Why NATO Isn’t Cooperating With The US War On Iran

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 032026
 

The Twitterverse is agog with dumb Trumpists whining about NATO not kowtowing to Trump and following his lead into war with Iran. Clearly illustrating they have no idea what NATO is.

What Is NATO?

NATO is a mutual defense treaty where members agree to come to the assistance of other members who are attacked. There is no obligation to assist a member who wants to carry out military adventures – even if those military adventures have reasonable goals behind them.

And it isn’t the US going to war with Iran; it’s Israel going to war with Iran and the US is helping its ally. Israel isn’t a member of NATO, so there’s even less reason for NATO to assist.

Is It Legal?

I’ve no idea if Netanyahu’s military adventure is legal or not, but there are legitimate concerns about whether Israel’s and the USA’s actions are legal. There’s no mandate from the UN giving permission to spank Iran; there’s not even a consensus amongst the nations of NATO.

Whilst it may seem strange to USAians that some country leaders worry about whether their actions are legal, it is not unreasonable to refuse to assist a military adventure if doing so may end up with a time in gaol.

Unlikely but not impossible.

The Nukes?

Is Iran developing nuclear weapons? Well come up with proof of that, and you’ll get cooperation. But we haven’t seen any proof; we’re supposed to trust the word of Israel (who are currently short on trust). No thanks.

Particularly when previous military adventures supposedly destroyed the weapons programme.

The Money Question

One of the things that keeps cropping up when the USians want to whine about NATO is that the US is supposedly paying for Europe’s defence. A great deal of that whining is based on lies.

First of all the direct costs of running NATO are funded by all members making a contribution based on how wealthy they are – the US contributes 16.2% of the total (Germany is also on 16.2%), and that percentage is of the entire NATO budget of €5.3billion.

NATO membership also requires countries to spend at least 2% of their GDP on military spending. That target is increasing to 5%.

However whilst Europe has traditionally lagged at below the 2% commitment, the situation has changed considerably in recent years with 23 out of 32 countries meeting or exceeding the 2% of GDP.

You will hear a great deal of the US’s $1 trillion spent on European defence. That’s another lie; the US spends that amount on all military spending including world-wide commitments. And yes that’s more than every other country in Europe – that’s how that “2% of GDP” works out – the rich pay more, and the US is effectively as large as the whole of Europe.

Now if you add up all European military spending, it still doesn’t match the US spending and that should be corrected (which is slowly happening) but it is actually a huge chunk of money – $472 billion. That’s well over twice what Russia spends militarily.

Who Defends Who?

The only time NATO was obligated to defend one of its members under “Article 5″ was in the aftermath of 9/11. Defending the USA.

No Through Way

The War on Cars (and Drivers)

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 072026
 

Every single measure taken to improve air quality on roads, add facilities for cyclists, restrict parking, restrict entry to overcrowded cities invokes a cry from the loony right of “Not more war on car drivers”. As if there really were a war on car drivers!

To those who read this and say “There is”, just imagine if there really were such a war – we could legalise shooting cars with shot-guns, setting up traps that’ll dump cars in the sea, etc.

Well perhaps not. But if you look at the harm cars cause, you do have to wonder if there shouldn’t be a war on cars – cars kill roughly 2,000 people a year (or just under) :-

And that ignores the thousands of “live-changing injuries” (that means important bits came off) that occurred over the same time period. If you compare with the number of deaths that occur through shooting in the UK, and the response to that cause of death, you see if anything we underreact to the deaths caused by cars.

And deaths are not the only aggravation caused by cars: noise, localised pollution, space on our streets, excessive priority, and probably a whole lot more.

Boat Skeleton

So the answer to “Why the War on Cars?” is “Well it’s about time.”

Upgrading Ubuntu 24.10 to 25.04 with ZFS

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Dec 282025
 

If you happen to have tried upgrading Ubuntu 24.10 (probably – I didn’t check before getting this done) to Ubuntu 25.04 with ZFS, you will realise that the upgrade is blocked because of known issues. Specifically (without having seen the issue personally), the upgrade blocks at a certain point where the userland ZFS tools have been upgraded and the old kernel is still running.

Fair enough, but why hasn’t it been fixed? Or even a suggested work-around?

One suggestion I came across was to remove the ZFS storage pool(s), upgrade, and add them back in. For those not familiar with ZFS, this is done by simply importing the previously exported (or not) pool without loss of data.

Although backups are as always a good idea!

But there’s more to the suggestion than that, so here are my working notes … the ones written down long-hand with a pen on paper (something I rarely do these days) :-

  1. Shut down the virtual machines.
  2. Shut down the gooey – as in shut down the applications, and return to the login screen.
  3. Switch to a text console (most of the work is done here).
  4. Shut down the containers.
  5. Unmoun the ZFS filesystems
    • zfs unmount -a
    • Which failed, so killed off various running processes with pkill -u ${USER}
    • A second zfs unmount -a also failed and had to kill off various other processes until it worked.
  6. Export the pool which failed – including a second attempt when forced.
  7. Removed the ZFS packages :-
    • dpkg –remove zfs-zed zfs-utils-linux zfs-dkms
  8. Rebooted as Linux still thinks ZFS is enabled.
  9. Upgrade started in text mode.
    • Skips past the ZFS block and completes normally.
  10. Added the ZFS pages back (zfs-zed zfs-utils-linux zfs-dkms) and imported the pool. This did issue a dire warning about potential data loss with ZFS and this version of the Linux kernel. With any luck this is an outdated warning and perhaps more to do with ZFS root.

But that dire warning is probably worth avoiding the upgrade.

Model lighthouse in a lake.
The Lighthouse

Is The UK a Christian Country?

 General, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Dec 042025
 

No.

No country believes in this religion or that religion; it is an individual choice of the members of that country as to what religion they should believe in (or not).

The lunatic fringe of the far right want to push the notion that the UK (and the USA) is a christian country because they want to use that as an excuse to punish anyone who isn’t. Oh, it’ll start with Muslims and Hindus and end with anyone who doesn’t follow their brand of Christianity.

As of 2021, the UK was 46.5% Christian; that’s the single largest religious group. But it isn’t the majority; there’s plenty of other religious groups and the non-religious. Of course the christofascists will point out that in the past, the UK was nearly 100% Christian, glossing over the fact that this was forced on us – either explicitly or more subtly.

The past is the past – whilst we may have a christian tradition we also have a pre-christian tradition (or a pagan tradition). Christianity is a foreign religion – it’s an immigrant from the middle-east.

War Memorial Church
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