691 thoughts on “Friday 10 January: When history rhymes: the prince, the American divorcee and the succession to the throne”

  1. ‘It’s not the cooler!’ Ross Kemp hits back at Tommy Robinson during jail cell interview and points out luxuries including a TV and a kettle – after the ex-EDL man complained about ‘ten weeks of solitary confinement . Mail. 9 January 2020.

    But toward the end of the documentary, it’s clear that 10 weeks in the cell alone has taken its toll.

    A bearded Robinson sobs as he tells Kemp that he just wants to be ‘normal’ for when he returns home to his children.

    He describes his time in prison as being as good as it could have been considering he was so alone and appears embarrassed as he cries in his cell.

    Morning everyone. No it’s not the cooler it’s solitary confinement! Tommy has endured enormous pressures from the establishment in an attempt to silence him. His treatment is oddly redolent of the old Soviet Union with its suppression of dissident’s voices than the country I grew up in at the same time. It is a wonder to me that he has survived them at all! I don’t think I would blame him if he called it a day. The battle is pretty much lost anyway!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7870961/Youve-got-TV-Ross-Kemps-response-Tommy-Robinsons-complaints-jail.html

    1. Yo Minty

      Kemp is your typical Left wing luvvie

      Has Transmit Button, but No Receive one.

      All Kemp has done in his life is act parts, Tommy has gone out and done things

      I certainly know whose side I am on out of the Two

      In June 2017, Kemp endorsed the Labour Party at the 2017 UK general election, and took part in campaigning for Labour candidates.

      Kemp aka Asswipe

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

    2. OTOH, many of us feared that the authorities would quarter TR among Norwegian Methodists (how I miss BT!) who would do horrible things to him. If he’s kept in solitary, at least he’ll come out in one piece.

  2. The letters today are confined to the furore in the Royal Family. I am only mildly interested in this. We will have to introduce subjects to liven up the Nottler site today and there are many to choose from. eg Iran air disaster, George Monbiot’s stupidity in saying livestock farmers should give up farming now[on the early morning Farming programme earlier this week on BBC Radio 4], The passage of the Withdrawal Bill through the House of Commons yesterday, what happens next?

    1. Yo clyde

      and who takes over as the new police Detective Inspector in ‘Death In Paradise’ on Beebs One at 2100

      1. I didn’t even realise the last one had left!
        Then again, I’ve missed a couple of series!

      2. George Soros? Oh, sorry, OLT, for one moment I thought you were Polly Parrot, the poster who poses questions but never answers them.

        :-))

          1. I was going to put up a picture of that scene. That series was so rich for quotes. It is a shame that Father Ted died when he did. That island parish could have had another two series in it at least.

    2. I am far from being a Remainer as readers of my posts will be aware, but I am far from happy about the passage of the Withdrawal Bill. I wish there were some way of overturning Bill’s Withdrawal from this site, as he announced yesterday.

      :-))

  3. Donald Trump’s rant against Iran is the howl of a dying empire. Thu 9 Jan 2020.

    As the president slurred ritualised abuse of Iran and pleas to Nato, we saw the US’s days as world hegemon dribbling away.

    Well it would be a brave man who would write off the United States. It is still the world’s predominant Military, Economic and Cultural power. The difficulties it faces today are pretty much the same ones that have dogged it since the middle of the Twentieth Century. Americans, ordinary Americans that is, don’t want an Empire. They don’t like the idea. They don’t want to pay for it and they don’t want to send their sons to either police it or run it. They no sooner overthrow some Regime and the people want to know when they are pulling out. Its hegemony is a creation of the American Elites. It allows them to play on the world stage and make a great deal of money for themselves out of doing so. There is no sign of this changing in the foreseeable future!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/09/donald-trump-rant-iran-dying-empire-nato

    1. ” The Guardian’s constant ranting against Donald Trump is the howl of a dying newspaper “.

    3. Good morning DB

      Green maintenance.. hmmm

      Moh says the golf course is soggy and will take ages to recover, drain and dry out

      Our rear garden is an absolute mess , the other day when we had a torrential down pour , it was slippery and downright dangerous , it isn’t exactly flat , has a slight rise, we have worm castes compounding the problem , oh yes and we have a mole or two..and the grass is yellow in places and growing ..

      We sit on chalk and flint here , not sand and gravel like the golf course!

  6. Megs has flown back to Canada again has she?
    Wasn’t it just a couple of months ago she gave us her views on flying and climate change?
    I’ve flown three times in the last ten years – Paris and back, Cologne and back and, at the courtesy of Her Majesty, Kenya and back with the RAF. All that barely equates up to a month of Sparkle’s footprint so she really should STFU. (Excuse my French)

    1. Left the sprog in Canada. I’m sure, as a devoted mum, she only meant to be away for a couple of days.

      1. That’s the same one who couldn’t be parted from the child for a few moments to carry out official duties not so long ago.

        1. She has played Harry like a fiddle.
          Deliberately bigged up any ‘issues’ he might have, estranging him from friends and family to make him totally dependent on her.
          When she drops him – as she will – I dread to think what will happen to him.
          Even at our humble level, I’ve seen this scenario several times.

          1. Who is this Meghan ?
            I thought she had changed her name when she got married to MeeMee!

          3. My guess, and I sincerely hope that I am wrong, is that the Duchess will pop out another baby later this year and then dump Harry about 18 months later, which will trigger a handsome divorce settlement.
            Enough spondulicks to enable Her Grace to engage a Samoan gardener and live in Malibu or Florida, or anywhere totally inconvenient for her 2nd ex.
            Sorry to be such a miserable cynic, but very few American (US) women settle down in rainy dull unglamorous Britain.

  7. Brendan O’Neil

    Harry and Meghan haven’t been driven out by racism or prejudice or

    hatred. Rather, they’re ducking out of their own accord so that they can

    go even more global, more woke, more famously, internationally,

    irritatingly PC. They’re going to become even more insufferable. And

    here’s the thing: they will trade on their still existing royal titles

    to do so. So Meghan spent a couple of years in the royal family and now

    is pretty much leaving it while holding on to the duchess / princess

    thing in order to give her naff feminism and eco-posturing and celeb shoulder-rubbing more oomph?

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/01/09/a-woke-wallis-simpson/

        1. Morning OLT

          She is a bolter , and I suspect he is just another notch on her bedpost . One wonders how much further she will climb.. Has she got her eyes on certain presidents or even a billionaire?

    2. Morning Rik,
      Personally I put it on par with holding on to UKIP MEP seats after leaving the party, surely a blatant case of
      use & abuse.

    3. Yo Rik

      The trouble with O’Neil, he just beats about the bush and does not say what he thinks!

  9. Greetings, Nottlers. Fallout and aftermath of US/Iranian tensions: US Rep. Ilhan Omar (Democrat, MN) complains she’s “stricken with PTSD” because of recent events in the Middle East. Really? No thought for the troops on the ground braving incoming Iranian missiles?

    “This is a disgrace and offensive to our nation’s veterans who really do have PTSD after putting their life on the line to keep America safe.” –US Rep. Jim Banks (Republican, IN).

    https://twitter.com/RepJimBanks/status/1215034549765312512

      1. In the nastily brainwashed minds of people such as her, the US military are the enemy. American casualties do not matter or register as being important. This woman is the same enemy that we have on our own shores.

  10. ‘Upskirting’ of women and girls is a daily occurrence, new figures show. 10 JANUARY 2020.

    Incidents of men taking ‘upskirt’ photographs of women are being reported on an almost daily basis since tougher new legislation was introduced, with victims known to be as young as 13.

    The first figures to chart the impact of the Voyeurism Offences Act show that almost one victim a day has contacted police to report being targeted since the law came into effect in April last year.

    Shock! Horror! Men interested in women! During the Victorian Age men gathered at street crossings hoping to catch a glimpse of a female (they were obliged to lift their skirts out of the horse manure) ankle. Plus ça change…

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/10/upskirting-women-girls-daily-occurrence-new-figures-show/

    1. Greetings Minty. But now these perverts have cellphones on selfie-sticks…and make a tidy living selling video on the darkweb.

      1. Really? Of course they didn’t have cellphones in Vicky’s reign. They just used to go down to the local cathouse if they felt sufficiently stimulated!i

    2. In my part of Scotland it’s rare to see a woman in a skirt and even then she’ll have Max Wall leggings on underneath. Men with kilts are more common and you don’t get people looking up them other than to settle an argument……it’s gruesome……hello, it’s gruesome more.

    3. A few months ago I was sitting in my car with my wife on a high street when I drew attention to a passing woman’s mode of dress. She was wearing a skirt. Alone of all the females populating that shopping street, she was wearing a skirt. That’s when it came home to me how this once common garment has declined in recent times.

      It makes me wonder how these men are finding someone wearing a skirt (other than certain ‘women’ in Brighton, obviously) in the first place. Maybe they aren’t trying to get a glimpse of her knickers at all, since most of the other females have their tightly-clad crutches on full display for all the world to see in their over-stretched leggings. Maybe the ones with the cameras are just getting record shots of what a skirt looks like before they vanish into a sea of unisex conformity.

  11. Nobody wants to read more about Brash ‘n Trash but some of the pics are good

    RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Her Majesty deserves better than this and you don’t have to be an ardent royalist to be thoroughly disgusted
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-7870373/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Majesty-deserves-better-this.html
    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/01/09/21/23210300-7870373-Be_honest_hands_up_if_you_d_ever_heard_of_her_before_she_got_her-a-12_1578604167554.jpg
    Be honest, hands up if you’d ever heard of her before she got her hooks into Harry? Me, neither. Apparently, her big break was holding the briefcase on the U.S. version of Deal Or No Deal

    3. They will be on QVC next flogging their tat and selling weekends in Frogmore cottage on AirBNB. and a £100 for taking a selfy with them

    4. Trash wants the privileges without the duties. Simples! And apparently she has a right to unearned privilege because her mum’s black, innit?

    5. My hand is up. I used to watch Suits when it first came on, so I had heard of her before she met Harry, or more to the point, before we heard she was dating him. I had difficulty picturing them together, I have to say.
      I still do…

  14. Morning Each,
    It would, I believe be a sound idea to return eyeballs to the balls section, and keep in mind this disloyal royal set up is manna for the politico’s of a dodgy nature,
    ( ALL of the HOC) overriding,& saves explaining the “benefits” of the deal AKA the anchor within the small print.
    Plus after Madge signs & gives her consent it is no good saying “if the politico’s have done a wrong un we will get revenge at the polling booth” because personally my dears these politico’s don’t give a sh!te.

    The golden trough will be seen to rule,OK.

    1. Have read this a couple of times and it still seems even more opaque than most Ogga offerings.

          1. Morning VVOF,
            I stood corrected, I plead that the tension is mounting, reciprocating saw / mini grinder gone into meltdown mode, new saw en route
            but will it reach me before I am engulfed in timber that is to be logged for the wood burner.
            Sod greta / gove, meals to be cooked if one is to survive the slings & arrows of outrageous,treacherous politicians & their ilk.
            Have a good day.

          2. And you ogga1, remember if all else fails you can use a handsaw and keep the greenies happy.

          3. VVOF,
            Sorry, bad advice though I am sure not intended as such, now unintended consequences ( your advice) has made me order a back up reciprocating saw to the one I am waiting on.

    2. Morning Ogga!

      The Meghan and Harry story is being bigged up to divert our attention from the Withdrawal Agreement and the small print therein. Yes?

      1. Morning SE,
        Very much so, the politico’s will use whatever comes to hand to cover up treachery & deceit.
        I seem to remember “just a little tidying up
        exercise ” was a used tag.
        To many peoples depending on “hope” johnson does the right thing, far to tenuous for me, when there is a countries / peoples future welfare at stake.

  15. ITV axes I’m A Celebrity spin-off Extra Camp in major shake-up

    ITV has axed I’m A Celebrity’s spin-off show – Extra Camp it was due to rising costs.

    The news comes after Emily Atack replaced Scarlett Moffatt, who quit the show before 2019’s series started.

    1. Without Kenneth Williams, John Inman and Larry Grayson Extra Camp wouldn’t have had a chance of success!

  16. In these bleak times, imagine a world where you can thrive. Gary Younge. Fri 10 Jan 2020.

    This is my last column. After 26 years as a staff writer and 20 years – on and off – as a columnist, I’m leaving the Guardian. In April, I take up a post as professor of sociology at Manchester University. I have not given up journalism. I may appear in this paper (if they’ll have me) and others, very occasionally. But I will be liberated from having to have a thought every Thursday, and you will be liberated from having to read or avoid, enjoy or be enraged by them every Friday.

    A professor of Sociology? There’s no sign of Younge ever having gained a degree or of writing a PhD! While he has numerous “Honorary” titles his Tertiary education looks suspiciously like someone taking a break from working!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/10/bleak-times-thrive-last-column-guardian

    1. I don’t read the Guardian for obvious reasons, so I had never heard of this man. Having clicked on that link, the picture that he has chosen of himself to be at the top of the column makes him look like a real charmer.

    2. Calls himself a journalist? There’s a massive howler in his opening sentence…

      As a child my mother used to put on the song Young, Gifted and Black, by Bob and Marcia, put my feet on hers and then dance us both around the living room. “They’re playing our song,” she’d say. It was the early 1970s, she was barely 30 and I was the youngest of three children she was raising alone.

      His mother was NOT a child when she played that record.

    3. “But I will be liberated from having to have a thought every Thursday”

      Oh, what toil. Wanker.

    6. Not even a bachelors degree? Gosh, there’s hope for me yet. I can retire from the BBC as a professor of Disqusology.

        1. In which case I’d like a PhD in ‘Female appreciation’.

          I shall discuss the role of the male in the appreciation – in all it’s manners – of the female form through the ages, starting with pornhub.

    8. I probably have a better claim to be professor of sociology than he does; at least I have a BA (Hons) in the Sociology of State Socialist Societies and an MPhil!

    1. Yo JB

      Taliking of Withdrawals, I hope Brashh takes it to heart, when ‘comforting’ Trash

    1. Mind you, looks like someone has been removing upvotes like crazy overnight, and it doesn’t appear to be due to people/bots/whatever ticking the down vote tab. Mine have gone from around 36,000 upvotes a while back (haven’t checked in quite a while) to 31,000 yes afternoon having seen the discussion here, and BT throwing in the towel/Nottl, to 28,880 today. There’s nothing obvious to account for it, so it’s got to be a Disqus thing. Question is, why?

      3. Don’t forget the problems over Christmas.

        It could well be that in trying to fix those and other issues, there may have been unforeseen events.

        Also, has anyone gone back to check if their posts of a few years ago are still there? If not, could it be that when they disappeared, so did the ticks?

        1. Eddy – this has been going on for over a year for “Conservative” commentators, and more recently some on the left to provide cover. It is systematic and deliberate, not a side-effect or a temporary event. There are many good people that I knew from back then who have been at zero votes for months now. They are still leaving comments with new names. 🙂

        3. I’ve never really bothered looking at upvotes/downvotes until the recent comments on the subject. Yesterday I had about 17.5k upvotes and today it is over 18k. That’s an unrealistic increase for which I have no explanation. I don’t really care and have never been sensitive to up or down votes.

          4. I saw that, J but I was remarking on the fact that Harry’s count had reduced in just 28 minutes.

          6. I didn’t bother looking that often, but my up vote count has gone down by several thousand in a short period of time, despite getting few actual downvotes. Just this morning my count has dropped to 28767 from 28880 earlier, and 31,000 yesterday.
            As Meredith says, at this rate, the count will go down to zero and I’ll be unable to comment on places like Breitbart, not that I do that much, but I do comment on Conwoman and the Speccie.
            Maybe that’s why Polly is forever creating new accounts. ??

        4. All the old posts disappeared from my record weeks ago. Everything prior to this new site went, along with the upticks therefrom.

          2. It doesn’t explain the more recent clear-out though. No upvotes are being added to those who are already at zero. I’m now down to 61.

      4. The 1,000’s of votes disappearing at the moment are just a computer program running on many people now. It is done in the background so that you only see the results when you check your “upvote” score. Almost all of us here, along with many others elsewhere, will be down to zero votes in the coming days.

        The purpose of this is that your account, and all the others, will be effectively blocked from making comments on large news sites such as brietbart when your score drops below zero. Every comment that you try to type there will go to “pending” and they do not check them, so nobody else will be able to see your comment.

        That is the point of this computer program or “bot” – to censor comments. The vast majority of people hit by it in the past have been “Conservative” or right-wing thinkers. What a shock. You will still be able to comment here though, and on any channel where they already know you and you are “whitelisted” or cleared to comment.

        So don’t worry too much. My account was disabled by fake spam reports 18 months ago, because the hard-left did not like what I was saying. I am still here and able to comment. 🙂

          1. Ndovu – yes. My account was disabled before this vote stripping-bot was widely used. They had to do it by putting “dummy followers” on my account and reporting every comment that I made as spam. It took them 5 weeks and 115+ fake spam reports to lower my Reputation score below 0, which is what blocks your account. It is not the number of votes that you have, it is having a Reputation below 0.

            I had only made around 2,000 comments back then and it took them 5 weeks of effort to disable my account. With the number of comments that some of you have made it would take them over a year of fake spam reports to bring your accounts down, and it is labour-intensive. You need to follow someone’s account and respond to their comment’s one by one with the fake reports.

            Then the vote-stripper bot came into wider use. It strips your reputation down to 0 over time without needing to do anything other than put your account number on the list. They may also need to attach fake accounts as followers to amplify the effects, but I don’t know how it works. But with the vote-stripper, they can just run the program 3 times a day and everyone’s scores come down.

            Although at the rate they are falling now, it looks as if they are running the program 3 times an hour at the moment. My account is already disabled by spam reports, so I don’t know if they will strip it as well. Blocking me twice has no extra effect. 🙂

          3. Yes you can, I’m trying to remember how. If you are using a computer just click on your icon and your “disqus homepage” should open. Click on the tab marked “Followers” which is middle-top on my browser. Then a list of those following you should come up.

            You can then click on their names to see if they look like real people. After I was blocked I checked the list and found 3 accounts that were 4 years old but had made less than 3 comments each in all that time. They were the dummy accounts used to track me and label all of my comments as spam. By the time that I knew this the damage had already been done, but I clicked the red X to “remove follower” anyway.

            I do not know if they effect the vote-stripper, but fake accounts like this were not attached to ours for our benefit. If you spot people that often make comments that you agree with, then that is obviously not a dummy account. 🙂

          4. Thank you, Meredith, I have looked and my followers are all subscribers to this forum and subscribers, whose comments, I value.

    3. I only say this for information for those who are interested in these things. It comes from observation and years of being online, and is useful to know when you spot it happening in front of you: (This has nothing to do with the program stripping 1,000’s of votes. That is just Disqus. The following observation is internet wide for all platforms.)

      For those learned users who are concerned about the number of “visible downvotes” that they receive, we have just had an object lesson in how stupid the left wing trolls are. It also shows that there is indeed one person using many accounts to pile lots of visible downvotes onto each of us. I am tired of this subject but this little gem is worth knowing.

      In the past 2 minutes I have just witnessed the “downvotes” for the picture above go from 0 to 11. This is clearly one person arriving and using 11 accounts to rack up those votes. The chances of 11 different people all arriving within 120 seconds, scrolling through all of the comments, finding that one picture and taking a dislike to it are not possible.

      So, when you see your comment and it has 11 (or more) downvotes next to it, we have just seen that there is a single left-wing troll here and it is only 1 person making most of them. So you can relax in the knowledge that this person on the left sees us as a threat and are just trying to make people feel bad and leave the channel.

      If only they realised that what we say is for their own good in the long run.

        1. It is always useful to know that when you are on a small site such as this and you see a score going up by 1 every couple of seconds, then that it is clearly 1 person using multiple accounts. I have seen it happening for years on different systems. “One person one vote” is clearly not a concept that they follow. 🙂

          1. This needs stamping out. The Left cannot be allowed this absurd manipulation.

            But then, it’s all they do. They can’t compete honestly, after all.

      2. Morning MM,
        By the same token could this thing that is adjusting the upticks to their liking, also add a letter or a word to a persons
        comment in any way ?

        1. No, the interface does not work that way. I cannot change your words and you cannot change mine. You would need to be a Disqus employee to edit comments on peoples channels without their permission.

          There have been quite a few complaints on the wider internet of Disqus staff doing that in the past, and even deleting comments entirely if they support political people that are not left wing. I don’t know if they still do this, but they would be the ones who are able to.

          Time for lunch.

          1. MM,
            So it has & could be done again, hence we would be posting on a controlled media,much
            like controlled politicians we are suffering.

      4. I started to give myself for a few weeks a downvote on my first (and sometimes only) comment of the day.
        This was just to highlight to whatever sad little troll is responsible how little regard I pay to your sad little antics.
        Downvotes will not alter my behaviour on forums such as these, not a jot.
        You lose troll!
        Edit. Oh God I just done it again!

        16:05 hrs 5 downvotes, only 5! What a pi$$poor excuse of a troll you are to only manage 5.
        Come on little sad lefty troll, put some effort into it. I expect a dozen by nightfall.

        1. veryveryoldfella – the munchkins are young with limited life experience. All that they know are the silly left-wing ideas that they were told at school, and the importance of being “popular” and getting lots of likes. It must be an incredibly limiting existence.

          When I was a boy our teachers encouraged our thoughts to soar far and wide. Our English teacher introduced us to many books not on the syllabus including 1984 and gems such as “A Wizard Of Earthsea.” The latter may seem trivial, but a key part of the book was facing the spiritual darkness inside of each of us and overcoming it. Which was heady stuff for 13 year olds. 🙂

          Now many of the youth seem obsessed with getting the prefect selfie. But there are still lots of them who are able to think for themselves.

    4. Could someone give me a downvote. I’m feeling a bit left out of things and if I don’t get one soon I will chuck my toys out of my pram and might leave. :-))

    1. You need to include the original tweet:
      Dr. Kimya Nuru Dennis http://www.kimyandennis.com
      @KimyaNDennisPhD
      ·
      8 Jan
      This week I have nine (9) trainings-presentations for school assistant principals and school principals.
      My trainings-presentations include a request that most books used in schools be burned.
      Stop using white history, white mathematics, and white science as the foundation.

      She could always bu**er off back to a non-white country where she would be so much happier. And so would we.

      Larry Elder debunks Michael Moore’s Claims About White Trump Voters | Larry Elder Show
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IC84kzpim0

    2. I am absolutely astonished. I genuinely do not understand what’s wrong with these people.

    3. You need to include the original tweet:
      Dr. Kimya Nuru Dennis http://www.kimyandennis.com
      @KimyaNDennisPhD
      ·
      8 Jan
      This week I have nine (9) trainings-presentations for school assistant principals and school principals.
      My trainings-presentations include a request that most books used in schools be burned.
      Stop using white history, white mathematics, and white science as the foundation.

      She could always bu**er off back to a non-white country where she would be so much happier. And so would we.

      Larry Elder debunks Michael Moore’s Claims About White Trump Voters | Larry Elder Show
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IC84kzpim0

    1. The Iranis are reported on BBC News as having removed most of the debris from the crash site. I presume the bodies were removed as well. Seems almost an admission that they are guilty of shooting down the plane.

      1. And they are going to analyse the black boxes rather than leave it to the international air accident investigators…

    2. Iran shot down the plane. It didn’t mean to, it was an accident.

      Now it’s blaming everyone else. It has to.

    3. Anyone know who the Ukrainians are blaming ? Surely they have something to say about it ? It’s one of their planes, after all.

      1. I timed that well –

        ”
        12 minutes ago-

        Ukraine’s foreign minister, Vadym Prystaiko, has said on Twitter that
        he and the Ukrainian president have met with US embassy officials and
        obtained “important data” about the plane crash.

        Prystaiko gave no further details but said the data would be “processed by our specialists”.
        Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is due to discuss the
        investigation with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this afternoon.”

        I wonder what they are going to cook up between them.

        2. I have a sneaky feeling the the Americans keep a fairly close eye on this part of the world and know most of what goes on.

  26. Good Morning all, I’ve decided to change my identity and put Uncle Beastly to bed, it was a term my Father in Law used ( for himself ) and it came to mind when I was flailing about trying to find an online name not used before ( difficult ) – anyhow I’m now Datz, this being the result of my granddaughter’s first attempt to call me Grandad.

    QT last night, I managed about the first 10 seconds of the first speaker wailing about the media’s vile racism towards Mrs Sussex before I returned to my whodunnit? , but it did make me think that people who make these , to me outrageous and untrue, statements ought to be made to prove them and if they can’t , be fined or imprisoned for “inciting racial hatred”

    1. When struggling to think of a new name or password, I find it useful to stare at the contents of a bookcase. Roaming your eyes over the different titles can make names / places / ideas spring to mind. Then you just need to remember it of course. 🙂

      1. Before I retired I looked after a Data Centre with Sun, DEC, HP servers and a few Windows devices, some local and some at remote sites, totalling 40+, The root passwords ( and some user/client/server passwords as well ) had to be changed every month and these had to comply with the usual rule of 8-16 mixed upper/lower case , special and random alphanumeric characters. It was a Bl**dy nightmare . As a beside I’ve just taken a quick look at my bookcase and the first volume to catch my eye was “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer so my password today will be s0ciaLlismw0rks!

    1. Do you think, that the bain of all Muslim childrens’ parents Father Christmas aka Santa Claus aka Kris Tingle aks lots of others delivered the vests to theTerrorists

      1. Insider job perhaps .. or catapulted / droned in..

        Send these evil monsters back to the country of their grandparent’s birth . We don’t want them in the UK.

  29. I have just come back from a pleasant country walk with the dogs .. car trip there , flooded roads and mud everywhere after yesterday’s deluge!.. The countryside is a grim muddy place in the winter time , however..

    I saw flocks of long tailed tits chattering in the birch trees , blackcaps darting around in the flowering gorse , a couple of bumble bees and a Red Admiral butterfly flying in the warm rays of the elusive sunshine . Clouds of midges, don’t you think that is all very unseasonal .. also clumps of daffodils flowering near an old mill, catkins dancing in the breeze.. plus the pollarded willow trees are red golden in full colour ..

    My walk felt very uplifting , but I wish I hadn’t worn a warm jacket , the temperature didn’t feel crisp .. but I guess I would never have seen the butterfly or bees , would I?

    1. It’s been a very mild winter so far – but who knows what’s lined up for the next couple of months?

      Enjoy it while you can – I was serenaded by a little robin this morning as I hung out my washing. It’s good to see the sun after the dark days.

      1. The thrushes have been serenading us at dusk and dawn as well..

        I have been putting sliced manky apples out for the blackbirds , which they have pecked away leaving the skin.. Well done with your washing, did it dry?

          2. Wow! that’s a great compliment! Thankyou!

            You can see more of my musings about hedgehogs on the Stroud News website!

          5. Curiously, back in the 1970s one of my relations lived in that area and knew LL, but only slightly.

          7. Laurie Lee propped up the bar of The Queen’s Elm on Fulham Road in Kensington most days throughout the seventies. His constant companion was Sean Treacy the publican.

            Eduardo Paolozzi and Elizabeth Frink were regulars.

            Sean wrote an account of his own youth in Ireland entitled ‘A smell of broken glass’.

  30. “It was on Thursday night claimed that Archie had remained in Canada while the Duke and Duchess flew back to London under the care of Jessica Mulroney, the Duchess’s close friend. 

    Who is looking after Archie then?

    2. It’s in a pram outside Walmart. But don’t worry, there’s a chain on one of the pram wheels.

  31. Good morning all. I am seeing a lot of excited posts from Farage about how we are ‘getting Brexit Done’ on 31st January. He’s even organising a party in Parliament Square! And yet, only a couple of months ago I attended a Brexit Party rally where he was talking about Johnson’s Deal being 95% the same as May’s deal. Why has he gone full-on Johnson fan-boy? I would like to ask him exactly what powers are being re-patriated to Westminster on 1st February. If none, how does this ‘get Brexit done?’

    To my mind, we will not have ‘got Brexit done’ until we are a free nation again, completely independent of EU control. On the 1st February we will be worse off that we are now, a “vassal state” of the EU. I don’t wish to be a party pooper, but it feels like we are being manipulated into forgetting about a clean break from the EU. Nothing to see here, back to politics as usual…

    1. I’d rather no ‘parties’ were organised.
      This contingent would like to just rock up to Parliament Square with a bottle of English fizz.

      1. Well, are you going to Parliament Square on January the 31st, Annie, or not? If not, why don’t we meet up (with Korky?) where we did last year, order a drink at around 10.50 pm and then celebrate until the end of Drinking Up Time. Alternatively both of you could come round to my place and we won’t need to rush the drinks!

        1. We are planning to travel up with son.
          He’s good at driving and parking in the Great Wen.
          That is the current plan.

    2. Mr Farage could be thinking “long-term” here. With such a large Conservative majority we are going to be taken to a place that might either be very good or very bad, or even neutral, although the latter seems unlikely. Being “neutral” compared to where we are now is far too close to the EU and its control for my liking.

      If we are going to be taken to a Trade Deal that many won’t like, then those taking us there would like the topic of Brexit to be out of the media as much as possible. With Mr Farage having such a public event celebrating our leaving, it keeps the idea of actually being free of the EU front and centre. It will be harder for the government to come back with a trade deal that leaves us in almost exactly the same position as we are now when they keep being reminded that we have voted to Leave.

      Out of all of the politicians that we have, both here and in the EU, there are only a handful such as Redwood and Farage that I would trust to take us fully out of the EU without lots of strings being attached for years to come.

      1. I am taking some comfort from the fact that if Farage seems happy then maybe he’s knows something we don’t about the direction of travel. He just went very quickly from ‘This is now the second-worst deal in history’ to completely backing down against the Tories.

        Whatever happens in the next 11 months, we mustn’t let our guards down. We need to scrutinise very carefully any deal which is negotiated behind closed doors.

  32. Good morning all. Every letter today is on the errant Prince.

    SIR – History repeats itself. A besotted royal prince, an older American divorcee.

    Be thankful for Charles, William, George and Louis. The succession is secure.

    Christine Whild

    Abingdon, Oxfordshire

    SIR – The decision announced unilaterally by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, made without even consulting the Queen, the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Cambridge, is astonishing.

    How are they going to pay their own way without using their names and status, and why should they have that advantage if they are not going to shoulder the responsibilities that go with it?

    They should petition the Queen to issue letters patent revoking the creation of the Dukedom of Sussex, and follow the example of Princess Patricia of Connaught, who in 1919 gave up her royal titles and was accorded the rank and precedence of the daughter of a duke.

    The couple would then become Lord and Lady Harry Mountbatten-Windsor and could lead exactly the kind of private life to which they aspire.

    Guy Stair Sainty

    London W1

    SIR – As an ordinary pro-royalty citizen I have been appalled at the rubbish my computer spews out at me with vicious, racist comments about the Duchess of Sussex. I was sickened to read that a man – clearly experiencing a boring day – posted a Facebook message suggesting that the county of Sussex didn’t really want these two to be their Duke and Duchess.

    We need to remind ourselves that three of the Queen’s offspring became divorced for a variety of reasons.

    If this move is the only way to protect this loved but vulnerable couple and enable them to fulfil the vows we so recently watched them make, our prayers should accompany them.

    Jill Lawson

    Eardisley, Herefordshire

    SIR – I am a committed monarchist, but I cannot be alone in being totally exasperated by the antics of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

    To have made a major announcement about their future in (or out of) the Royal family, without consulting the Queen is the final straw, and shows a total lack of consideration and courtesy.

    The Duke’s grandmother, father and brother deserve better than this. He says he will “seek financial independence” – I hope he finds this an absolute necessity after his behaviour. It’s time to grow up.

    If he and the Duchess feel that the press is intrusive, then they should try looking at how other members of their family behave: the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Princess Royal are all good examples. They don’t give emotive interviews, but say nothing, keep calm and carry on.

    Jean Forward

    Great Bookham, Surrey

    SIR – “Collaborate” with the Queen? Surely this shows a basic misunderstanding of the position.

    Keith Haddow

    Stapleford, Cambridgeshire

    SIR – Many of us retain a great affection and respect for the concept of monarchy, and the selfless duty and commitment shown by the Queen and other members of the Royal family.

    However, when its members appear to turn their backs but still want the privileges, that affection and respect can no longer be taken for granted.

    Iain D Bailey

    London N5

    SIR – Our 93-year-old Queen is, again, suffering at the hands of her feckless family. She is trying to cope with the constant criticism of the foolish Prince Andrew, while also dealing with the frailty of her 98-year-old husband.

    Rather than providing the support his grandmother might appreciate, the Duke of Sussex has run away. One can only guess at the influence that the Duchess exercises over this weak young man.

    John Hanson

    Canterbury, Kent

    SIR – After the Duke of Sussex’s shock announcement, many will probably cast the Duchess as the snake in the royal garden, whispering discord in his ear. However, this is not her fault – in truth these issues predate her arrival on the scene.

    From brawls with paparazzi outside nightclubs to his first Afghanistan tour being cut short by a breach of the media embargo, the Duke has always been suspicious of the press, which made it all the more baffling that the Palace required him to take on a senior role.

    He hugely enjoyed his military career. Film of him grinning as he led Cadet Force parades and the quiet satisfaction on his face as he serviced his Apache chopper in Afghanistan showed that he found personal fulfilment and relief from the intrusive media while in the Army.

    His discharge in 2015 surprised everyone, and in interviews the Duke remarked on the difficulty of balancing military and royal obligations. It is clear now that he was pressured to leave the Army before he had a chance to calm down and make his peace with the press. Why was the second son Prince Andrew permitted to complete a full 22 years as a Navy officer but the second son Prince Harry afforded less than half that time?

    Although I wish the Duke could have gone about his decision in a more diplomatic way, ultimately he has my sympathy. The simple fact is that he was forced into a public role 10 years too early.

    Robert Frazer

    Salford, Lancashire

    SIR – The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s “break for freedom” lands a devastating blow by all accounts. To whom?

    Simon Crowley

    Kemsing, Kent

    SIR – Are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex really so far removed from the real world that they’re unable to see how their new plans look to us mere commoners?

    An unbelievably privileged couple, constantly whingeing about their “tough” life, announce they’d like to keep all the bits of it they enjoy – the titles, the money, the houses – but opt out of the actual job, until it suits them otherwise.

    They didn’t even have the courtesy to give proper notice to their boss! I suggest they be immediately demoted, including titles and benefits, and relocated anywhere that will give all of us the rest we need from this spoilt couple, who are clearly unsuited to their role.

    Sam Dawson

    London SW3

    SIR – The Duke of Sussex is rash and impulsive, as was his late mother. Let us hope he does not live to regret his rejection of the Royal family.

    Christine Doughty

    Nottingham

    SIR – It would seem that Harry and Meghan wish to have their cake and eat it.

    I suggest they move to Canada permanently and cease being an expense to this country.

    They should be stripped of their titles. We in Sussex don’t want any “half-baked royals”.

    Incidentally, I am a staunch royalist.

    Stuart Scholes

    East Grinstead, West Sussex

    SIR – As the Queen pointedly displayed during her Christmas speech, she has an heir and two spares.

    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex may join the Duke of York away from the spotlight at no cost to the state without damaging the monarchy.

    By their actions, they have shown themselves unsuitable for major public roles, and we will no longer have to suffer their views on climate change, mental health and much else.

    Michael McGough

    Loughton, Essex

    SIR – Since the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have announced their wish to “step back as senior members of the Royal family”, perhaps the Duke could revert to the title “HRH Prince Harry”, as he was known before his marriage. His wife could simply be known as Mrs Henry Mountbatten-Windsor.

    Zara Tindall and Peter Phillips seem to enjoy more freedom without titles.

    Philippa Madgwick

    Glastonbury, Somerset

    SIR – I cannot believe that the Duke of Sussex should so disrespect the Queen by making his announcement without consulting her. This speaks of brash Americanism. If the Duchess thinks this will endear her to her adopted country, she should think again.

    Lynne Waldron

    Woolavington, Somerset

    SIR – I’m sure that Diana, Princess of Wales, did not bring her son up to be so discourteous to the Queen.

    Jane Steer

    Bideford, Devon

    SIR – To resign on the first day back at work, after taking a six-week paid sabbatical, is unforgivable.

    To lose one younger brother of the heir to the throne from royal duties was unfortunate; to lose two is careless.

    I trust the “cottage” will now be handed to working members of the Royal family. The Duke of Sussex should roll up his sleeves and work for the Duchy of Cornwall, which, after all, pays his stipend.

    Alternatively, his brother could put in a good word in for him with the East Anglia air ambulance service, which is always looking for good trained pilots.

    Geoff Pringle

    Long Sutton, Somerset

    SIR – There used to be a television series where a well-off person swapped places with someone whose life was more mundane, often a struggle and definitely less enviable.

    Perhaps the Duke and Duchess should have tried that experience before their announcement, which frankly, seems quite unworkable.

    Patricia Griffiths

    Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

    SIR – Will they apply for Universal Credit?

    Leslie Watson

    Swansea

    SIR – If the Sussexes are leaving royal duties to make a fortune in the New World, why should the British taxpayer continue to fund their security? After all, their celebrity friends have to pay for their own, don’t they?

    Tom Callaghan

    Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

    SIR – Many will seize on this departure as an opportunity to carp about the cost of the Royal family and bang on about poverty and food banks. They will then resurrect demands that the monarch be replaced by an elected president. (No doubt Tony Blair would be the first to throw his hat into the ring.).

    First of all, the royal “brand” brings into the British economy far more revenue than it costs. A president would cost just as much (probably more) but, crucially, raise nothing in revenue.

    The wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge alone was estimated to have boosted the economy by about £2 billion, attracting some 800,000 extra tourists here in 2011.

    Whether one loves them or not, the Royal family are at worst cost-neutral to the taxpayer, so getting rid of them won’t stop food banks and homelessness.

    Angus Long

    Newcastle upon Tyne

    SIR – Anyone seeking to understand the Duke of Sussex’s decision to step back from royal duties would be well advised to consult Alan Jay Lerner’s very apposite lyrics of “I’m an Ordinary Man” from My Fair Lady. Therein, I suspect, lies the answer.

    Graham Hoyle

    Baildon, West Yorkshire

    SIR – I really must watch The Prince and the Showgirl again. I can’t recall whether it is a comedy or a tragedy.

    Katie Hurlow

    Weybridge, Surrey

    SIR – For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

    Ian R Lowry

    Reading, Berkshire

    2. So, any criticism of a black person, for whatever reason, is racist? Crap!
      Anyhow, she is as “black” as Obama: suntanned and fabulously priviledged. Bah!

    3. “the quiet satisfaction on his face as he serviced his Apache chopper in Afghanistan ” He was a pilot, he would not have ‘serviced’ his helicopter – the groundcrew would.

      1. Correct – his ‘servicing’ was, at best, limited to pre-flight checks of the airframe and systems.

        ‘Morning, Alec.

  33. “Every letter today is on the errant Prince.”

    8.07am and only nineteen comments. Goes to show how much anyone cares about Sexit.

  34. Woman posed as teenage boy to sexually assault up to 50 girls after grooming them online

    A woman who posed as a teenage boy to groom then sexually assault underage girls is due to be sentenced later today.

    Gemma Watts, 21, used Snapchat and Instagram to lure her young victims, duping them into thinking they were in a relationship with a boy their own age.

    Disguising herself and claiming she was a 16-year-old boy, she travelled the country sexually assaulting girls as young as 14.

    Watts, who lived with her mother in North London, has admitted attacks on four youngsters, but police fear she may have assaulted as many as 50.

    It wil be interesting to see what ‘punishment is meted out to her, compared with what a 21 year old man would get, for the same/similar offences

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/10/woman-posed-teenage-boy-sexually-assault-50-girls-grooming-online/

    1. Gawd help the women she will be sharing the prison with !

      What a dirty little wretch she must be .. all youngsters need to be protected from her .

        1. Tony, the sentence is halved for good behaviour.

          However whether the other young girls that she shares the prison with will consider her behaviour “good”…?

    2. How dare they suggest she is a woman. If she said she was a boy on the days in question, then surely she was a boy on the days in question. She may have been a woman on other days when she wasn’t being a boy, but that’s her own personal choice. That’s the way it is.

      (S)he does appear to have lied about his/her age, but that’s a different matter altogether.

    1. I wonder how quickly Harry will become bored with being a Hollywood celeb .. paraded around the celeb circuit by his faux attention seeking duchess?

  36. Samira Ahmed wins equal pay case against BBC

    Ah well that has messed up the BBC’s pay scales big time. How do they dig themselves out of that, It seems to imply that if you are say a presenter you should be pretty much paid the same as any other presenter no matter how minor the channel or how small the audience

    Will Jeremy Vine now be going down to £400 an hour ?

    1. Ahmed claimed she was underpaid for hosting audience feedback show Newswatch when compared with Jeremy Vine’s salary for Points of View.
      The judgment said “her work on Newswatch was like Jeremy Vine’s work on Points of View under section 65(1) of the Equality Act 2010.”
      She told the recent hearing that she was owed almost £700,000 in back pay.

        1. If as it seem it applies across the board and I would assume it will also apply to men then the BBC will have to cut salaries by quite a bit

          It seems daft as the media tend to pay on how much of an audience you can pull in. Now it seems some one can read the news on a minor channel at 5am and get the same pay as on a major channel at say 6pm

          4. Don’t be silly. They don’t want that. They want equal pay for less work.
            (See Wimbledon championship prize money)

          7. Rather than cut men’s’ salaries the BBC in the spirit of fairness and diversity will probably sack those females doing jobs equivalent (but paying less) to men’s.

            Watch out, Bruce, Kuenssberg et al

        2. The beeb will have to put the licence fee up again. They will probably re-possess the OAPs’ houses if they don’t pay.

    2. I want to know why I’m not paid the same as Lord Hall. Blatant discrimination.
      Of course her male predecessor on Newswatch was also paid less than the presenter of Points of View but neither Raymond Snoddy nor Terry Wogan identified as “women of colour”, so that’s alright. Ludicrous.

      1. The media have always paid on the basis basically of the audience they can attract. This tribunal decision seem to say the BBC should pay on the basis of the job so it seems to means all News readers should be paid a similar amount and all presenters a similar amount and all games show host a similar amount

        Where the BBC now go with this who knows. They clearly cannot increase most people pay several fold and I cannot see Jeremy Vine taking a 1500% pay cut

  37. With all the forore of numbers of downvotes and loss of individual upvotes, I’ve just removed the extension that allows down-votes to be seen.

    Peace, perfect peace.

    1. Did it show you the culprits though? We can all see the downvotes but not who does it.

      You don’t need an extension for that.

      1. No, no names, J, so, if you cannot see who the dribbling idiots are, why see the results of their spite.

        1. I am pretty certain its Gedore ( now called John Drake ) and the demented parrot who are actively down voting on here, plus a number of stalkers who follow me from blog to blog and use sock ID’s for downvoting

          3. https://blog.disqus.com/2019-in-review-0#disqus_thread

            “How does one go from 67605 Up Votes on Wednesday evening to 67080 by late Thursday afternoon and others lose
            all their 165-000 Up Votes in five weeks (December 1 2019-January 9 2020 ) without any one at Disqus noticing who’s
            involved and why ,answers please ?”

            This isn’t someone on this site. There might well be a few people who down vote others, but that can only account for a few votes, not thousands.
            And I don’t appear to have that many comments that get downvoters anywhere, and they’re massively outnumbered by upvotes, but my overall tally is still going down.

          4. Yes. The vote-stripper works separately to those who visibly downvote people here, and we do not have very many of those. We have a couple of people here who like to touch the downvote button in relation to private arguments, but nothing on the scale that we have seen in the last day or so. Most here don’t do it. I know that I don’t unless its really bad, and that has not happened here yet.

            We have picked up a specific troll that is making their presence known on this channel now, but mahatma’s comments would all be at -15 if it was one of those following him around. Fortunately trolls get bored easily and move on.

    3. I can’t see the requisite number of downvotes anyway, i.e. hundreds since yesterday.
      I don’t think it’s regular commenters doing it, but someone at Disqus. People have lost thousands of total votes that can’t be accounted for by the visible number of downvotes. It’s something going on in the background.

      2. lms2 – You had 35,121 on 22/10/19 rising to 35,585 on 19/11/19, so you were not on the vote-strippers list during that month. This morning you had 28,917 and now have 28,072. So you are now losing around 2,000 a day.

        I have only started looking at peoples numbers again in the past day because they are dropping so fast.

    4. Surely though there are accounts that are persistently doing nothing but down voting entries for no reason except prejudice.

      Are these not recorded somewhere?

  38. Labour leadership: Clive Lewis calls for Royal Family referendum

    Labour leadership candidate Clive Lewis has said there should be a referendum on the future of the Royal Family.

    2. The man is a dumb dummy and should be ignored. He won’t get the leadership, that is reserved for Kim Jong Bailey in order that we may watch her getting a drubbing, every time she dares open her gob and spew crap in the Commons.

      1. They would vote for them to be excluded from the future, of course.
        It’s called socialism. Russian Royal Family and all that.

        1. Socialists / Marxists / Communists all have a deep core of vanity within them. They want people looking up to THEM not to some other group such as a Royal Family. But many “working and middle class” people really like the Queen. So this man is making a strong bid for Labour to lose the next election as well. Good, that is at least 10 more years free of them.

    4. I think questioning the future of the monarchy and whether Britain should be a republic or not is perfectly reasonably subject for discussion. Why shouldn’t it be? If people voted to continue with a monarchy then at least they would have some sort of democratic legitimacy.

      1. Oh, not another referendum that went the wrong way !!
        Maybe the Royals could vote to return to what they used to be, and bring back back
        things like the droit du signeur etc. (that one would solve the Andrew problem).
        (the down-vote isn’t me)

      1. I caught a very short clip of him on QT the other day – he’s a thoroughly nasty piece of work!

  39. Is there a rule that the more wokeness and virtuesignalling/”progressiveness” a person displays, the more selfish and self-centred they are likely to be.

    1. Yes. Hypocrisy is always a part of the psychological makeup of the Social Justice Warrior!

    2. Those people that I know who go out of their way to help others don’t care a fig if anyone else knows that they are doing it. They do it because “it’s right.” There was one man that I read about who would pick up several newspapers from the newsagents in the morning when he bought his own, and then walk around delivering them to those who could not easily get out of their houses.

      He did it for years with nobody knowing about it, until one of them thought people should be aware of how nice he was. He just went red and was lost for words when it came out.

      1. That’s right Meredith! SJW’s like the social recognition, the virtuous spouting. The other aspect of course is that they don’t want to actually do anything themselves; it is always a call for someone else, usually the taxpayer. You could starve to death living next door to one without them lifting a finger!

      2. That’s right Meredith! SJW’s like the social recognition, the virtuous spouting. The other aspect of course is that they don’t want to actually do anything themselves; it is always a call for someone else, usually the taxpayer. You could starve to death living next door to one without them lifting a finger!

  40. Fuckwits,fuckwits everywhere

    “Huge swathes of farmland owned by the National Trust are to be forested under plans to make the charity carbon zero by 2030.

    On the Trust’s 125th anniversary, Hilary McGrady, the director

    general, announced that trees will be planted on 18,000 hectares (44,000

    acres), the equivalent area of 42 Sherwood Forests.

    But controversially, around half of that expanse will come from

    grazing land, with dozens of tenant farmers told they will have to

    reduce their numbers of cattle and sheep.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/09/national-trust-forest-vast-swathes-farmland-plans-go-carbon/

    1. At a time when ‘farmland’ birds are under increased pressure through loss of habitat, modern farming techniques and pesticides, the last thing our larks, grey partridges, yellowhammers, corn buntings and the rest need is more trees.

        1. ‘Morning, Belle.

          It must b 2 or 3 years since I last saw a Lapwing. They used to be a common sight on the guided bus route to Cambridge.

          1. Lapwings are still common both as breeding birds and as winter visitors where I live, but not in the numbers they once were. Still lots of curlews probing the coastal pastures for worms in winter too, but also reducing.

            What have really fared badly are the seed-eating passerines, such as the buntings. They need seeds all year round to live, but since weeds that produce food for them are routinely sprayed off, spillage from harvesters and leaky tractor trailers no longer occurs when wheat and barley are deposited in leak-proof grain bins and winter stubble is a thing of the past, when fields are ploughed in and set as soon as the harvest is off, they struggle on that score.

            They also struggle through over-spraying of crops with insecticides. They spend a lot of time in spring and summer collecting thousands of insects that their chicks need in the nest to provide the protein to grow and to make feathers, so it’s a double whammy for them. No seeds for the adults and the insects have been killed before they can get to them.

            In the 80s and even into the 90s corn buntings were common with their jangling keys call on the coastal strip of Northumberland. For a good few years now (over a decade) they have been functionally extinct in the county, with only one or two records of short-staying single birds each year. Yellowhammers were to be seen and heard almost anywhere there was somewhere for them to sit. Now, although they still breed in some places, they are only at a fraction of their 1990s population.

          2. Paradoxically, perhaps, given the bad publicity surrounding the way endangered raptors ‘mysteriously’ disappear when their electronic tags indicate they have dispersed onto managed grouse moors, some of the best places to find yellowhammers these days is where there are well-organised pheasant shoots. Feed bins and game-crop fields give them and finch flocks the sustenance they need to see them over the winter.

          4. ‘Morning, Spikey.

            A journey on the GB across the Fens is rewarding because of the wild-life that can be spotted, especially when the weather is like today’s.

          5. Written in 1973 when I drove to work from Wilburton into Peterborough. It was my attempt to capture what I saw on the journey:

            Morning Journey
            I think of many things before I go to sleep,
            I find that thoughts are better than counting silly sheep.
            Pale rain-washed sunshine over flat, reedy fenland
            Giving light and shade to the corn on every hand.
            The long, grey ribbon of the lonely fenland road,
            Weary now, from bearing all its years of load.
            A green, slime-capped post – a hanser* perched atop
            Who sees me as I pass, though his fishing doesn’t stop.
            The road runs along by Vermuyden’s Dyke
            Twins in separation, at first glance much alike;
            Both wide and grey, the lifelines of the fen
            The surfaces disturbed by ripples now and then;
            Each has its traffic, both fast and slow
            Motor cars and tractors, pike swimming to and fro.

            Noted on the morning run to Peterborough from Wilburton in Autumn 1973

            *East Anglian term for a heron.

      2. Skylarks. Round here I never hear that constant twittering high in the sky any more, it used to be a constant pleasant background. Last time I heard it was some years ago in Dorset.

        1. We’ve still got skylarks and meadow pipits, but less widespread that they once were. Take away what they eat and they aren’t going to flourish.

          It’s a vicious circle. Insects are seen as pests on crops, so insecticides were introduced, then more effective ones to improve crop production, at some cost to the beneficial insectivorous birds, then even more effective insecticides, with maximisation of cropping areas removing nesting and foraging habitat as well as foodstuff. Birds suffer local extinctions, like your skylarks and out corn buntings. Their contribution to insect reduction is lost forever, so more chemicals need to be used.

          When the birds are gone, there will be only chemicals to replace them and the service they provided free.

  42. Just a thought.

    If Meg is going to get on with divorcing, she’d better hurry up before The Firm turns off the money hose.

    2. I have not followed these people after I heard her preaching about the woke agenda, so I don’t have much of an idea of her body language or her eyes (windows of the soul after all) and what she is really like. But if she is as calculating as some say that she is, then she will wait to have one more child before going anywhere.

      Then even if there is an accident or illness that takes one child (God forbid) then she will still have a spare to keep her linked to the family. But she would need to be damned cold-hearted to think that way. I don’t think that the young man has any idea what he could be in for. He might not want to burn all of those bridges with his real family.

      1. “Cold Hearted” you say………………
        You mean like claiming you couldn’t possibly leave the child for a second to fulfill your official duties but dumping him with a nanny in a different country while you virtue signal and politic is just fine??

        1. Ahh, as I said, I do not follow what people such as these do with their lives. I prefer real people. What you have just said though does not sound good.

          1. She’s a third rate actress who struck lucky. She’s able to virtue -signal all she likes as she’s mixed race but not too dark. She’s “Woke” and she won’t like it if Harry goes “broke” when his father cuts the allowance. She’s a golddigger through and through.

          3. Ha Ha! They’re all too woke there.

            The only comment policy here is not to attack other posters. Rudeness will not be tolerated!

  44. Happy Friday all Nottlers. Since an increasing number of you have joined or will soon join ” CLUB ZERO ” I am offering to all those Nottlers who want to have a few more Blogs that you can freely post on the offer of being Whitelisted on the 4 Blogs that I own or Mod on . If you are interested, check out the links to the 4 blogs & make me a reply post on here, any of the 4 blogs or by email to Admin_News@mail2world.com
    1) The Coconut Whisperer https://disqus.com/home/forum/the-coconut-whisperer/
    2) The Sputniks Orbit https://disqus.com/home/forum/thesputniksorbit-blogspot-com/
    3) Life of Earth https://disqus.com/home/forum/lifeofearth/
    4) NTJP News https://disqus.com/home/forum/81a9a82c-deaf-4c4b-898b-8116224e55e8/

    1. Thanks Hat – I already spend too much time online so I won’t take up your offer just yet.
      I may reconsider if I can’t post here!

    2. Just been over on the Disqus Home blog page, and plenty of people there are very unhappy about the insidious vote count decreases. Absolutely no comment from any of the staff that I saw, so they have to know about it but are ignoring or endorsing it. The company is based in San Francisco, which tells us everything we need to know. Wasn’t it Google who promised their staff that they wouldn’t allow another election defeat like 2016…??

      1. Happy Friday Ims2 . Discuss Disqus is moderated by the number one hard left Troll Mod on Disqus CaliCheeseSucks . She banned me on there 4 years ago at an IP level so no matter what account I use I am prevented from commenting on there.

        They have known about the bot all along – IMO they created it to drive former channel users off of Disqus!

        The company was created by two ethnic Chinese Americans – hard left San Francisco residents – Daniel Ha & Tony Hue in 2009, both have left the company since Zeta in NY bought it for $90 Mil so they are laughing all the way to the bank . Since the beginning they made their Globalist
        ( ie.Marxist ) beliefs part of the company policy & they created and ran the first group of channels as hard left propaganda outlets – their flagship channel was ‘News Views’ created by a Muslim IT guy Saeed Oday which he later transferred to a trusted Marxist agitator & unionized California state employ called Gina Martini ( ironically she has now lost all her upvotes ! ) . Afterwards they allowed ordinary posters to create & own channels but the social experiment backfired on them as by 2017 Right wing channels dominated the network ( such as my ‘News’ Channel ) and so they took the decision to eventually closing the entire network down on Sept.1st 2019

        1. I remember banning CaliCheeseSucks from the old Nottl site some years ago.

          I wonder how long it will be till Disqus no longer works on little blogs like this.

          1. They can at anytime terminate the use of Disqus – the free version that I use straight away – with the paid versions I think its a months notification. There are other commenting platforms out there but I believe they are all paid for services such as Spot.IM https://www.spot.im/ I have a Spot mahatma ID & use it on the Jerusalem Post , I have used it to post you a greeting
            https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-start-ups-team-up-to-make-genetically-modified-mega-cannabis-613792

          2. You just pay a subscription to a Virtual Private Network company easily found on google. You can then choose where in the world you wish to be seen posting from via a VPN from that area.

            Presently i’m posting from my normal IP address but when i wish to visit sites in another country i can piggyback a local server and it looks like i’m there.

            One of my addresses is a backroom of a hairdressers in Vegas. :o)

          3. Phizzee – You can pay for them, but Opera is free and I’ve been using it for many months now with no problems. Apart from when I forget which browser I’m using and the website I’m accessing thinks that I am in Sweden or Russia. 🙂

          5. mahatma – the short version is “Just install the Opera Browser and use that to read Disqus pages. Making sure the VPN button at the top of the page is turned on (the padlock will look green when it is.)”

            You can use your normal browsers for anything else that you do at the moment with no other changes. Just use Opera for Discus. Then you can make as many accounts as you like. We have picked up a troll here in the past two days who clearly has 20+ accounts on Disqus, because their actions have given them away. 🙂

          7. I just have. It’s not a true VPN. They also log data. Which is not good. Plus they only have a handful of servers.

          8. Phizzee – I am of the opinion that if they really want to find you, they are going to. Opera is good enough to use multiple accounts on Disqus, which is good enough for me. 🙂

          9. True, but it still requires a warrant to be issued. The company in question also has to expend a substantial amount of money and will often fight against. If the data is more than a year old they will say it is not possible to retrieve it. Even the biggest operators can only store information on their servers for about a year and they have server rooms the size of football pitches.

          10. I meant the – “We want him dead, the footsteps behind you as the van pulls up, he is not seen again” type of people. The ones who do not care about the process of law. Those ones will find you if they really want to. No-one sitting at a desk working for an IT company is going to quibble with a gun pointing at them. They will press the button and the data unfolds.

            But we have all got to die one day. Best for it to happen while you are trying to do “good.” 🙂

            But paying for a more complex system is fine if you want to. I am happy with Opera.

      2. Me. I would be a fantastic emperor.

        My decisions would be ferocious and welcomed – such as forcing Quality street to sell bags of those green triangles and banning the wearing of hats indoors (punishable by flogging), pony tails on men, flip flops, socks with sandals and having cyclists who go through red lights explode.

        Anyone not indicating or using a mobile telephone while driving would, of course, simply be hanged.

          1. Sounds Frog. To the tower with you!

            I would also immediately replace the entire French language with a gutteral ‘Eh!’ and ‘Hoh!’ and require them to say ‘Gruber’s little tank at least once a day.

          2. An Eminence Grise is the one that has others wash away the blood afterward. After creating the flow. I know people good with a mop . :o)

    2. I prefer the HHGTTG solution. Pick someone at random as Monarch, but don’t tell them they are the ruler, and then just present them with decisions to make.

  47. An elderly married couple were at home watching TV.

    The husband had the remote and was switching back and forth between a fishing channel and the porn channel.

    The wife becoming more and more annoyed, finally said:
    “For god’s sake! Leave it on the porn channel. You already know how to fish!”

  49. When Her Majesty does finally step down at the end of her long reign, I would still prefer a mad King Charles carrying a pot plant around with him, instead of rewarding those grey soulless people who drone on and on about us becoming a republic. Prince William could be fine serving alongside him. Or even be King himself if Charles does not want it after all of these years.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d80737eb1748629952e4b3c6265b5e1c4275f66d55e5a473d01bb854ee497822.jpg

    1. I think Prince Charles could be fine as king and feels he is fulfilling the roll he has been trained/in waiting for. It is unlikely to be a long reign considering his age and he might even make changes like a formal retirement age for monarchs and let William take over after a while. I certainly wouldn’t want to take on such roll at 70+ years and he might see feel some such change is in order.

    1. Is it just me or does anyone else feel completely indifferent about what this pair do with themselves?

  52. Good Intent pub in Rochester to have one last knees up

    Morris dancers have pledged to “drink the place dry” just weeks before their local pub calls last orders.
    The Good Intent in Rochester – a popular haunt with folk music fans – is to close at the end of the month, despite a campaign to save it.

    t is being organised by the award-winning Medway-based Bishop Gundulf’s Morris, from noon on Sunday at the hostelry in John Street.

    The get-together coincides with an ancient pagan ceremony of The Blessing of the Plough which marks the start of the agricultural season.
    Among those taking part are Loose Women, Kent Korkers, St Clement Clogs, Liberty and the Widdershin Witches.

    1. Sadly, I fear its namesake in the next village to mine is following the same path. It was closed ‘for refurbishment’ for seven weeks in the Autumn; and re-opened under new management. The only discernible change was that the fairy lights behind the bar had gone. The menu comprised only ‘light bites’ until the New Year. I visited within a week of its re-opening, and decided it was a lost cause. Since when, every time I’ve passed, there has been no sign of customers. Decided to give it another chance after the Carol Service in that village, and the place was packed. The whole village, plus the former tenants, seemed to be in there. It turned out that it was the long-established barman’s last night, and everyone had turned out for his leaving ‘do’, which included a generous whipround. The consensus is that the new tenants don’t understand the business, have no chance of making a profit, and are devoid of people skills. The most recent review on Google is revealing. It won’t (and doesn’t deserve to) survive. Fortunately, the other hostelry in the village has reverted from being a miserable, soulless Harvester to an proper pub, so all is not yet lost…

  53. Clearly been working on it for some time

    Why are The Duke and Duchess of Sussex choosing this new working model?
    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex take great pride in their work and are committed to continuing their charitable endeavours as well as establishing new ones. In addition, they value the ability to earn a professional income, which in the current structure they are prohibited from doing. For this reason they have made the choice to become members of the Royal Family with financial independence. Their Royal Highnesses feel this new approach will enable them to continue to carry out their duties for Her Majesty The Queen, while having the future financial autonomy to work externally. While the contribution from The Sovereign Grant covers just five percent of costs for The Duke and Duchess and is specifically used for their official office expense, Their Royal Highnesses prefer to release this financial tie. More details on the specifics of the Sovereign Grant are outlined below.

    https://sussexroyal.com/funding/

        1. Haven’t a clue.
          I have absolutely no wish to read woke justification for their childishness.

        2. I didn’t bother looking. They won’t be so keen to be independent when Charlie cuts off the Duchy dosh.

          1. I have no idea of the current costs of security and armoured vehicles for transport, but if they are going to pay for multiple men 24 hours a day to protect them, then they will need to be earning a lot of money independently. Unless we will still be paying for them, overseas in another country. That will run to a few bob.

            Unless they have found a goldmine somewhere in darkest Canada.

          3. Yup, as she seems intent on doing her Diana re-creation thingy, she may as well go the whole hog.

          4. What they have done, and how they have done it mostly, is utterly despicably rude to HM The Queen. I am gobsmacked that Prince Harry, previously in the Forces, could agree to the announcement being made without proper sanction.

            I think lots of us knew MM would cause trouble but I didn’t think it would come to this. What a shame they ever met!

          5. It is possible that Harry was as much in the dark as the rest of the family. It has long been rumoured that they do not live together. Hopefully they were all celebrating yesterday at Kate’s birthday that their torment is nearly, although it still has some legs on it yet.

            God save the Queen.

          6. They will still have nigh on £30 million; even at today’s debased interest rates that would give you or me enough to scrape by on.
            In the hands of a shrewd financial advisor, it might finance the occasional £50,000 frock.

  54. Ignore the confected fury of the liberal elites – stop-and-search works. IAIN DUNCAN SMITH. 10 January 2020.

    It’s official – stop and search saves lives.

    The latest figures from across England and Wales confirm what many of us have known for some time. London, as ever, is the exception to the rule. Here, homicides have continued to spike, although youth crime has started to decline. Given the massive scale of London’s gang epidemic, turning things around will be a bit like reversing a super tanker, it will take more time. However, the Metropolitan Police has at least woken up; with stop and Search now up by 30 per cent.

    I’m in the Search and Hang party. It is 100% effective. No one detained under it has ever killed another person!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/10/ignore-confected-fury-liberal-elites-stop-and-search-works/

    1. No one detained under it has ever killed another person!

      They only dare Stop and Search White OAPs

      Anyone else it is victimisation or racism

        1. You could claim Racism.

          I cannot remember the last time the immigration/security bods at an airport were WASPs

      2. Well, stop and search does disproportionately target black people. It is a fact.

        1. And being “vulnerable to becoming a stabber” (wokespeak/BBCspeak) also disproportionately targets black people.

          2. Not always, unfortunately. I recall a young Polish girl being caught in black gang crossfire in London a few years back.

          3. LD,
            There is always going to be collateral damage
            the innocent will always suffer.
            People power could change things in a very short space of time but the JAY report did show me that people power use & abuse the ballot booth.
            In the name of the party first they give carte blanche to the very same political latch lifters that welcomed the odious paedophile in & under the umbrella of the membership & party.

        2. But surely that the people of colour have the advantage of the burka PC,Appeasement protection.

        3. The Left would far and away prefer that blacks were NOT searched. It makes for far more self righteousness around the supper table.

          The body count? They don’t care. It’s all about how *they* feel.

        4. That needs to be qualified as to whether black people commit a disproportional amount of crime. In the US, crime statistics include race, and since 50% of the country’s violent crime is committed by that particular 10% of the population, I am not that surprised they are targeted.

      1. If, for each innocent person wrongly hanged, ten innocent people escape being murdered then is capital punishment worth it or justifiable or not?

        I wonder if school debating societies still debate such a question along with topics such as euthanasia and abortion?

        1. One year (mid ’50’s as I recall) in the final of our annual debating society contest, one of the motions to be debated was: “This house believes W0gs start at Calais”. The boy selected to propose the motion, a bright Scots lad, opened by questioning whether they actually started at Gretna. A comment well received by a 99% English “audience”. He carried the day, as I recall.

    3. That’s the third time in a week I’ve seen the term ‘spiked’ used incorrectly. A ‘spike’ is a statistical term used to describe a short term abnormal maximum in something, not a consistent rise, which is what the writers are actually referring to. Unless of course they have crystal balls and can see into the future when murders in London suddenly fall back to 1990s values.

    1. The EU has as little interest in science as it does economics. All it wants is power, and the green scam is a path to control.

      1. Afternoon W,
        Not a lot of people know that.
        Like with many an odious issue they know it is a
        scam / wrong but to admit to it
        being a scam & wrong makes it uncomfortable when kissing the parties candidate in the polling booth.
        Three monkey mode of voting rules OK?

      1. WS,
        That question should weigh heavily on the consciences of
        many counsellors in high child abuse areas in the UK.

    4. Why should Public Relations be disqust?

      The problem with using Initials (note: not Abbeviation or Acronym), without expanding them, no-one knows (for sure) what you are talking about.

      So, Lewis is on safe ground there, along with Lammy Abbot Coerbyn etc

    5. Lewis listen up, it is what the bloody people, not you,want.
      You are after all is said and done, are staff

  57. Sinn Fein are in agreement with the new Parliament proposals. The N I Parliament could be at work within days [BBC News]

    1. Odd that Labour did everything they could to destroy grammar schools.

      Regarding the costs – what value have we really got for 250,000 a year? What worth has she?

      1. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland”.

        So said Anthony Crosland, Labour’s education minister….

        1. Crosland was born at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. His father, Joseph Beardsall Crosland, was a senior official at the War Office, and his mother, Jessie Raven, was an academic. Both of his parents were members of the Plymouth Brethren. His maternal grandfather was Frederick Edward Raven (1837–1903), founder of the Raven Exclusive Brethren and secretary of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. He grew up in North London and was educated at Highgate School and at Trinity College, Oxford. After obtaining 2nd class honours in Classical Moderations in Greek and Latin Literature, Crosland served as a paratrooper in Europe during the Second World War, from 1940, reaching the rank of Captain.

          After the war, Crosland returned to Oxford University and obtained a First Class Honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, which he studied in 12 months; he also became President of the Oxford Union. He then became an Oxford University don tutoring Economics. Notable people Crosland taught at Oxford included Tony Benn, Norris McWhirter and Ross McWhirter.”

          2. Uneducated people are easier to control. Which is the real reason for dumbing down education.

          3. In the case of the “old’ Grammars, I always felt there was an element of political calculus at work – when children of good Labour voters passed the 11+ and went to Grammar School, they were then likely to become professionals, not manual workers, and as such would probably vote Conservative.

            The other thing of course was that the Unions hated Grammars with a vengeance as their members’ children tended not to pass the 11+, so the solution was obviously to get rid of it. There was an article in the Times, way back in William Rees-Mogg’s day, which in analysing the TUC, pointed out the “tragedy” of organized Labour was that not one of the then trade union leaders had managed to pass the 11+.

          4. “…when children of good Labour voters passed the 11+ and went to Grammar School, they were then likely to become professionals, not manual workers, and as such would probably vote Conservative.”

            Crosland’s less often quoted remark made just that point: “It’s not that Grammars fail our people; it’s that they turn them into Tories.”

            In that quote can be seen the reason that Corbyn’s Labour lost more than half a century later – the idea that the party owned some of the people.

    4. Rather bad luck for her having such pencil-thin lips and so much gum on display above her teeth.

  59. A prescient letter in the Spectator (and also a reminder not to back any horses tipped by Matthew Parris):

    Given up on Chesterfield?

    Sir: Matthew Parris makes some interesting and accurate points about growing Tory support in the north and Midlands (‘The Tory push north will end in failure’, 7 December). He did not mention Chesterfield in his article, but it is a good example of what he talks about.

    It seems to me that the Conservatives have decided Chesterfield is a lost cause, even though it would on the face of it seem promising territory for them. With an average age higher than the national average and no university, it is one of those ‘left behind’ areas with a lot of traditional working-class voters who dislike Corbyn. A good local candidate and some active canvassing could at least have made a dent in Labour support.

    So what did the Tories do? They did not, as other parties have done, choose a local candidate. Instead they airlifted in someone from Melton Mowbray, whom none of us had heard of before. Naturally the Labour election flyer made much of this, and we local Conservatives suspect we are being used to give this person a bit of experience, rather than being offered a serious contender. There has been little canvassing by the Conservatives, only one flyer (which seemed to be a national one, rather than aimed locally), and I have seen no Vote Conservative signs.
    Susan Deal
    Chesterfield, Derbyshire

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/letters-why-have-the-conservatives-decided-chesterfield-is-a-lost-cause/

    Anyway, if you examine the actual result result, it is clear that Chesterfield must be a target for 2024:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/constituencies/E14000632

  60. Boy George has hit back at ‘ridiculous’

    claims that he’s ‘transphobic’ after saying that gender pronouns are a

    ‘modern form of attention seeking’.

    The singer, 58, from London, who became synonymous with his androgynous style of dressing at the height of his fame, sparked fury after taking to Twitter on Monday and telling his followers to ‘leave your pronouns at the door’.

    Fans
    insisted they were ‘heartbroken’ by the comment and felt ‘genuinely
    disappointed’ that an LGBTQ icon would post such a comment, with one
    asking: ‘What does it take to show others respect by using their
    referred pronouns?’
    Boy George hit back, saying: ‘Thanks for that but I have eyes and can mostly describe what I see.’

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7872627/Boy-George-mockingly-rubbishes-ridiculous-transphobia-claims.htm

    And he was friends with Steve Strange and Marilyn who was a man.

    Good on ya George.

    ♫Karma, karma, karma chameleon♫

      1. “Fans insisted they were ‘heartbroken’ by the comment.”

        It takes nothing at all to knock these people down and make their world shake. It is almost as if their beliefs are built on sand.

      2. No idea. I was never a big fan of anyone. I do like some of his songs though, even now and i’m 55.

        Boy George has always wanted to be controversial and he is still doing it.

    2. It seems it is as hard now for a person to ‘come out’ as a gay man and use the English language, without being condemned, as it was 40 years ago

      At least then, you could say that you were gay and still speak English like what it is meant to be spoken

  63. My father married when he was in his 30’s and he had the good judgement to choose a woman with a strong personality who was completely loyal to him and loved him as much as he loved her. I never once heard either of them say anything remotely negative about the other – they were completely supportive of each other.

    Prince Harry had far less good luck with his parents who clearly came to loathe each other and wanted to score off each other and belittle each other. Prince Charles chose the wrong woman to be his wife just as Lady Diana Spencer chose the wrong man to be her husband.

    I fear that Harry has inherited his father’s and his mother’s lack of clear judgement when it came to choosing a spouse; I thank God that I inherited my father’s good judgement when I came to marry. Like my much loved father I could not have chosen better.

  64. The deal to restore Northern Ireland’s executive includes new language commissioners to recognise and support both Irish Gaelic and Ullans. Irish language group Conradh na Gaeilge welcomed the draft deal but said it fell short of promises for an Irish Language act.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-51068774

    Perhaps we can have a commissioner to protect English in England. It’s needed.

    1. You should see how much money they’ve wasted in Scotland putting everything in Gaelic, when only the islands and part of the highlands ever spoke it.

      1. Good to try and preserve some of the indigenous culture before it completely dies out though.

        1. I don’t see the point. The only time they use it is to exclude English speaking visitors.

      3. I am bi-lingual but am pleased that my second language is actually becoming more and more popular. I speak English and perfect bullshine.

      4. I dread to think how much has been spent on Welsh road signs and translating everything. I used to get my electricity bills in Welsh as well as English (I live in England).

    2. Or at least a political party because since the mid 70s we have seen neither hide nor hair of one,

    1. [The guide] says that issues to look out for include people who speak in “strong or emotive terms about environmental issues like climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution”.

      That includes most Nottlers…but, of course, we are counter-extremists.

  68. Driving back home in the dark, from Pudsey, we were following most of the way a double full moon – you know, where one seems to be superimposed on the other. A spectacular sight. At times the bottom part of one seems to curve below the other, which we think is caused by the weight of all those Indian astronauts who have just landed there.

    1. Full moon tomorrow. There’s a penumbral eclipse due while the moon is rising. Not sure if it’s visible in the UK.

        1. Oops I’m a day out. Thanks for the tip. I’ve just popped outside and grabbed a couple of photos. Clear skies. (I’m in Spain)

      2. We can’t see the moon tonight due to rain and cloud. Last night it was magnificent.

    3. “where one seems to be superimposed on the other.”
      I thought that was after my 8th pint of Guinness.

    2. VW,
      When we were eating bread it was Hovis, warburtons was a no no on account of the halal tag.

  71. Whoever did it thank you for the 3 downvotes. My first and I now feel part o the family. :-))

        1. I find it amusing that we spend our time on this site because we enjoy it and get something out of it and the downvoters spend all their time not enjoying it and getting annoyed. LOL.

  72. Watching Monty Don .. BBC2 .

    He is so enthusiastic .. viewing some spectacular gardens .. and giant water lilies that look like enormous floating dinner plates . He is in the USA

  74. Our Judo-Christian heritage of 1500 years has been p1ssed on so much that it has all but expired in hardly more than one generation:

    Little silver man

    Sir: Charles Moore’s sales assistant may not have known what a blotter was (The Spectator’s Notes, 26 October), but I wonder how he would have reacted to the question the young girl asked me when I went into a jewellers’ in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral to buy a silver cross for my goddaughter’s First Communion. ‘Do you want the plain one,’ she asked me brightly, ‘or the one with a little man on it?’
    Deborah Hodges
    Shaftesbury, Dorset

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/letters-why-have-the-conservatives-decided-chesterfield-is-a-lost-cause/

    1. I’m not sure how to respond – ignorance, poor education, lack of awareness… sigh…

    2. She’s probably not the only person who doesn’t know the difference between a cross and a crucifix.

  76. Am I just unlucky? Someone on NTTL assured me that there was not an over-represntation of LGBT guests on ‘Desert Island Discs’, yet today I listened to my first for some months, and guess what? – Yes, a gay actor/film-star (Rupert Everett). Furthermore, he said he was deesperately keen to work at the Glasgow Empire because of its reputation for sex in the showers (laughingly, he said this proved not to be true). Plus, he told us that he would discretely drop his copy of The Bible into the briny. Quite a few have been delighted on Twitter.

        1. His father was quite a character and had a good racehorse named after him (Everett) trained by Fulke Walwyn.

  79. It’s always a pleasure to see the The Moonbat given a good kicking. The author doesn’t quite manage it but the readers do.

    Don’t believe misanthrope George Monbiot’s anti-meat propaganda

    JAMIE BLACKETT

    It’s hard to square Channel 4’s public interest remit with the post-truth propaganda it puts out

    The Campaign for Random Accusations against Pastoralists (there is an acronym if you find this too much of a mouthful) reached its apotheosis this week with the airing of Channel 4’s documentary Apocalypse Cow: a whole hour of prime time vegan proselytising as veteran Leftie George Monbiot prophesied – with no small amount of personal delight – the end of farming.

    Extinction Rebellion commissar Monbiot’s motivation for making the programme is plain to see. He has a weirdly misanthropic obsession with closing down farming and re-wilding the countryside which, ironically, is built on the Marxist view that capitalism is fundamentally at odds with the goal of sustainability. Yet beneath the sonorous platitudes and pseudo-Leninist posters, I couldn’t help thinking that it was more about profits than prophets. Channel Four is alleged to have signed a seven figure equity deal with The Meatless Farm Company in return for promoting their products – on top of all their other advertising revenues from Big Vegan. Follow the money.

    The programme’s thesis was based on several big lies. The main one – the grossly false assertion that 4kg of beef is as bad as a flight to New York and back – concerns methane output from livestock farming. Methane was vilified as a greenhouse gas but its contribution to global warming has recently been dramatically downgraded by mainstream science as it has finally been acknowledged that it is reabsorbed into the soil through plants as part of the carbon cycle and does not remain in the atmosphere forever. Some regenerative grazing systems have actually been shown to be carbon negative and processed vegetables have a higher footprint than grass-fed meat.

    Another accusation was about health. A throwaway remark blamed saturated fats from animals for causing cancer and obesity – yet plenty of nutritionists will tell you that carbs and sugar are the real baddies.

    The answer, according to this starry-eyed techno-optimist, is to grow electric protein from bacteria and hydrogen in factories “literally out of thin air”. But how are future humans are going to get their daily intake of iron, zinc and other minerals if their food has had no connection with the soil? How can we be sure these Frankenstein foods will be safe to eat? Even if they are proved safe, will anybody want to buy them?

    Poor George is becoming like one of those deranged Bond baddies with a power lust for seizing the global food monopoly. It might all be funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious. Farmer suicides are at an all-time high and there are some very vulnerable families worried sick by the constant attacks on their livelihoods.

    It’s about time Ofcom took a serious look at Channel 4. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to square the channel’s public interest remit with the post-truth propaganda it puts out.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/10/dont-believe-misanthrope-george-monbiots-anti-meat-propaganda/

    2. I read a published scientific paper the other day which quite clearly said that a mix of meat and veg was best for the environment.

      1. As we were taught – everything in moderation – meat, fruit/veg, carbs, etc.

        If we not supposed to eat meat, our teeth would be different.

      3. You cannot have a proper balanced healthy vegan diet it is simply not possible. With great care most people can live on a vegetarian diet

        1. Very true Bill. I have been a veggie for decades and manage – but I don’t understand the Vegan thing…..it makes no sense to me.

    3. Moonbat is a nutcase. I read his articles for amusement as his rants are epic. Mind you, he has good company on the Graun, including the “everybody is racist” brigade, the Owen Jones’s of this world and more.

      1. I hope, if they do succeed in their aims of destroying the method that feeds us and rewilding which won’t, that when they are out picking fruit and nuts they get eaten by the wolves and wild boar they wish to introduce.

  81. Main NI Parties Agree Power Sharing

    Another success under Boris’s watch. Lets hope it does not fall apart

          1. After the Good Friday agreement was signed and they reconvened, the first thing they debated (and agreed) was a pay rise for themselves!

  85. A man and his wife were listening to the local weather news one morning in the depths of winter. The announcer said that as the town needed to get the snow ploughs out to get the streets cleared, today cars should only park of the odd numbered sides of the streets. The wife dutifully moved her car to the correct side of the street.

    A couple of days later, the same weatherman announced that today, all cars should be on the even numbered side of the streets, again in order to allow the ploughs through. Wife immediately moved the car.

    Next day, the weatherman started to say that, today the cars should be…..when they had a power cut. Wife looks at husband and asks him where he thought they should park the car. The husband, married to his blonde wife for many years, says “Why don’t you just leave it in the garage today, sweetheart?”

  86. Evening, all. I have just arrived as others are leaving. I don’t think it was anything I said; I didn’t have time 🙂

        1. Oh, I was only going to turn in for the night….. my apologies for the misunderstanding.

          And then I awoke very early, and here I am with a mug of mint tea. I will probably try and get another couple of hours of sleep now.

  87. I am having an early night due to an early start tomorrow, but I have noticed something nice for Bill Thomas if he looks in. Also, it does show that we currently have a troll using 20+ Disqus accounts dropping in once or twice a day, so ignore any visible downvotes that you get for the moment if you don’t normally get them.

    There is a picture a long way down the page, or at the top if you “sort by Best,” that has signs saying that we don’t want Bill Thomas to leave. Many of you have upvoted it, so I’m sure you have seen it.

    Getting +5 votes for a comment here is good, +10 is great. I think that Bill currently has +28 which is the highest total that I can remember seeing here for a single comment. So he is well liked on this channel. The point of this comment is that next to this number is the downvote count which is -29.

    It is utterly absurd to think that there are 29 “quiet people” who have suddenly all come out to vote that way. This is a second clear indication today that there is a troll here at the moment using many accounts to fake the votes. This is another “beginner” mistake from the troll because they just pile up the votes without thinking. That is a combined total of 57 people and I cannot recall that many ever commenting on a single entry here.

    So, if you find a comment of yours with lots of downvotes next to it, then you can relax. It is just one or two sad people voting lots of times. The type of people that you would push out of the pub if they dared to show their faces in it. Also, if Bill does look in – from the above example you can see that those downvotes that you received yesterday were not real votes, they were sad people playing games.

    They are following a party that will be out of office for at least the next 5 years and more likely for 10 years. They are squealing in mental anguish at the failing of socialism in this country once again and are lashing out. That is all that they are doing. They may need to go out to work for a living after all, and they don’t like that idea. Have a good night. 🙂

    1. On the bright side, the time they waste casting pointless down-votes, the less time they have for supporting a second referendum, etc.

      1. Evening AA,
        ogga1 has been suffering down votes for yonks this also for posts many were agreeing to, but the max votes only amounted to three, one on a regular basis ( nearly every post) from some sort of footwear character with the user name clog or something.

    2. I’ve suggested to BT, privately, that downvotes aren’t worth a tinker’s cuss. For the life of me, I don’t know WTF Disqus were thinking of when they introduces visible downvotes as the default. But BT made the point that there certain posters here who are quick with ad hom attacks, and I concur. One in particular has driven away two long-standing posters in the last week. Here’s an example – we’re all grown-ups here (with the possible exception of PP). If some posters regularly fail in the grammar department, it may be beyond their control. One recently-departed and long-established poster here had issues with grammar. And apostrophes. This was due to asphasia, following a TIA. He didn’t deserve to have the piss taken out of him. People tread on eggshells where my disability is concerned. It’s quite funny when feet are mentioned in all innocence, followed by furious backpedalling and apologies. But some disabilities are less visible.

      Since its inception, this site has been a pleasant place to pass the time. Lately, not so much. I believe it has been a force for good, but I’m increasingly aware that all sorts of unpleasant sh1t goes on offline, behind the scenes. I may be naive, but I think most folk here derive pleasure, education and friendship from the site. Most, but sadly not all. The site will be our years old on 1st April. Will it reach its 5th anniversary? I’m not so sure.

          4. …and I didn’t even mean those typos, they genuinely just happened: Freudian or what?

      2. Evening Geoff. And all of course.

        I’m sorry that long-standing Nottlers have left because of downvotes or whatever reason. Have to say I just post, very erratically, and then get on with whatever. Also that way I seem to have missed the unpleasantness you mention. Of course it could be going straight over the top of my head so …

        1. Hi, vw. Happy New Year to you and gg. I see I’ve already attracted a couple of downvotes for my previous post. Don’t care. And my upvote total is now zero. Disqus is obviously broken – it’s a shame that some people have taken it so personally. :-((

          2. Happy Friday Geoff – welcome to CLUB ZERO This ID of mine is on the way, I expect to be at Zero by the end of the month.
            Firstly regarding the non-stop down voting on here – I personally suspect its Gedore ( now known as John Drake ) and Polly Parrot , banning their ID’s will not help as they are using multiple sock ID’s to down vote perfectly fine posters on here. Secondly down votes do have an accumulative negative impact on a posters Disqus reputation, especially on brand new posters whose accounts will quickly turn from Average to Low Rep if they are serially down voted in the first 3 months since signing up to Disqus – it happened to an ID of mine which within 3 months turned Low rep from receiving up to 15 down votes on each comment made, despite having zero flags or spam marks & getting about 2,000 upvotes in the same period.

          3. HNY to you too Geoff, hope you had a lovely Christmas.

            Bill Thomas will be missed but maybe he will come back to us in a while. I may not post very often but I usually read because it’s enjoyable. And thanks to you for making it possible. Look forward to 5th anniversary.

      3. Jack and I have enjoyed all the people we have met on this site and thank you and all mods for keeping this site available. It has helped us immensely to understand Brexit especially!! So cheers to you all and long may Nottlers continue! ExPats Jack and Jill

      4. I hope i’m not one of the guilty party. I’m always cheeky but don’t necessarily know i’m hurting someone.

      5. From one who mainly just enjoys the various conversations and The musings of some very knowledgeable souls, I am surprised that anyone is deeply offended by down votes. There have been unpleasant exchanges over the years and if I am involved, I say my piece and go away. But if you are giving opinions on an open forum then you may have to accept some heat. I am sure most of us are sensitive to reasoned criticism and may consider what has been said. But downers, pah, you have probably just annoyed someone who is very annoying, Bravo!

      6. Well said Geoff.
        I’m sure we’ll still be going for a number of years. It’s the stupid childishness of some posters who add nothing to any discussion but just keep on repeating the same tired old message. I try ignore them but now and again try to engage in conversation but give up exasperated at their continuous whining and obfuscation.
        As the blog has been good since you started it it not surprising that a few spoilers will come in but it shouldn’t spoil our for the ha’peth of tar that is annoying.

    3. I saw that post earlier on, it has either been deleted or downvoted out of existence.

      And you now have eight downvotes on this message, the downvoter must be human.

  89. Referendum on the future of the monarchy
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51062770

    Speaking at his campaign launch in London Clive Lewis said: “A lot of people would like to see the monarchy scaled down.”

    He said he understood the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to step back as “senior” Royal Family members.

    3. Wasn’t he on QT last night defending Markle ..

      We switched channels .. I can’t stand him.. He is another chap of colour who has a great big chip on his shoulder!

  90. It seems that BTL comments on today’s (Saturday’s) letters have been removed. Is it me, my browser, the DT pages or my paranoia?

  92. DT Story

    Philip Hammond banned from discussing Brexit negotiations role with new employer

    Philip Hammond has been banned by the government watchdog from discussing his involvement in Brexit negotiations with his new employer to avoid helping them “unfairly”.

    The former Chancellor has joined the board of Ardagh Group, the Irish packaging company, and is being paid a reported £125,000 a year.

    This odious man clearly hates Britain just as much as Corbyn and his cronies do. Why doesn’t Johnson arrest him for treason and have him locked up in the Tower of London shackled to the Traitors’ Gate.

  93. The Letters page is still unavailable. I presume we carry on on this thread. Iran now admit the Boeing was shot down by its military in error. The perpetrators will be dealt with.

    1. I’m guessing the battery commander & vehicle crew have already been liquidated.
      Morning.
      Edit: wrong comment – removed. :-((

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