Unthreaded
@stewgreen, tomo et al
Pidgin - no, no, no. BBC Charter is educate. Pandering to mangled English instead of promoting Queen's English hinders their employment opportunities.
BBC/Left view: job done, keep them poor so we can cry & feel guilty.
Pcar
Roger Scruton: How Fake Subjects like Women Studies Invaded Academia
Youtube
“The pursuit of truth becomes secondary to something else.
.. the pursuit of some kind of political conformity”
(They) "say that truth isn't something which which we can rely upon at all, because it is a historically given thing which changes with the with the power, structures and structures of domination of the society in which it is uttered"
(So) "you can turn in all the subjects at the university upside down rearrange them as part of the agenda of liberation, and think that you're still doing scholarship"
Thus "The growth of the fake scholarship industry allows which enables people to claim Authority for nonsense"
That "makes conformity to orthodoxy the only thing that you have"
"So your conclusions are the liberal axioms from which you actually began with"
stewgreen
Jeremy is going vegan (Corbyn not Clarkson) h/t Guido.
Sep 4, 2017 at 4:59 PM | tomo
I am sure vegetables should have a right not to be eaten, without a bit of butter.
golf charlie
Sep 4, 2017 at 3:07 PM | tomo
My personal experience is with Marine VHF, which is normally good for about 15 miles, but I have had conversations with yachts 70 miles away on the other side of mountainous ridges!
Electronics is not my thing, and I have never used Morse Code. Those who did use Morse Code always said it was more reliable in poor conditions for transmit/receive. The difference between a dot and a dash being more decipherable than garbled vowels and consonants
The idea that another US Fleet Ship did not send an aircraft to confirm that the "get out of the Warzone" message had been received, was being complied with by USS Liberty, and if not, why not, just seems another inconsistency around the "facts" reported by the US AND Israel.
Israel would not have known whether they had rendered Liberty "out of service", with the air attack, but did not press on with the torpedo boat attack, suggesting that the scale of the SNAFU had been grasped by the Israelis at the scene, by that time.
For the US, the opportunity to monitor a conflict involving Western v Soviet technology was too good to miss. They just didn't tell Israel.
golf charlie
Over on biasedbbc @Manxman claims to have debunked a Dec2016 BBC story
"bbc 700,000 deer starve to death because of climate change, irrefutable.
Reality 700,000 culled by order of the Russian government." to remedy overpopulation
stewgreen
@gc
Secure communications to a ship in 1967 would've been by HF morse crypto - the command messages could've been sent by landline to a nearby base but the potential latency is considerable...... Making contact usually involved a radio time schedule where propagation was factored in - and even then the unreliability of the particular frequency being used in a particular area could be frustrating - never mind jamming. Semaphore on a foggy day.
US Navy ships are in my experience also not inclined to be particularly chatty on normal marine radio be that VHF 16 or 2182 HF SSB unless you're well known to them or they are up for some bluster. If in international waters - outside the 12 mile zone getting them to talk would likely be like pulling teeth. The apocryphal tale of a lighthouse being told to move out of the way of USS Whatever rings true to many civvy mariners.
SNAFU wasn't invented out of idle mischievousness - military chaos needed a more colorful tag :-)
tomo
Sep 4, 2017 at 12:53 PM | tomo
It is all conjecture, I know.
The IDF were trigger happy, trusting no one, and with good reason. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to produce reasons why the IDF would have targeted a US Ship, knowing it definitely was a US Ship.
The USS Liberty was overflown by an Israeli Noratlas, a French manufactured multipurpose cargo plane similar to a Hercules, being used as a surveillance spotter plane. If this plane identified a ship with US Flag and markings, but the US denied having any ships in the area, and perhaps any radio identification was not received by the Noratlas, the IDF would have assumed "hostile intent".
The Israeli Mirage Jets attacked with 30mm cannon and rockets, weapons guaranteed to kill people, but not sink a ship of that size. It seems they were armed to fight groundforces, and were diverted to another target. The pilots were ordered to attack "the ship" at an approximate location.
Alternatively, of course, deliberating attacking a US Spy Ship with rockets and machine guns, would be the simplest way of taking it out of operation, without sinking it, but this presumes that IDF had a motive.
Secrecy and Speed were the key to IDF operations, in what we now know as the "Six Day War". Wikipedia notes various bits of conflicting and unconfirmed military intelligence being received by the IDF, about the identity and intentions of an alleged ship.
It seems bizarre that a US Spy Ship equipped with state-o-the-art radio communication snooping kit, could not recieve a message from is own Commander-in-Chief ordering it to get out of a warzone.
There are too many conflicting inconsistencies
golf charlie
gc
technology moves on ... but synthesising targets has always been a core aim of countermeasures from radar day one.
One can easily imagine the Israelis seeing a 30 knot target, dispatching jet fighters (20 to 30 minutes) to find a slow old tub bristling with aerials at the plotted location - and with an American flag on it - go figure....
pure conjecture I know....
tomo
\\ Helen Czerski Sep 2
@IMechE Do yr members know you're hosting huge climate change deniers event?
You're lending yr credibility to this: https://www.thegwpf.org/tony-abbott-to-deliver-2017-annual-gwpf-lecture/ … //
Classy Beeboid sciency person - shouts DENIER -
and stirs to try to discourage a body from renting room to people who are not of her tribe
Well BBC I am not happy that you employ some sciency person who tries to censor free and fair debate