Wednesday 21 April: The European Super League challenge to Uefa is not going to go away

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/04/20/lettersthe-european-super-league-challenge-uefa-not-going-go/

704 thoughts on “Wednesday 21 April: The European Super League challenge to Uefa is not going to go away”

      1. Ganz gut, danke. Und dich?
        Winter reappeared this morning. Hail & snow. Ugh.

      2. Ganz gut, danke. Und dich?
        Winter reappeared this morning. Hail & snow. Ugh.

    2. Yo Minty

      …..waking up in the middle of the night or early in the morning.

      is far, far better than the alternative

  3. A Golfing Dilemma

    A man was about to tee off on the golf course when he felt a tap on his shoulder & a man handed him a card that read:

    “I am a deaf mute. May I play through, please?”

    The 1st man angrily gave the card back, and communicated that “No, he may NOT play through, and that his handicap did not give him such a right.”

    The first man whacked the ball onto the green and left to finish the hole.

    Just as he was about to put the ball into the hole, he was hit on the head with a golf ball, laying him out cold.

    When he came to a few minutes later, he looked around and saw the deaf mute sternly looking at him, one hand on his hip, the other holding up 4 fingers.

  6. ‘Pandemic poppies’ plan to commemorate Covid dead. 20 april 2021.

    Covid “poppies” should be created to help families commemorate the pandemic, a former military chief behind a series of war memorials has said.

    General Sir Lord Dannatt, an ex-head of the army, is spearheading a drive to make March 23 an annual “Covid Memorial Day”, with a minute’s silence held in schools, workplaces and public venues.

    The campaign, backed by 50 MPs and peers from a range of parties, is also calling on the Government to fund a Covid monument in every town, as well as a national memorial in Whitehall.

    God almighty! North Korea here we come!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/04/20/pandemic-poppies-plan-commemorate-covid-dead/

    1. Morning, Araminta.

      So, permanent displays of propaganda in every town. I can envisage the memorials being a syringe surmounted by a potion dose bottle: which manufacturer’s name on the bottles will depend on which one coughs up the largest brown envelope. Of course, the national memorial will be covered in gold leaf as an indicator of the of cost to the Nation’s treasury.

      In real life when enough people understand what Johnson et al. are really up to this idea will sink without trace. Whatever induced Dannatt to get involved with this nonsense?

      1. On the other hand, Korky, if we erect monuments to the March 23 lockdown, the initial report from Wuhan, the second and third lockdowns, the vaccination programmes (start of first and second inoculations plus the dates when each cohort was offered an inoculation date), etc, etc it might just give the woke brigades something to do, i.e. tear down the statues and throw them into the nearest river. This would keep them too busy to make trouble demonstrate and riot and loot and thus let the majority of us go on living our lives in peace and quiet. (Sarc.)

        1. Rhubarb!

          I’m not being rude but it’s coming along nicely and should be ready in a week or so. If you would like some, let me know.

          1. A kind offer, Korky, but I must decline. I have been following Grizzly’s diet for three months now and have lost two and a half stones. I still have one final stone to lose which will probably take another three months. On this (Ketogenic) diet sugar is a no-no, so I haven’t made any rhubarb crumble for months and I still have the last of 2020’s rhubarb in the freezer. Also, the spring 2021 rhubarb is now ready to harvest and will probably also go in my freezer. Having said that, I plan to use last year’s crop to make some crumble or maybe just stew it with a minimal amount of sugar, then eat very small portions for a dessert. The problem with rhubarb is that it is so tart that some sugar is essential or it would be virtually inedible. I’ll phone you in a week or so to see if – weather permitting – we can meet up in your/my garden for a coffee one afternoon.

    2. What poppyc0ck. Covid memorial day – for the many who died ‘with’ but not ‘of’ the bat flu? And as for an annual minute silence – time to crank up the speakers on some Quo music methinks. Still, such a notion will be lapped up by the fearful, hand-wringing doom-mongers who wear their masks in their cars, outside (even in the countryside) and still believe every lie put out by Doris, Wimpy, Hanc0ck and Saint beeb et al.

  8. Yo All

    Main headline in Tellylaff:
    Some new EUSSR footy league scrapped
    Europe’s elite suffer sport’s most astounding humiliation – and wounds will take a long time to heal

    By-Line

    Derek Chauvin trial: Relief across US as guilty verdict read out
    Black criminals have now been given carte blanche to carry guns.. the police in the US and here will be
    wary of firing their guns, even in self defence

    The makings of another Pandemic

  9. SIR – Jason Burt (Sport, April 19) suggests that some football clubs are motivated by greed and self interest. Maybe. The enormous sums generated from games are controlled by a less than perfect organisation – Uefa.

    This American-inspired Super League proposal seeks to make Uefa redundant – may be no bad thing. However, to use the American notion of no relegation will not find approval with European football fans.

    This idea won’t go away and a compromise needs to be found. In the meantime, the proposal should be of no concern to politicians, who have more than enough to do.

    Peter Kleeman
    Newbury, Berkshire

    SIR – Once again, Boris Johnson has forsaken his libertarian ideology to meddle in a free-market arrangement.

    Simon Bird
    Penn, Buckinghamshire

    SIR – When leading Rugby Union clubs in England attempted to create a league with no relegation, I don’t recall threats of government intervention.

    Should the Government also intervene to stop the cricket Hundred, which will destroy red-ball cricket as we know it?

    J G Hopkinson
    Tunbridge Wells, Kent

    SIR – The current outcry is similar to that in 1977 when World Series cricket was started by Kerry Packer.

    Kevin Lees
    Alton, Hampshire

    SIR – How short are the memories of such clubs as the now great Manchester City. Only in 1998 they were playing the likes of Macclesfield Town in Division Two. Now they would stop any other club from reaching their current heights.

    Clare Morgan
    Alderley Edge, Cheshire

    SIR – Any principled player (and, yes, there are many) of affected clubs should demand a transfer – I’m sure a good lawyer could argue that the clubs are in breach of contract with their players.

    Coupled with expulsion from the Premier League, this would have the effect of leaving the super-clubs without their best players, and how would the clubs survive then in this crazy new league?

    Tony Haworth
    Porthcawl, Glamorgan

    SIR – I have just turned on the BBC World News to be presented with 20 minutes of talking heads going on about football. Have we taken leave of our senses? It is quite simply not that important.

    David J Hartshorn
    Badby, Northamptonshire

    SIR – It’s a funny old world – we seem more concerned about the loss of football clubs from the Premier League than we do about the loss of our civil liberty.

    Alan Rogers
    Epsom, Surrey

    Medicine shortages

    SIR – Northern Ireland could face shortages in medicine supply because of the Brexit deal. The current temporary grace period for their supply in the region is a sticking-plaster solution, and medicines manufacturers cannot wait until the end of the year for further clarity.

    Generic medicines represent four out of five drugs used by the NHS, including Northern Ireland. The manufacturers operate on simplicity, efficiency, high volumes and low margins.

    Nearly all Northern Ireland’s medicines are provided by UK manufacturers. If companies have to duplicate regulatory licences, inspections, storage, quality testing and laboratory space, this complexity will make supply unfeasible. Medicine shortages will increase.

    Without political agreement between the UK Government and the EU on mutual recognition for medicines, Northern Ireland risks losing the wide range that is provided to Britain. For the sake of patients, we must avoid this.

    Mark Samuels
    Chief Executive, British Generic Manufacturers Association
    London EC2

    Demand for housing

    SIR – Does anyone in government understand the most basic principle of economics – supply and demand?

    If the Government creates additional schemes to increase the budget of first-time buyers (report, April 19) looking to purchase their own home (and chasing the same finite supply), all that will happen is that house prices will increase further.

    The only way to solve the housing crisis and enable more people to own their own homes is to increase supply and build more houses.

    Andy Tuke
    Pensford, Somerset

    To boldly split

    SIR – Suzanne Kirk (Letters, April 20) says that it is poor practice to split an infinitive.

    H W Fowler, in his standard work Modern English Usage (1926), spends two and a half pages discussing the “tyranny” of the principle and concludes that, for clarity, it is far better to split an infinitive than to reduce a sentence to absurd clumsiness in the headlong clamour to avoid its use at all costs.

    Alan G Barstow
    Onslunda, Skåne County, Sweden

    Unhelpful banks

    SIR – Rather like the gentleman thwarted by age-sensitive technology in his quest for a pint of beer (Letters, April 14), I have encountered a problem in applying for a bank account for a new business. Metrobank requires a photograph of me and either my passport or a photo driving licence.

    Attempts by the bank’s system to photograph my passport failed, but then to produce a clear photograph from a grainy passport covered with a layer of film is a tall order. Metrobank’s alternative was not available because I am of an age where I have only ever had the wonderful old driving licence on a piece of pale green paper, which carries no photograph.

    My company is now in the queue for an account at Barclays.

    Brian Symonds
    Worcester

    SIR – Banking used to be regarded as a service industry. No longer. Yesterday I went to NatWest to open a joint account, having banked with them since 1964.

    “Online only,” said the greeter. I had two cheques to pay in. “Please use the machine over there,” said the cashier, who had no other customers.

    I suppose that if the in-branch experience is made sufficiently unpleasant fewer people will go and the branch can be closed through lack of footfall.

    Christopher Watkins
    Brentwood, Essex

    Vaccine passport flaw

    SIR – I received my first Oxford-AstraZeneca jab on February 4. I am still awaiting my second.

    On April 11 I had a test for antibodies as part of a research project with UK Biobank. It was negative.

    What is the point of a Covid passport without an antibody test? I am still allowed to go anywhere that requires proof of vaccination, even though I have no protection from the virus.

    Win Dewsbury
    Sheffield, South Yorkshire

    Pub lectures

    SIR – Poor old Sir Keir Starmer only wanted a chat, but ended up telling the landlord of The Raven in Bath that he didn’t “need lectures from you” (report, April 20). But is that not what politicians must expect from us, the voters (tedious though it may be), when they go walkabout to press the flesh?

    Like Boris Johnson or loathe him, I’m sure he would have ended up having a pint with the Labour-voting publican.

    J S F Cash
    Swinford, Leicestershire

    National Trust votes

    SIR – Further to Walter Walker’s letter (April 17), we at Restore Trust welcome the support of anyone who cares about the National Trust, whether or not they are current members.

    However, only National Trust members have the power to bring about change by using their vote at its annual general meeting.

    Jack Hayward
    Restore Trust
    Bristol

    Garlic smell? Not me

    SIR – If you consume garlic on a daily basis, you do not smell of it (report, April 19). I speak from experience, as garlic is part of my daily diet; your metabolism learns to assimilate the alliin.

    David Sisson
    Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

    The masterclass in piping at the Duke’s funeral

    SIR – The lament played by the solo piper at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral (report, April 18) was Flowers of the Forest, an almost sacred pipe tune, written to commemorate the fallen at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.

    The Pipe Major last Saturday, Colour Sergeant Peter Grant, gave us a masterclass in ceremonial piping. His instrument was meticulously tuned, the drones and the chanter were in perfect harmony.

    He shortened the tune slightly to match the exact number of steps he took to slow march out of the church, and, of course, played exquisitely. It was sublime.

    Tony Craig
    Mold, Flintshire

    Hospital care for chronic conditions neglected

    SIR – The backlog of people waiting for NHS treatment (Leading article, April 16) tells only part of the problem. For some time, bed numbers have been
    reduced and people are being treated in overcrowded Accident and Emergency departments rather than being admitted to hospital.

    The regular surveillance of chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart failure, appears to have gone by the board, yet we have no means of finding out what is going on in our hospitals.

    Perhaps your efforts to highlight these problems will have some effect.

    Dr Nigel Legg
    Bracon Ash, Norfolk

    SIR – Is it not time that GPs returned to their normal service as family doctors?

    I recently tripped, fell and hit my head. Next day I had visual disturbance, so rang my GP, who told me to go to A&E. There, after shielding for the past year, I would risk contracting Covid-19, which I might then pass on to my family bubble.

    A simple GP appointment could have assessed whether such a visit was really essential.

    Caroline Jane Monro
    Lockerley, Hampshire

    SIR – Like Dr Alistair Brookes (Letters, April 15), my wife and I have had problems getting our ears syringed by a GP. Reasons given have included: “It is not a service the NHS pays for, or which GPs are required to provide,” to, “The new equipment risks damage to the ear drum”. Yet you can pay to have it done privately in a non-medical location. Does that add up?

    Blocked ear drums cause distress and discomfort, which is surely a reason for the NHS to fund the service. Latterly it was done by practice nurses, not doctors, but any risk is surely better managed in a surgery. The NHS needs to publish clear guidelines so that the public – who, after all, pay for its services – are given facts not excuses.

    Barry Bright
    Storrington, West Sussex

    1. Are GP surgeries less likely than A&E to harbour the virus? Perhaps if they’ve done the square root of diddly squat for a year, the answer could be ‘yes’.
      If the sensitive Mrs. Monroe is that bothered about passing on the lurgy, she could view her disturbed eyesight as a worthy sacrifice to the common good.

  10. SIR – How short are the memories of such clubs as the now great
    Manchester City. Only in 1998 they were playing the likes of
    Macclesfield Town in Division Two. Now they would stop any other club
    from reaching their current heights.

    Clare Morgan Alderley Edge, Cheshire

    With an adress like that, I wonder how many WAGs she knows?

  11. The only way to solve the housing crisis and enable more people to
    own their own homes is to increase supply and build more houses.
    Andy Tuke Pensford, Somerset

    The only way to solve the crisis is to STOP all illegal immigration and deport
    all those imigrants who are in UK Illegally, thereby reducing demand

    Simples

    1. The solution may be “simples”, OLT, but getting the countries we would like to return their subjects to may prove a little more difficult. And then there is the further problem of the law courts agreeing to the repatriations.

    2. The solution may be “simples”, OLT, but getting the countries we would like to return their subjects to may prove a little more difficult. And then there is the further problem of the law courts agreeing to the repatriations.

  12. SIR – Suzanne Kirk (Letters, April 20) says that it is poor practice to split an infinitive.

    H W Fowler, in his standard work Modern English Usage
    (1926), spends two and a half pages discussing the “tyranny” of the
    principle and concludes that, for clarity, it is far better to split an
    infinitive than to reduce a sentence to absurd clumsiness in the
    headlong clamour to avoid its use at all costs.

    Alan G Barstow

    Onslunda, Skåne County, Sweden

    One up for Mr Grizzle

  13. Jailed for waving flowers in the street or holding tea parties: Life in the newly totalitarian state of Belarus. 21 April 2021.

    Belarusian police are jailing people for short terms for petty infractions, in a push to unnerve its population

    Obviously they need to take lessons from the UK Government! Make sure everyone stays six feet apart. That’s a good one. Make them wear masks even though it’s not necessary. Even better. Tell them all 24 hours a day non- stop that they are in danger of dying any minute! Absolute corker that! Soon reduce them all to spineless jelly!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/21/jailed-waving-flowers-street-holding-tea-parties-life-newly/

    2. Belarus…one of the few countries to impose NO lockdowns,No social distancing,NO shop or business closures.
      And their football season carried on as normal with spectators.

  14. SIR – If you consume garlic on a daily basis, you do not smell of it (report, April 19). I speak from experience, as garlic is part of my daily diet; your metabolism learns to assimilate the alliin.
    David Sisson Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

    A bit like the stench of corruption on an MP/ex MP/exPM/present PM, in fact any pollytishun

    1. Maybe Mr. Sisson has very tactful friends and relations …. or he has none at all.

      1. For once, I disagree with you! I don’t know whether it’s daily garlic consumption or metabolism, but some people reek of garlic when they eat it, and others really don’t. (I can cite in evidence several gorgeous Italians whom I have checked at very close quarters. Well, someone has to do the research . . .

        1. That’s also the asparagus conundrum; most people know the next time they go to the loo that they’ve eaten sparrowgrass, but approx 25% are unaffected.

        2. I think much depends on the quantity used. I use garlic in stews, curries and spagbol. I think it acts as a foundation that gives other flavours a “lift”. The smell and taste of garlic are not discernible.

    2. Dear OLT

      Have you ever travelled in a Maltese bus or Taxi?

      The next most off putting experience was catching a taxi from the station in Birmingham to the NEC.. reeked of curry smell!

  15. Good Moaning: as the item is long, like Gaul, I have divided Melanie Phillips into three parts.
    Part 1:

    Rationality fights back

    Is the resistance to post-modern totalitarianism beginning to stir?

    Melanie Phillips

    Apr 20

    Might we be witnessing the beginnings of a revolt by the long-suffering centre-ground against the malign imbecilities of the age?

    In America, ground-zero of identity politics, some intriguing straws in the wind are floating out from behind the entertainment and education barricades. Even in the world of apocalypse-now climate change, it’s possible to detect some slight movement towards sanity.

    Item one, as I write in my Times column (£) today, is the Oscars. Hollywood is nervous that the audience for this Sunday’s awards ceremony may display a further disturbing drop in public interest after a declining trend in the ratings for other award ceremonies this year.

    This can’t be put down entirely to the ravages of the pandemic on cinema attendance. As the New York Times has reported, TV ratings for the Oscars ceremony plunged by 44 per cent between 2014 and last year before Covid struck.

    It’s more likely that viewers started tuning out after Tinseltown turned itself into a platform for identity politics. Awards ceremonies turned into virtue-signalling harangues, and the subjects for this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominations resemble a social justice warriors’ handbook.

    There’s poverty, immigration, more poverty, right-wing state officials stitching up a heroic political campaigner against poverty, a woman taking revenge on a violent man, a Black Panther leader assassinated by vicious right-wing state officials and — wonder of wonders — the very same Black Panther leader popping up in another possible Best Picture when his comrade is put on trial alongside principled, witty and intelligent revolutionary lefties by a vicious and risibly imbecilic right-wing legal and political system.

    Is it therefore surprising that the viewing public, which has had it up to here with the colonialist patriarchal heteronormative racist far-right white supremacism of which they have been judged guilty just by virtue of their existence, might not be rushing to bag their place on the sofa for Sunday’s three-hour TV wokefest?

    3. Long gone are the days when most films entertained us. Similarly with the effnic portrayals in tv adverts and soaps.

  16. MP Part 2:

    Item two is the stirring of revolt at some of the most exclusive high schools in America. Parents and teachers are beginning to withdraw their co-operation, children and money in fury at the hijack of these schools by anti-west, anti-white propaganda. They’re paying a fortune for their children to be indoctrinated into hating their country and their culture. Now some of them have had enough.

    After seven years, Andrew Gutmann has pulled his daughter out of Brearley, a private girls’ school in Manhattan which charges annual fees of $54,000. He has written to around 600 fellow parents to urge them to do the same on account of Brearley’s “obsession with race”.

    In this coruscating letter, which has been published on Bari Weiss’s blog, Gutmann wrote:

    I object to the view that I should be judged by the colour of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the colour of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs.

    …I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades.

    …We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country’s history and adds no understanding to any of today’s societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.

    I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners

    …If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.

    Gutmann’s letter followed a public protest, also published on Bari Weiss’s blog, by Paul Rossi, a maths teacher at the private Grace Church high school in Manhattan. Teachers there agreed to flag up students who appeared to resist its promotion of “anti-racism”. Examples of such resistance included “persisting with a colour-blind ideology,” “suggesting that we treat everyone with respect,” “a belief in meritocracy” and “just silence.”

    After Rossi protested that this pedagogy reinforced the “tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend,” a public reprimand of his conduct was read out loud to every student. National Review reports that on Sunday, the school wrote to parents and staff telling them that Rossi had been relieved of his teaching duties, and that his essay “contains glaring omissions and inaccuracies.”

    Yet now, in recordings posted online by the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism, Grace’s head teacher, George Davison, can be heard tellingRossi that the school used language that made white students “feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible for.” He also said that “one of the things that’s going on a little too much” is the “attempt to link anybody who’s white to the perpetuation of white supremacy,” and that “we’re demonising white people for being born”.

    At Dalton, yet another exclusive Manhattan school which charges annual fees of $54,180, its head teacher has resigned after an anonymous group of parents wrote an open letter objecting to its radical social justice agenda.

    Last month, the school responded to the Black Lives Matter agitation with eight pages of “proposals”. The New York Post reported:

    Those demands called for the hiring of 12 full-time diversity officers, and multiple psychologists to support students “coping with race-based traumatic stress,” requiring courses that focus on “Black liberation” and “challenges to white supremacy” and abolishing high-level academic courses by 2023 if the performance of Black students is not on par with non-Blacks.

    But according to the parents, the school’s curriculum has already been hijacked. They wrote:

    Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, “racist cop” re-enactments in science, “de-centring whiteness” in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity-training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.

  17. MP Part 3:

    Item three is a development in what is arguably the most intractable of all our current lunacies — the belief that the planet is hurtling towards apocalyptic climate change caused by man-made global warming which will destroy life on earth as we know it.

    I very much support environmental issues such as fighting pollution and safeguarding diversity in the natural world. However, catastrophic man-made global warming is a theory for which no evidence exists that sustains serious scrutiny. Constructed almost entirely from wildly inadequate and inappropriate computer modelling, grant-aid which is conditional upon research results that uphold the theory and outright intellectual frauds, the theory represents (in the words of one of its major advocates) “post-normal science,” a branch of truth-denying post-modernism which fits evidence into a preconceived belief and therefore negates the meaning of science altogether.

    In the three decades and more since this theory emerged, attempts to explain that it is anti-science by some of the most storied scientists in the world — including several who resigned in disgust as advisers to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the way their own research was being grossly misrepresented — were gradually drowned out by a corrupted scientific establishment that punished those who spoke scientific truth to this abuse of power. The media and education establishment also played their part in turning this propaganda into holy writ, with schools teaching this theory as unchallengeable fact and with the BBC actually barring global warming sceptics from its broadcasting studios on the basis that the science was “settled,” an attitude that betrayed both science and journalism.

    The reason this is arguably the most intractable issue in the west’s repudiation of reason is that, because of the systematic suppression of the evidence that undermines man-made global warming theory, very few people are aware that there is indeed another side to this claim.

    Yet even here, rationality has begun to stir. An article in the Wall Street Journal notes that the “climate community” has been backing away from the apocalyptic scenario the public now accepts as unchallengeably true. Holman Jenkins writes:

    A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”

    This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal burning a century from now. And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modellers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.

    …The strain of holding realism at bay is starting to tell. John Kerry, the new climate czar, recently blurted out that the Biden green agenda will have no effect on climate unless countries like China and India join, which they already declared they won’t.

    A bigger moment of truth will come with a book by Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist and chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department, demonstrating what the science — the plain, recognised, consensus science — says about climate change: it won’t be catastrophic. It’s unlikely to be influenced in a major way by policy actions. The costs will be large in relation to everything except the future, richer economy that will easily pay for them.

    In a paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Carnegie Mellon University’s David Rode and Paul Fischbeck argue that apocalyptic climate forecasts can erode public trust in science. You bet. And this is why. The Eureka Alert site reports:

    Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.

    Fischbeck noted, “from a forecasting perspective, the ‘problem’ is not only that all of the expired forecasts were wrong, but also that so many of them never admitted to any uncertainty about the date. About 43% of the forecasts in our dataset made no mention of uncertainty.”

    In some cases, the forecasters were both explicit and certain. For example, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and British environmental activist Prince Charles are serial failed forecasters, repeatedly expressing high degrees of certainty about apocalyptic climate events.

    Rode commented “Ehrlich has made predictions of environmental collapse going back to 1970 that he has described as having ‘near certainty’. Prince Charles has similarly warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, and when expired, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain…and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”

    The researchers noted that the average time horizon before a climate apocalypse for the 11 predictions made prior to 2000 was 22 years, while for the 68 predictions made after 2000, the average time horizon was 21 years. Despite the passage of time, little has changed–across a half a century of forecasts; the apocalypse is always about 20 years out.

    Fancy! An infinitely moveable apocalypse! Who knew?!

    Of course, all these signs of rational life are merely straws in the cultural hurricane. But they do offer hope that all is far from lost in the battle for civilisation, and suggest that the resistance to post-modern totalitarianism is beginning to stir.

    2. Because the climate change promoters are advocating earthshaking solutions to this nonexistent problem, the things that we should be doing are being ignored. We should be seeking to cut the use of plastic to zero. We don’t need to travel the world. We do not need to buy everything from China and move it here, when we could make it here. We don’t need to move soft drinks hundreds of miles when they could be bottled locally.

  19. A thunk has crossed my mind. Who is paying for Sir Kneeler’s security when he’s out on the stump?

    3. Good Question. He had one very big companion, dressed in dark suit, who restrained the pub owner when Starmer was chucked out of the pub. There may have been others.

  20. Good morning, all. Bleak sunshine – quite breezy. Woke to find a huge hare on the lawn. G & P not the least bit keen! The hare was twice their size.

    I see Mr Chauvin has – as expected (and required by politicians) – been found guilty.

    Dagnabbit – no lootin’…

  25. 331836+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 21 April: The European Super League challenge to Uefa is not going to go away

    SOD the football,
    There is a verdict coming out of America that shows quite plainly the way things are currently, and the way they are going to be improved on
    by the forces of evil going into the future.

    SOD the football,
    We as a Nation, want to be in reality once again a world leader in regaining personal common sense,integrity, decency & self respect for starters.

    Then stop using/abusing the polling booth in giving carte blanche as in condoning incarceration / suppression of free speech & personal freedoms.

    Unity in people power has proved to work in the past and so it can again, at this moment in time we the peoples hold the
    freedom, return to decent normality key, but many due to the party first,
    regardless of past odious history and consequence mode of voting
    along with the three monkeys are proving to be a successful drawback.

  26. So what was the Superleague Squirrel released to Hide or Distract from???

    My money’s on the sacking of Mercer for demanding the Bloated Turk kept his word to our troops………..

    Johnny Mercer sacked by text message after row over Northern Ireland veterans

    Veteran’s Minister fired from Government after accusing Boris Johnson of

    lacking ‘moral strength’ to protect ex-soldiers from prosecution

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/04/20/johnny-mercer-brink-resigning-betrayal-troubles-troops/
    Or it could be the latest Green Lunacy
    So much choice……….

  27. Good morning from a cloudy and slightly dull Derbyshire with a full 5°C on the yard thermometer!!

  28. If one believes that trial by jury is the best way of deciding guilt or innocence one must accept the Chauvin result.

    But imagine being a juror on that trial, knowing that any verdict other than guilty will result in riots and in all likelihood could well result the deaths of you and your family; what would you do?

    1. When you think the of the trouble Tommy got into for trying to cover a court case while it was in progress, how come these US politicians and the MSM have gotten away with trying to influence the verdict without rebuke, while this one sided interpretation of the law jury trials will not be free from influence.

      1. The whole thing was a farce of attempted undue influence, which I believe was successful.
        However, the result is the Jury’s decision and they heard all the evidence. Whether they stuck only to the evidence at the trial and paid no heed to what was going on outside is something only they can know. I know what I believe.

        I believed jury trial, under most circumstances, was the best and fairest way to be tried. But this belief is being undermined almost daily.

        It will be interesting to see if Chauvin appeals/is permitted to appeal

        1. The could not have been any other outcome to the trial to be fair, it was all on camera.

          1. Indeed.
            But as the defence noted, there was very little context and the prosecution made maximum use of that, as one would expect; and also as the prosecution virtually stated: Never mind the evidence, just use your common sense.

          2. What was all on camera?
            Chauvin using an approved restraint technique to hold a suspect who had proved more than a bit troublesome and had actually complained of being unable to breathe before being laid on the ground AT HIS OWN REQUEST?
            Many people have never bothered to even consider the video evidence beyond that 9 minute clip, nor have they considered the Tox Report on him.

    2. That was not a trial, that was a Kangaroo Court that railroaded Chauvin into Prison at the behest of the Democrat Party.

  29. The autopsy report from Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office concludes the cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” That conclusion, death due to heart failure, differs from the one reached by an independent examiner hired by the Floyd family; that report listed the cause of death as “asphyxiation from sustained pressure.”

    https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/04/869278494/medical-examiners-autopsy-reveals-george-floyd-had-positive-test-for-coronavirus

    Did GF die from heart failure or suffocation?

    A full autopsy report on George Floyd, the man who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police last month, reveals that he was positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The 20-page report also indicates that Floyd had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death, although the drugs are not listed as the cause.

    Neither – he died from COVID following self administration of an anaesthetic drug combination.

    1. My thoughts tonight are with George Floyd’s family and friends.

      He’s probably referring to the $30 Million dollars they’ve stashed away since George pegged out!

      1. That would pay off Lulu Chargealot for the No.10 flat makeover and leave enough to buy CarrieOn a new frock.

    2. Nothing the duplicitous piece of excrement that goes by the name of Boris Johnson says or does can possibly deepen my hatred and distrust of him. I thought that May had driven my hatred of politicians to its nadir but then along came Johnson. Hancock is neck and neck with Johnson with Gove coming up along the rails. What have we done to deserve such disgusting self-serving politicians?

      1. 331836+ up ticks,
        Morning KtK,
        ” What have we done to deserve such disgusting self-serving politicians?”

        Sinse major had a curry love in things have openly deteriorated, but never via the polling booth, the support / vote for the close shop LLC coalition that continues unabated.

        Our current standing as a nation is surely due
        via the continuing input of the mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella lab/lib/con, close shop coalition.

        1. We know that, ogga1, you’ve reminded this blog often enough. What do you suggest as a way out?

          1. 331836+ up ticks,
            Morning once again KtK,
            I do believe after suffering certainly these last three decades
            at the hand of the party before Country brigade and the damage they have done as can be clearly seen daily a
            “lest we forget” reminder does NOT go amiss.

            “What do you suggest as a way out?”

            IMO reverse the voting pattern that has got this nation into a high state of sh!te and near feet touching the bottom of the sh!te bog.

            Think before voting ,do I really need, can I honestly do without, MORE of this type of political driven crap.

      2. A comment in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago regarding Hancock’s declaration about the experimental injection being safe for pregnant women and that they should step up for vaccination when they get their nhs letter to make an appointment – “Hancock is starting to make
        H1t ler look like Andy Pandy.” Since the start of the ‘vaccination programme’ there has been, allegedly, a 500%+ increase in the incidence of miscarriage.

        Last night I was reading the testimonies made by their relatives about the deaths and those seriously injured by this experimental injection on fb. It makes for tragic reading. It comes across as these poor souls having been poisoned – severe fatigue, blistered eyelids, mouths covered in ulcers, skin rashes, lumps, shingles, dizziness, lack of awareness, severe headaches going on for weeks, vomiting for days, heart attacks, strokes. It would not be surprising, amongst other toxins the injection contains polyethylene glycol, known to us as antifreeze, designed, so I read, to enter every cell in the body and cross the blood-brain barrier. 3,000 dead and 182,000 with severe side effects (in only 4 months) and probably the tip of the iceberg as these events are played down and swept undef the carpet by their ‘health providers’.

        1. I know someone who has had the AZ potion. The first jab left her right arm so painful that she couldn’t drive for several days along with fatigue accompanied with a tendency to fall asleep during the day, something that had not happened before. The fatigue etc lasted for weeks.

          The second jab has, to now, had no similar side effects other than a sore arm.

          I’ve read that a real vaccine for SARS-2 has been formulated and is currently being tested. If that type of vaccine can be made, why did all the other companies go for gene therapy potions? Something that in the past, for SARS-1, has had disastrous effects on the test animals when they were exposed to the wild virus?

          1. I wish I’d looked more closely into the effect on the test animals exposed to the wild virus. At the time, I simply took the jab (Pfizer) in the hope we might get to see our son and grandchildren in Canada. Him and his ‘boss’ are already telling the little ones that they will be able to have the jab too.
            As long as the muzzles must be worn on flights and the risk of mandatory and expensive hotel quarantine both here and in Canada remains, I really have no wish to visit.

          2. So much promised by our devious government on the back of the jabs has not materialised, as clearly planned. Many millions have been duped by the likes of Johnson, Hancock etc. Sadly, I expect that when told a booster jab is required many millions will bare their arms without a thought.

          3. So much promised by our devious government on the back of the jabs has not materialised, as clearly planned. Many millions have been duped by the likes of Johnson, Hancock etc. Sadly, I expect that when told a booster jab is required many millions will bare their arms without a thought.

          4. I wish I’d looked more closely into the effect on the test animals exposed to the wild virus. At the time, I simply took the jab (Pfizer) in the hope we might get to see our son and grandchildren in Canada. Him and his ‘boss’ are already telling the little ones that they will be able to have the jab too.
            As long as the muzzles must be worn on flights and the risk of mandatory and expensive hotel quarantine both here and in Canada remains, I really have no wish to visit.

      3. A comment in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago regarding Hancock’s declaration about the experimental injection being safe for pregnant women and that they should step up for vaccination when they get their nhs letter to make an appointment – “Hancock is starting to make
        H1t ler look like Andy Pandy.” Since the start of the ‘vaccination programme’ there has been, allegedly, a 500%+ increase in the incidence of miscarriage.

        Last night I was reading the testimonies made by their relatives about the deaths and those seriously injured by this experimental injection on fb. It makes for tragic reading. It comes across as these poor souls having been poisoned – severe fatigue, blistered eyelids, mouths covered in ulcers, skin rashes, lumps, shingles, dizziness, lack of awareness, severe headaches going on for weeks, vomiting for days, heart attacks, strokes. It would not be surprising, amongst other toxins the injection contains polyethylene glycol, known to us as antifreeze, designed, so I read, to enter every cell in the body and cross the blood-brain barrier. 3,000 dead and 182,000 with severe side effects (in only 4 months) and probably the tip of the iceberg as these events are played down and swept undef the carpet by their ‘health providers’.

    3. Nothing the duplicitous piece of excrement that goes by the name of Boris Johnson says or does can possibly deepen my hatred and distrust of him. I thought that May had driven my hatred of politicians to its nadir but then along came Johnson. Hancock is neck and neck with Johnson with Gove coming up along the rails. What have we done to deserve such disgusting self-serving politicians?

    4. Boros just says ‘wot e as bin told to say’. by Biden

      If the he had any backbone, he would say what the world is thinking.

      A crook died, resisting arrest and the jury, for the sake of their own lives, the lives of their families
      and to prevent mass BLM rioting around the world, had no choice in their decision.of Guilty

      A licence has been given to crimiminals to ‘Fire at Will’, who next time, is going to be a white copper.

    5. Boros just says ‘wot e as bin told to say’. by Biden

      If the he had any backbone, he would say what the world is thinking.

      A crook died, resisting arrest and the jury, for the sake of their own lives, the lives of their families
      and to prevent mass BLM rioting around the world, had no choice in their decision.of Guilty

      A licence has been given to crimiminals to ‘Fire at Will’, who next time, is going to be a white copper.

    6. The prime minister is a disgrace – he has no common sense nor judgement at all. How can he be removed from office before he does any more damage?

      Taken with Johnson’s determination not to lose the copulatory benefits (or rites?) afforded him by his harlot if he does not destroy Britain’s economy with ‘environmental issues’ it is transparently clear that this man is not fit for any office at all.

    7. Politicians should not be commenting on the verdicts of courts – especially foreign ones.

    8. I’m utterly astonished at that response from our PM. What message does that send to law enforcement?

    9. I’m utterly astonished at that response from our PM. What message does that send to law enforcement?

    1. Is this woman mentally unstable? To say she has ‘mental health issues’ is a gross understatement – she is, to use a rather vulgar expression, batshit crazy.

    2. She really meant to say, “Thank you George Floyd for being a total asshole and screwing up your life with drugs & criminality to the point where you died of a drug overdose, but in such a way that we could railroad a police officer through a kangaroo court.”

    3. She’s nuts. To abuse the death of the man is just vile. He wasn’t a hero, not a victim. He was a criminal yet a human being who made poor choices.

    1. It looks increasingly as if blacks and whites cannot live happily together in the USA.

      Is there any answer? In South Africa they had the much reviled apartheid but the crime levels there have soared since it was ended.

      1. Separate development is an answer that works. Maybe all the whites could be relocated from a couple of States and all the blacks could move there. Although I am not sure that the take-up of the Liberian option was very successful. Liberia did OK while the black American-Liberians ran the country. When the black natives took over, it did not go so well.
        Everywhere around the world diversity has been a recipe for trouble. Homogeneity on the other hand has seen peace, order and prosperity.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia

      2. I don’t know how different the countries are – wealth, attitude, housing, poverty and what not.

        However, this increasing desperation the Left have to divide people is miserable. Why must they label everyone? Are they really so backward that they cannot just leave people alone and treat folk as individuals?

      3. In South Africa, Richard, it is reported that Apartheid is back but this time it’s blacks who are battening down on whites.

        Lovely world we live in!

  36. Nicked,all too bloody true…………..

    It’s uncanny that comedy quotes can often sum up present real life situations ……..

    General Melchett:

    If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.

    1. 331836+up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      Especially true in the polling booth and the three monkey mode of voting that has very near destroyed a nation & hasn’t lost the chance yet.

  37. Johnny Mercer sacked by text message after row over Northern Ireland veterans. 21 April 2021.

    Johnny Mercer, the Veterans’ Minister, was sacked by text message on Tuesday as he accused Boris Johnson of lacking the “moral strength and courage” to protect ex-soldiers from prosecution in Northern Ireland.

    Mercer, unusually for an MP, has done his best to protect Northern Ireland veterans from malicious prosecution and the ongoing enmity of the IRA. This is his reward. It cannot be said too often that Westminster and its denizens are the true enemies of the UK and its people!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/04/20/johnny-mercer-brink-resigning-betrayal-troubles-troops/

      1. Mercer = trouble-maker. Clearly a man of principle – who has no place in the modern “parliament”.

      2. Boris and his scumbag chief whip obviously haven’t remembered the old advice that it’s better to keep an enemy in your tent, pissing out, than have him outside, pissing in! I hope Johnny Mercer has a good prostate and can piss in a lot!

    2. Morning Minty ,

      Did I also hear that Boris had spent £10million on refurbishing the briefing room, which will no longer be required .
      Has that fat boozy Libertarian got a pox of the brain as well as in his pants .

      Why has JM been sacked .

      1. Morning, Belle.

        Read Mercer’s letter of resignation. He clearly feels that he, and the veterans he hoped to help, have been betrayed by Johnson & Co.

          1. Wait until a few million more recognise that they’ve been betrayed by Johnson over the “virus”. Surely a shit-storm of unrivalled ferocity will run through the government. Ending furlough will be a catalyst but I am hoping for something to happen earlier.

          2. Britain cannot survive Johnson much longer.

            How he made anyone think his Brexit surrender was a triumph is beyond all understanding. His WA and his ‘deal’ with the EU are catastrophic.

          3. His green agenda, coming on the back of his Covid disasters, should, in a sane World, see him out of office. However, he currently has the MSM’s backing, especially on the “vaccine success” and his green credentials. Journalism, as a fairly honest profession, is not what it used to be and we are all the poorer for that situation.

          4. Morning Richard .

            Brexit has created an unnecessary muddle for many ..

            Here is an extract from an email I replied to yesterday ..

            “It’s nice to see life returning back to normal. I visited that lovely garden centre near us to buy some pots of Lupins , remember the one you both visited when you stayed with me 2 years ago ?

            People were having coffee and cake around the large pond on the patio, the weather was very warm today, and it was good to hear the clink of china and murmur of voices .

            EXCEPT…. there is currently a shortage of plants because BREXIT has made the Dutch growers narky re-export licences and taxes and that sort of thing .. There are so many unbelievable difficulties re-importing and exporting …. anything! The plants that are available have shot up in price .

            The paperwork involved is phenomenal. ”

            Stories like that are everywhere .. I think Brexit arrived with out the proper terms and conditions .

          6. Consider what might be involved in sending a EU made item back to the manufacturer for repair. Then the manufacturer sending the repaired item back to the UK. How to explain that on Customs documents?

      2. I’d read it was 2.6 million?

        Either way, I contacted a popular streamer/writer chum of mine who has a proper studio where he interviews guests, sometimes 3 or 4 at a time. He said his set up cost about £180K, the most expensive elements being the cameras and mics, as you can imagine. What has the rest of the money been spent on?

    3. I seem to remember that Boris Johnson promised to end the iniquitous treatment of NI veterans. Why did he drop this pledge almost immediately?

      1. I presume that’s a rhetorical question! Fataturk has no shame, no integrity and no intention of keeping his promises if he can’t see a political or personal advantage – the man is a complete disgrace.

  38. Good morning all .

    Just sitting here listening to BBC radio 3 , much of which in the past 15 minutes hasn’t been to my taste, they are also advertising TV progs that I don’t need to hear about.

    I am watching the birds dart around the garden , the blackbirds are pulling worms from the flower bed I watered last night .

    Nature is doing it’s thing, and all the trees and bushes reliably reveal their beauty as Spring moves on .

    Moh is playing golf .

    Do you see what I am doing… trying to avoid the news .

    1. Do you see what I am doing… trying to avoid the news.

      Morning Belle. I take it in strictly limited doses!

    2. Morning T-B – the 10 minute slot on BBC Radio 4 Today programme at 8.10, was devoted to the George Floyd case aftermath. The BBC reporting was strongly biased toward the guilty verdicts. There was one fairly sensible contributor, Martin Luther King III, who suggested that the defence could attempt an appeal. Is there a solicitor brave enough to take on an appeal – it is an open goal?

    3. Good morning, Belle. We haven’t listened to it for years. It is hard to break the habits of a lifetime but we were forced into it in France – back in 2013 the bbc switched off the ‘beam’ from the satellite they were using to a satellite with a narrower beam. It no longer reached us in the south of France, it only just about covered northern France, so we decided to do without rather than going down the path of a more expensive solution to the problem. Being switched off, we have discovered, sharpens the perception.

      We saw our first swallows yesterday flying low (rain in the offing or a change of weather) over Therfield Heath just outside Royston. It was a joy to see them skimming the turf, a flick of the wing and a change of direction. We actually went to see and photograph the Pasque (fritillary) flowers which grow there but we were too late, they had been and gone.

    5. I might have nine holes Tmz with number two son.
      We will have hire a buggy, my left knee is giving much gyp.
      Talking of which, some of them have broken the padlocked gate and are now camping in the huge playing fields his house backs onto.
      I expect the local police face will be negotiating with the ‘travelers’.

    6. This morning, from the kitchen window, we watched a Goldcrest pulling bits of downy last year leftovers from the flowerheads of willow herb. Soft lining for a nest, I suppose.

    7. This morning, from the kitchen window, we watched a Goldcrest pulling bits of downy last year leftovers from the flowerheads of willow herb. Soft lining for a nest, I suppose.

  39. I read this morning that one thug is convicted of killing another thug in a far-away country.
    Meanwhile..time for some gardening.

  40. Derek Chauvin was jailed to appease black racists in America.

    If you reverse the situation – a white drug addled career criminal arrested and restrained by a black police officer and the white criminal died wouldn’t have garnered a flicker from the state beyond an internal investigation and exhoneration.

    Floyd was a career criminal.

    He had a choice to use drugs.
    He had a choice to use counterfeit notes
    He had a choice to be there on that day and commit a crime.

    He was arrested, he died because of his choices. No one elses.

    If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been arrested. He would be alive, like countless other black fellows in America.

    The conviction and sentencing was solely to appease black racists. Nothing else.

    1. Will anyone in the MSM have the testicular strength to state this obvious truth?

      Of course before he disintegrated as a rational person and became a woke imbecile the HIGNFY presenter, Ian Hislop, said of the court judgement against Private Eye and in favour of Robert Maxwell:

      If this is justice then I’m a banana.

      Hislop is certainly not going to make plantain complaints against the US justice system.

      (But the economy of the Caribbean and South America can only benefit as they will need extra ship loads of bananas.)

    2. basically collateral damage to, “in their mindset”, maintain momentum for Buy Large Mansions, MSM and what passes for political elites. Nothing different than BBC repeats

  41. Navalny’s supporters fear Russia’s Putin wants him dead. 21 April 2021.

    Vladimir Putin’s foremost critic was detained the moment he returned to Russia in January after treatment for nerve agent poisoning in Siberia last summer. He was then jailed for violating the terms of a court conviction widely condemned as politically motivated.

    “This weekend was pretty bad, I won’t lie,” Navalny wrote in his latest Instagram post, passed on via his lawyers, describing how he was transferred to a prison hospital after his health took a turn for the worse.

    Then why isn’t he dead is the simple answer! Why are they not starving him as opposed to doing it himself? Why did they send him to Germany for treatment when they could have let him die in Omsk? Why did he return supposing he was at risk, and moreover late; the one thing that would guarantee his gaoling? Why are they letting him talk on Instagram if they really wish to silence him? This is just an engineered farce!

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56812292

      1. It’s all about delivering the ‘right’ verdict, according to everyone interviewed on the BBC Breakfast show. If Chauvin had been found not guilty, it would have been the ‘wrong’ verdict. I don’t understand how he can be found guilty of both murder and manslaughter. One or the other, not both (and yes, I do believe he was at fault).

        1. Decision was already made before it even went to court on the basis of election result and Democrats in the big chair now. Guilty of 2nd degree and 3rd degree murder plus manslaughter with only one victim? It has to be one of the three, but as usual what passes for “law” Stateside, they hedged their bets for a win-win outcome regardless of evidence and ensured no “All White” jury

          1. Juries are frequently confused when there are multiple charges.

            I recall a case at the Old Bailey involved six young men charged with theft, robbery and conspiracy. The jury found that A conspired with B; but that B did NOT conspire with A – and the various verdicts were permutations of such nonsense. All got off on appeal, of course. And – they were all as guilty as hell. I know. I acted for them!!

          2. that’s UK, Stateside it’s the equivalent of having Groucho Marx as judge, jury, prosecution and defence and they [the TV audience] still can’t figure it out

          3. that’s UK, Stateside it’s the equivalent of having Groucho Marx as judge, jury, prosecution and defence and they [the TV audience] still can’t figure it out

        2. It’s more usual for juries to be given a choice of charges and to select the most appropriate one. Finding him guilty on all three is ridiculous and smacks of pandering to the BLM mob.

          1. Really? But I thought it was all about justice.
            “Yes, nurse, the leather straps on that jacket are very fetching.”

        3. I would have gone along with the manslaughter one but he didn’t intend to kill the guy.

          1. Hundreds of people are killed by the US police every year. Where is the outcry for them?

        4. Did he kill floyd? I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the medical findings, the drugs floyd was on, or their affect on respiration.

          Was it an acceptable form of restraint considering the criminal? I don’t know, as I am not a police officer nor do I know of the criminal’s behaviour beforehand.

          However, the only person responsible for floyd’s death was floyd. It wasn’t an accident, he wasn’t crossing the road and hit by a car, he wasn’t an innocent. He was a criminal, he was on drugs, he was arrested. He was restrained, he died.

          Choice, choice, choice, consequence.

          1. Did he kill floyd?

            No, he did not. There was enough fentanyl and other drugs in his system for him to have died whatever Chauvin did.
            Even before he was laid on the ground he was complaining verbally of not being able to breathe, indicating that he WAS able to breathe, but that the oxygen in his breath was not getting into his bloodstream.
            A classic symptom of fentanyl poisoning I am led to believe.

          2. Did he kill floyd?

            No, he did not. There was enough fentanyl and other drugs in his system for him to have died whatever Chauvin did.
            Even before he was laid on the ground he was complaining verbally of not being able to breathe, indicating that he WAS able to breathe, but that the oxygen in his breath was not getting into his bloodstream.
            A classic symptom of fentanyl poisoning I am led to believe.

    2. Not watching it , but because the BBC represent the Black Broadcasting Corporation , nothing surprises me .
      Blacks are over represented everywhere on the media .

      1. They were filming Copenhagen re corona passports and must have waited a long time to find a black lady, but they did. Not that i noticed 😏

      2. Never watch telly in the daytime. OH will put the tennis or snooker on, but that’s it. Or the Rugby.

        1. Ditto. But not even rugby, nowadays. Watched the D of E’s funeral; the last time I had the telly on in the day was way back at the first announcement about the covid malarkey – April? last year.

          1. Neither of us watched the funeral live – just the highlights in the evening. It looked as though the old boy got what he would have wanted.

          2. The live event was extremely moving. The brilliant sunshine, the silence except for the bearer party’s boots on the gravel…

            And the piper for once made the bagpipes sound nice!

          3. Having been the Drum Major of an RAF Pipe-band, hearing ‘Floo’rs o’ the Forest‘ as I’ve heard it many times at Remembrance Day Parades, brought tears to my eyes.

      3. I’m not bothered about how many there are. Heck, if I go into surgery and every face is black I don’t think ‘feckk! Da blicks!’ I just see qualified nurses and doctors.

        If all the newsreaders were the best person for the job, it just doesn’t matter but realistically with 50 applicants and one being black it’s unlikely he’ll be the best person by law of averages.

        The further we travel down this road of discrimination the further away we get from ignoring the idiocy of colour and victimhood.

        1. I wasn’t talking about Medical people , I WAS referring to the media and BBC quotas.

          I have received great care from BAME medical people , who are modest and not self seeking and do their job .

          The media are stoking the flames of racial discontent!!

          1. The same must surely apply though. In ANY environment you want the best person. That’s a meritocracy. That’s the utopia that Star Trek presented. That’s fricken’ paradise.

            The Left don’t want an equal, fair, decent society. They foster bitterness, division, hatred, spite and cruety.

        2. I wasn’t talking about Medical people , I WAS referring to the media and BBC quotas.

          I have received great care from BAME medical people , who are modest and not self seeking and do their job .

          The media are stoking the flames of racial discontent!!

      4. Indeed. My wife and I are heartily sick of the ‘diversity’ being rammed down our throats in just about every TV advert. The non-white performers may love the money but for the rest of us the whole charade is insulting and patronising. We now rarely watch a programme live, instead recording them fast-forwarding over the ads. It won’t be long before we give up and stop watching so we can avoid all the cr&p and stop subsidising the BBC.

    2. Levy seemed to take a bit longer to withdraw than the other clubs. Perhaps it’s because Spurs have a current debt of well over 500 million.
      Time for the players to take a pay cut ?

    3. None of them dare mention the life savers they have denied to the dying. Thousands upon thousands dead because they were denied Hydroxychloquine and Ivermectin, Criminal.

  46. Since football went ‘professional’ it has been more about money and business than about locality and footbal. How many of the Manchester United players, for example, were born and brought up in Manchester? Manchester United is a ‘world brand’ which might just as well have its headquarters in New York or Tokyo – where Manchester is situated is almost irrelevant.

    And so why are fans so loyal to commercial football clubs?

    And if football clubs are just brands why pretend that they have anything much to do with football or footballers. Football clubs are just about money as the current fiasco has shown.

    But of course football fans do enjoy a good punch up so why don’t other businesses get in on the act and forget about the game altogether. We could have mass meetings in car parks where the fans of the Sainsbury Sadists can do battle with the fans of the Tesco Tyrants while in the second division the Asda Assassins’ fans can take on the zealots of the Aldi Abortionists.

    1. And they have so MUCH money that they were able to twist BPAPM’s arm and be allowed to go on diving and cheating and kissing and threatening referees while the rest of the population was virtually in house arrest.

      Could never understand why wendyball (and rugby) carried on – but that dangerous, disease-spreading activity “golf” was banned.

    2. There use to be a limit to the amount of overseas player allowed to play in the English leagues. I fear todays youngsters spend so much time in side tapping around on versions of technology, school playing fields have been built over and parks are difficult to find in inner cities, no ball games allowed etc. In these modern times a lot of youngsters who might have been good players will never get the chance.

      1. Why not just bring in residential qualifications? Nobody born or living more than fifty miles from the club playing ground should be allowed to play for the club. However permanent, uninterrupted residence for a period of five – ten years should allow you to acquire the necessary residential qualification.

        1. Good idea, Richard, but, being born by the side of the River Yare, not 10 miles from Norwich, at 76 (77 next month) I don’t particularly want to play for Norwich City.

      2. That’s got me thinking. U.K. football clubs were not allowed to discriminate against EU footballers and the EU effectively extended this to go easy on non-EU footballers. Now that we’re not in the EU, can we make our own rules, thus allowing limitations on foreign players? I suppose it’s all academic, as I expect these rich clubs to bung a few million into political party coffers and the trousers of former PMs to lean on the FA.

    3. The Lisbon Lions is the nickname given to the Celtic team that won the European Cup at the Estádio Nacional near Lisbon, Portugal on 25 May 1967,] defeating Inter Milan 2–1. All but two members of the 15 man squad were born within 10 miles of Celtic Park in Glasgow, Scotland (Bobby Lennox, who was born 30 miles away in Saltcoats, and Tommy Gemmell, who was born in Motherwell 11 miles away)
      Celtic were the first British team to win the European Cup.
      That was then.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Lions

      1. The late, inimitable Jimmy Johnstone was quoted as saying: “I can still see them standing alongside us in the tunnel waiting to go out on the pitch: Facchetti, Domenghini, Mazzola, Cappellini, all six-footers with Ambre Solaire suntans, Colgate smiles and slicked-back hair.

        “Each and every one of them looked like Cesar Romero. They even smelled beautiful. And there’s us midgets. I’ve got no teeth, Bobby Lennox hasn’t got any either, and old Ronnie Simpson’s got the full monty, no teeth top and bottom.

        “The Italians are staring down at us and we’re grinning back up at them with our great, gumsy grins. We must have looked like something out of the circus.”

        https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/sport/13332255.lisbon-may-25-1967-european-cup-final-the-night-that-gave-birth-to-a-celtic-legend/

      2. The late, inimitable Jimmy Johnstone was quoted as saying: “I can still see them standing alongside us in the tunnel waiting to go out on the pitch: Facchetti, Domenghini, Mazzola, Cappellini, all six-footers with Ambre Solaire suntans, Colgate smiles and slicked-back hair.

        “Each and every one of them looked like Cesar Romero. They even smelled beautiful. And there’s us midgets. I’ve got no teeth, Bobby Lennox hasn’t got any either, and old Ronnie Simpson’s got the full monty, no teeth top and bottom.

        “The Italians are staring down at us and we’re grinning back up at them with our great, gumsy grins. We must have looked like something out of the circus.”

        https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/sport/13332255.lisbon-may-25-1967-european-cup-final-the-night-that-gave-birth-to-a-celtic-legend/

    4. The Lisbon Lions is the nickname given to the Celtic team that won the European Cup at the Estádio Nacional near Lisbon, Portugal on 25 May 1967,] defeating Inter Milan 2–1. All but two members of the 15 man squad were born within 10 miles of Celtic Park in Glasgow, Scotland (Bobby Lennox, who was born 30 miles away in Saltcoats, and Tommy Gemmell, who was born in Motherwell 11 miles away)
      Celtic were the first British team to win the European Cup.
      That was then.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Lions

  47. For the life of me, I am at a lost to understand why the UK meeja – and politicians – are spending such a lot of time on just one of many, many thousands of murders in the USA every year. WTF has it got to do with us?

    Retires to crossword – puzzled.

    3. There was a quite nauseating headline in the Telegaffe today about “This talented man who wanted to be a judge” – amazingly they were referring to a man who embarked on a life of crime and held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman during a robbery! Elsewhere in the paper is an article about a woman who lied about being raped and arranged to have herself stabbed to set up her ex lover – she has been sentenced to life imprisonment and “will serve at least 4 years”!!!

      1. Yes – I saw that – and wondered why the “life” sentence.

        Seemed to be a group of slammers – wit jealously playing its part.

        1. She should have been given a minimum of the expected sentence for her target if he had been convicted of rape and attempted murder.

          If she’d have been a man she’d have gone away for at least 10 years. It’s just another case of women getting far lower sentences than men for similar crimes. If she’d been a white working class man she’d have gone away for 20 years; white privilege, eh?

    4. Has the Bbc stopped referring to George Floyd’s arrest on ‘a minor traffic infringement’? He was actually arrested on suspicion of passing a fake $20 bill.

          1. Petty crime, though. Good Lord – anyone may be carrying a forged nine pound note…

          2. Not everyone has a lengthy criminal record. And I’m not talking about a Val Doonican LP.

          6. Crumpled Money

            With a very seductive voice the woman asked her husband, “Have you ever seen Twenty Dollars all crumpled up?”

            “No,” said her husband.

            She gave him a sexy little smile, unbuttoned the top 3 or 4 buttons of her blouse, and slowly reached down into the cleavage created by a soft, silky push-up bra, and pulled out a crumpled Twenty Dollar bill.

            He took the crumpled Twenty Dollar bill from her and smiled approvingly.

            She then asked him, “Have you ever seen Fifty Dollars all crumpled up?”

            “Uh… no, I haven’t,” he said, with an anxious tone in his voice.

            She gave him another sexy little smile, pulled up her skirt, and seductively reached into her tight, sheer panties… and pulled out a crumpled Fifty Dollar bill.

            He took the crumpled Fifty Dollar bill, and started breathing a little quicker with anticipation.

            “Now,” she said, “have you ever seen $50,000 Dollars all crumpled up?”

            “No way!” he said, while obviously becoming even more aroused and excited.

            “Well go look in the garage,” she said.

      2. Why no mention of his harassing his wife for the children in the car, that he was carrying a knife or looked as if he was on the screens and that he was saying I can’t breathe whilst standing next to the car?

      3. What makes me larrff is the way black american people keep banging on about anything that is convenient on the day to the ”we are hard done by” propaganda programme. And constantly harping on about their rights etc etc. Why don’t they take a break and go to their beloved Africa, where i’m sure they will be welcome with open arms if only just because of their colour (or not) and then give life a go. Or maybe not, they probably have already realised they wouldn’t last a week, let alone never find meaningful employment or any social benefits etc and will have to return to the country they all seem to hate so much and to be in permanent dispute with.
        Would they be happy anywhere ?

        1. Yet the real problem is that for every noisy idiot black demanding special treatment to excuse their laziness, there are hundreds of others working away, earning their wage, obeying the law and thinking ‘I wish they’d go away, they’re setting back equality centuries.’

          1. Sadly only the people with the biggest grudges who are aggressive with loudest voices seem to believe they represent the majority. And that’s a wretched human down fall.

    5. It’s ‘cos ‘ee is blick.

      The Left are trying to push that the world is racist against anyone non white. This is a lie and utter tosh, but if they keep pushing the line then they make it stick. Heck, we’ve stated the truth that immigration would lead to lower wages and were called racists. It’s a control system to enforce and promote racism as a dividing force to weaken and demoralise their pathetic agenda – whatever that is.

      What did Gobbels say? Lie big, and keep lying – only to be repeated by Junker later on. Same attitudes.

    6. It’s ‘cos ‘ee is blick.

      The Left are trying to push that the world is racist against anyone non white. This is a lie and utter tosh, but if they keep pushing the line then they make it stick. Heck, we’ve stated the truth that immigration would lead to lower wages and were called racists. It’s a control system to enforce and promote racism as a dividing force to weaken and demoralise their pathetic agenda – whatever that is.

      What did Gobbels say? Lie big, and keep lying – only to be repeated by Junker later on. Same attitudes.

    7. It’s ‘cos ‘ee is blick.

      The Left are trying to push that the world is racist against anyone non white. This is a lie and utter tosh, but if they keep pushing the line then they make it stick. Heck, we’ve stated the truth that immigration would lead to lower wages and were called racists. It’s a control system to enforce and promote racism as a dividing force to weaken and demoralise their pathetic agenda – whatever that is.

      What did Gobbels say? Lie big, and keep lying – only to be repeated by Junker later on. Same attitudes.

    8. It’s ‘cos ‘ee is blick.

      The Left are trying to push that the world is racist against anyone non white. This is a lie and utter tosh, but if they keep pushing the line then they make it stick. Heck, we’ve stated the truth that immigration would lead to lower wages and were called racists. It’s a control system to enforce and promote racism as a dividing force to weaken and demoralise their pathetic agenda – whatever that is.

      What did Gobbels say? Lie big, and keep lying – only to be repeated by Junker later on. Same attitudes.

  48. I have read this article twice, and I am aware that it’s from the DM; however, there does appear to have been some slithering around with supporters’ money which Lord B seems to have smoothed over. Is this the going rate for a title?

    If nothing else, I feel my usual subscription has been better directed to the DofE Award scheme.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9492829/Leaked-memo-shows-Tory-chief-knew-58-000-donation-Boris-Johnsons-Downing-Street-flat.html

        1. I noticed earlier that Not Lord or Sir Blair was being interviewed about something he all ready knows everything about on the BBC this morning, people like him are not welcome in my home,…… click…………..

      2. This person? “George Mark Malloch Brown, Baron Malloch-Brown KCMG PC (born 16 September 1953) is a British diplomat, communications consultant, journalist and former politician who has served as president of Open Society Foundations since 2021.”

        1. “Diplomat” my backside. A completely useless wazzock – failed at everything he did and was repeated promoted to get him away from his last fiasco.

          A bit like the fatuous Ashton wman.

        2. “Diplomat” my backside. A completely useless wazzock – failed at everything he did and was repeated promoted to get him away from his last fiasco.

          A bit like the fatuous Ashton wman.

      3. This person? “George Mark Malloch Brown, Baron Malloch-Brown KCMG PC (born 16 September 1953) is a British diplomat, communications consultant, journalist and former politician who has served as president of Open Society Foundations since 2021.”

  51. I used to know the US very well, having lived there for a time, having worked for the Middle Eastern and African operations of an American company from 1968 to 2000 and having crossed the Atlantic 67 times and the Pacific twice to attend meetings there. What I see of the US now is a far cry from those days.

    Anyway, perhaps I am the one who is out of touch with modern America, controlled by the Dems, having reviewed some of the numerous news items this morning. Here are a few gems:

    1. Mr Biden said “Today’s verdict is a step forward. No one should be above the law and today’s verdict send that message. But it’s not enough. We can’t stop here.”

    “It was a murder in the full light of day and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism … that’s a stain on our nation’s soul.” He then called for Americans to come together!

    2. Nancy Pelosi said “Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice! Nothing surpasses the honor of being with the Black Caucus today where we have seen a step in the right direction for justice done. Earlier at about 3 o’clock I spoke to the family to say to them thank you. God bless you for your grace and dignity, for the model that you are….they complimented the Congressional Black Caucus for its role it played in all this… His name [George Floyd] is synonymous with justice, and dignity and grace and honor.” (So much for his 8 prison sentences and his multiple drug use)!

    3. A Minneapolis City Council candidate publicly encouraged Black Lives Matter rioters who “feel like burning sh-t down” to target wealthy communities instead of poor ones. She also said: “The only way forward is abolishing the police, no institution should be allowed to murder in our communities with impunity.”

    4. Someone interviewed in Minneapolis said “I don’t want to say we need to start killing all white folks, but it’s like… Maybe they need to feel the pain and the hurt”

    5. George Floyd’s Girlfriend Thanks Him for Dying! She says “He Gave His Life So This Could Happen” (Cynical me thinks that she probably thanked him for dying so that she could share in the ‘compensation’ of $27 million given by the City of Minneapolis to his family weeks before the trial!)

    If the Dems don’t abolish the police, I think it is going to be very hard to recruit any more white ones.

    3. Demanding agreement of others to your own view is the act of totalitarianism.

      floyd was a criminal. His choices lead to his death. He is solely responsible for his death. Pretending otherwise is silly.

    4. The United States is not that country we knew. It has become what it once opposed!

  52. Dershowitz: Derek Chauvin Conviction Should Be Reversed on Appeal

    Renowned defense attorney and Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday that the conviction of former Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd should be overturned on appeal because of the public intimidation of the jury and the judge’s refusal to sequester the jury.

    Dershowitz noted the “outside influence” of people like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who encouraged unrest at a protest on Saturday night in nearby Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, if there was no murder conviction in the case.
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2021/04/20/dershowitz-derek-chauvin-conviction-should-be-reversed-on-appeal-biden/

    1. Appeal successful?

      Has he been eating those crispy fried pork wings again?

      I suspect that Chauvin will be dead long before any appeal can be completed.

      1. “Tragic accident in prison. Staff did all they could to save his life – sadly, he “passed”…”

        1. The autopsy and investigation reveal:

          “He fell over, broke the CCTV camera and accidentally stabbed himself, and in his pain he thrashed around continuing to stab himself, 19 times.”

        2. I said that as soon as he was found ‘guilty’ of being a white cop on the scene of a crime. He wont last a week inside.

          5. anything “.gov” is the woke propaganda. Corporations couldn’t care less on skin colour [black, white, latino etc], just get the bodies in. Basic numbers game Stateside

          6. Are you really suggesting that it is the corporations getting the prisoners in, rather than law enforcement and the courts?
            If it was a numbers game, as you suggest, they would be doing their damnedest to hang onto what they have.
            Even prisoners’ deaths are investigated, a time consuming and expensive process and if your facility is deemed unsafe you’ll not get your contract renewed.

          7. the money chain goes both ways, corporations need numbers in rgeardless [both ends of the chain get paid [courts, law enforcement, Rperesentatives, Senators, Central Govt]. If numbers expand, build another prison. Agree many relatives want deaths investigated, again another strand of the system [lawyers and lines to take to ensure correct verdict reached]. Cancel contract, everyone in the money chain loses out. Merely passing info I got from spetic mate high enough up in the mil but who deals primarily with “ex service” personnel that end up in clink

          8. I think your mate has drawn a conclusion driven by prejudice against “the system”

          13. I believe that his notoriety will make him a target for every aggressive black prisoner seeking revenge for their own predicaments and that unless monitored 24/7 that he will be raped, probably repeatedly and that he will be lucky if he even survives his sentence.

          14. Just like Andy Dufresne.
            If the US prison authorities had any sense they would put him in solitary and move him out to another state, give him a new Id and leave him be.
            But they don’t seem to have any sense.

        3. I said that as soon as he was found ‘guilty’ of being a white cop on the scene of a crime. He wont last a week inside.

    2. Plastic Joe put his oar in as well if only to garner more votes any which sleazy way.

    3. Forgive me, but is the threat of violence and thuggery if you don’t get what you want politically merely fascism?

      The Left keep saying the Right are fascists, but… it’s them. It is always them.

      1. And that attitude of threats and violence is exactly what we see on Police tv progs when RoPers are crowding round officers and making very thinly veiled threats about the officers partners and children – all caught on video – and absolutely NOTHING done about them. The police should be charging them with EVERYTHING they do – NOT let them get away with it – only to increase the threats next time.

        1. Yes – law must be absolute and equal, otherwise it’s not law.

          However, the state has somehow become hypocritical where some laws are applied and others not to some groups, but not others.

          Justice is blind – except when it suits those applying the law.

      2. And that attitude of threats and violence is exactly what we see on Police tv progs when RoPers are crowding round officers and making very thinly veiled threats about the officers partners and children – all caught on video – and absolutely NOTHING done about them. The police should be charging them with EVERYTHING they do – NOT let them get away with it – only to increase the threats next time.

    4. Forgive me, but is the threat of violence and thuggery if you don’t get what you want politically merely fascism?

      The Left keep saying the Right are fascists, but… it’s them. It is always them.

  53. BBC Radio 4 reported this morning that Our PM may have broken protocol by negotiating by text with Dyson to give him assurance that his company would be safe if it produced much needed ventilators for the NHS. Rishi Sunak was aware of the texts. Apparently a senior civil servant should have been involved but wasn’t. Some one must have revealed these texts to the public.

  54. I didn’t see anything come out of Chauvin’s trial of witnessed racism or that he treated Floyd any differently because of his race. Did I miss it or is this all some bandwagon completely ignoring reality and reason?

  55. 331836+ up ticks,
    A great fear is, on par with the 1665 great
    (real) plague, and that the people’s will encourage the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration coalition to greater efforts in race replacement by continuing their regular ( society destructive ) vote on the 6th May, as in, more of the same by people’s request.

    https://twitter.com/MigrationWatch/status/1384771384363163648

    1. 331836+ u-p ticks,
      O2O,
      Cannot be done the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella coalition current
      supporter / member / voters say NO.

      1. 331836+ up ticks,
        Afternoon HM,
        The wretch cameron knocked the arse completely out of the vow,promise & pledge rhetorical patter.

    3. Her vows are just about as sincere and meaningful as Boris Johnson’s vows to his wives and promises to his mistresses, whores, the mothers of his illegitimate children and the foetus-carrier of his aborted child.

      1. Rastus, with his litany of deceit and lies to the many women in his life, and especially to his former wife, why would anyone believe that his political promises/proposals are worth considering? Johnson cast aside his electoral mandate as quickly and easily as he previously cast aside his women when the arrival of CV-19 offered greater opportunities of control etc. A very nasty piece of work and the UK will rue the day that he was elected as PM.

        1. ‘Afternoon, Korky, “…and the UK will is rueing the day that he was elected as PM.”

        2. ‘Afternoon, Korky, “…and the UK will is rueing the day that he was elected as PM.”

      2. I wonder – genuinely wonder – if they’ve all just gone native.

        The civil service is huge, oppressive and incredibly well funded. If it plays it’s usual games of delay and lie and fights ministers then this is what would happen.

  56. I’ve just watched Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly.
    A lot of camera time was given to Prime Minister MM….the next President of Russia?

    1. If Putin goes on living as long as our queen is doing then the Russian prime minister will have a Prince Charles sort of existence.

      Didn’t Godot’s friends have Russian sounding names?

    2. ‘Fraid, Harry, I, and probably many others, don’t know who Prime Minister MM is. Mutti Merkel?

        1. Never heard of ‘im but he’s probably a shoo-in, as Putin becomes PM and MM President (under Putin’s jurisdiction) as the other guy whose name began with M was President for a while with Putin as PM.

    3. ‘Fraid, Harry, I, and probably many others, don’t know who Prime Minister MM is. Mutti Merkel?

  57. Implement the Minsk Agreement that Ukraine signed..no need for media gestures.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has offered to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin “anywhere” in Donbass, where a conflict has simmered for seven years between Kiev and breakaway republics supported by Moscow.
    Speaking during a public address on Tuesday night, Zelensky urged the restoration of the ceasefire agreed to in 2014 in Minsk, Belarus, as part of a peace plan Kiev has refused to implement. As well as Ukraine and Russia, Germany and France were also signatories to the deal.

    “There was a proposal to meet on the line of contact to see and understand the situation as accurately as possible,” Zelensky said, speaking in Russian. “What is there for me to understand? I go there every month. Mr. Putin, I am ready to go even further and offer to meet you anywhere in the Ukrainian Donbass where the war is going on.”

        1. Pole sana, Kenya power another long lunch break. the demarcation boundary is I think Blackfriars Bridge or St Pauls Cathedral, either way, the point made’s not lost

        2. Pole sana, Kenya power another long lunch break. the demarcation boundary is I think Blackfriars Bridge or St Pauls Cathedral, either way, the point made’s not lost

    3. Have there been any prime ministers since Margaret Thatcher who did not deserve to be assassinated?

    5. They’re liars, we know that. They’e also desperate to control us. We know that as well.

    1. Probably one of the few who grow old gracefully – and continue to do her duty. Vivat Regina!

  60. Yippeeeee…

    BEIRUT (Sputnik) – Syrian President Bashar Assad has put forward his candidacy for the presidential election scheduled for 26 May, Parliament Speaker Hammouda Sabbagh said on Wednesday.

    “The head of the People’s Council [the parliament] announced that the council was notified by the Supreme Constitutional Court of the registration of Bashar Hafez Assad’s request for the post of president of the republic. He became the sixth candidate to apply for the presidential elections,” the speaker said, as quoted by the state-run SANA broadcaster.

    Earlier in April, the parliament announced that Syria will hold its presidential election on26 May, while the candidate registration started on Monday.

  61. 331836+ up ticks,
    We the decent people contingent within the Kingdom should encourage this khan mindset, think of the aid program savings also mass deportation would relieve infrastructure considerable ie education,
    accommodation, incarceration, medication, it would also be a boon to fighting the rape & abuse of the pakistani paedophile brigade.

    Please DO start a boycott war, I’ll back you.

    Pakistan Urges Muslim Trade War Against West for Allowing ‘Insulting the Prophet’ Blasphemy

    1. I’ll insult you, Paki, your stupid ideology and your mumbling paedophile if I wish.

      1. Yes, they’ve rather missed the point of free speech. The thing that sets society above a rabble.

  62. I wonder if the George Floyd case is going to generate pressure on some black families to push family members to make armed attacks on the police in the hope that they will be killed while doing so and that the state will then give the families several millions of dollars in compensation? It could be a nice little earner.

    2. The problem is how to prevent black communities from rising up, looting, vandalising and arson when they disagree with the authorities? How can we do this and avoid lethal force? Do we just have to grin and bear it?

      1. If they rise up and will not desist from looting (larceny) and obstruct the law – shoot ’em down, like the terrorists they are.

        1. That’s what I admire about you, Tom. You always show your soft side!
          :-))
          #meetoo, btw.

      2. Oh, that bits easy. Collar them when they start complaining. Attach a lead and loop it around a post.

        If they won’t behave like humans then they’ll be treated like dogs and made to obey. If they succeed at dog training, then we can start with potty training. I imagine ifthey were to read that they’d be uppity but.. just proves their lack of civility.

    3. What the verdict could well do is to make American police officers think twice before using their guns. That could be a good thing, but could also lead to more police officers being killed because they hesitated.

      1. And more innocent bystanders too.

        Imagine a police officer hesitating just as a killer with a semi-automatic rifle opens fire and being wounded or killed and that terrorist then continuing to kill several people because the officer was taken down.

      4. Or… fewer arrests and more shootings by police officers.

        As it is, the whole thing stinks and will do nothing but diminish the police.

  63. Exports of Russian wheat and meslin flour more than doubled in January-February when compared with the same period of 2020, amounting to 7.59 million tons, according to the Federal State Statistics Service.
    In monetary terms, wheat supplies abroad more than doubled to $1.884 billion. Exports of vegetable oil rose by 3.1% in annual terms and amounted to 589.2 thousand tons. They were worth more than $630 million.

    Statistics also show that export of cereals by Russia in 2019 amounted to 39.4 million tons (including 31.9 million tons of wheat and meslin). Grain shipments in the 2019-2020 agricultural year (from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020) stood at 41.7 million tons. The country also supplied 33.2 million tons of wheat to the global market. The Ministry of Agriculture projects that in the 2020-2021 agricultural year grain exports will amount to 45 million tons.
    Last April, Russia capped grain shipments until July, to avoid domestic price spikes amid the global coronavirus crisis. Moscow introduced export limits for certain grains, including wheat, rye, barley, and corn, capping supplies at seven million tons.

    Booming agricultural production in recent years has enabled Russia to capture more than half of the global wheat market, becoming the world’s biggest exporter of grain, thanks to bumper harvests and attractive pricing. Since the early 2000s, this share of the global wheat market has quadrupled.

    1. While we, in rural England are having our arable farmland covered with Solar Panels and our import of food will rise beyond 39%.

    1. He has the right to do as he pleases, I suppose and we have the right to criticise him for it and to not vote for him ever again

      1. He may say what he wants – as a private individual. But this comment is made a bloody Prime Minister – and, therefore, represents the nation’s view..

          5. 331836+ up ticks,
            B3,
            I don’t care how appealing boris is if he & party are reelected as with lab/lib
            then it is surely game,set,& match for Blightly.

          6. 331836+ up ticks,
            B3,
            I don’t care how appealing boris is if he & party are reelected as with lab/lib
            then it is surely game,set,& match for Blightly.

          7. What do you mean if?

            There has been so much in the way of political interference that he will appeal and probably be given a retrial.

    2. From the limited evidence that has been published it is clear that the members of the jury have been grossly misled by the emotional arguments of both prosecution and defence lawyers whilst blindfolded to suppressed parts of key scientific reports publicly available from multiple medical examiners.

      The PM I’m sure is not in a position to comment on the jury’s verdict without the full disclosure of scientific evidence on which he solely relies to make informed judgements about the medical treatment of UK citizens.

    3. From the limited evidence that has been published it is clear that the members of the jury have been grossly misled by the emotional arguments of both prosecution and defence lawyers whilst blindfolded to suppressed parts of key scientific reports publicly available from multiple medical examiners.

      The PM I’m sure is not in a position to comment on the jury’s verdict without the full disclosure of scientific evidence on which he solely relies to make informed judgements about the medical treatment of UK citizens.

    4. One that I posted earlier

      Boros just says ‘wot e as bin told to say’. by Biden

      If the he had any backbone, he would say what the world is thinking.

      A crook died, resisting arrest and the jury, for the sake of their own lives, the lives of their families
      and to prevent mass BLM rioting around the world, had no choice in their decision.of Guilty

      A licence has been given to criminals to ‘Fire at Will’, who next time, is going to be a white copper.

      1. …and the autopsy identified that he did NOT die of asphyxiation but rather from a drug overdose of fentanyl.

        It just goes to shew that the US Justice System is as warped as our own.

    5. One that I posted earlier

      Boros just says ‘wot e as bin told to say’. by Biden

      If the he had any backbone, he would say what the world is thinking.

      A crook died, resisting arrest and the jury, for the sake of their own lives, the lives of their families
      and to prevent mass BLM rioting around the world, had no choice in their decision.of Guilty

      A licence has been given to criminals to ‘Fire at Will’, who next time, is going to be a white copper.

  65. Well, great excitement. The MR and I are going on an OUTING – to Narridge – the first time (apart from going to the horsepiddle) since last June.

    And – to add to the tension – another, similar one tomorrow….

    I don’t know whether I will be able to sleep – what with the anticipation…!

    Back later.

    2. We had a lovely lunch outside Wagamama. Rocked up, waited 5 mins for a table and that was it.
      None of all the dispiriting nonsense.

    3. We had a lovely lunch outside Wagamama. Rocked up, waited 5 mins for a table and that was it.
      None of all the dispiriting nonsense.

  68. London Bridge emergency: Station evacuated and trains diverted – police scramble

      5. If the trains are able to run through the station, run the services straight through to Blackfriars, Canon Street or Charring Cross without stopping.

        If they are not able to run through, you’re buggered.

    3. It was a big fat Rasta lying in the middle of the road shouting “I can’t breeve, $50,000, I can’t breeve”., “Find me a copper, I can’t breeve”.

  69. London Bridge emergency: Station evacuated and trains diverted – police scramble

    4. I realised a long time ago that the rear head & shoulders view of an overweight baldie often resembled the glans of the penis with the foreskin pulled back!

    1. Hey man, we were all chilled out like, did a bit of filming of girl on girl stabbing for the album

      1. It’s tradition. The English have their collar and tie, their high teas. The Scots have their bagpieps and kilts and Blick Sarf Lununers have their knives and guns. The ho’s don’t get their stabbers until they have left kindergarten – or the locked back room where they learn to pick pockets and pass on ‘brown stuff’ that their bro’s bring home each night.

        1. and there was innocent me thinking that they had been doing a cooking class at school and the knives were for chopping veggies.

  76. Only in his first sentence and his remark about Johnson engaging with the public does Sumption suggest that he wrote this while nearer to the end of the bottle of claret rather than the start.

    Keir Starmer has betrayed a chilling truth about lockdown

    It is a travesty that Labour’s leader denounced a landlord who questioned shutdowns as a Covid denier

    JONATHAN SUMPTION

    Sir Keir Starmer was arguably the first Labour leader of real stature since John Smith died in 1994. The big disappointment since his election has been his position on the pandemic.

    From the outset, his approach has been to take every Government policy and double it. If the Government locks us down, he says that they should have done it earlier. If the Government relaxes its grip, he says that it should have happened later. If the Government opens the schools, he wants them closed for longer. If there are sparks of our former liberal tradition left, he wants them extinguished.

    The mark of true moral and political stature is a willingness to stand up for the public interest in the face of public fear and governmental folly. Why has Sir Keir failed to live up to his initial promise?

    On Monday, he was put on the spot in Bath by Rod Humphris, the landlord of The Raven pub, who threw him off his premises. Mr Humphris’s business, like countless others, has been closed down by ministerial order for seven of the last 12 months. As one might imagine, he has not taken kindly to being treated like this.

    Initially, Mr Humphris was manhandled into a corner of his own pub by security men. When he was eventually allowed to confront Sir Keir, he made two basic points, crudely and loudly but effectively. First, the lockdown was indiscriminate. Instead of protecting the old by sheltering them, the Government tried to do it by interfering with the right of the young and healthy to visit his pub and his own right to serve them. Secondly, the lockdowns have not worked, and have themselves caused thousands of deaths. Sir Keir, he concluded, had “failed to do his job and ask the right questions”.

    Whether one agrees with Mr Humphris or not, these are serious points which deserved an answer. For all his faults, Boris Johnson is at least capable of engaging with real people in the streets. If Sir Keir had answers to the “right questions”, he would surely have explained them to Mr Humphris. Instead, he allowed himself to be hurried away by his minders, mumbling something about hard-working NHS staff and not being willing to take lectures on the pandemic from the likes of Mr Humphris.

    Moments later, Sir Keir was interviewed by a nearby camera crew. His answers were enlightening, mainly for what they failed to say.

    His first point was that Mr Humphris was a Covid-denier. He had “queried… whether there was a pandemic at all”. The Labour Party later issued a statement accusing him of “spreading misinformation”. This old cliché is often used as a way of evading serious issues. In this case it was a travesty. No sensible person disputes that there is a pandemic or that it is serious. The questions are whether lockdowns are the most effective way of dealing with it and, if so, whether they are worth the appalling collateral damage. We are entitled to expect a leader of the opposition who favours them to have answers to these questions, and to explain them to members of the public who have been faced with ruin.

    Sir Keir’s other point was that most of the public would disagree with Mr Humphris’s views about the lockdown. So they would, judging by the opinion polls. But is that really all that the Leader of the Opposition has to say? Wrecking businesses across the nation is fine if the public is in favour. Perhaps, however, he touched on an important point here, albeit by accident. When democracy becomes a mechanism for mass coercion by governments, with the approval of the opposition, it is surely heading towards its end.

    What is a totalitarian state? It is a state in which citizens have no autonomy because they are mere tools of government policy.‡ Until last March, it was unthinkable to treat citizens like this at the discretion of ministers. No government statement, planning document or published scientific advice ever previously contemplated such a thing. Why not? Because it was thought to be morally repugnant as well as economically destructive. A Leader of the Opposition should be able to do more than mouth platitudes when someone points this out to him in the street.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/20/keir-starmer-has-betrayed-chilling-truth-lockdown/

    ‡ Quite. It is hard to explain to some people that totalitarianism isn’t the gulags, the salt mines, the death camps, the 2am knock on the door, the unmarked graves in the deep, dark forest. It can be almost benign. The mere hint of a threat is enough.

  77. Weather turning funny , cliffs are misty , sea visibility almost zero, turned cloudy, temp has dropped .

    i have been out with the dogs , walked around a large sheep free field .. the perimeter bordered by a lovely wood on one side , fenced off, and the view from the field was high enough to almost see the Lulworth ranges on the Purbecks.

    The army are busy firing mortars , boom boom, yesterday was very noisy, lots of helicopter activity and more boom boom /

    The grassy field was full of dandelions , some clover , and buttercups , but the edge near the wood was delightful, bluebells, violets , bugle and early purple orchid and a few other flowers that I am trying to identify .. blackthorn still blossoming and hawthorn which is rather early.

    The dogs weren’t too bothered by the noise from the artillery .

    Moh will probably snooze this afternoon, he has just arrived home from golf.

    1. Bloody snowing here.

      Monday it warm enough to wear shorts, today the world is white.

  78. Weather turning funny , cliffs are misty , sea visibility almost zero, turned cloudy, temp has dropped .

    i have been out with the dogs , walked around a large sheep free field .. the perimeter bordered by a lovely wood on one side , fenced off, and the view from the field was high enough to almost see the Lulworth ranges on the Purbecks.

    The army are busy firing mortars , boom boom, yesterday was very noisy, lots of helicopter activity and more boom boom /

    The grassy field was full of dandelions , some clover , and buttercups , but the edge near the wood was delightful, bluebells, violets , bugle and early purple orchid and a few other flowers that I am trying to identify .. blackthorn still blossoming and hawthorn which is rather early.

    The dogs weren’t too bothered by the noise from the artillery .

    Moh will probably snooze this afternoon, he has just arrived home from golf.

      1. 331836+ up ticks,
        Afternoon P,
        The success the entrance campaign is having
        the replaced electorate could very well be this year, it seems to be doubling up very rapid.

      2. 331836+ up ticks,
        Afternoon P,
        The success the entrance campaign is having
        the replaced electorate could very well be this year, it seems to be doubling up very rapid.

    3. They lied. As they seem to have lied about everything.

      Damned Patel is inviting the wretches here.

      1. 331836+ up ticks,
        Evening W,
        Been going on for donkeys, many peoples knew that but just went into three monkey mode when entering the polling booth.

      2. 331836+ up ticks,
        Evening W,
        Been going on for donkeys, many peoples knew that but just went into three monkey mode when entering the polling booth.

  83. Probably a tad late here but that USA cop was going to be guilty, even if Perry Mason had defended him. He’ll be murdered in prison eventually.

      1. Opened fine here. Anyway here’s a copy paste, not sure if weblinks embedded will work:

        1. – The Anglo-Saxons have a hereditary enemy: the Russians. For them, Russians are despicable people, destined since Otto I (10th century) to be nothing but slaves, as their name indicates (‘Slavic’ means both ethnicity and slave). In the 20th century, they were against the USSR, allegedly because it was communist, and are now against Russia without knowing why.

        2- Second adversary, enemies they have created for themselves by waging an “endless war” against them since September 11, 2001: the
        populations of the wider Middle East, whose state organisation they are systematically destroying, whether they are allies or adversaries, in
        order to “send them back to the stone age” and exploit the riches of their region (Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy).

        3- Third adversary: China, whose economic development threatens to relegate them to second place. In their eyes, they have no other choice than war. This is at least what their political scientists think, and they even speak of the “Thucydides trap” in reference to the war that
        Sparta waged against Athens, frightened by its flight.

        4 – The issues of Iran and North Korea are far behind the first three.

        Joe Biden has always been the “Pentagon’s man”.

        Joe Biden’s Interim National Security Strategy or their Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community keep repeating this from different angles.

        Fighting three wars at once is extremely difficult. The Pentagon is currently looking at how to prioritise these. It will report in June. There is absolute secrecy about the commission that is doing this assessment. No one even knows who the members are. Yet without delay, the Biden administration is focusing on Russia.

        Whether we are independent or subservient to the “American Empire”, we must stop trying to avoid seeing. The United States of America has no other objective than to destroy Russian culture, Arab state structures, and – eventually – the Chinese economy. This has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate defence of their people.

        There is no other way to explain why the United States spends astronomical sums on its military that bear no relation to the budgets of those it describes as its “friends” or “enemies”. According to the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the US military budget is at least equal to the sum of the budgets of the other 15 most armed states. Military budgets of the 15 largest states (in billions of US dollars).

        Issues for confrontation with Russia

        The US is concerned about Russia’s recovery. After experiencing a sharp drop in life expectancy between 1988 and 1994 (5 years less), it
        has recovered, then largely surpassed that of the Soviet era (12 years more), although its healthy life expectancy remains one of the lowest in Europe. Their economy is diversifying, particularly in agriculture, but remains dependent on energy exports. Their army has been renewed, their military-industrial complex is more efficient than the Pentagon’s, and it has acquired experience in Syria.

        For Washington, the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline threatens to free Western Europe from its dependence on US oil. While the attachment of Crimea to the Russian Federation, and even that of Donbass, is at least partially a blow to Ukraine’s dependence on the
        American Empire (Crimea and Donbass are not of Western culture). Finally, the Russian military presence in Syria is slowing down the
        project of political destruction of all the peoples of this region.

        “When you want to drown your dog, you say it has rabies”

        It was undoubtedly President Biden who opened the hostilities by calling the Russian president a “killer”. The two powers had never exchanged insults, even in the Gulag era. His interlocutor replied politely and offered to discuss the matter publicly, which he refused.

        The United States has a short-term view of the world. They do not see themselves as responsible for their legacy. According to them, the evil
        Russians have amassed more than 100,000 troops in the vicinity of Ukraine and are preparing to invade it, as the Soviets did in Poland,
        Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But then it was not Russia, but the USSR; not the Putin doctrine, but the Brezhnev doctrine; and Leonid Brezhnev himself was not Russian, but Ukrainian.

        The Russians, on the contrary, have a long-term view of the world. In their view, the barbaric Americans challenged the balance of power with
        the attacks of 11 September 2001. Immediately afterwards, on December 13, 2001, President Bush announced the withdrawal of the United States from the ABM Treaty. The United States then brought into NATO, one by one, almost all the former members of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR in violation of their promise at the time of the dissolution of the latter. This policy was confirmed by the Bucharest Declaration in 2008.

        Everyone knows the peculiarity of Ukraine: Western culture in the West, Russian culture in the East. For about fifteen years, the country was politically frozen, until Washington organised a pseudo-revolution and put its puppets, in this case neo-Nazis, in power. Moscow reacted quickly enough for Crimea to declare its independence and join the Russian Federation, but it hesitated for the Donbass. Since then, it has been handing out Russian passports to all the inhabitants of this Ukrainian region for which it is the only hope.

        The Biden administration

        President Biden was known, when he was a senator, for introducing legislation in the Senate that was devised by the Pentagon. When he
        became president, he surrounded himself with neo-conservative figures. We cannot repeat it enough: the neo-conservatives were Trotskyite
        militants who were recruited by Republican President Ronald Reagan. Since then, they have always remained in power, except during the
        parenthesis of Jacksonian President Donald Trump, switching from the Republican to the Democratic Party and back again.

        During the colourful Maïdan ’revolution’ (2013-14), Joe Biden, then vice-president, took up the cause of the neo-Nazis who were agents of Nato’s stay-behind networks He ran the operation with one of the then assistant secretaries of state, Victoria Nuland (whose husband, Robert Kagan, is a founder of the Project for a New American Century, the fundraising arm of Republican George W. Bush). President Biden decided to make her the deputy to his new Secretary of State. She relied on the then US ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, now posted in Athens, Greece. As for President Biden’s new Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, he is both judge and jury because his mother is of Ukrainian origin. Although he was raised in Paris by his mother’s second husband, te lawyer Samuel Pisar (advisor to President Kennedy), he is also a neo-conservative.

        Preparing for the confrontation with Russia

        In mid-March 2021, the United States and its Nato partners organised the Defender-Europe 21 manoeuvres. These will continue until June. This is a repeat of the mega-exercise Defender-Europe 20, which was reduced and shortened due to the Covid-19 epidemic. It is a huge deployment of men and equipment to simulate a confrontation with Russia. These manoeuvres are joined by a nuclear bomber exercise in
        Greece, attended by the aforementioned Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.

        On March 25, President Volodymyr Zelensky published the new Ukrainian Security Strategy, three weeks after President Joe Biden published the US one.

        Responding to Nato, Russia undertook its own manoeuvres on its western border, including its border with Ukraine. It was even sending
        additional troops to Crimea and as far as Transnistria.

        On 1 April, the US Secretary of Defense called his Ukrainian counterpart about a possible increase in tension with Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a statement saying he was monitoring Russian moves that could be provocative.

        On 2 April, the United Kingdom organised a meeting of the British-Ukrainian Defence and Foreign Ministries, under the responsibility of British Minister Ben Wallace (who was very active in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict).

        On April 2, President Joe Biden called his Ukrainian counterpart to assure him of his support against Russia. According to the Atlantic Council, he announced his decision to give him a hundred combat aircraft (F-15, F-16 and E-2C) currently based at Davis-Monthan air base.

        On April 4, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Adam Smith, negotiated with Ukrainian parliamentarians to
        provide large subsidies to the Ukrainian army in exchange for the Ukrainian commitment to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Discreet return trip to Qatar by President Zelensky and the head of the Ukroboronprom arms factories on April 5, 2021.

        On April 5, President Volodymyr Zelensky paid a visit to Qatar. The official purpose was to develop trade relations. Qatar is the main
        supplier of weapons to the jihadists and, according to our information, the question of possible financing of fighters was discussed. The
        director general of the military manufacturer Ukroboronprom, Yuriy Gusev, was on the trip. It was he who had supplied weapons to Daesh on order from Qatar.

        On April 6, Lithuania, which in the past protected the western part of Ukraine in its own empire, enquired about the military situation.
        President Zelensky receives the Chairman of the Nato Military Committee on April 7, 2021.

        On 6 and 7 April, British General Sir Stuart Peach, Chairman of the Nato Military Committee, visited Ukraine to clarify the reforms
        necessary for the country to join Nato.

        On 9 April, in accordance with the Montreux Convention, the Pentagon informed Turkey of its intention to transit warships through the
        Dardanelles and Bosporus straits.

        After discussing weapons and money with Sheikh Tamin in Qatar,
        President Zelinski came to talk about men with his Turkish counterpart,
        Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on 10 April 2021.

        On April 10, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan received his

        Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul as part of regular
        consultations between the two nations.

        In view of the Qatari endorsement, Nato member Turkey immediately began recruiting international jihadists in Syria to fight in the Ukrainian
        Donbass. Turkish military instructors were also sent to the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, the headquarters of the International Islamist Brigade, created by President Erdoğan and his then Ukrainian counterpart with Tatars loyal to Washington against Russia.

        Logically, the Russian Federation was amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. So its partners in the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) questioned it about its manoeuvres. The Russian side only answered evasively. The Vienna Document (1999) obliges OSCE members to provide each other with all information on the movements of their troops and equipment. But we know that the Russians do not operate like the West. They never inform their people or their partners during an operation, only when their deployments are over.

        Two days later, the G7 issued a statement expressing concern about Russian movements, but ignoring those of Nato and Turkey. It welcomed
        Ukraine’s restraint and called on Russia to “stop its provocations”.

        On April 13, on the occasion of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting with the Ukraine/NATO Commission, the United States pulled out all the
        stops. All the allies – none of whom wanted to die because the Ukrainians could not get a divorce – were invited to support Kiev and denounce Russia’s “escalation”. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held extensive talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kouleba. War was inexorably on the way.

        Suddenly, President Joe Biden lightened the mood by phoning his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. He proposed a summit meeting,
        whereas Putin had dismissed the proposal for a public debate when he had insulted him. After this initiative, war seemed avoidable.

        On April 14, Antony Blinken, however, summoned his main allies (Germany, France, Italy and the UK) to mobilise them. President Biden clarified his position on Russia on April 15, 2021.

        On April 15, President Joe Biden gave his vision of the conflict, expelled ten Russian diplomats. He imposed sanctions on Russia, which was accused not only of rigging elections to get President Donald Trump elected, but also of offering bounties for the assassination of US soldiers in Afghanistan and of attacking federal computer systems using SolarWinds software.

        Predictably, Russia expelled a similar number of US diplomats. In addition, it set a trap for a Ukrainian diplomat, who was caught in the
        act of espionage with classified documents in his hand.

        Continuing on his path, President Volodymyr Zelensky went to meet his French and German counterparts, President Emmanuel Macron and
        Chancellor Angela Merkel. While deploring the Russian escalation and reaffirming their moral support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, they were evasive about what would happen next. In the end, if the United States and Russia are to meet and discuss, it is a bit early to die for Kiev.

    2. I saw that article. Very interesting. It is intended for use in Africa using mine shafts. Here’s how it works.
      1. Dig a very deep vertical mine shaft*.
      2. Construct the necessary strong housing at the top of the shaft s well as the internal framework and guides**.
      3. Install the weights and wires, dynamos etc**.
      4. Train the operational staff* to drag the weight from the bottom of the shaft*.
      5. Train a supervisor to release the weight after the haulers have let go*.
      6. Repeat as required*.
      7. Write a report regarding the reasons for failure**.

      * Black slaves.
      ** Edinburgh University engineers.

    5. “Each weight would produce about 1MWh of energy storage capacity, enough to provide power to hundreds of homes for an hour, and would cost £8 to £16m to build.”
      Maybe it would be doable at the £8 projected price.

      1. How does the weight get back up to the top? Where does the power come from for that?

  86. Johnny Mercer has been sacked as Veterans’ Minister after threatening to resign unless the Government addressed the issue of the malicious prosecutions of Northern Ireland veterans. Could Mr. Mercer be that rarest of creatures – a politician with principles?

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9492571/Johnny-Mercer-quits-Veterans-Minister.html

    We’re tired of your foot-dragging, Boris, tired of your weasel words and your equivocations. Come the next election, we will remember.

  87. Afternoon everybody how goes it, well, I hope.

    Feeling smug now. Just defrosted and cleaned out the freezer – well past time it was. Took about half an hour with the hair dryer and a couple of e-cloths to wipe out. Good job out of the way.

    Playing our first game of Bowls this evening so looking forward to that. The ground will be fairly heavy but speeds up as spring becomes summer and then it becomes faster too. Also a chance to see other club members we haven’t used for months. Should be good.

    1. glad you got freezer squared away. The generic rule of thumb here is await long power cut then sort, or adjusting to local reality. Still yours is done and bowls to follow. Have a good one

    2. Afternoon vw – what do you use the club members for?
      Glad you got the freezer done – it’s something we always put off for too long.

    5. I defrost the freezer by putting a saucepan of boiling water on the shelf and shutting the door of the disconnected appliance.
      The lumps of ice that drop off are very satisfying.

    6. I use a wallpaper striper steamer with the appropriate jet nozzle fitted. All ice gone in under 10 mins.

      3. That’s really fast. We don’t possess a wallpaper steamer so the hair dryer is the next best for us. Anyway job done thank goodness. One of those jobs you know needs doing but …

    7. I use a wallpaper striper steamer with the appropriate jet nozzle fitted. All ice gone in under 10 mins.

    1. I do wonder what on earth is wrong with Boris that given the ability to ignore green policy, to grow the economy, to recover and exceed the pathetic EU, to create jobs, foster wealth, reduce poverty, security and unhappiness he does the exact sodding opposite.

      Is he just a liar? A fraud? Are they all liars? If so, why do we tolerate them?

  89. Heading out as it’s time for Indian Pension League [IPL] and watch the signs saying “Keep distance, wear masks and use hand sanitizer” to a mammoth crowds through tournament so far, of 0. Have a good evening everyone

  92. Yesterday’s jury decision in Minneapolis reminded me of a little joke.

    A man was on trial for murder and if convicted, would get life imprisonment.

    His brother found out that there was a blonde on the jury and decided that she would be the one to bribe. He told the blonde that she would be paid ₤10,000 if she could convince the rest of the jury to reduce the charge to manslaughter.

    The jury was out an entire week and returned with a verdict of manslaughter.

    After the trial, the brother went to the blonde’s home, told her what a great job she had done and paid her the ₤10,000.

    The blonde replied that it wasn’t easy to convince the rest of the jury to change the charge to manslaughter. “They all wanted to find him not guilty.”

  96. That’s me for this unexpectedly good day. Weather sunny but very cold north-easterly wind. Our trip to Norwich (well, the outskirts) was remarkable for two reasons. We went to a garden-centre called “Urban Jungle”. From their website, I was dubious – expecting hippies with no idea about what they were selling. Au contraire, the young man who helped did indeed look a bit hippy-like but he had tremendous knowledge of their large range of plants from the South of France, Spain – and other hot places – but which are ALL able to live and thrive in Norfolk.

    Then to a shoe-shop (heart sank, when the MR suggested ( = instructed) that we just had a look. Again, a very young but extremely well-informed young woman served us – and arranged to order the shoes that I wanted.

    So, being overcome by shock – and delighted that there ARE youngsters who are keen and enthusiastic – I shall sit down with a glass of medicinal liquid.

    A demain – when another Narridge trip looms… More shoe shopping (ugh)..

    4. North or North east winds forcast till a week on satuday. Lets hope they are wrong again.

  97. That’s me for this unexpectedly good day. Weather sunny but very cold north-easterly wind. Our trip to Norwich (well, the outskirts) was remarkable for two reasons. We went to a garden-centre called “Urban Jungle”. From their website, I was dubious – expecting hippies with no idea about what they were selling. Au contraire, the young man who helped did indeed look a bit hippy-like but he had tremendous knowledge of their large range of plants from the South of France, Spain – and other hot places – but which are ALL able to live and thrive in Norfolk.

    Then to a shoe-shop (heart sank, when the MR suggested ( = instructed) that we just had a look. Again, a very young but extremely well-informed young woman served us – and arranged to order the shoes that I wanted.

    So, being overcome by shock – and delighted that there ARE youngsters who are keen and enthusiastic – I shall sit down with a glass of medicinal liquid.

    A demain – when another Narridge trip looms… More shoe shopping (ugh)..

  98. It seems sewer problems are in favour just now… after our embuggeration last year, Firstborn’s septic tank (not rhyming slang) collapsed this morning.
    Oh, shit!

  99. It seems sewer problems are in favour just now… after our embuggeration last year, Firstborn’s septic tank (not rhyming slang) collapsed this morning.
    Oh, shit!

  100. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy on cancel culture…

    “Little by little and without warning, do-gooders and censorship have taken control. Obsessed by their image of upholders of morality, a whole load of people without culture, without experience and without courage are trying to impose their narrow-minded ideas on us. Their sterile, uniform and puerile ideas are seeking to invade humanity. If we have the misfortune not to think like them, they rush at us with all their dictatorial energy to try to make us be quiet. Humour is quietly disappearing as a result of their moralising speeches, freedom is in its death throes, creation is lifeless and democracy in great danger. In short, it is not good to joke in 2021…”

    The Left see this as progress. They’re nutters. It will end in fascism, resistance and war. It always ends in war against these psychotic fools. Every time they raise their petty little heads, we tolerant, decent normies think it’ll be different. It never, ever is. They need a thorough, sound beating and to be told what they are until they’re ashamed, silent and remorseful.Best we fight them now than millions die later.

    1. The George Floyd trust fund for the furtherance of anti-white lawsuits is sponsoring him?

    2. Tommy Robinson tells the truth and thats a problem for the snowflakes…..
      And I do know Luton….

  102. Just for a laugh…

    Sorry. It was a very amusing clip sent to me by a friend in MP4 format but I can’t copy it, despite having converted it to other formats.

    Not so funny, after all!

  103. Let Us Spray….

    Pope Francis has called for a month-long prayer marathon to ask God for a swift end to the coronavirus pandemic, the Vatican announced Wednesday.

    Ring-a-ring o’ roses,
    A pocket full of posies,
    A-tissue A-tissue
    For cute little noses
    Get your jab
    Made in the lab
    Now don’t be coy
    ……..girl or boy
    Act the clown
    and…………………….We all fall down.

  104. Let Us Spray….

    Pope Francis has called for a month-long prayer marathon to ask God for a swift end to the coronavirus pandemic, the Vatican announced Wednesday.

    Ring-a-ring o’ roses,
    A pocket full of posies,
    A-tissue A-tissue
    For cute little noses
    Get your jab
    Made in the lab
    Now don’t be coy
    ……..girl or boy
    Act the clown
    and…………………….We all fall down.

  107. DILLIGAF again. Watching the BBC BRIT channel… this acronym is getting a lot of use these days.
    :-((

          1. You have to feel for the poor bugger on the other end of the rivet. What a job !!!

      1. I posted for the reason that many blacks are eminently sensible Americans and think positively about the globalist corruption around us and how best to counteract it.

      2. I posted for the reason that many blacks are eminently sensible Americans and think positively about the globalist corruption around us and how best to counteract it.

  113. Evening, all. Thank you, everybody, for your good wishes and commiserations. I’m still a bit too choked to stay, but I do appreciate it. The bad week continues; I even managed to fall off when riding this afternoon 🙁

    4. Distress makes you unco-ordinated; you lose things, forget things, drop things and fall off things. You scrape your car and reverse into things….. take extra care and allow extra time when doing things and going places for a month or so, Conway. It takes a while. Always take the time to remember you have removed your card from the card reader AND put it away, that you know where your wallet is at all times and your keys are not absentmindedly hurled into a different place whilst thinking of other things. It is such a hit to the solar plexus; it will get better, in time.

      Re-reading this I sound so bossy – not intended to be bossy…

      1. That reads like my everyday existence, PM. Watch out, take care, be systematic…

      2. Not bossy at all, just considerate. I have already been through the “put things down and have no idea what you did with them” stage. I have been putting feelers out today to find another dog. He won’t replace the irreplaceable, but he will fill the hole in my day. From getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, Charlie was there with me unless I was riding, shopping or out on my pushbike. I keep expecting to have to step over him (I used to tell him that getting in the way was his only talent).

        1. He won’t replace the irreplaceable, he will run alongside. All the best for finding a new companion.

        2. I replied via notifications earlier today but I can’t see it…. it seems to have disappeared. I know what you mean about the hole in your day. The new pup will never replace the dog in your heart, he will run alongside Charlie and you will be wrapped around his paw before you know it. Dogs have nothing to leave except your love for him/her to be extended to another furry, four-pawed friend. All the best in your search.

          1. Thank you. He won’t be a replacement, but he will fill an empty space. It’s been bad today, because just about everything I’ve done I used to do with him. I even thought I felt him touch my leg when I was typing on the computer – he used to stick to me like glue and sit on my feet.

          2. It takes a long time – when our little black cat went missing and was found dead under a hedge a week or so later I blubbed every day for two weeks nearly all the time…. walking up the stairs at work, sitting at my desk, quietly blubbing away. I was never without a tissue in my hand. Sooty would be out most of the day but when I was bringing the washing in from the line at the end of the day he would emerge from I know not where, I would become aware of his furry presence by his silently wrapping himself around my legs. It is a lonely path we take.

          3. When I got back from the stables yesterday, there was no dog waiting by the gate as he often was. When I went in, there was no dog lying on his mat waiting to greet me. It’s things like that that hurt.

          4. It is. Sooty used to pop out from the garden when we returned home, there was no longer a pile of black fur gently snoozing in the armchair when I left for work in the morning. Poppie is coming up to twelve in July, I am trying to prepare myself for the future. Dogs are so much more to humans than cats, however adorable individual cats may be.

    7. So sorry- I missed your bad news last night and have just caught up. He was your comfort and companion and will always be missed.

    8. So sorry- I missed your bad news last night and have just caught up. He was your comfort and companion and will always be missed.

    9. So sorry you have lost a great uncomplaining companion .

      The death of a pet is always a wrench to the heart .

      Please rest and sleep , and most of all be careful , I hope you weren’t too badly bruised when you had your riding accident?

      The next few days will I hope be easier for you .

      God bless.

      1. Thank you, Maggie. For once, as I was riding a different horse, I was wearing my body armour, so that helped.

    10. So sorry you have lost a great uncomplaining companion .

      The death of a pet is always a wrench to the heart .

      Please rest and sleep , and most of all be careful , I hope you weren’t too badly bruised when you had your riding accident?

      The next few days will I hope be easier for you .

      God bless.

    11. Oh bugger. I’ve only just seen your post about losing your dog. You have my sympathy.
      Surely it’s about time things started getting better for you?

  114. We’ll need champions of science like Richard Dawkins to win the war on woke orthodoxy

    The American Humanist Association stripped Dawkins of its 1996 Humanist of the Year award after he tweeted about gender self-identification

    FRASER MYERS

    Richard Dawkins is surely just as known for his militant atheism as for his scientific genius. He is loved by some and loathed by others for his zealous crusades against religion and his savage mockery of the sacred. But this week, he was excommunicated by those you might least expect: his fellow atheists.

    Dawkins’s act of blasphemy was not against any religious doctrine. He did not voice scepticism of transubstantiation, but of transgenderism. He did not query whether bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ, but whether a man can become a woman – and vice versa.

    And so the American Humanist Association has stripped Dawkins of its 1996 Humanist of the Year award. The AHA had initially honoured Dawkins for his extraordinary contributions to communicating science to the public. But 25 years later, the AHA has accused him of abusing “scientific discourse” to “demean marginalised groups”.

    The AHA alleged that Dawkins had “accumulated a history” of offensive statements, but singled out one tweet for condemnation: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”

    Of course, Dawkins said nothing demeaning or bigoted in that tweet. He merely raised a question about the inconsistency of modern identity politics.

    It’s a good question, in fact. Why is it that racial boundaries are today more likely to be viewed as fixed, but gender as fluid? After all, you don’t have to go full Rachel Dolezal and try to live life as a black person to fall foul of the modern racial gatekeepers. In recent years, white people have been denounced for “cultural appropriation” over acts as trivial as practising yoga, braiding their hair in cornrows or writing fiction from the perspective of non-white characters.

    At the same time, the belief that gender can simply be a matter of self-declaration has been placed beyond question. “Trans women are women” is now a foundational woke commandment. Clearly, it has even become an article of faith for self-professed “humanists”. You might think that humanists and atheists would be the first to recognise how dogmatism hinders the search for truth. But there are greater forces at work, which Dawkins has himself picked up on.

    At the end of last year, writing in the Spectator, Dawkins warned that scientific truth was coming increasingly under attack. Most insidiously, truth was being undermined in academia, in the very institutions set up to discover and uphold the truth. A school of thought that claims there is “no objective truth… no natural reality, only social constructs” has come to dominate, he said. This worldview also prioritises the so-called lived experience and identity of the speaker over empirical reality. Proven scientific facts, Dawkins complains, are too often dismissed as products of “patriarchal domination”.

    In his Spectator piece, Dawkins switches frequently between attacking the nascent woke ideology and the theologians he has been battling for decades. Although he does not make the link explicitly, the similarities between the two groups are too great to ignore.

    In fact, Dawkins has personal experience of them converging. Last year, Trinity College Dublin rescinded his invitation to address its Historical Society. And in 2017, a radio station in California cancelled an event he was due to speak at. Both de-platformed Dawkins because the world-famous atheist had fiercely criticised Islam and not just Christianity. Criticism of Islam is prohibited by the woke not on theological grounds, but because critcising the beliefs of a “marginalised group” is considered bigoted (or Islamophobic, in this instance).

    But no deity or dogma – whether formed in the 7th century or the 21st – should be so sacred as to be beyond question. As the woke orthodoxy becomes more powerful and resistant to challenge, we’ll need far more heretics like Richard Dawkins.

    Fraser Myers is assistant editor of Spiked

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/21/need-champions-science-like-richard-dawkins-win-war-woke-orthodoxy/

    We may have laughed at some of Daft Dickie’s utterances in the past but the writer has a serious point. However, it’s a little disappointing that he hasn’t quoted Dawkins’s follow-up to the row. Michael Deacon has written on the same subject and includes this:

    After the inevitable outrage, Dawkins insisted that he “did not intend to disparage trans people”; he had simply been inviting debate. “I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this,” he wrote. “It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the US now exploiting this issue.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/denunciation-richard-dawkins-shows-wokeism-has-become-new-religion/

    Ah well, win some, lose some but in the madness of modern ‘transgenderism’ we need the rational onside. I wonder if Cambridge University would dare to strike off Dickie as they did David Starkey?

  115. We’ll need champions of science like Richard Dawkins to win the war on woke orthodoxy

    The American Humanist Association stripped Dawkins of its 1996 Humanist of the Year award after he tweeted about gender self-identification

    FRASER MYERS

    Richard Dawkins is surely just as known for his militant atheism as for his scientific genius. He is loved by some and loathed by others for his zealous crusades against religion and his savage mockery of the sacred. But this week, he was excommunicated by those you might least expect: his fellow atheists.

    Dawkins’s act of blasphemy was not against any religious doctrine. He did not voice scepticism of transubstantiation, but of transgenderism. He did not query whether bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ, but whether a man can become a woman – and vice versa.

    And so the American Humanist Association has stripped Dawkins of its 1996 Humanist of the Year award. The AHA had initially honoured Dawkins for his extraordinary contributions to communicating science to the public. But 25 years later, the AHA has accused him of abusing “scientific discourse” to “demean marginalised groups”.

    The AHA alleged that Dawkins had “accumulated a history” of offensive statements, but singled out one tweet for condemnation: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”

    Of course, Dawkins said nothing demeaning or bigoted in that tweet. He merely raised a question about the inconsistency of modern identity politics.

    It’s a good question, in fact. Why is it that racial boundaries are today more likely to be viewed as fixed, but gender as fluid? After all, you don’t have to go full Rachel Dolezal and try to live life as a black person to fall foul of the modern racial gatekeepers. In recent years, white people have been denounced for “cultural appropriation” over acts as trivial as practising yoga, braiding their hair in cornrows or writing fiction from the perspective of non-white characters.

    At the same time, the belief that gender can simply be a matter of self-declaration has been placed beyond question. “Trans women are women” is now a foundational woke commandment. Clearly, it has even become an article of faith for self-professed “humanists”. You might think that humanists and atheists would be the first to recognise how dogmatism hinders the search for truth. But there are greater forces at work, which Dawkins has himself picked up on.

    At the end of last year, writing in the Spectator, Dawkins warned that scientific truth was coming increasingly under attack. Most insidiously, truth was being undermined in academia, in the very institutions set up to discover and uphold the truth. A school of thought that claims there is “no objective truth… no natural reality, only social constructs” has come to dominate, he said. This worldview also prioritises the so-called lived experience and identity of the speaker over empirical reality. Proven scientific facts, Dawkins complains, are too often dismissed as products of “patriarchal domination”.

    In his Spectator piece, Dawkins switches frequently between attacking the nascent woke ideology and the theologians he has been battling for decades. Although he does not make the link explicitly, the similarities between the two groups are too great to ignore.

    In fact, Dawkins has personal experience of them converging. Last year, Trinity College Dublin rescinded his invitation to address its Historical Society. And in 2017, a radio station in California cancelled an event he was due to speak at. Both de-platformed Dawkins because the world-famous atheist had fiercely criticised Islam and not just Christianity. Criticism of Islam is prohibited by the woke not on theological grounds, but because critcising the beliefs of a “marginalised group” is considered bigoted (or Islamophobic, in this instance).

    But no deity or dogma – whether formed in the 7th century or the 21st – should be so sacred as to be beyond question. As the woke orthodoxy becomes more powerful and resistant to challenge, we’ll need far more heretics like Richard Dawkins.

    Fraser Myers is assistant editor of Spiked

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/21/need-champions-science-like-richard-dawkins-win-war-woke-orthodoxy/

    We may have laughed at some of Daft Dickie’s utterances in the past but the writer has a serious point. However, it’s a little disappointing that he hasn’t quoted Dawkins’s follow-up to the row. Michael Deacon has written on the same subject and includes this:

    After the inevitable outrage, Dawkins insisted that he “did not intend to disparage trans people”; he had simply been inviting debate. “I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this,” he wrote. “It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the US now exploiting this issue.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/denunciation-richard-dawkins-shows-wokeism-has-become-new-religion/

    Ah well, win some, lose some but in the madness of modern ‘transgenderism’ we need the rational onside. I wonder if Cambridge University would dare to strike off Dickie as they did David Starkey?

    1. How to get off jury service – loud stage whisper in court “Which one’s the guilty bastard?”

    1. I was going to ask exactly the same thing when I saw his letter in the DT! Great minds….

        1. ‘Twas concerning the use, or not, of the split infinitive! That’s when I realised that I missed him!

          2. Just keeping his hand in the grammatical world, I expect! Since Peddy is missing as well!

          3. Apart from the odd typo i think we can all understand each other with out all that pedantic nonsense 😎😍

          4. Just keeping his hand in the grammatical world, I expect! Since Peddy is missing as well!

          7. I once suspected I might have a split personality. Although I was in two minds about it, I consulted the doctor who said there was nothing wrong with either of us.

            I’m going to seek a second opinion….

          10. I once suspected I might have a split personality. Although I was in two minds about it, I consulted the doctor who said there was nothing wrong with either of us.

            I’m going to seek a second opinion….

    2. I was going to ask exactly the same thing when I saw his letter in the DT! Great minds….

      1. I did recently because i was unwell and unable to take part sometimes things get a bit heavy and it’s difficult to cope with illness and all what is happening in the world.

        I’ve just been trying to look on Google Earth where my elder sister use to live in Harpenden and the road has been blocked from ground level view.
        They lived in a large 5 bed detached on a third of an acre built in the late 60s. it was sold twice after they moved out and then demolished. And the last time i was able to see it a massive double fronted house had been built on the plot. I would stick my neck out and suggest that a north London a footballer bought it and developed the plot but now its not possible to go any further along the cul de sac. Surely it’s stretching privacy too far it’s still a public road.

        1. Do not worry. The footballers are about to confront reality for lack of season tickets and replica kit sales which have become off the scale.

          These otherwise worthless knee bending incompetents will be out of a job shortly. Nobody cares anymore. They are mostly artless and their theatrics on the field of play has become a sick joke.

          1. I agree, I know it was a long time ago but when footballers were paid 20 quid a week they put their hearts and souls into the game. And didn’t have silly haircuts and tattoos.

      2. I did recently because i was unwell and unable to take part sometimes things get a bit heavy and it’s difficult to cope with illness and all what is happening in the world.

        I’ve just been trying to look on Google Earth where my elder sister use to live in Harpenden and the road has been blocked from ground level view.
        They lived in a large 5 bed detached on a third of an acre built in the late 60s. it was sold twice after they moved out and then demolished. And the last time i was able to see it a massive double fronted house had been built on the plot. I would stick my neck out and suggest that a north London a footballer bought it and developed the plot but now its not possible to go any further along the cul de sac. Surely it’s stretching privacy too far it’s still a public road.

      1. Maybe he’s producing an enormous meal to celebrate having lost so much weight and reaching his target.

        Or alternatively he has returned to his easel and is producing an apocalyptic painting depicting the demise of mankind as a result of the terminal stupidity of the human species.

  119. Mass Covid screening is an obscene waste of scant resources

    Public health professionals have aired their serious concerns but the ‘moonshot’ mentality persists regardless

    PROFESSOR KAROL SIKORA

    In medicine, as with so much in life, it’s important not to run before you can walk. Get the basics right and the rest will follow. If you try to catch two rabbits at once, more often than not you’ll get neither and end up falling flat on your face.

    The Government should be capable of chasing several rabbits but, as we’ve seen time and time again, this has simply not happened. Vaccine passports may be in the pipeline but how are they really going to be used when we just don’t know how long immunity will last? There are of course other ethical and practical issues. Mass testing is now being prioritised and is consuming gargantuan resources when the benefits are unclear.

    Original reports on “moonshot” testing estimated the cost at £100 billion. More recently it has been reported that every positive case found in schools is costing £120,000. Whatever the precise cost is, there is little doubt that it is eye-watering. Anybody can go on the gov.uk website and order dozens of lateral flow tests a week – are we sure this is a good idea, and even if it is, are there not better ways to spend such outrageous amounts of money?

    Testing vast numbers of asymptomatic people is an enormous undertaking, especially if this is going to continue indefinitely. Even with a tiny false-positive rate, there are going to be thousands of people every day being told incorrectly that they have Covid. Guidance has changed so a confirmatory PCR test is needed, but we are using some extremely blunt and expensive methods to pick up a tiny number of asymptomatic cases.

    These kits aren’t easy to use. We’re trusting millions of untrained people to push a swab far enough up their nose to collect enough sample. It’s an unpleasant experience. Can we be sure that they’re being used properly? On a small, targeted scale these kits are of use. At our Rutherford cancer centre network anyone entering the building has to take one, administered or overseen by trained staff. We’ve made a careful plan of how to ensure we are getting the best, most accurate and useful information out of our kits. Can the Government honestly say the same?

    “Test, test, test” – that now famous exclamation from the World Health Organisation’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesushas – has been taken a little too literally by some. Coincidentally, those people are also the ones running the country. Many public health professionals have aired their serious concerns, but the “moonshot” mentality persists regardless.

    Mass screening has always been a contentious issue in medicine. Over-diagnosis has been a concern for many and at a time when NHS waiting lists are bursting, thousands are missing their cancer diagnosis, the waiting times for heart operations are far too long and mental health issues are rife, there are surely better ways we could be using our limited resources.

    Forget mass testing and focus on getting those with symptoms tested, isolated and supported. Estimates are as low as 18 per cent of people with Covid symptoms are following the proper procedures. Even if it’s nearer to half, there’s the crucial weakness. Meagre financial help is available to some, but it’s pitiful. If you were a self-employed worker and the only way you could put food on the table for your family was to continue working with a slight cough, could you honestly say you would get tested at the risk of missing half a month’s work?

    Some would, but many wouldn’t. Politicians need to get their heads in the real world. A sizeable number of symptomatic people are continuing daily life and spreading this virus – there’s the issue. Throwing billions at testing anything that moves is an obscene waste of time, effort and money when the benefits are so unclear and there are other far more pressing issues to tackle.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/21/mass-covid-screening-obscene-waste-scant-resources/

    1. And me, my eyes are sore and as is heard in parliament they have it………….
      Night all.
      The bloody news is on again,……… another reason to turn in.

      1. I couldn’t be bothered to watch it all over again. The Beeb gloating over an unfair trial.

    3. I’ve already stocked up for Ramadan. Conveniently, ASDA had 25% off six bottles of wine a short while ago, so I took full advantage of the offer. I’ve also got plenty of bacon in the fridge for my sandwiches, pork sausages in the freezer and will be probably be having roast pork this Sunday. Well, it would be rude not to join in with the celebrations.

      1. mng, as the saying goes here in Nairobi “and make sure the red dot on your forehead is switched on to record everything”. MMhindis trying to punt it here, majority of people neither buying into it or vaguely interested – other priorities

  123. Thursday 22nd April 2021

    Jay Sands

    A Very Happy Birthday

    and many more excellent ones to come.

    With best wishes,

    Caroline and Rastus

        1. Sunny here, but chilly. Blew a hoolie last night, some power cables down, bits of tree everywhere, have to hunt the terrace furniture again…

          1. lol, another “house safari” then. For now at least, pleasant, overnight rains, daytime dry and warm enough. For once DSTV are showing all this month liver coverage 24/7 from Game reserves on edge of the Kruger and throughout day Kalahari and Masai Mara”. No ads, no waffle, merely live coverage.It avoids anything remotely for what passes for “news”

          2. Nice! Sounds like NRKs “slow TV” – live Bergen to Kirkenes by ship (a week), the Telemark Canal end-to-end (days), Bergen-Oslo by train (8 hours)… they are excellent programmes.

          3. and likewise it allows you to avoid MSM propaganda. Norwegian mate who lives in Mtwapa [Mombasa] is from Bergen, he normally keeps me updated, but he’s currently stuck in Addis and can’t fly back. As usual instead of going “ape”, he’s trying toorganise an off radar drive bk into N Kenya. That pt of world usual problem, controlled networks. He got me info from Norwegian Emb

          4. Nice! Sounds like NRKs “slow TV” – live Bergen to Kirkenes by ship (a week), the Telemark Canal end-to-end (days), Bergen-Oslo by train (8 hours)… they are excellent programmes.

Comments are closed.