OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

He knows exactly what he thinks he is doing. Sadly, he doesn't know as much as he needs to and he can't believe that he needs to know more.

Whose businesses went bankrupt on a spectacular scale.

1. a hard bargainer.

More a a rapacious crook.

Dream on. Remember the Covid-19 pandemic. It killed about half a million more Americans than it needed to, and America ended up only about 81% vaccinated against the virus. Being dead isn't hardship. but it is an undesirable outcome.

Warm, sun-dappled uplands await them.

In heaven, perhaps sooner that might otherwise have happened.

By which John Larkin means that Donald Trump shares a few absurd misapprehensions with John Larkin and a bunch of other gullible suckers.

If you set the scheduled speed slow enough the trains are unlikely to run late, and slower trains are cheaper than faster trains (though you do need more of them).

Bring back horse drawn stages coaches and you can save even more money.

...and the pollution is bio-degradeable.

Left-handedness is slightly different. It doesn't seem to be the opposite of right-handedness, but rather a state in which brain localisation of function isn't closely defined.

One of my wife colleagues used an elaborate electro-encephlograph to work out which bits of the brain were doing which which bits of speech process shortly after the speech being processed had hit the ears.

She wouldn't test left-handers because the processing locations weren't the same from one left-handed test subject to the next. Most right-handers had much more predictable processing locations.

Most of the incidence and heritability statistic make more sense if you look at it as a contrast between between predictable right-handedness and less predictable random assignment.

My father wrote with his right hand, but only because his teachers had insisted on it. I'm left handed, so is my younger brother but my youngest brother isn't. My mother wrote with her right hand, but the handedness preferences of her three kids do suggest that she'd been lucky, rather than genetically programmed.

Not exactly. Horses exhale CO2 and fart methane, and while plants do eventually metabolise CO2 into carbohydrates, they don't do it all that fast.

Methane gets turned in to CO2 and water in the ozone layer and there's nothing biological about that.

London was vile when horses did all the heavy work.

And before rail transportation, everyone had to live close to work. Most people walked.

European wars don't make me nervous. They have been so routine for so many millenia that they are boring.

Too bad about the genocides. Lots of innocents have died.

Not for the participants. And war has changed a lot over the millenia.

Genocide is a pretty recent phenomena. In most wars you kill your enemies, rather than members of some specific human group. If a civilian population is feeding your enemies you tend to kill them too, but that isn't genocide - just strategy.

And every other large city.

Canals and fast barges weren't a quick as railroads but they were faster than walking and a lot less like hard work than riding.

The Dutch had tourism long before they had railroads - it isn't a large country so fast barges were fast enough.

Rather surprisingly (and not very well known): one of the biggest side-effects of canals was the expansion of London. It had reached a size where the transport of feed for the horses in the centre needed much larger numbers of horses coming in from the surrounding farmland. Likewise, the horses that removed the dung had to be fed and their dung also had to be removed. This put a limit on how big London could grow.

When canals were built and one horse could tow a 30-tonne boat, the need for so many transport horses reduced and the feed and dung could be brought in from much further out, so the built-up area could be enlarged.

Horse droppings, coal smoke, open sewage ditches, dirty water. Must have been nasty. And unhealthy.

Rather, they were too late: Ukraine was commited to neutrality. But it was attacked by Russia in 2014 and they wanted protection against next attack. And predictably NATO did not want to get involved in frozen war.

London hasn't changed a bit - except to say you're far more likely to get stabbed to death by an illegal immigrant nowadays. Aside from that, much the same.

Back then the immigrants weren't illegal. Crime rates are now quite a bit lower than they were from say 1700 to 1850, so you are now less likely to get stabbed than you were then.

How about some quiche?

Zelensky doesn't seem to have been sufficiently intimidated. He didn't kow-tow enthusiastically enough during the "negotiations" in the White House and Trump had him thrown out. Trump and Vance seem to have mastered obnoxiousness, but actual intimidation seems to be more than they can manage.

There was a famous public transport in Holland. You have a canal, and there is a boat "trekschuit" drawn by a horse alongside the canal, "jaagpad". Bring your laptop and you can do a lot of work travelling. Much more comfortable than the diligence.

Make Holland Great Again. The speed was 5 km/h or less. At least that was a functioning society.

'cracked' , is what I heard.

RL

'cracked' is what I heard.

RL