Unthreaded
tomo,
I was too trusting of the caption on that video. Impressive conflagration all the same. Luton Airport fire looks to have been exciting too. Whether or not lithium batteries triggered it, it looks very likely that they were what made it unmanageable.
Of course batteries are yet another politically polarised topic. It is funny that the supposed democratising of the media that the Internet brought us, where you'd expect all views to get an airing, has resulted in nearly every controversial topic being a choice between zero and one.
Yes, rather sickening seeing the Muslim mob marching on the Opera House. It has always been a serious flaw in "multiculturalism": how much of their culture do you want them to keep? We might have the picture of exotic cookery and quaint traditional attire, but the reality brings along ingrained politics and hatreds.
I suspect most of the people marching were born here, have suffered no significant personal grievance, and support the Palestinians in a virtue signalling way, to introduce a bit of heroism into their own self-images. There were similar votes of support for ISIS a while back, and some were foolish enough to fly over and join them. I believe they found out that their love for ISIS was not reciprocated.
There seems to be a common thread between Palestinian grievance and Aboriginal grievance. What makes the problems *so* intractable is that there's bloody good money being made as long as the problems persist.
Another question is why the Opera House was being lit in Israeli colours anyway. Unwise to politicise a tourist-magnet. We already had the NSW Premier vetoing lighting the Opera Houp to celebrate the King's coronation (obviously political). Fine. He should veto all the rest too. It gets lit up for all the "right think" stuff, pride, gay marriage, etc. The novelty has completely worn off and nowadays the displays are tawdry or, at best, kitsch.
Loved the wording of that tweet on the Dogger Bank wind farm. Pythonesque.
One other point on the Benin Bronzes, Tombs said he *did* support repatriating one of them back to Nigeria: the one that the Nigerian President stole from a museum to give to the Queen in 2005.
robertswan
Freemantle Highway aftermath
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOCSHMOf73Q
tomo
All hail (trumpets !!!)
The Largest Windfarm in The World
https://twitter.com/A1an_M/status/1711765704653856941
tomo
Robert
An electric double decker likely will go up but that wasn't I think one of them...
Lithium battery powered vape yet to be blamed (ban them!)
https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/23845358.bus-destroyed-bradford-city-centre-fire-broadway/
elsewhere
I see Sydney (and London) police are falling down on the job wrt this stuff
tomo
tomo,
Forgive them. They mean well, they just need a good session with the clue stick — for which an uncomfortable month in Nigeria might suffice.
Puts me in mind of a reality TV series: Toughest place to be a... (from a decade or so ago), particularly the one where a london bus driver relocated to drive a bus in Manila. He was living with (what he thought was) a poor family. He learnt about "pag pag": a stomach turning idea where leftovers from fast food meals are picked out of garbage, deep fried, and sold as cheap nourishment. Our busdriver went to give the lady selling the pag pag a piece of his mind. It turned out that she was *really* poor, with a sick husband unable to work and she had to pay for his medicine somehow. The lesson for our now mortified busdriver (and the viewer) was that people will press on in apparently horrible situations, and those situations can't always be boiled down to exploitation, profiteering, etc.
Meanwhile, the London bus experience: an electric bus has set new highs for ULEZ air quality. Styropyro would be proud of that one.
Robert Swan
re:Benin bronzes
I wouldn't be surprised if there's an element of the restoration of the bronzes being returned that has local ramifications way beyond what a bunch of braying jackass lefties think... Symbolism is exceeding powerful stuff in that neck of the woods - the lead-up to the seizure of the bronzes should be required reading for people presuming to direct how we deal with African states.
Simon Webb seems almost alone in trying to stem the torrent of absolute steaming whoppers streaming from the race hustling woke left - Having been around West Africa for some decades I'm easily triggered by the sort of stupendous ignorance and sneering of Guardian reader types about whitey's role in that part of the world - still waiting to offer some dinner party dickhead a free month in Nigeria (at places of my choosing).
tomo
Hadn't previously encountered Styropyro, but he has a fair corpus behind him (so to speak). I wonder what the complete "carbon footprint" of YouTube really is — not just storage and retrieval; including all the effort that the multitude of content providers go to to attract eyeballs. Must be huge.
Listened to the Ramsay Centre's talk by Robert Tombs on whether the "history wars" are worth fighting. He thinks so. Did like the part about the Benin bronzes being returned to Nigeria, this being a case where the British freed slaves and took the bronzes away from the African slave traders. A century or so later modern justice has it that the art works must be returned to the descendants of the slavers. I see Tombs also wrote a Spiked article about it.
Robert Swan
styropyro's laser antics are quite something.
I always treat stored electricity with respect + caution. A colleague melting (OK vaporising...) a 1/4" screwdriver in some few milliseconds with quite a bang some decades ago has stayed with me.
tomo
John Campbell's interview with Prof. Angus Dalgleish is lengthy, but well worth the time. The nixing of requests for post mortems is pretty outrageous, and tales of a spate of "explosive" cancers in young people and reawakening of cancers that were in remission might not be new, but are worrying. Dalgleish condemns the COVID vaccines with vigour. With him on that.
At points he got a little too fervent and a bit too sure of himself. I'd also have liked to hear strong condemnation of the standard "treatment" for COVID (i.e. inaction). That might have to wait until Campbell works his way down the list to interviewing me...
A more lighthearted video is Styropyro wielding the power of 100 car batteries. A fair bit of rapid melting/exploding going on when confronting big chunks of metal with 40,000A. Entertaining, but not exactly relaxing.
Robert Swan
Sports professional and (ex... ) media bloke Matt LeTissier describes his coronavirus and vaccine journey.
imho - worth a watch - a quite level headed and rather understated recounting of his journey - he still gets noxious automated social media responses from what must be some kind of 10¢ army as far as I can see.
SkyTV in the UK are an utter shower of gutless state stenographers.
There was a big car park fire in Manchester? a while back - the domino effect must be massive...
open air no better
https://twitter.com/Alresford36/status/764186045340585984/photo/1