that school hits the ground in DC, he’s like Superman landing on Earth and finding out he can just put his fist through the locals as if they were jell-o statues. And not just Hitch, either; if you saw George Galloway vs. Sen. Norm Coleman, you saw a Brit street-mouth fighter end the career of a mealymouthed, consensus-sucking American politician in ten minutes. Oh, and on the way to the hearing where he mulched Coleman, Galloway paused long enough to TKO Hitch, who tried to ambush him. The argument between Hitch and Galloway was like that scene from the old Superman movie where a couple of other expats from Krypton landed on earth, and for once Superman had to fight hard enough to work up a sweat, while the helpless papier-mache earthlings hid and screeched.

….

Oh, right, the F-35 … is that ol’ thing still around?

^ The LRS-B/B-21 project has no reason for being except for use against China. The discussion is inevitable.

Im just pointing out that you seem very Biased in favor of the Chinese.

I am not biased in favour of China. I am, however, devoid of most of the widespread biases against China born of a combination of wishful thinking, not-so-subtle racism, political propaganda, chronic short-termism, and a lack of historical perspective.

A country who has a habit of creating enemies on every border. You dont see the U.S. claiming the entire Gulf of Mexico, or the carribean.

Really? You are referring to the nation that began as a handful of settlements along the NE coast of North America and expanded WSW under a doctrine of ‘Manifest Destiny’ until there was no more land to take from its previous inhabitants, waging war against both Canada and Mexico in the process and seizing significant territory from the latter. The nation that claims two entire continents as its exclusive zone of influence, that acquired farflung overseas territories through both war and disreputable conduct (Hawaii), which has dreamed for centuries of subjugating Cuba in the same way and which has overthrown, attempted to overthrow, or assisted in the overthrowing or attempted overthrow of the governments of any number of nations esp. in Latin America when they did not suit. If the United States has fewer enemies than China, it is because it has destroyed or subverted most of them.

You are talking about a coutry who has institutionalized cheating, to gain an advantage. If innovation was a mainstay this would not be the case.

Of course China engages in widespread industrial espionage and adopts trade and industrial policies to benefit its own companies and accelerate its technological catch-up. In this China is no different than Japan before it, or the United States before that, or the Europeans “borrowing” from Byzantium and the Islamic world for that matter. All nations pursue their own interests and it would be a foolish statesman indeed to forego a course of action so clearly in the national interest solely on account of some vague notions of propriety.

The United States has the largest and most resourced intelligence gathering apparatus in the world, and many of these resources are directed towards industrial espionage, as confirmed by Edward Snowden (who joined up anticipating something rather different). Of all nations the United States has the least reason to engage in industrial espionage, and yet we know that it does. By mid-century the US will probably be stealing/copying more from China than the other way around.

I would suggest learning how to build a jet engine 1st.

China builds many jet engines.

I wonder how that smog issue will look when they grow their economy large enough to surpass the U.S. plus fight the entirety of Asia?

Significantly better than it does today — well, not by the time China’s economy surpasses the US as that is merely a handful of years away, but certainly a generation from now air pollution will be a much less significant issue in China than it is today (which is of course not much comfort to those who will still be dying from a lifetime of exposure). Perhaps you should read up on the history of air pollution in western nations during their age of industrialization and the widespread health effects thereof before being too smug.

Any indication of how many of these bombers would be bought?

Around 100.

Of course this number is just as reliable as the plans for 650 Raptors, 32 DD-21s, 132 B-2s, 29 SSN-21s, 2,400 JSFs and Reagan’s Death Stars were.

The US military that exists in successive generations of official planning documents is one hell of a thing.