Tim 168
Using Google never a good idea. The average teacher in the UK is on 42k and the average Nurse 38k, both also get pension deals both other public workers and private sector workers could only dream of. You can find the average salary deals of every school and NHS Trust in the UK if you look properly. Don’t search with google is a good tip.

Posted by: IAN WRIGHT | Feb 5 2023 11:56 utc | 203

JW | Feb 5 2023 11:08 utc | 204
“Sending in Western made tanks” was, is, and will be a PR stunt.”
The Leopards are slated to be used up completely. Their battlefield failure will be irrelevant. So far it looks like the US has no intention of ever sending any Abrams since its failure would be too much of an embarrassment. It would be worthless even against a balloon.

Posted by: Flying Dutchman | Feb 5 2023 12:01 utc | 205

Posted by: IAN WRIGHT | Feb 5 2023 12:08 utc | 209
The efficiency of the public sector in general is a modern day problem that is only partially well addressed.
A public service that has at the beginning started as a way to improve living standards and lower costs for the private sector, will through the years degenerate in efficiency as it transits from a service to an entitlement (a right) for the people.
There are also few ways to correct price/quality of public sector services. Some are privatized, some are subjected to improvised market mechanisms, some get mixed roles…
The public sector has suffered from this lack of vision for many years in the West and the stress levels are going through the roof. You have on one side the citizens that demand their rights and entitlements with increasingly loud voices due to high participation levels (e.g. via social media), which also adds to demand volume by asking for custom/individual approaches for every one’s personal situation. On the other side are public sector employees that struggle with diminishing resources and woke infiltration, further making their lives a living hell.
The situation in some branches is that service levels are getting capped as neither one can find employees with experience to tackle these huge problems (they will be cancelled by the woke crowd in a matter of weeks) nor are the current employees supported to do something even if they are motivated.

Posted by: alek_a | Feb 5 2023 12:34 utc | 207

I have noticed on Twitter a group of POGs (paid opinion groomers) promoting the “endless Christmastime for Ukraine” weapons giveaway.
These include:
-Michael McFaul (former U.S. ambassador to Russia, now at Stanford):
https://twitter.com/McFaul
-Anders Aslund (a Swedish economist who imposed “shock therapy” on Russia in the 1990s, now based in Washington, DC):
https://twitter.com/anders_aslund
-Alexander Vindman, (Ukrainian/American Jewish, former military intel, shaped the narrative for Trump’s first impeachment):
https://twitter.com/AVindman
-Paul Massaro (seems to be a NAFO “fella”)
https://twitter.com/apmassaro3
-Iullia Mendel, a former Zelensky spokesperson:
https://twitter.com/IuliiaMendel
-Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, often tweets in English
https://twitter.com/MelnykAndrij
Perhaps there are others.

Posted by: John Schmeeckle | Feb 5 2023 12:46 utc | 209

Derek 180
Teaching is in an existential crisis across the Western world, as are the societies they teach. Blaming the font-line workers is simplistic, fails to address the real problem and, crucially, let’s the real culprits off the hook that they should bloody well be skewered on!

Posted by: Milites | Feb 5 2023 12:54 utc | 211

Don’t know if this has already been discussed
Zelensky’s new documents: revoke citizenship, arrest, seize all property, corporation rights+assets?

Posted by: ahji | Feb 5 2023 13:17 utc | 213

Regarding prisoners performing tasks within the framework of the SMO. …
Posted by: Down South | Feb 5 2023 10:32 utc | 192
Any eligible convict who volunteers to serve in Wagner PMC, for duty in the ongoing SMO, will undoubtedly repay their debt to Russian society immeasurably over the enforced nullity of mere incarceration.
It’s really saying something that detractors of this Wagnerian success story are incapable of refuting their own misapprehensions. If the conflict drags on, and the pool of eligible convicts exhausted, one wonders if the scheme’s detractors will then lament its passing?

Posted by: anon2020 | Feb 5 2023 13:41 utc | 215

@Arioch | Feb 5 2023 13:33 utc | 219
I have some doubts about that email.
An English speaker would probably just say “Ipswich”, it is a well known town. If they felt the need to pin it down they would say it is in Suffolk or East Anglia. No Briton refers to the area as East England.
Few, if any, English people would use the salutation “Distinguished Editor”.
Perhaps English is not James’s first language.
The alleged letter to sponsors also raises questions. The “t” is missing from “government”. The use of the word “precising” is unusual in this context. The inconsistent use of punctuation and odd capitalisation also seem perculiar.
Perhaps the Civil Servant that drafted the letter had the same English teacher as James.
None of this is proof of fakery, but it does make me wonder.

Posted by: Ranelagh | Feb 5 2023 13:58 utc | 217

I am surprised the Russians have not, at least tried to hit the railroad bridges within, say 30 miles of the Polish border. But that’s likely very hard to do because to some extent it is a technical problem. It takes lots of missiles to drop a bridge. Look at the Russian attacks on the Zatoka bridge.
https://odessa-journal.com/russian-federation-launched-a-rocket-on-the-bridge-in-zatoka-for-the-fourth-time/

The Zatoka bridge is a big Soviet one and they shot at it with Kalibr missiles.
The Kh-22s would have done much more damage, and then there are hypersonics, which should be able to take it down with a single shot, simply thanks to the kinetic energy. No idea why they didn’t send a Kinzhal at it, that was clearly a test of how hard it would be to take down a major bridge, so why not try it?
They also disabled one of the smaller bridges on the Dnieper with a single strike back in the summer.
But destroying the bridges on the Dnieper is not even needed to block weapons flows. The northern half of the Polish border is a river with just two bridges to destroy, and then there are numerous smaller rivers in between the border and the Dnieper, with smaller bridges that need only a single hit with a 500-kg warhead and are out of commission.
It is a very clear political decision not to do it. For what reasons we can only speculate. Some of them might actually be good reasons, others are too horrifying to even think about.
But it is certainly not a matter of lacking technical capability.
Technical capability is absent when it comes to blowing up individual trucks or trains while in motion. But guess what, nobody has that capability. You need jets flying directly on top. The US would have the exact same problem the Russians do now with not being able to fly jets (even the F-22s and F-35s) until it manages to suppress Ukraine’s AD. The difference is that the US would have actually gone seriously after bridges and other railway infrastructure and it would have done a proper SEAD campaign from the start (which for some unfathomable reason the Russians only really started in the last few months, and even then not at 100%)

Posted by: shadowbanned | Feb 5 2023 14:08 utc | 219

The efficiency of the public sector in general is a modern day problem that is only partially well addressed.
A public service that has at the beginning started as a way to improve living standards and lower costs for the private sector, will through the years degenerate in efficiency as it transits from a service to an entitlement (a right) for the people.
There are also few ways to correct price/quality of public sector services. Some are privatized, some are subjected to improvised market mechanisms, some get mixed roles…
The public sector has suffered from this lack of vision for many years in the West and the stress levels are going through the roof. You have on one side the citizens that demand their rights and entitlements with increasingly loud voices due to high participation levels (e.g. via social media), which also adds to demand volume by asking for custom/individual approaches for every one’s personal situation. On the other side are public sector employees that struggle with diminishing resources and woke infiltration, further making their lives a living hell.
The situation in some branches is that service levels are getting capped as neither one can find employees with experience to tackle these huge problems (they will be cancelled by the woke crowd in a matter of weeks) nor are the current employees supported to do something even if they are motivated.
Posted by: alek_a | Feb 5 2023 12:34 utc | 210

The public sector has been deliberately crappified in order to justify its eventual privatization and thus maximize overall rent extraction.
And a return to the 19th century.
The public sector in the West was the result of long and bloody labor wars lasting a century as well as the blood tax paid in WWI and WWII, during which the loyalty of the masses had to be bought somehow. Both in order to convince them to fight and in order to avoid the millions of men trained to fight and returning from the front then doing the logical thing and using their newly acquired skills to physically dispose of the parasite upper classes who sent them to the front as disposable cannon fodder. In addition, communism existed as a powerful ideological alternative, especially when the public sector and the welfare state were created immediately after the war.
Once the USSR collapsed and once the Western elites decided it was time to start rolling those concessions back (and note, very importantly, that the actual sequence of events was the inverse — the latter started in the 1970s in the West, the Soviet elites sold out in the late 1980s), then the program of privatization of everything started.
But it couldn’t be done all at once — that was only possible in the former Eastern Bloc because it was ideologically defeated — as if, for example, the NHS was to be dismantled in a single act and healthcare in the UK transitioned to an insurance model, that would create too much outrage. In Eastern Europe they did precisely that and nobody objected much, but in the UK it would have been a problem.
Gradual crappification is the solution to that problem — you defund, you install management that makes one idiotic (on the surface, but actually deliberate) blunder after another that degrades the functioning of the system, then you turn around and say “see, it doesn’t work when it’s government run, let’s privatize”. And you privatize it bit by bit.
Of course, only a complete retard would fail to grasp the very basic point that if a system is run for profit, it will be a lot more inefficient than a system not run for profit — because in the latter there is nobody extracting rent that is not going into improving the system but instead is redirected into yachts, mansions, and wild orgies with lots of expensive prostitutes and blow. This is where economics “theory” and big brain talking heads come to do the brainwashing needed to convince people that it is in fact the exact opposite to the self evident to everyone with a brain truth.
There is no way out of this mess other than physical extermination of the parasite elite classes, the talking heads, and everyone else who supports them. The Bolsheviks understood that. But the brainwashing is too deep and successful, and there is no prospect for a sufficiently strong force to self-organize and carry this out any time soon…

Posted by: shadowbanned | Feb 5 2023 14:09 utc | 221

I have some doubts about that email.

Posted by: Ranelagh | Feb 5 2023 13:58 utc | 222
I share your doubts, plus a couple of additional points. First, there’s no sign of a postcode; other personally identifying information is blocked out so if the code was there I would expect it to be redacted but it doesn’t even seem to be there. Unusual for correspondence from a government department.
Second, it seems highly unusual for the Ministerial signature to be appended. Whenever I’ve had correspondence with Government departments it has invariably been signed by an official or manager on behalf of the relevant Minister.
Third, I’ve never seen uppercase used in the body of the text of official letters. If they want to emphasise something, like a legal requirement, it’s in bolded lowercase.
So I’m tending towards the view that it’s a fake, though to what purpose is beyond me. Perhaps to somehow scare Ukrainian refugees?

Posted by: West of England Andy | Feb 5 2023 14:48 utc | 223

Well, isnt it the same way as ever, coming down to the question how far the Russians want (& manage) to abstain from beating the donkey (the agent) instead of the principal/s?
Posted by: Yogi | Feb 5 2023 14:54 utc | 229

The big worry here is that all the usual excuses about how Putin is trying to fight a humanitarian war, or trying to manage the post-war peace (i.e. let’s try to kill as few Ukrainians as possible because each dead Ukrainian means another family that will hate us after that), or trying not to do too much destruction (because the Russia will have to pay for the rebuild), or trying to do “escalation management” fail to explain why weapon flows were not stopped.
Because continued weapon flows make all those problems worse — it has meant a prolonged war, more dead Ukrainians (and Russians), more destruction, and more escalation. To the point where we may very well indeed get a nuclear war, which would not have happened had there been a firm reaction already back in April 2022.
It just makes absolutely zero sense.

Posted by: shadowbanned | Feb 5 2023 15:02 utc | 225

Putin has little say on “when” to end on this war. It’s mostly up to US neocons, who wield 110 % influence in Ukraine. And there’s the other question, I don’t think there’s a clear definition on what constitutes state of war and what doesn’t in Ukraine and Russia. Because it’s still more like an anti-terrorist operation. There are all the time events where some Ukrainians surrender, and others who try to surrender get blown up by Azov blocking battalions and artillery.
This is existential to Russia, it wasn’t originally existential to Nato as an organization or US empire, but they have made it existential to themselves, too. While everyone is denying the recent US Blinken offer of 20 % of Ukraine’s territory to Russia to freeze the conflict, it’s possible that it might’ve been true, just outright rejected. US is seriously overextending themselves already and already talking about fighting China. Yeah, Odessa will be Russia, whether it takes 1, 2 or 3 years. Because the alternative with a “freezed” conflict is Odessa becomes Nato and next time we will probably get straight out nuke war, if the origins of the war don’t get resolved.

Posted by: unimperator | Feb 5 2023 15:10 utc | 227

re: “You need the civilians to feel pain until THEY put the pressure on the Ukro”
Well, when you cannot win on the field of battle then take it on the non-combatant civilian.

Posted by: CommiesGOFY | Feb 5 2023 15:27 utc | 229

@ unimperator | Feb 5 2023 15:10 utc | 230
Indeed. Empire & vassals have openly, publicly, officially outed themselves as direct extant committed existential threats to the Russian Federation. An objective relentlessly pursued for over 110 years minimum re the modern era.
There can be no frozen conflict, nor an internal DMZ. Odessa will be relieved. The Black Sea coastline seized to ensure strategic depth for Crimea(Sevastopol) & the security of all bordering States coastlines/trade. Ukraine will be fully demilitarized & denazified, forced & enforced rump Neutral State.
Finland, Poland(Especially) & the Balts cannot be permitted to become the next Empire controlled sacrificial proxies. Moldova will have to choose ‘wisely’ re it’s status. These are the minimum steps to reduce the permanent threat, IMV.
The unfortunate example of sacrificed & ultimately discarded & abandoned OUN-B Nazi suborned Ukraine by Empire will hopefully focus minds. Otherwise …

Posted by: Outraged | Feb 5 2023 15:44 utc | 231

Yogi | Feb 5 2023 15:46 utc | 232
Another concern troll supporting his colleague. Read #228 here.
No Sir, it is not Russia who is to blame because of the slow pace of the SMO, if it comes to nuclear war. The responsibility rests to 100% with those who killed the negotiations and escalate to the brink. NATO, it is.

Posted by: OttoE | Feb 5 2023 15:53 utc | 233

@ aristodemos 88
Indeed. Profound.
We Are Spiritual Beings having a human experience. Our temporary body ends; and our spirit (light,soul,energy) remains eternal.
Thanks.

Posted by: Likklemore | Feb 5 2023 16:33 utc | 235

IAN WRIGHT | Feb 5 2023 7:14 utc | 153
I believe that deep underlying ignorance and camouflaged bias brings forth statements like “Putin is aware of this and laughing”…

Posted by: DoesItReallyMatter | Feb 5 2023 16:46 utc | 237

CoupLeeBob,
I strongly disagree with your assessment, vis-a-vis, Odessa, which is crucial to maintaining a Russian bulwark against NATO, as well as a land bridge to Transdinistria, and beyond.

Posted by: Adam Frank | Feb 5 2023 17:04 utc | 239

A letter appeared on social media sent to “sponsor/host” of Ukr refugees in UK. Must provide info and current location of male refugees from Ukr aged 18+
Looks like Bojo is going to send them back or collect them for a little army.
Re: press gangs making a comeback
I agree that letter might be fake. It could be ghostwritten by a Zelensky supporter.
A gentle reminder as well, the UK is a signatory to the UN convention on refugees, both 1951 and 1967.
I am not an expert on international law, but I believe that legally speaking, refugees cannot be “press ganged” to fight back in their homeland.
And there is the right of the refugee to have access to the courts.
Now, of course I am aware that the psychopaths running the UK and other western clown fake-democracies have a bad habit of turning the “rules based order” into whatever they want it to be at a given moment !

Posted by: Chris | Feb 5 2023 19:47 utc | 241

@Outraged | Feb 5 2023 15:44 utc | 231
Finland, Poland(Especially) & the Balts cannot be permitted to become the next Empire controlled sacrificial proxies. Moldova will have to choose ‘wisely’ re it’s status. These are the minimum steps to reduce the permanent threat, IMV.
Correct, these “sacrificial proxies” have been ‘groomed’ for many years, the invisible hand of the deep state, US State Dept. in collusion with media, can be seen in all those nations. Vide – the ‘work’ of historians like Timothy Snyder (of Yale fame), of Anne Applebaum (wife of former FM Sikorski), and many others. One example of how long and how secretly the ‘grooming’ was cultivated is the recent disclosure that the Polish government, without knowledge and consent of the Polish nation, has already in 2016 made a deal (or had to make a deal) with Ukraine to sign some kind of agreement to “help each other militarily” in case of war. This came to light only in 2019 – I am pasting a paragraph from a blog of a Polish blogger Michalkiewicz – -I am not translating it, maybe someone capable to use interpretation machine can do that. The gist is – that these sacrificial proxies are used, or abused, because they are smaller than other nations, not capable of strong leadership, and still too preoccupied with sufferings caused by imperial Russia and later the communist Soviet Union – the language barriers also contribute to the ease how the people can be manipulated by media and corruptible representatives.
http://michalkiewicz.pl/tekst.php?tekst=5332
“Okazuje się jednak, że ze strony rządu to był tylko taki zwód, żeby przed opinią publiczną lepiej ukryć pewne wydarzenie, które miało miejsce na długo przed rosyjską inwazją na Ukrainę, bo 2 grudnia 2016 roku. Tego dnia między rządem polskim, a rządem ukraińskim została bowiem podpisana umowa o wzajemnej współpracy w dziedzinie obronności. Została ona dlaczegoś opublikowana dopiero 3 lata później, w Monitorze Polskim z roku 2019 pod pozycją 50. Bardzo możliwe, że ze względu na zawarty w niej art. 12, którego treść uzasadniałaby zmianę tytułu umowy – że nie o „współpracy w dziedzinie obronności”, tylko „o oddaniu Ukrainie wszystkich zasobów, jakie znajdują się w posiadaniu Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej”. Przytoczę ten artykuł w pełnym brzmieniu, żeby Czytelnik sam się o tym przekonał.”

Posted by: fanto | Feb 5 2023 21:46 utc | 243

@ fanto | Feb 5 2023 21:46 utc | 243
Translated quoted text:

“It turns out, however, that on the part of the government this was just such a deception to better hide from the public a certain event that took place long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as on December 2, 2016. This is because on that day an agreement on mutual cooperation in the field of defense was signed between the Polish government and the Ukrainian government. It was somehow published only 3 years later, in the Polish Monitor of 2019 under item 50. Very possibly because of Article 12 contained therein, the content of which would justify a change in the title of the agreement – that it is not about “cooperation in the field of defense,” but “about giving Ukraine all the resources that are in the possession of the Republic of Poland.” I will quote this article in full so that the reader can see for himself.”

Posted by: Outraged | Feb 5 2023 22:01 utc | 245