LongTimeLurker

Electric car batteries being produced that can charge in five minutes is probably what should be most eye-catching about that page as it is part of a wider technology advance that could start to make fossil fuel use in road transport obsolete in another 5 to 10 years. Bit depressing that the Guardian went with a divisive Daily Heil type headline over COVID instead.

Think the argument would probably be that the railway stations for South Queensferry, Rosyth and Dalgety Bay aren't necessarily in the best locations to attract passengers as the main lines involved weren't built with commuters in mind and there is a significant demand for commutes to the west end of Edinburgh as well as to Princes Street. Think that will take a few decades to happen though.

It's mainly a question of capacity on that. Buses are fine for a large town, but the advantage of trams in a larger city is that you can move a lot more people that way during rush hour. Princes Street is already pretty much maxed out on what's readily doable with buses. Greater public transport usage will require trams in the decades ahead because Edinburgh has an expanding population and heavy rail is maxed out due to how many trains can enter Waverley through the tunnels involved. Apparently there's plans or at least aspirational proposals for tram lines eventually extending over the Forth Road Bridge into Fife using the line out to the airport, to Musselburgh using existing railway alignments into Leith docks from the east then hooking up with the Newhaven extension, and out to Penicuik as an extension to the originally planned line south from the city centre that got axed for funding reasons but is still being protected for future implemetation in planning terms.

You are Theresa May and I claim my £10. Would rather go on being a citizen of nowhere thank you very much.

Extending it to Newhaven should help. The Princes Street section was the difficult and expensive part. Hooking up more lines to that should be easier over the next few decades now that piece of infrastructure is in place. Would have been crazy to stop with just the one line out to the airport.

...the difference between you banging on about the evils of London control and Sammy Wilson banging on about the evils of Dublin control or Nigel Farage banging on about the evils of Brussels control is what exactly? I'd prefer politics revolving around a shared set of social values that readily transcends national boundaries to them and us tribalism that cavemen from thousands of years ago would have understood.

No I genuinely mean being European federalist complete with the euro, Schengen and no Maastricht opt outs. The inability of the UK elite to properly embrace Europe because they wanted to "stay British" in a weird post-imperial twilight is what made the rise of Farage's brand of identity politics possible because none of the mainstream political parties were making a positive case for the European Union. Sammy Wilson is a bit of a low IQ individual in many ways but he is far from alone in that in UK politics.

A Yes vote in 2014 would have been a one way ticket to similar disruption in a Scottish context. Maybe it would have been better if everybody across the British Isles would have given identity politics a rest and we could all have focussed on being European?

Surprising some have not been added for the new Montrose to Inverurie crossrail service. People tend to overdo it on criticising the Beeching cuts but not keeping rail infrastructure mothballed so a Deeside commuter service would still be possible in future definitely doesn't look too clever in the context of the present day.

For close to a century even after the end of the Civil War when slavery was finally ended, the United States tolerated a culture of vicious racist violence that denied the right to vote to vast numbers of African American citizens and created an ongoing apartheid system across most of the US south. For decades racist American police officers could arrest pretty much anyone they didn't like the look of on something like a vagrancy charge and very little was done to stop lynch mob violence. The idea that the USA has always been about "democracy, political process, the constitution, and everything else" has never held up to close examination. Eventually the Democrats under LBJ pushed through Civil Rights and Republicans even though they were originally the party of Lincoln have been surfing the racist backlash to electoral office ever since. Demographics are shifting rapidly now towards a non-white majority (predicted by 2045 or so) after racist immigration policies were end in the late 60s so that will soon stop working for them at the federal level. Once Texas flips blue, it's over for them as currently constituted. To win federal elections in the years ahead either the Republicans will have to moderate their politics in a big way or they will have to completely collapse the system and go for something like Putin's Russia where elections are just for show. Stupid is the wrong word to describe what happened on June 6th. The people involved were dangerous fanatics out to collapse the system who a decade ago would have listened to Alex Jones rambling on about Ruby Ridge or whatever and would have voted for some no hope Libertarian crank like Ron Paul and hence could be safely ignored for the most part. More recently they became part of Trump's electoral coalition under the malign influence of Roger Stone probably so they could be used to crash the system, if necessary. Too many people simply laughed at Trump in the build up to 2016 and didn't take him seriously when it should have been obvious that post-2008 the conditions were very much ripe for 1930s style politics. Bernie Sanders would have had a better shot at beating him than Hilary Clinton but the Democrats rigged their primary system to ensure an insugent candidate of the left could never win even when conditions were ripe for a change. The main positive of Jan 6th is that a lot more people are out of denial and are awake to the threat of populism now.

He annoys a lot of nationalists because he tries to view history through a much wider lens than the we are the good guys and they are the bad guys nationalist narratives that many people are most comfortable with.

The system is rigged towards the left when Trump was still able to almost win with 7 million fewer votes overall due to the bizarre electoral college system and because of a systematic application of voter suppression tactics in red states that is routinely tolerated by the American legal system but would not be in pretty much any other first world country? Some people are in a parallel universe on this. Heard an interview with the historian Timothy Snyder yesterday where he convincingly argued that he could see a coup attempt coming because the ongoing historical culture of white supremacy can only be maintained in the United States at this point by completely breaking the existing system rather than just bending it to fit the needs of the post-Nixon Republican party. He pointed out that Trump has been talking openly about ignoring the outcome for six months now and has been actively making moves to try to get the military to go along with it, so Jan 6th was the logical outcome of everything that has been happening.

Why does that map never get fixed? So much intricate detail on the Hebridean islands then whoever drafted originally drafted it messed up Shetland big time so that the Sullom Voe terminal is located miles inland and Lerwick is southeast of Kirkwall.

Have seen video of her getting shot and she definitely wasn't propped up. She was quickly making her way through a broken window into a blocked off section barricaded with furniture despite lots of shouts about a gun having been drawn by an officer on the other side of the barricade.

Problem is the motorway was built over a lot of the old railway alignment around Glenfarg, which is the main reason why the line was closed in the first place. A Leith to Kirkcaldy tunnel would line up better than going via Queensferry with both the Ladybank and Newburgh route to Perth and Inverness as well as the Ladybank and Cupar route to Dundee and Aberdeen. It also leaves the west side of Waverley free for more east - west services through to Glasgow and potentially takes a lot of freight traffic pressure away from the two bridges north over the Forth and the Carlisle to Carstairs stretch of the west coast main line. A price tag needs to be provided before we know whether this is realistic though.

To be fair to him getting half of the cabinet that Trump selected to agree as well may be the stumbling block.

That sort of mentality worked so well in the DDR where she grew up. Too bad nobody was able to cut the mike on Adolf when the Enabling Act was being passed. A strong civil society that can tell El Presidente to do one is one of democracy's last lines of defence.

Charlotte in 2017 when proto-fascist street thug type politics surfaced in a big way should have been what made it obvious to them that things were heading towards a 1930s sort of scenario and that they should distance themselves from Trump and his Il Duce routine pronto. Problem is that the US primary system makes even the most senior and long-serving politicians vulnerable to a grassroots populist insurgency, so they were all too scared to stick their head above the parapet.

Once you have people showing up with a portable gallows, pipe bombs and zip ties then there is no way to characterise it as anything else. One possible scenario is that Trump was originally trying to ramp up pressure on Mike Pence and Republican senators to do his bidding and some fringe groups were taking the rhetoric a little more seriously than he intended, but then you have to ask why he gave the speech he did anyway when it was obvious Pence and McConnell hadn't folded, why he didn't use social media more effectively to try to get his rabble to cease and desist once they started going on the rampage, and why it took the National Guard so long to show up. Difficult to see how Trump is going to get away with this once he loses presidential immunity.

I was joking about what life could be like in Scotland back in the early 70s and before when haggis, neaps and tatties represented something you ate on a big occasion. Things definitely perked up on the culinary side of things when a Chinese kerry oot (won't use the name that was used back then) opened up close to where I lived, so yes there are other things you can do with the same basic ingregients. There's a reason why you don't find too many Scottish restaurants when you travel the world even though you'll find plenty of malt whisky.

When the Daily Heil is reporting it you know there's an issue. Back to delights such as prunes, rhubarb and cooking apples for your vitamin C fix to recreate the "good old days" pre-EEC that some of us still remember in culinary terms. Mince and tatties ===> fish and chips ===> pie and beans ===> repeat cycle ad nauseam

Says something important about the mentality of the American far right that they thought they could get away with being so brazen about this. Prancing about without a mask in a public building you are most definitely not legally allowed to break into that has security cameras all over the place is going to lead to what exactly? Anyone with the IQ of the average 10 year old should be able to grasp that it is a one way ticket to sharing a bunk bed with Bubba down at the county jail. Trump did them a major disservice by weakening Capitol security to the point that doing this was actually possible, but a malignant narcissist doesn't care less about what ultimately happens to the mugs he manipulates.

US presidents can do a lot of things by executive order, so the next 10 days are still a very dangerous time in terms of a second attempt at a coup d'etat or doing something crazy in a conflict zone overseas. The optics of doing nothing to oust him at this point would not be good. Will be interesting to see if he gets arrested the moment he is out of office. Regardless of whether they can link him directly to what happened last week, the phonecall made to the Georgia official is in the public domain and will be very difficult to ignore and sweep under the carpet.

The average age on deaths from COVID-19 tends to be low 80s in western countries. If the vaccination programme puts a massive dent in the numbers in that sort of age group and also on hospitalisations by the middle of next month good things will start to happen on lifting restrictions, because those are the numbers that really matter. Having lots of people under 50 sick with mild symptoms they will almost all recover from or asymptomatic is not something an economy gets closed down over.

No Deal was the Armageddon story. It didn't happen, because Boris finally caved on the fish issue after transport through Dover got shut by Macron. Indy in 2014 could have led to that sort of outcome and the Yes camp were unable to convincingly address that for a lot of potential swing voters. It's close to a soft Brexit so far but all the extra red tape from not being in the Customs Union is going to strangle a lot of businesses that were orientated towards the EU market. Some sectors of the Scottish economy with fishing being the poster child ironically would probably benefit big time if Indy in 2021 provides rapid access back into the Customs Union. Others would definitely have to worry about what access to the England&Wales market would be like. What happens with NI and the RoI on that will determine how well scare stories resonate in future.