The General Discussion Thread

[Publish Date updated to restore to front page]

Okay as an experiment here it is. Discuss your favourite generals here!

Well perhaps… Really this is simply the place to post news-items, fun-items or whatever takes your fancy. In short just post what you want here.

It’s just another wee experiment – comments welcome.

Squonk.

[Image: General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry)]

17,285 thoughts on “The General Discussion Thread

  1. Squonk, you’re getting as alarmist as Chrome’s security certificate warnings; has the sun come out?

    Oops, not a Facebook page; a Twitter account – probably more appropriate for a Jeep; I can’t imagine they have much to say.

  2. I find the behavior of the counter terrorists, especially the FBI, simply baffling in the Tennessee massacre.

    Instead of the recruiters shot at in the first instance being questioned about their failure to warn the five victims in the second shooting, the Bureau is obsessed with proving that the shooter was consulting with others in encrypted messages about how to pull off such a massacre.

    Wouldn’t one expect the first recruiters calling the second recruiters seven miles away that a lunatic has just shot up their premises, and he might well be on route to do the same at their place instead of talking about arming all recruiters, and making out that they are all heroes no matter what transpires?

    A single call would have prevented the five murders!

  3. Clark; McPherson is as optimistic as I am. I know the bureaucrats have been preppers for public unrest for a long time. Not that they know any more than we do, but they can see how a perfect storm of untoward events threaten their perch. Personally, I have the same cynicism of Geo Carlin who felt imminent human departure was unavoidable. I’ve not seen anything predicted as close as 2040 before, however.

  4. Rain has come at last. For weeks, forecast after forecast had predicted rain, but hardly any actually materialised. Repeatedly they revised the forecast just two or three hours before rain had been said to be due. Such unpredictability is not the norm, even for the notoriously changeable British climate; forecasts between 12 and 24 hours usually turned out to be correct within an hour or so; the weather they said was coming would usually arrive, albeit a bit early or late.

    But this looks like the real thing; it might even get the streams flowing again. The rain is persistent and moderately hard. The air is warm and humid with hardly any wind, but the forecast is for it to rise steadily until 3 or 4am, when it’ll suddenly more than double to 40mph, gale force.
    – – –
    Google have been making me laugh. The new version of Street View no longer requires the horrible Adobe Flash Player, but if I try to access Maps with Javascript disabled I now get this:

    http://www.killick1.plus.com/odds/sherlock.png

    Ben, had you been following McPherson before Glenn’s link?

  5. The places where big puddles form have all filled up and are overflowing. I’m off out soon. I’m preparing the house for storm conditions before I go.

  6. Investing in some indoor grow mechanisms to keep my Tangerine Dream in the loop throughout the year. Just about to take some clones off mother plant. I feel like a mad scientist drunk with power. 🙂

  7. Bloody jetstream has finally stopped blowing over the UK. The bad news is it has gone on Summer vacation even further south to catch the end of the Tour de France!

    http://cci-reanalyzer.org/DailySummary/

    And the surface temperature anomalies.

    And the outright weird sea surface temp anomalies.

    That cold pool in the north Atlantic needs to go away.

  8. Squonk, will “that cold pool in the north Atlantic” be melt-water from the abnormally warm areas further north? Just guessing, but it looks as though that cold pool has deflected the Gulf Stream southwards.

  9. Don’t you love the judge leading the inquiry of the set-up murder of babbler-mouth Alexander Litvinenko, suggesting that Putin was preventing the appearance of one of the Russian suspects!

    Livinenko was killed for leaking details about Western covert operations, especially the plan to end the Cold War at Olof Palme’s expense.

    The suspect apparently doesn’t have a clue about hanging judges.

  10. http://www.newson6.com/story/29641839/powerful-earthquake-rattles-oklahoma

    Powerful Earthquake Rattles Oklahoma

    A powerful earthquake rattled northeast Oklahoma Monday afternoon.
    The quake shook the News On 6 studios at 1:12 p.m. Reports starting coming in to the newsroom from all over Oklahoma and even into Kansas about the quake.

    The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake measured 4.5 and was centered about six miles northwest of Crescent, Oklahoma in Logan County. That followed a 4.0 quake that hit at 12:49 p.m. centered in the same place. The Oklahoma Geological Survey recorded the same numbers.

    Visit the News On 6 earthquake page.

    People in Fairfax, Tahlequah, Stillwater, Claremore and south Tulsa reported feeling the quake. Folks in Dewar and Weleetka also say they felt it. Other reports came in from as far away as Wichita.

    https://earth.stanford.edu/news/oklahoma-earthquakes-linked-oil-and-gas-drilling

    STANFORD SCHOOL OF EARTH, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
    A new Stanford study finds that the recent spike in triggered earthquakes in Oklahoma is primarily due to the injection of wastewater produced during oil production.

    Stanford geophysicists have identified the triggering mechanism responsible for the recent spike of earthquakes in parts of Oklahoma–a crucial first step in eventually stopping them.

    In a new study published in the June 19 issue of the journal Science Advances, Professor Mark Zoback and PhD student Rall Walsh show that the state’s rising number of earthquakes coincided with dramatic increases in the disposal of salty wastewater into the Arbuckle formation, a 7,000-foot-deep, sedimentary formation under Oklahoma.

    In addition, the pair showed that the primary source of the quake-triggering wastewater is not so-called “flow back water” generated after hydraulic fracturing operations. Rather, the culprit is “produced water”–brackish water that naturally coexists with oil and gas within the Earth. Companies separate produced water from extracted oil and gas and typically reinject it into deeper disposal wells.

    “What we’ve learned in this study is that the fluid injection responsible for most of the recent quakes in Oklahoma is due to production and subsequent injection of massive amounts of wastewater, and is unrelated to hydraulic fracturing,” said Zoback, the Benjamin M. Page Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

  11. Squonk, isn’t that the biggest earthquake ever recorded in Oklahoma?

    Not after the downgrade to 4.5. European seismo network had it at 5+ but US says 4.5 so European Centre changed to match authoritative agency.

  12. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/27/android_phone_text_flaw/

    Got an ANDROID PHONE? SMASH IT with a HAMMER – it’s the only way to be sure

    Have you got an Android smartphone? Have you received an MMS on it lately? You may as well destroy it now – in fact it would probably be a good idea.

    With the appearance of a new vulnerability in the Android OS, a hacker justs need to know a victim’s cellphone number to send them a booby-trapped multimedia text message that will silently run software of his choosing on their vulnerable device.

    That’s according to security researchers at Zimperium zLabs. The long and short of it is: if you’ve got an Android Jellybean or newer device, you’re at risk of someone hijacking your phone, and if you’re running an Android version older than Jellybean, you’re completely screwed.

    We’re told a flaw exists in a software library called Stagefright buried deep inside Android: the software, written in C++, is susceptible to memory corruption, and after trawling through the code, the researchers found a very worrying bug.

    When an MMS message containing a video file is sent to an Android device, Stagefright will be used to generate a preview of the vid. If the message is specially crafted, it will trigger a bug in Stagefright that executes malicious code hidden in the video on the handset. No user input is required to exploit this remote-code execution vulnerability – the victim doesn’t even have to watch the video, just simply receive it on his or her phone.

  13. If you have a rooted Android then the following line in build.prop may protect you.

    media.stagefright.enable-player=false

    That will apparently disable the stock Android video playing library and any third party player that uses stagefright as the underlying engine. Not really an ideal solution if you watch lots of videos on the device though, but installing MX player or VLC should work.

  14. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/stagefright_vul.html

    Stagefright Vulnerability in Android Phones

    The Stagefright vulnerability for Android phones is a bad one. It’s exploitable via a text message (details depend on auto downloading of the particular phone), it runs at an elevated privilege (again, the severity depends on the particular phone — on some phones it’s full privilege), and it’s trivial to weaponize. Imagine a worm that infects a phone and then immediately sends a copy of itself to everyone on that phone’s contact list.

    The worst part of this is that it’s an Android exploit, so most phones won’t be patched anytime soon — if ever. (The people who discovered the bug alerted Google in April. Google has sent patches to its phone manufacturer partners, but most of them have not sent the patch to Android phone users.)

  15. Now Luke Harding, the British spooks’ reporter, has written an article in The Guardian about most corrupt Sergei Pugachev’s alleged escape to France to keep the West’s heat on Putin, now claiming that he took out not only Litvinenko, Berezovsky and Nemtzov while the tool of the bureaucracy was running everything on the fly but also by trying to kill him too!

    Is there no end to covert, unrestricted Russophobia!

  16. My mobile is a 15-year old Nokia 6210i – works fine, nothing wrong with it, and it seems pretty unhackable. Only needs charging once a week too – the battery is great.

  17. Squonk, thanks for your recent news updates.

    The Android vulnerability illustrates how important it is for users to have control over their own computing. As Stallman says:

    If the users don’t have control of the software, the software will control the users

  18. Now Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is to be released after 30 years in prison for preventing the British assassination of Sweden’s Olof Palme from triggering a US-NATO led nuclear armageddon of the Cold War with the USSR.

    The Anglo-Americans thought that it could end it by a surprise, non-nuclear conclusion, but they did not know about the existence of 82 Soviet SS-23 missiles whose firing would have kicked off an all-out, intercontinental, nuclear war.

    If it had not been for spies like Pollard, especially Rick Ames, and Robert Hanssen, we wouldn’t be exchanging any messages now.

  19. Question for you guys who know all about radiation, please:

    If you bought something small on eBay which you thought was coming from the UK, and it turned up today showing it had been posted in Japan, with no indication of what part of Japan, would you be concerned about it? (It’s not the bottle I’m wondering about, but the packaging.)

  20. Dreoilin, I wouldn’t worry about it much; the main thing is not to ingest any emitters, and the really active ones like I-131 have decayed away long since (apparently destroying a lot of Pacific sea-life in the process).

    I probably wouldn’t bother, but precautions would be to wear rubber gloves and hold it down-wind while unpacking it, dispose of the packaging (in a pre-dug one foot deep hole if you’d rather not bin it), and then wash the bottle and gloves. It’s only contamination that’s a possible concern; the contents are unlikely to have been activated to any measurable degree.

    There’s almost certainly more to worry about contaminants that got into the atmosphere and the food chain directly from the disaster itself.

    Squonk?

  21. Dreoilin, it’s people who deal with radiation emitters every day that have to take precautions seriously; people such as nuclear medicine staff and x-ray operators.

  22. Ben

    Thank you Kindly For Warm Words ..over Next Door… Would Love to meet ya.

    Here is a wee mad, Wonderful thank you – It’s the way i Sing, or try to… But a wee Story first.. Heard of the Three Tenors… well I’m Ze fourth… i would always Launch off in the camp site with Tenor singing… Then sheepishly crawl oot the tent Anonymously ( Aye Right ) Wisnae Me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_5yt5IX38I

    Also Before she Goes… ( July )

    Machi naka a

    agawa nagaruru

    yanagi kana

    Through the Town
    a little stream is flowing
    willow branches hanging down

    – Shiki ( 1867 – 1902 )

  23. Now former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Mike McCaul is reviving his claim that the pilots of MH370 deliberately crashed it – apparently to take heat off the fact that two Iranians with stolen passports, and one-way tickets back home, what terrorists usually do – what McCaul openly acknowledged.

    He is obviously using pilot sabotage as the last possibility for the crash as the searchers continue to look thousands of miles away from where the plane burst into flames because of the sabotage caused by the Iranians, apparently by hand-held lasers, and disappeared into the South China Sea.

  24. Hope flaperon proves to be one from MH370 as it will finally establish that the plane crashed, and all the passengers were killed, but it will provide little, if anything, about why and where the plane disintegrated.

    I think that the flaperon came off when the pilots reacted to the fire in the cabin, wrecking the control system – like in the crash of Asiana Flight 214 – but the plane was going too fast for the maneuver, and it just kept going on without the flaperon to its fiery death in the South China Sea.

    The crash was caused by MI6 to get back at China for the Neil Heywood debacle, and hoping to make out the the Iranians were just engaged in more international terrorism which London wanted to establish for Washington’s benefit.

    Actually, it was the last thing that the Obama administration wanted, as it was desperate to sign a nuclear agreement with Tehran, so Representative Mike McCaul et al. led a cover up at the pilots’ expense.

  25. What do you reckon on this with the Bin Laden family, in Hampshire, Trowbridge – bit odd isn’t it?

  26. Very suspicious to me, Glenn.

    Looks like an act of vengeance against the bin Laden family for not doing a better job in controlling Osama.

    Seems either the plane’s transponder was hijacked, or its controls were sabotaged so its pilot could not control it.

    Did the Saudi leadership do it to establish better relations with Obama?

  27. Looks like it’s connected to the terrorism which brought down MH370, and its cover up.

    Saudi Arabia led the wild goose chase for the missing plane, claiming satirically that it had even landed in the garden of the Prince of Jeddah, and its passengers was dining there.

    Apparently, its leadership was happy that those two Iranians with stolen passports had brought it down, a tragedy which blackened the eyes of Iran, Malaysia, and China, countries with which it has very bad relations.

    Of course, its helping the cover up completely fell apart when it discovered that the cover up was wanted to help Washington achieve the nuclear agreement with the hated mullahs.

    The sabotaging of the plane in England was to teach the Anglo-Americans to get back to basics and together when it came to conducting the war on terror.

  28. Is there a news blackout now on the crash?

    And why did Saudi King Salman up and leave France while on expensive holiday?

    Did the French authorities say that they could no longer guarantee his safety or was it because they did not permit his taking over planes, and crashing them while on its territory?

    The war on terror is becoming a mindless free-for-all!

  29. I heard in passing last week that some well connected Saudis had decamped in the South of France, on account of it being uncomfortably warm in Riyadh (mid 40s °C, ~110+°F). This was no secret, it had been announced and reported fairly widely for some reason. It would give potential assassins plenty of time to work sabotage on the plane at a number of locations.

  30. The killing of those bin Laden family members who were to testify before the Chilcot Inquiry on British soil has further delayed its release because the coroner reports on their deaths have been postponed until well into next year.

    What if he finds that they were deliberately murdered?

    Wouldn’t that put Chilcot back to square one, explaining why Cameron is so demanding about its release now?

    Seems King Salman has put the Anglo-Americans who were so adamant about Saddam having WMD again in a most awkward position.

  31. Can you believe there is no criminal investigation of the crash which killed three members of the bin Laden family.

    The Hampshire coroner is just waiting for the Air Accident Investigation report before holding his inquest!

    What if the pilot killed them in a big insurance scam, or he did it to please King Salman?

    Or King Salman arranged it to get back at the Americans?

    Puts Britain big in the banana republic league!

  32. What if the Saudi-Isreali coalition decides to solve the Iranian nuclear dilemma its way – taking out Iran’s nuclear establishment some way?

    Then we would find out if Tehran already has its own nukes, making desolation of the whole area!

    We are getting to the edge of the abyss, and more sensible ideas better prevail.

  33. We are getting to the edge of the abyss, and more sensible ideas better prevail.

    Like Scotland independence… Thanks Trow…

  34. Thanks, Brian.

    The bin Laden plane crash was an act of revenge aka sabotage, either by the Jordanian pilot or more likely the people who took control of its transponder, like in the Germanwings crash, to get back at his suicide bombers who caused the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks.

    They are still murders which should be acknowledged and treated as such.

  35. I remember telling Friends that the usa version of bin Laden Murder was False %100 Nonsense..Bin laden Died in 2001… Hands in Air Performance… ” The bbc said ” … Grow up.

    i found this interview To be Em.. Startling… They Knew

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1443&v=3TQZ-2iMUR0

    And Clouds yet again for the Perseids..Cloud Cloud Cloud.

Comments are closed.