Monday 15 April: A stark reminder that Iran’s ambition is the total destruction of Israel

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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839 thoughts on “Monday 15 April: A stark reminder that Iran’s ambition is the total destruction of Israel”

  1. Good morning all! It’s actually not raining here! Wonders will never cease!

    1. Good morning. Enjoy it while you can as the forecast suggests it won’t be long before rain sweeps through. Mind you, I did hear that on the BBC..

        1. Sue, the BBC weather forecast, updated hourly is about the only thing that the BBC has to recommend it. (Good morning, btw.)

          1. Yes well, ok! My dad was a met officer and I’m afraid I don’t believe a word they say! I look to the skies!

      1. Well pet, it’s raining now and blooming freezing! 😘 Dobby sitting hunched up on the radiator!

          1. Yep! Sounds like Scotland in April! Have just been in the garden with the twins smelling all the herbs, and found two ladybirds sitting in the sunshine! The boys were thrilled!😘🐞🐞

    4. Wet and windy on the Costa Clyde this morning. It made for an interesting game of walking football. Time for a shower to dry off.

    1. Now, now, Bob3, don’t succumb to the British bad habit of always criticising the weather (Too Hot or Two Cold). Both rain (jigsaw puzzles) and sun (picnics) each bring their joys. (Good morning, btw.)

      2. Good Morning, Elsie,

        Wordle 1,031 3/6

        ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
        ⬜🟨⬜🟩⬜
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. So I noticed when I took the empty milk bottle out.
      EDIT:-
      Good morning by the way.

  4. A stark reminder that Iran’s ambition is the total destruction of Israel

    All that fuss over such a small piece of land

    1. It’s been highly contested since the dawn of history, the land bridge between Asia and Africa, the transit point for sea trade between East and West, the birthplace of the two most influential religions and metaphysical thought systems in history… Medieval mapmakers were right to make Jerusalem the centre of their maps.

  5. Young people must realise Britain needs to spend more on defence to protect their freedoms, the boss of Babcock has said.

    David Lockwood, chief executive of the British defence company, said Britain must make the case for higher defence spending to younger generations born since the Cold War as the world enters a more dangerous period.

    Mr Lockwood said the West could no longer take democracy and liberty for granted as authoritarian and totalitarian states such as China and Russia become more aggressive.

    We don’t need to take Freedom and Democracy for granted in the West because they no longer exist. The restrictions on Free Speech are particularly noticeable and spread widely throughout what was once referred to as the Free World. Scotland’s Hate Crime Law would do credit to any demented authoritarian state and the Online Harms Bill has only one real purpose. To prevent people saying what the Government does not like. Whether it is worse in Russia and China I don’t know. I suspect that there is little difference, at least so far as Russia is concerned.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/14/young-people-understand-west-freedom-risk-babcock-chief/

    1. I would imagine, Minty, that Mr David Lockwood’s desire for more spending on defence might well be on the profits which such a policy would bring to his company.

  6. Good morning Good People!
    And what a bloody foul, wet, & miserable one it is too!
    Heavy rain and 3½° on the yard thermometer just now when I took the empty milk bottle out.

    1. Good morning, BoB. Just be grateful that you only have to pop outside briefly with the empty bottle; the poor milkman has to spend his entire working day in the heavy rain doing his rounds to deliver the full bottles of milk.

  7. Good morning, chums. I hope you all slept well. I was up early so posted today’s Wordle result (it took me four attempts) at the tail end of yesterday’s (Sunday’s) page. Now to read Sir Jasper’s recycled joke and then on to indoor jobs because rain and heavy winds are forecast for most of today.

        1. It increasingly feels like it Ma’am, toiling away in the dark with rocks falling on me!

  8. The successful Western defence of Jerusalem, whereby the wrath of Tehran resulted in just one missile landing on an army base, is a case of “back from the brink”. Contrast that with, say, the defence of Ukraine.

    If Jerusalem, in its madness, elects to push on with their campaign of Total Destruction, all the solidarity from the West will not save it again, or deserve to.

    I am sick with worry, but my detractors here say that this is a good thing and rain down insults and lies on me. They have nothing but malice left in their hearts.

    The best and only sane outcome is for both sides to put aside indefinitely any thought of “total victory”, put it down to chest-thumping and bravado, and accept one another’s deterrence kept in reserve for if either side has notions of “total victory”. In time, they might even become friends.

    2. I suggest you read up on the apocalyptic Shia cult that dominates the Iranian clerico-fascist regime, a regime that wants Israel exterminated as a means of awakening the last Mahdi whom they believe sleeps at the bottom of a well in Qom and ushering the End Times. Good luck making peace with them.
      But no, as ever, you focus your ire on Israel and the Jews.

      1. It is they that constantly harp on in their propaganda about “total victory” either for themselves or attributed to something former Iranian leader Ahmadinejad said decades ago.

        I do not deny the unpleasantness of the current regime in Tehran that even many of its people are sick of. Beating up young girls for being improperly dressed seems about the limit of their sense of moral virtue, and the drip feed of proxy trouble is an irritant we could do without. That said, there are quite a few unpleasant regimes in the world today, and Iran does not stand out in the way that Israel currently does as a paranoid nuclear-armed rogue state with a bloodcurdling mission to kill anyone getting in the way of their God-given aspirations.

        A far more potent threat from militant Islam is the awakening that Western feminism has stymied relations between men and women in our culture, but allow Muslims to breed freely. Soon they will dominate without firing a shot, and then they will dictate what “anti-colonialist” terms they wish on our hapless and helpless indigenes. Will the Jews save us? Like hell they will.

        1. Complete distraction as always although your last few words shows the mask slipping and reveals your instinctive anti Semitism. Israel has enough to do to save itself, the West can do so readily if it can summon the energy.

          1. “Complete distraction” is chutzpah for getting to the point.

            I am instinctively anti anyone speaking, carrying the capacity and the intent for all out war. If that is deemed a “hate crime” in Scotland, then so be it. I do not excuse a murderer because he, she or it belongs to a favoured identity group as you seem to be doing.

        2. Reference to your last paragraph.
          Scotland now being a classic example.
          How have the historically proud nationalistic Scots allowed this to happen?

    3. Would you have said that of the Nazïs rounding up Jews in 1940s Germany. “Hey you lot just stop it and make up”.

      Sam Harris is worth a listen to on this topic as to what Israel are dealing with here.

      As for the insults, I ‘ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you just don’t realise that you often wander into anti-Semitic territory. But it might be noted that anti-Semitism can bring out the insults in readers.

    4. Can’t they disagree without malice? We are in sad times. Naomi Wolf has just published a book, which sounds very good, about how we are polarized and what happens if you stand against a majority, “Facing the Beast”. There is good interview by by Tucker Carlson on video.

      1. It was telling that it was Ireland that was reported as considering the recognition of Palestine.

        Ireland is a nation that for centuries was a province of Great Britain, and which still comprises two peoples, one of whom fanatically loyal to remaining a part of Britain, and the other equally fanatical about living in its own self-determining republic without any ties to Britain. These two peoples are also divided by religious allegiance, even though their patron saint, revered by Irish Catholics who celebrate a day in March in his honour, was an Englishman.

        The similarities between the Irish Republic / United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Israel, fiercely self-determining and Palestine, that was created nearly 1900 years ago as a loyalist colonial province, becoming for centuries part of the Greater Caliphate and more recently a British Protectorate.

        The difference being that following decades of internal warfare known as “The Troubles”, the Irish learnt to settle their differences and live alongside each other in relative peace.

    1. That is mental.
      Oh well – a little more madness, or a little less.
      Who’s counting?

  10. To the title, let’s hope that now Israel and Iran have measured each other’s manhood they might stop waving their appendages and we might avoid WW3.
    Mind you, with the guarantees of gender affirmation they are offering, I don’t know what the US military can do in support with half of them squabbling over sit-down toilets in the Gents and the other in sick bay from jab-induced chronic illness.

    God help us.
    If He can be bothered.
    If I were Him, I might hesitate.
    Lucky I’m not.

    A part tout ca – bonjour les copains!

  11. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) Story
    THE PICKLE SLICER

    Yossel worked in a Polish pickle factory. For many years he had a powerful desire to put his penis in the pickle slicer. Unable to stand it any longer, he sought professional help from the factory psychologist.

    After six months, the therapist gave up. He advised Yossel to go ahead and do it or he would probably never have any peace of mind.

    The next day he came home from work very early. His wife, Sacha, became alarmed and wanted to know what had happened.

    Yossel tearfully confessed his tormenting desire to put his penis in the pickle slicer. He went on to explain that today he finally went ahead and did it, and he was immediately fired.

    Sacha gasped and ran over to her husband. She quickly yanked down his trousers and underpants only to find a normal, completely intact penis. She looked up and said, “I don’t understand. What about the pickle slicer?”

    Yossel replied, “I think she got fired, too.

  12. Vladimir Putin ‘looking to use WMD’ as Russia and Iran form ‘coalition from hell’. 14 April 2024.

    Vladimir Putin is hoping that the conflict between Iran and Israel will distract the West from the invasion of Ukraine, an expert has warned.

    I think someone would notice if a Nuke went off in Central Europe. These propaganda stories are of course ubiquitous; they are more intended to set the tone for International Relations than provide serious comment.

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1888272/vladimir-putin-weapons-mass-destruction-ukraine-russia-Iran-israel

    1. Across the West, the penny seems to be dropping that multiculturalism — in the sense that diversity is promoted, while integration is abjured — has failed.

      Wow. Imagine that! Who would have guessed?

      1. Multiculturalism was always just a Marxist tool to silence the majority while their country was being wrecked.
        Just like Woke really

      2. Up to a point, Lord Copper. Japan and Ireland are planning to import large numbers of enrichers. It’s almost as if there were a plan, which must proceed whatever the setbacks. But that would be silly, yes?

        1. Lord Copper gets all the mentions – but what about Mr Salter the chap who couldn’t say No (like the girl in Oklahoma!) and so said up to a point, Lord Copper so as not to offend his master.

          Scoop was once one of the set texts for “O” level Eng. Lit. and one of my colleagues, who taught French and Spanish, was called Mr Salter so the boys mischievously made unflattering comments about the character in their essays.

          This was rather unfair as Mr Salter was a very competent (or even cunning!) linguist who sang in the chapel choir so we spelt his name Psalter.

      3. The ‘THEY’ have obviously never really noted that a lot of people go or come on holidays and usually go back home.
        Or use to.
        There has never really been a necessity for permanence.
        It obviously doesn’t work.
        It just gets a bit sticky.

    2. The EU has replaced law with shared experience. It, being a supranational entity seeks to tie nations together not with legality because it cannot bind using shared heritage, culture, society and morality.

      In fact, the EU would very, very much like to do away with those because they are the primary hinderance to it’s hegemony.

  14. Any written constitution must also include the fact that ‘Common Law’ overrules all legislation, but that’s already in Magna Carta

      1. I wouldn’t trust any of the parties in the HoC to concoct a written British constitution. It would be a word salad such that any statement, clause etc. could be interpreted in a number of ways. Truly a rogue’s charter.

        1. Of all times in history, given the standard of our use and understanding of the English language, and of the customs and nature of our society, this must be the worst in which to ask the experts to write a constitution; which means that it will probably happen.

  15. Any written constitution must also include the fact that ‘Common Law’ overrules all legislation, but that’s already in Magna Carta

  16. No, you focus your ire on Israel and Jews, while bemoaning dispassionately the nature of the Iranian regime. It’s always thus with you. You cannot stop yourself.

  17. Good morning, all. Climate appears normal for an English April: yesterday was sunny, warm with a useful breeze to aid the drying of the washing, this morning has high fairly thick cloud with patches of blue visible and has retained the breeze. Many plants, especially my grape vines, are responding to the climate by putting on daily measurable growth.

    As for today’s weather, the forecast is for sunny intervals with showers for the main part with the chance of a pulse of heavy rain late morning. Cooler than yesterday.

    More climate news, well, not really news for those who follow real science/scientists, but these facts cannot be repeated enough times.

    In addition a senior Canadian politician appears to have broken with the controlled narrative by telling the truth about Net Zero, power generation and storage.

    https://twitter.com/iluminatibot/status/1779487419177324724

    https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1779503570045325492

    **Fact check by the N Essex community.

    The following comment is an exaggeration and should not be taken seriously. Should such a facility covering Iowa spontaneously ignite the neighbouring states of Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota et al. would be devastated. Sleep easy in your beds.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/588f66b1155037b083d7b83dc22364f6771da259b637ab2b5b1e0dae2acc754d.png

    2. Is it me? Am I just being a bit too simple?

      We/You/They can build as many batteries of ever increasing sizes and power (theoretically) as they wish, but where do we get the surplus power to charge them from?

      Good morning, by the way!

      1. Stop being silly and expecting science and logic to be applied to the religion of ‘climate change’. If science starts to take over the entire hoax evaporates.

        1. I did rather suspect it was me being simple Wibbles, in mitigation I cite a long history in engineering, and we engineers are definitely hamstrung by the application of logic and thinking in straight lines?

          Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

    3. There are a bunch of Lefties who continually waffle on about ‘climate change’ and believe the lies completely. They cannot conceive of being wrong because they’ve been told what to think.

      When there are such people who refuse to consider alternative views there is no hope. To them, climate change is religion. It is blind faith. Reality isn’t involved at all.

  18. Good morning!
    For the past few weeks there’s been a problem in my building of hot water getting into the cold water pipes and for the past two days I’ve had to run the cold water tap in the bathroom for an hour plus to drain the hot and finally get lukewarm water to avoid scalding myself in the shower. Got up at 7 am this morning to allow for the same routine. Was full of dread and lo and behold, everything was fine!

    I’ve been complaining to the management but they said no one else had the problem and they’ll only act if it’s a “general problem”. So I did a knocking on doors exercise. Sure enough my neighbours were experiencing it too. They just thought someone else would deal with it! I explained how that works.

    I think Stanley is trans? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e13ead7ca3731ec09ec5bd01196f239b183a7a9bde1c2cc27ffc6f9c4fb37d45.jpg

    2. It could be that the dog in the dress is the presenter of the award, and Stanley has not yet appeared on the stage.

      1. Possibly. The joys of communal heating and hot water. I had everything in my flat checked out right at the outset but the problem is elsewhere in the system.

  19. Good morning from the Kingdom of Mercia and Helicon with a longbow and axe in my handbag along with a marmalade sandwich 😊. A delightfully enchanting morning .

      1. It was very nice but a long day when with the RSPB group travelling by coach for the day . I think I much prefer staying for long weekends at a lovely pub In a nearby villiage. But it was very nice- lots of new younger people in their 20s in the group which Is nice to see .
        I saw bitterns, red kites, the first swallows of spring, heard a nightingale ( but have never seen one but didn’t hear a cookoo

        2. I haven’t heard or seen a cuckoo before May here in east Cornwall in the 20 years we’ve been here.

          Edit; But we saw swallows on Friday 5th April at Siblyback reservoir.

        3. I haven’t heard or seen a cuckoo before May here in east Cornwall in the 20 years we’ve been here.

          Edit; But we saw swallows on Friday 5th April at Siblyback reservoir.

    3. Are you Ælfwynn (Æthelred’s) daughter) or Ætlfgifu (Emma of Normandy) Æthelred’s wife?

      1. I’m Æthelflaed of Mercia. Daughter of Alfred and defeated of the Vikings 🙂 morning Tom .

        1. Founder of a string of burghs across the Midlands to hold back the Viking hordes.

          1. Seems I’m descended from those Viking hordes – we got to Norfolk.

            50th generation, me, Anne.

          2. Like the Germans nipped round the end of the Maginot Line, they swerved the forts.
            Or they landed at Chelsea-on-Sea.

          4. And built fortresses in Western Mercia as a defence against invading Danes, she took an active role and lead the battles hence being called a warrior Queen . Lead the forces against the Danes at Derby and captured it and defeated them at Leicester- the Danes eventually submitted to my rule . Even Invaded Wales ( sorry Squire and Opopanax) in retribution for Welsh Kings killing an English Abbott. Kidnapped a Welsh Kings wife for that but she kept singing Tom Jones songs 🙂 but the undoing was the wretched Dylan Jones poetry- help from Helicon came with my inner muse Terpsichore. My father Alfred did eventually stop burning cakes 🙂

          5. She must have been quite a lass. Anglo-Saxon queens were there to breed, not smite the enemy and save their culture.
            Without checking, I cannot even remember the name of her hubby. I can only assume it wasn’t Mr. Aethelflaed. (Newish laptops doesn’t have the jolly useful diphthongs.)

        2. Thank you for clearing that up. surely that’s Æthelfæd, though? The second æ diphthong as well.

    1. Sunak is a manager, not a leader.
      His nit picking measures – maths to 18, the smoking ban, registering backyard chooks, are the hallmarks of a petty minded desk pilot with no ability to see the larger picture; no driving vision to make life freer for the British.
      Even New Zealand has binned horse face’s stupid legislation.

        1. The shopkeeper’s response should be “Are you 18 sonny? You’ll need some ID – they’re an age restricted item”.

      2. All he knows is how to exist in the system. He can’t lead. He simply has no vision because that means having principles or ideals and managers don’t have those.

        He keeps waffling on pointless nonsense to give the impression of doing something while really just generating activity, not achievement.

  23. Strap back Sunshine! That was unexpected! The rain has stopped and the sun’s out!!!!
    Don’t suppose it will last long.

    1. Woke up and it wasn’t bad. Since then weather has devolved into storm winds and rain. Bins all fallen over spewing rubbish everywhere which, of course, the bin men won’t bother to pick up.

      And doubly annoying as they’re late, will probably turn up tomorrow if they bother at all.

  24. Morning all 🙂😊
    I’m just glad I managed to cut the grass yesterday. Weather as forecast…..horrible again.
    Why are Muslims so hateful towards so many other people, what is their inherent problem ? Leave Israel alone, its a very successful self supporting nation.

    1. There’s your answer.
      … “successful self-supporting….”
      The Muslims don’t even have the wicked libel, used for centuries by Christians as an excuse for persecuting the Jews, based on the ‘blood curse’ that dubiously appears in one gospel..

      1. They are parasitic they can’t survive on their own. They simply take advantage of any situation available.

        2. Like cockroaches, they live off others and can breed with phenomenal speed. They are quantity (1.6 bln) and the Jews are quality (15 mln).

    2. Indeed, here is one of the central problems ignored by many. Leave Israel alone.

    3. “Why are Muslims so hateful towards so many other people, what is their inherent problem ?”

      It’s written in their ‘holy’ book – kill or subdue all non-Muslims.

      1. We have many more books available than they do, perhaps they should join the library and get a better choice at life.

  26. Headline:

    Salman Rushdie: I May Return To UK If Trump Wins

    I suppose there had to be a negative aspect to a Trump victory.

    1. There are plenty here who would like to stab him in his other eye.

      Under Trump one would see a return to Law and Order. Safer if you don’t rush off.

      2. Good morning Squire, you’re not usually around so early, it’s nice to see you.

        1. I woke a little earlier than normal. Did you enjoy yesterday’s trip? È ventoso qui stamattina, ma c’è un po’ di azzurro in cielo.

          1. I’m more of a lark then an owl. It was a very nice day yesterday, thank you. Quei venti forti a Snowdonia sono buoni per camminare ma assicurati di essere caldo. É normale che Í inizio della primavera sia soleggiato un momento successivo il tuo can lo adorerá

    1. Colonia Fluvius Colchester as opposed to the other of the same name which rises in North Mymms Herts, flows through Watford to the Thames.
      Recently a lot of work has been carried out to clean it up and restored the sagging banks.

        1. I know , just teasing:-) my inner muse from Helicon, Terpsichore daughter of Zeus would say you were a Trojan war hero .

  30. Good morning all and the 77th,

    Wet and windy at McPhee Towers, only 8-9℃ all day today so it’s going to feel chilly.

    Today the DT marks the passing of a notable avaitor. The man who, along with his crew, proved that jet engines and volcanic ash don’t mix.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f4045c02e39ea2b18dbc1efcbaf63f7f535a9e4362047d1f8b6e63e06b0f0d60.png

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2024/04/14/eric-moody-british-airway-pilot-boeing-747-volcanic-ash/

    I was acquainted with Eric Moody when I was in BA and served with him on BALPA committees. He dined out for the rest of his life on that escapade which must have been, er, stressful, to say the least.

    RIP Eric.

  31. In the Telegraph this morning the American ambassador is reported as saying that the Duke of Sussex won’t be deported under Biden. That means we are in danger of getting the wretched fellow back once Trump becomes President. As a matter of urgency should Rashid Sanook not be pushing through Parliament an amendment to the Rwanda Bill, banning members of the Royal family who have married American actresses and taken cocaine from entering the UK? Their names can then be added to the list of those being sent to Rwanda should they attempt to return.

    2. Judging by history, any royal who marries an American adventuress should be exiled.

    3. A good solution. After all before their marriage Harry was very keen on Africa and the pair of them had a great pre-nuptial shagofest there. It was even mooted that Harry should be given a special role in the dark continent.

    4. What has the D of S done to warrant deportation? Apart from being a pillock, but that’s quite common these days.

      1. Pah! His ancestor Henry VIII would have sorted him out and shortened his odious wife by a head!

    5. As long as they don’t think about coming back to Canada. BC is as woke as California and Truedumb would love to have some photo ops with them.

      Never mind that the majority don’t give a toss about the scrounging couple and don’t fancy picking up their security tab.

  32. In the Telegraph this morning the American ambassador is reported as saying that the Duke of Sussex won’t be deported under Biden. That means we are in danger of getting the wretched fellow back once Trump becomes President. As a matter of urgency should Rashid Sanook not be pushing through Parliament an amendment to the Rwanda Bill, banning members of the Royal family who have married American actresses and taken cocaine from entering the UK? Their names can then be added to the list of those being sent to Rwanda should they attempt to return.

  33. TELEGRAPH VIEW
    14 April 2024 • 10:00pm

    There have been times since the atrocities of October 7 that someone unversed in Middle Eastern politics could be forgiven for thinking the most disruptive force in the region was Israel. Mass demonstrations have taken place denouncing the Jewish state’s response to the attack on its territory.

    Its leaders and people are forever being entreated to avoid escalation and to act proportionately. They are hectored, lectured and told to act responsibly. No other country in the world is required to behave in this way when it is attacked by states that want to wipe it off the face of the earth. Once again Israel has been subjected to an onslaught only to be told not to retaliate, to follow a diplomatic route and, above all, not to make things worse in an already volatile region.

    Yet it is not Israel that has caused all of this trouble, but Iran. It is the ayatollahs in Tehran who bankrolled Hamas and encouraged its murderous pogrom last autumn, killing more than 1,000 people and taking hundreds hostage. It is Iran who arms and funds Hezbollah in Lebanon, where thousands of missiles – provided by the Iranians – are targeted at Israel.

    It is Iran who supports the Houthis in Yemen currently subjecting the world’s shipping to the threat of drone and missile attacks, forcing vessels away from the Suez Canal. It is Iran who is sponsoring assassination attempts on foreign soil against critics of the regime.

    Where are the protest marches against Iran, against its deliberate destabilising of the region, its treatment of women and minorities, its efforts to arm itself with nuclear weapons, its extra-judicial killings, all in the name of isolating Israel and spreading Shia Islam?

    Why is a brutal, theocratic autocracy that keeps its own people under the yoke considered somehow deserving of greater latitude than a democracy responding to attacks on its territory?

    There may well be questions for Israel to answer about some of their activities in Gaza but they would not be there at all were it not for Iran. There would be no potential famine or wrecked towns if Tehran had not funded and encouraged Hamas to attack Israel.

    The democratic world stood alongside Israel at the weekend when it came under fire from hundreds of rockets, missiles and drones from Iran. The defences and air forces of a number of nations, including the US, the UK and France, helped repulse the onslaught. Damage was negligible apart from some damage to an airfield. The Iron Dome held and all that was exposed was Iran’s weakness since its attempts to degrade Israel’s air defences failed utterly.

    Now President Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron and the rest are urging Israel to leave it there. Their argument seems to be that since the Iranians were taking revenge for an Israeli raid on Damascus earlier this month, which killed two leading generals in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), tit-for-tat should be avoided.

    But there is no equivalence here. The IRGC is actively seeking Israel’s downfall, urging Hezbollah to enter the fray with its experienced troops, battle-hardened by years of involvement in Syria’s civil war. The Damascus strike can be seen as pre-emptive action against the chief perpetrators. Israel wants to be left in peace but its enemies refuse to do so.

    Arguably, Iran should have been dealt with years ago yet since arriving in the White House, President Biden has failed to recognise Tehran as the cause of all the trouble and has even sought to negotiate with the ayatollahs. They have no interest in a rapprochement with the West and have made alliances with Russia and China.

    The reason western leaders are so jittery about Israel’s likely reaction to the weekend’s attack is because they fear this can no longer be contained within the Middle East and has the capacity to spread.

    Indeed it already has. Russia has been using Iranian drones to strike energy infrastructure in Ukraine, depriving millions of power, heat, and critical services. People in Ukraine are dying as a result of Iran’s actions.

    The question, therefore, that confronts western planners is not how to rein in Israel but what to do about Iran. No-one should any longer harbour illusions about its malign role in the Middle East. Its hand can be detected in all of the region’s most dangerous crises. The only way to deal with Tehran is from a position of strength. Allowing the ayatollahs to continue with their campaign of mayhem is no longer an option.

  34. I don’t mind Rushdie returning. He may be an odious old lefty, but it would wind up our Ropers no end which would be amusing.

    1. I assumed that Israel’s response to the attack would be to utterly destroy all Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

  36. Really, M&S, pandering to minorities?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8302fc5921549ce0edae431507805d92a7291adc2e2bd37535daddf49ef33f16.png

    Quite.

    Me – What virus?
    Covid science – The “vaccine” eradicated them.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0bbb1d4d03535de40b507041b2a2aace91fb0e2fcdc40fa30cacd34bdcae0aa5.png

    The New Science/Logic post the Plandemic.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9619418ddd83c97ae8a060504a5d13e39239925c28eee8b2f61a7946a5aec9a1.png

    I experienced good times during my life/marriage and that’s as close to imagining heaven as I got. As for hell, I don’t have to imagine it, I, along with all decent people are now living it.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/27830aa3b4c4269d57189543cc5b1dc1ab986a3b822e89334e0f96955e1360de.png

    One of the reasons for people having to live hell.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b6803a2ac0ac8ec77c65eb96b5745d2b6e231d3f66e41ff211ca8fbab22efcf9.png

    1. I cannot believe those sandwiches, it’s brainwashing and utterly atrocious .

    2. Excellent as usual.
      Strange Biden his time, has a massive explosion on his far left.

        1. If it was purchased recently it’s bound to give someone the hump!

          Morning mola & all….

      1. Aeneas is a distant relative of my inner muse. A Trojan prince and son of Aphrodite . He escaped the seige of Troy and what he says is correct .

  40. 386082+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    The way I do view the whole issue is through eyes and reasoning in pointing out the major fact that, these isles cannot be pro ANY foreign nation all the time, being born & reared genuine British, one would have thought that would result in being
    PRO BRITISH, not so, nigh on half wanted foreign rule over independence.

    Currently we are staring in the face of WW3 and all the ingredients, as in the WEF / NWO assets, are moving into place
    profits from arms dealing and major CULLING would fit nicely into their agenda.

    We would be well advised to deter from any sabre rattling wilst
    skating on thin ice regarding the home turf, and, by the by, an alien army in residence, waiting.

    It’s time to finish the work of Brexit, and finally bring control back to our sovereign Parliament
    A ludicrous decision in Strasbourg proves that we must leave the ECHR or be governed by the whims of judges

      1. Sorry Tom, Parliament is a court of law, we have the Kings Government and so therefore Parliament is sovereign.

          1. In right, yes, the people are sovereign. In practice, the state utterly ignores our wishes, intent and will because it can.

            We do not live in a democracy.

          3. Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham) said many years ago that we live in an “elective dictatorship”.

        2. I don’t think our Parliament has sovereignty any more. It is ruled by outside interests, the WEF, UN, WHO, etc. etc.

          Look spat what’s happened in Switzerland. The referendum on “climate” responses were turned down by the people but along comes the ECHR who rule that Switzerland is not “doing the right thing” by their citizens.

    2. The state has no interest or intention of ever leaving the ECHR. That would mean re-applying. If we took the opportunity to scrap all the other Left wing idiot nonsense such as the HRA, refugee pact and so on it’d make it nigh impossible to rechain ourselves to the hated EU.

      No, the less the state deviates from EU law the easier rechaining is going to be, the less work they have to do.

  41. Horrific article from Professor Angus Dalgleish in today’s The Conservative Woman.

    Caroline is part of a WhatsApp group praying for her very dear friend, a nurse who was given the choice between losing her job or being jabbed. With seven children she had no realistic choice so she had the jabs against her will and she is now dangerously ill and the chemo therapy she is getting is extremely painful and does not seem to be achieving anything.

    When will our cowardly politicians in both France and England come clean about their complicity and what must they do to atone for their sins?

    Massive cancer deaths study vindicates my warnings over covid boosters
    By
    Professor Angus Dalgleish

    April 15, 2024

    IT IS well over a year since I first published my concerns that my patients with melanoma were relapsing after several years of being in remission. I could find none of the usual causes but on further investigation I realised that they had all had a booster covid vaccine between three weeks and three months before their cancer’s resurgence, the time in which their immune repression fails.

    This was mainly against their will, most only reluctantly agreeing to it so they could travel after the misery of the lockdowns. Others gave in to the bullying of the NHS and GPs who hounded them with texts and calls (which I myself received regularly) about the importance of having a booster even though they presented no evidence that it could be beneficial. Indeed in my judgement there was none, and only ever speculative and specious. Having worked in vaccine development for a decade I remembered an adage that if a vaccine needs a booster, it doesn’t work! What concerned me too was that they were boosting against a virus that had long since left the planet so, at the very least, it would do no good but more likely do harm, inducing immune responses that would be positively harmful and enhance susceptibility to infections with other viruses/variants, as has exactly turned out to be the case. This is not merely anecdotal. Despite several attempts to deny its conclusions and claim it has been misinterpreted, this Cleveland study indisputably shows a greater than threefold increase in covid infections in those who were boosted. A large-scale Israeli research study reported in the BMJ at the end of 2021 had already found a significantly increased risk of covid infection after the second vaccine dose. Its significance was ignored. Perversely, the authors concluded that this negative efficacy might warrant a third dose.

    I was so alarmed at the possibility that the vaccine boosters could induce cancer relapse that I alerted everyone concerned, only to be told to prove it or shut up and stop upsetting cancer patients. Amazingly, one of my clinical colleagues who disagreed with me simply refused to engage in discussion at all. I then became aware of literally dozens of people who had not had cancer before developing leukaemia and lymphomas after the boosters. Since pointing this out publicly I have been contacted by many physicians and patients from all over the globe saying that they are not only seeing the same phenomenon but also an increase in other cancers especially colorectal, pancreatic, renal and ovarian.

    Yet the GP texts and calls still came to my patients and myself to get a booster now to ‘stay safe!’ Indeed I was told to organise the proof myself with no resources or help, with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Office for National Statistics (ONS) seeming to collaborate to keep any useful data secret, as Carl Henegan and colleagues have discussed many times.

    However, last week an amazing paper from Japan was published. It was available on a pre-publication server last year but now it has been peer-reviewed and published in Cureus. Titled Increased age adjusted cancer mortality after the third mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccine dose during the COVID pandemic in Japan, it is authored by Miki Gibo and colleagues. It is an enormous study and compares the full official statistics by annual and monthly age adjusted mortality rates (AMR) for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 with regression analysis.

    The results are astounding. It shows there was a deficit for all cancers in the year 2020 when the first and second covid waves occurred. In 2021 there was an excess of deaths of 2.2 per cent and a 1.1 per cent increase in cancers. However, by 2022 the excess deaths had increased 9.6 per cent and cancer by 2.1 per cent. This paper was completed and published before the 2023 figures release which will almost certainly be much worse. What is remarkable here is that we are talking mortality, that is deaths from cancer not incidence of it.

    I predicted the lockdowns would lead to a vast increase in cancer cases but that deaths would be delayed because we are very good at treating the majority of cases. This data shows that in spite of good treatment (which Japan certainly has), patients are now dying at an increased rate. It cannot be due to covid as deaths went down during the first two waves!

    The paper looks at 20 subtypes of cancer with no significant change in type of death for the three years examined. The main tumour types that increased were lung, pancreas, liver, bile duct, ovary, leukaemia and nearly all other types. The most significant omission is a lack of increase in colorectal cancer which my colleagues have been seeing here in the UK. I immediately remembered that Japan has a unique non-inflammatory diet and that this may account for the difference.

    So what is the cause of this sudden increase? It is revealed in the title of the paper! Indeed the paper goes on to examine the close relationship between the third covid mRNA injection and the increase. As I have noted previously, the third useless jab not only has no possible benefit but wrecks what is left of the immune response and control of cancers by suppressing the T cell responses and switching the antibody response to a tolerising one, hence totally destroying the immune response that was controlling these underlying cancers. The discussion reviews many other additional possible reasons, including the ability of the mRNA spike protein to induce clotting which is known to promote cancers and increase expression of various molecules that help tumours escape immune control.

    Another pieces of research I have just come across concurs with this study. It is a review in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules by a team from several countries and continents which concludes that many mRNA vaccines inhibit the natural immune response by interfering with interferon signalling which in turn inhibits many immune protective pathways. (There are also published models that show that mRNA vaccines can stimulate cancer growth and metastatic spread.) Moreover, the study shows that this is mainly associated with an insert – N1-methyl-pseudouridine (m1Ψ) – used by both covid mRNA manufacturers to stabilise the spike protein long enough to be recognised as a foreign antigen. It would appear that they could not have chosen a worse candidate for this as other agents and or inserts do not cause such changes in these models. The authors conclude that they should have been avoided as they may cause excess cancer in recipients.

    As I completed this last paragraph I was informed by radio and by my GP surgery by email that our completely incompetent NHS and Department of Health are offering a spring booster covid vaccine to those over 75 and at risk. What they will be at risk of is increasing their chances of dying of cancer. Do these people not read the literature, or are they just plain stupid or just not care?

      1. Dalgleish is a splendid chap but he is wrong when he says: “People are not stupid” It is very clear that the vast majority of people are very stupid indeed.

        1. I also think a very large number of people were coerced or duped, not necessarily all stupid people.

    2. Prof Dalgleish is a top man. I have written about him and his work numerous times here and elsewhere. He warned the Cabinet not to proceed with MRNA vaxxes in March 2020 but Cummings refused to allow any discussion of alternative approaches at Cabinet.

    3. This morning, I received an email inviting me for the Spring booster. Nope, just like all the previous ‘campaigns, I won’t be even remotely considering getting a potentially harmful jab for a disease that has all but disappeared anyway.
      Supposedly, I ‘might’ have an impaired immune system, but my consultant has confirmed this is not the case because I am not on the modern biologics medication.
      Mind you, the wording on the email has changed since the last booster campaign. Previously, it was blanket coverage, no extra ‘proof’ needed.

      ‘We’ll need to confirm you still have a weakened immune system before we can vaccinate you. For the health condition or treatment that weakens your immune system, it will help if you can:
      Bring a repeat prescription or medicine box, OR
      Bring an NHS letter confirming your diagnosis, OR
      Show your health record or medication history in the NHS App.
      If your health status has changed and you no longer have a weakened immune system, you don’t need to book another appointment.      ‘

      ‘Getting your COVID-19 vaccination this spring will reduce your risk of serious illness. It’s important you top up your protection because it fades over time and COVID-19 variants can change.‘ ‘Protection fades over time’ – no sh** Sherlock – never mind ‘fades over time’, it has long been known that any alleged protection faded within a few weeks anyway, always has done.

      But, all is well – translators will be provided (free, natch) on phone calls for those who need it.

    4. This morning, I received an email inviting me for the Spring booster. Nope, just like all the previous ‘campaigns, I won’t be even remotely considering getting a potentially harmful jab for a disease that has all but disappeared anyway.
      Supposedly, I ‘might’ have an impaired immune system, but my consultant has confirmed this is not the case because I am not on the modern biologics medication.
      Mind you, the wording on the email has changed since the last booster campaign. Previously, it was blanket coverage, no extra ‘proof’ needed.

      ‘We’ll need to confirm you still have a weakened immune system before we can vaccinate you. For the health condition or treatment that weakens your immune system, it will help if you can:
      Bring a repeat prescription or medicine box, OR
      Bring an NHS letter confirming your diagnosis, OR
      Show your health record or medication history in the NHS App.
      If your health status has changed and you no longer have a weakened immune system, you don’t need to book another appointment.      ‘

      ‘Getting your COVID-19 vaccination this spring will reduce your risk of serious illness. It’s important you top up your protection because it fades over time and COVID-19 variants can change.‘ ‘Protection fades over time’ – no sh** Sherlock – never mind ‘fades over time’, it has long been known that any alleged protection faded within a few weeks anyway, always has done.

      But, all is well – translators will be provided (free, natch) on phone calls for those who need it.

  42. Ian O’Doherty
    The real reason Ireland is going to recognise Palestine
    14 April 2024, 6:30am

    When the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin recently stood up and announced to the Dail that Ireland would officially recognise a Palestinian state ‘within a matter of weeks’, there were no sharp intakes of breath or fits of fainting in the chamber.

    Irish political parties have long been relatively united in their calls for full recognition of a Palestinian state. But this was the first time there had been an explicit statement of intent, and within a specific timeline.

    Relations between Ireland and Israel have traditionally been poor since diplomatic ties were established in 1975. But events since October 7 (which many Irish politicians seem to have conveniently forgotten) have plunged those relations into freezing territory.

    There have been repeated calls in the Dail to expel the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich, and to permanently shutter the Israeli embassy, while also ceasing all diplomatic, official, cultural and economic relations. That isn’t just a boycott, it’s effectively a call for a complete blockade.

    That some of the most strident voices on the Irish left had been making such utterances even before that awful day in October, which marked the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the end of the Holocaust, should come as no surprise.

    Ireland is a cold house for Israeli Jews and this urge to recognise a Palestinian state is the latest way for the government to punish the Israelis – while also throwing some red meat to the more vociferous Israelophobes in the Irish political and media classes.

    There has been little mention of October 7 in Ireland since the invasion of Gaza, and even less about the estimated 130 hostages who still languish in Hamas captivity.

    It’s almost as if mentioning the hostages muddies a perfectly clear and easily understood narrative for the left – a narrative in which the evil, oppressive Israelis slaughter the peace-loving Palestinians. This is a hopelessly naive and historically illiterate way of seeing things, but many people in Ireland seem to see one of the world’s most intractable problems in this totally binary way. According to far-left TDs such as Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy, Israel is an ‘apartheid, genocidal state.’ After all, everyone is against apartheid and genocide, aren’t they?

    Last month, there were even calls for the then-Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, to boycott the annual, traditional St Patrick’s Day trip to the White House, with Murphy demanding that ‘there should be no shamrock for genocide Joe’ in response to America’s support for Israel.

    Boyd Barrett’s party colleague, Gino Kenny, has said that ‘We cannot treat Israel like a normal state. It subjects the Palestinian people to apartheid and is a state of racism’.

    Even the more supposedly moderate left-wing parties have been eager to get a piece of the action.

    Both Labour and the Social Democrats have been vociferous in their condemnation of Israel, with Labour’s Aodhan O’Riordain going so far as to claim that ‘It’s evil in our time, it’s a genocide on our watch.’

    Of course, the only party in this conflict openly espousing the total, genocidal destruction of a people is actually Hamas. But this is either ignored or glossed over as Israeli propaganda.

    Under these circumstances, it is hardly a surprise that minister Martin is now blatantly calling for the urgent recognition of a Palestinian state. This will inevitably attract support from the thousands of people who gather outside Dublin’s General Post Office every Saturday, chanting that loathsome ditty ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’

    The fact that the chant itself appears to call for the destruction of Israel and a single Palestinian entity stretching from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean (which, of course, would be controlled by the gentle, peace-loving democrats of Hamas) seems to bother them not a jot.

    These are dark days for Israel, and everyone wants to see an end to the bloodshed. But they are also dark days for western politics, Ireland included. When this horror finally ends, Israel will remember who its friends were. Assuming it still exists, of course.

    ***************************

    Maurice Jones
    a day ago
    Bless. The only country to sign a book of condolence at a Nasty embassy when AH topped himself.

    Pip Maurice Jones
    a day ago edited
    The president of Ireland at the time, Douglas Hyde, went so far as to visit the German ambassador to offer his condolences. This was in May 1945 when the horrors were known to all. Rotten apples it seems fall even closer to the tree.

    OhAndAnotherThing Pip
    a day ago
    Indeed. The horrors of the concentration camps were public knowledge by that time.

    Fenlander404 Maurice Jones
    a day ago
    “Oh here’s to Adolf Hitler,. Who made the Britons squeal,. Sure before the fight is ended. They will dance an Irish reel!” – Sinn Fein.

    Julian Hodgson
    a day ago edited
    Irish leftists, safely ensconced on the periphery of Europe, protected by the RAF, freeloading off NATO’s defence posture, neutral, facing no existential threat, lecturing Israel, a democracy, somehow clinging on in the world’s toughest neighbourhood is an unedifying spectacle. You would have thought there would be a natural affinity for a similarly sized country playing host to a people who have been persecuted for millennia. Or are they simply the descendants of De Valera, a man who infamously sent his sympathies to the German people on the death of Adolf Hitler?

    1. Many Irishmen are renowned for their charm. If only their charm was matched by the same level of brainpower.

      1. There is a convention whereby a nation only has one regime at a time. To recognise two either suggests that some places have a split personality, or it recognises a state of Civil War existing there.

      2. More than that Jasper and good morning. Show me the boundaries of the land of Palestine. Show me its lineage of their ancient kings and the ruins of its civilization. Show me artifacts and the ancient coinage of their culture. Show me any trace archeologically or historically that there ever was a Palestinian state and that thus, they have the right to live there.

        For Israel I can show you historical and archaeological proof of all the things I request for the Palestinians. Irrefutable proof going back to 1208 BC. Their has always been a Jewish presence in these lands, evidence that provides irrefutable proof that this land is the land of the Jews and that they are the traditional natives of the land.

    3. The Irish are like the Canadians and Kiwis and Ozzies and Scottish. They are losing their collective heads in pursuit of “progressivism”.

      1. Speaking of progressive.
        A Vancouver shelter for the homeless has issued staff with respirators so that they can avoid inhaling the smoke from drugs that are being openly smoked by residents.
        Instead of expressing concern about what their decriminalization drug policies have done, politicians remarked on how well the employer was caring for staff.

    5. Another reason to loathe the Fenian Irish.
      Roman Catholicism. like Orthodoxy, has long been infected with anti Semitism and the Irish caught it from there which is why the Fenians sympathised with the Nazis and later the Soviets.

  43. Just when one thinks that we have reached peak nuttiness…

    Iran’s ‘nerve centre’ in the UK received £240,000 during Covid

    Islamic Centre of England, the ‘voice’ of Iran’s supreme leader, received furlough payments of £109,476 and £129,556

    Charles Hymas, HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR
    15 April 2024 • 6:00am

    Ihttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/04/14/TELEMMGLPICT000220342097_17131251484130_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqe2gUmjRsyy_1k97WQihbV47lQelJ5VzPwBW_rFOvCUM.jpeg?imwidth=680
    In 2020, the centre hosted a vigil for Qassim Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps CREDIT: STANISLAV KRASLINIKOV/GETTY

    An Islamic centre branded the “nerve centre” for Iran in the UK received more than £240,000 in government Covid payments despite having a reserve of £4.2 million, it has been revealed.

    The Islamic Centre of England (ICE), described as the voice of Iran’s supreme leader in the UK, received two furlough payments of £109,476 in 2020 and £129,556 in 2021, even though its year-end accounts showed £4.2 million in reserve.

    The payments were revealed in a report by the think tank Policy Exchange which called for a ban on visas being issued for Iranian nationals to work at the centre.

    The report said all four directors of the centre since 1994 had been named as representatives in the UK of Iran’s supreme leader. It has also frequently held events to mark the 1979 Islamic revolution.

    In 2020, the centre hosted a vigil for Qassim Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who had been killed in a drone strike in January 2020.

    ICE’s director Seyed Hashem Moosavi issued a statement on its website in which he praised Soleimani as a “great martyr”.

    Last year the Charity Commission opened a statutory inquiry into ICE amid serious governance concerns.

    Governance concerns
    It appointed an interim manager “due to the trustees’ failure to comply with their legal duties and responsibilities and their failure to protect the charity’s assets”. Policy Exchange said the inquiry should be expected to report within two months.

    Paul Stott, head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange, said: “Iran challenges our security, but it also threatens the UK’s social cohesion and our values.

    “Allowing it to build and sustain an infrastructure in this country is madness. We need to get much smarter in our response, and that starts with proper control of the visa system.”

    The report recommended: “Visas should no longer be issued to Iranian nationals to work at ICE, or any institution affiliated to it.

    “ICE, with its director serving as the representative of Iran’s spiritual leader, is an arm of the Iranian regime in this country. The policy of issuing visas to Iranian clerics to minister in this country should end.

    “The role of the Islamic Republic of Iran in disputes in this country concerning blasphemy must be fully investigated.”

    ICE was contacted for comment.

    A spokesman has previously said the centre was a “purely religious and cultural organisation, which provides various services to the local communities”.

    The spokesman added: “It is an independent charity regulated by British law, which is totally funded by the local beneficiaries. The majority of the trustees, donors, and attendees are British citizens. Indeed, this charity is nothing to do with politics, while we strongly believe that the politically motivated lobbies are trying to drag the charity into their political disputes.”

    ********************

    Overtaxed Unrepresented
    18 MIN AGO
    This is how our “masters” in so-called “government” and civil service squander taxpayers cash then squeeze the taxpayer for even more to cover the shortfalls caused by their carelessness and incompetence while padding out their own inflated salaries, expenses and gold-plated pensions.
    The only solution is to rid ourselves of these paper pushing para sites and have small government.

    3. An awful lot of fraud went on during the Covid years; it would not surprise me if the world and his dog went in for easy money if they could.

      What I suspect however is that it may be a cover for MI6. Where better to get to the heart of what is going on in the Islamic Republic than to plant some charity workers there.

    6. Yes, our government is far too top heavy. We don’t need so many MPs (with the rise of the internet) and we certainly no longer need the corrupt house of frauds. This money would be much better spent on more referenda so that citizens’ direct voices can be heard. The more layers inbetween increasingly results in more opportunities for corruption. Govt, as it stands, no longer works for us.

  45. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6b84b09fd3015065f2f2a81fa7788a38c44751ea/0_361_6240_3744/master/6240.jpg?width=980&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=882cf7c593c82e207cda649a6af1891d
    People in Bali, Indonesia, transport a sarcophagus in the form of a bull during the cremation procession for Tjokorda Bagus Santaka, a member of the Ubud royal family.

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d4fba5c0e68b26966347148926825b532e3a734b/0_0_3500_2333/master/3500.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=7719903847f4f2946649ea246b578a86
    London, UK
    A boy in replica uniform joins members of the Scots Guards as they gather for a remembrance parade at the chapel of the Guards Museum in Wellington Barracks, Westminster. On Sunday, the Duke of Kent stepped down as colonel of the Scots Guards after 50 years

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/75ad313a9ec8c6a8f66e97707b5a12a454bff328/0_0_3500_2127/master/3500.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=0a2c7b5df97fa22674e1d0a29a17f4bc
    Hampshire, UK
    The S15-class steam locomotive 506 travels along the Mid-Hants Railway route, also known as the Watercress Line

    PREPARE TO RAM
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3ed37d662e7437f5453b6e76a36b75419adfed05/0_0_5344_3563/master/5344.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=8198a088c0378d8a9c5aa9ae8883b383
    Portobelo, Panama
    Panamanian Afro-descendants take part in the Congo Pollera festival

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4b94b625bf95d4d83b28e59d677cd0a5cf5fe4fe/0_0_8311_5540/master/8311.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=e2160e72ecfb8a40f6d3c93b87ffc59b
    Frankfurt, Germany
    A gosling and its mother

      1. I’m less enthusiastic about geese at the moment as I was attacked by a malevolent Canada goose while out walking at the weekend. It was on the grass verge and lunged at my ankles as I walked past on the path. It may have got a blow on the bill as I jumped (not my forte usually).

        1. When we had geese, I used to face them off.
          Looked them straight in the eye and uttered the magic words “bugger off”.
          Worked a treat.

          1. I did that after my evasive action. The goose looked a tad deranged with blood red tongue lolling and a crazed gleam in the eye – the anserine equivalent of 🤪

    1. Wouldn’t it have been a shame if one of those Iranian missiles had landed on the mosque and totally destroyed it?

      1. It must be tempting, if only to put various flavours of Islam against each other.
        Unfortunately, even if it was destroyed by Muslim rockets, Israel would be blamed.

  47. Bugger,overslept off to A&E again later alls
    Just worked out why they replaced a trolly with a bed in the cubicle cuts down on the stats “left on a trolley overnight”
    Bastards

  48. Wordle 1,031 4/6

    🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
    🟩🟨🟨⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. April sunshine & showers here, after overnight rain. Breezy too – typical April weather.

  50. Jonathan Agnew: Calling it the ‘Men’s Ashes’ is sad – it began in 1882
    BBC commentator unhappy that the oldest cricket series now has a gender prefix, despite the women’s version only being launched in 1998
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2024/04/14/jonathan-agnew-mens-ashes-bbc-inclusivity-1882/

    BTL Percival Wrattstrangler

    Why don’t the women call their series against Australia “The Cinders” rather than “The Women’s Ashes”.

    And “Cinders” has appropriate pantomime connotations!

    Glass slippers rather than the appropriate glass ceiling because it is a biological fact that women cannot compete against men at the highest level of cricket just as it is unfair for men in frocks to play cricket in women’s teams.

  51. Jonathan Agnew: Calling it the ‘Men’s Ashes’ is sad – it began in 1882
    BBC commentator unhappy that the oldest cricket series now has a gender prefix, despite the women’s version only being launched in 1998
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2024/04/14/jonathan-agnew-mens-ashes-bbc-inclusivity-1882/

    BTL Percival Wrattstrangler

    Why don’t the women call their series against Australia “The Cinders” rather than “The Women’s Ashes”.

    And “Cinders” has appropriate pantomime connotations!

    Glass slippers rather than the appropriate glass ceiling because it is a biological fact that women cannot compete against men at the highest level of cricket just as it is unfair for men in frocks to play cricket in women’s teams.

  52. The Telegraph is on true brown-nose form for the neocon gophers of Little Rishi and his chums. Con Couglin thinks Iran has exposed its weakness. Well, it’s a weakness that cost $35bn to defend against on the strike they just sent, -at least ten times what it cost Iran to mount, according to IDF sources.. And do we believe the IDF propaganda? If you assume that both sides lie fluently about the effects, which is the experience we are used to, there was a little more damage than a some sheds on a base and a little Bedouin girl.

    Deep shame on all concerned. School yard stuff as a geopolitical demonstration.

  54. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/15/more-than-half-heat-pump-grant-money-unclaimed/

    They cannot even bribe people to spend money to get cold and have higher heating bills. Funny ‘dat.

    Heat pumps are still getting a cool reception from homeowners with £173m in potential grants remaining unclaimed as the scheme reaches its second anniversary, according to data from Ofgem the energy regulator.

    The Boiler Upgrade Scheme set up two years ago has issued just £127m in grants – despite having £300m on offer to persuade householders to ditch gas boilers in favour of low-carbon home heating.

    An Ofgem spokesman said that 22,307 households had been given the grants in the 23 months to March. That compares with a target of about 55,000. The figure will rise only slightly when the latest figures are added this week.

  55. Gosh, woke up at 6 am and made up by Breakfast Tea Jug. Toast topped with Ginger Preserve, It was windy and by 8 am it was downright stormy with kids walking to school due a soaking. Drifted nack off to sleep, rewaking at 9:45 (OK, you know she is away at the moment) and it was brilliant sunshine, but feels like 4C inn that wind. Being alone, I could put something on to inspire a walk:

    https://youtu.be/klloPV-_DNY?si=OFkVEmC_ci_lELdO

  56. What a great idea, let’s exacerbate the housing problem for legal British people by grabbing housing to accommodate invading parasites. /sarc

    Fight back against 20,000 asylum seekers and refugees moved out of hotels – and into private rented homes: Furious residents in Teesside, Hull and Bradford warn ‘scandalous’ Home Office plan to buy up properties will create ‘mini ghettos’

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13301795/Fears-mini-ghettos-pressure-public-services-housing-market-Furious-residents-Teesside-Hull-Bradford-blast-scandalous-Home-Office-plans-buy-homes-asylum-seekers-warn-increase-community-tensions.html

    Locals in Middlesbrough were among those to slam the move, claiming that concentrating asylum seekers in certain areas will slow their integration into British society and add to the regional housing crisis.

    Sorry people, but all the evidence suggests that very few of the Muslims will ever really integrate, no matter where you place them initially.

    1. There are 2500+ new flats being built at White City and they’re too expensive for most working folk but I can’t help wondering if they’ll be bought up by companies or government and used to house migrants.

      1. Quite possibly.
        I could believe anything of the bleeding hearts who encourage their arrival.

    3. It’s like saying that transplanting a gangrenous limb will make it better – it will just infect whatever it’s grafted onto.

  57. From The Dictionary Of Insults:

    Their romance started out as puppy-love, but it went to the dogs a long time ago.

    You can’t deny that he’s got a certain something. But his wife wishes he had something certain.

    On Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Carlyle:
    ‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four.’ – Samuel Butler

    They are splitting up because of another woman – his mother-in-law.

    ‘Sire, your greatest enemy is dead,’ said a courtier to George IV, announcing Napoleon’s death. But the King mistook his meaning and answered with amazement: ‘By God, is she?’

      1. I appreciate he’s playing to the gallery but there’s already an inquiry. The state is wasting 250m a day to ensure the right result to exonerate it’s actions and find that absolutely everything was done but that more of the same could have been done.

        What does he think they’ll say? ‘Sorry guv, fair cop. We weren’t sure, there wasn’t enough information. We panicked and overreacted. When the vaccine came out it hadn’t been fully tested and again, as we were too deep in the narrative we clutched at anything to get us off the hook.’

  59. Has cricket gone completely batty?

    Jonathan Agnew: Calling it the ‘Men’s Ashes’ is sad – it began in 1882
    BBC commentator unhappy that the oldest cricket series now has a gender prefix, despite the women’s version only being launched in 1998

    Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s departing chief cricket correspondent, has complained over cricket’s adoption of the gender-neutral ‘batter’ and references to the Ashes as the ‘men’s Ashes’.

    Agnew, who has just signed a new four-year contract to remain part of the BBC’s Test Match Special team, announced earlier this month that he will step down after 33 years as cricket correspondent at the end of summer.

    “This was my call,” he said. “I think you can be in a job for too long.”

    However, in an interview with the Sunday Times, the 64-year-old Agnew alluded to certain frustrations. “I hate ‘batter’,” he said. “I always call a woman batsman a ‘batter’. But why can’t a man playing a man’s game be a ‘batsman’?”

    Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) replaced the term “batsman” with the gender-neutral “batter” back in 2021, saying that cricket was “a game for all and this move recognises the changing landscape of the game in modern times”.

    It is a terminology that has been adopted in the media, including at the BBC. “I just think it’s sad,” said Agnew. “Inclusivity’s great, but come on!”

    Agnew, who is currently speaking around the country in an “Evening with Aggers” tour, also spoke about the 142 year history of the ‘Ashes’ contest between England and Australia. There has been a women’s ‘Ashes’ trophy since 1998, following on from a name that first emerged in respect of the 1882-3 series between the England and Australia men’s teams.

    “That doesn’t mean to say that the Ashes has to be the ‘Men’s Ashes’,” said Agnew, before asking if that was old fashioned and if he would look like a dinosaur. “People will call me an old fart, I suppose,” he said, before adding: “It’s an event. It happened. It’s not the ‘Men’s Battle of Hastings’, is it?”

    …..

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2024/04/14/jonathan-agnew-mens-ashes-bbc-inclusivity-1882/

    1. I suggested below that the Women’s cricket series against the Australians should be called The Cinders.

    2. Women’s sport is ugly, no matter how skilful and energetic they are , the sight of tattoos and other body muck is just horrible.

  60. Sydney is rocked by another stabbing rampage with a priest and worshippers attacked at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13309617/bishop-stabbed-Sydney-church.html

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    [W.B. Yeats: The Second Coming]

    1. If we question it, we’re silenced. Dissent from the message is not tolerated. If the press don’t force it, the media does. The state creates law specifically designed to silence what it dubs ‘wrongthink’.

      It is no longer about doubt, but about who controls what you can say.

    2. Appalling news, but I do like that poem – part of the quote above also appears in the frontpiece of Murray Smith’s excellent book “The Devil’s Juggler”!

    3. Appalling news, but I do like that poem – part of the quote above also appears in the frontpiece of Murray Smith’s excellent book “The Devil’s Juggler”!

      1. It was clearly an anti-Christian attack and the pictures show a dusky-hued attacker.

        However no details of him are yet given. They will wait until they have sanitised the story and can claim that the attack had nothing to do with Islam and is not terror-related.

  62. Good morning all,

    Sunshine and showers , fierce wind .

    We had a raging five minute storm at about 10am , sleet battered the blossoms on the neighbour’s fruit tees .

    Our previous garden was glorious , we planted many fruit trees , apples plums and pear trees .

    Those were the days when Geoff Hamilton promoted deep beds , decades ago , Moh grew some wonderful produce for the freezer . I tended them carefully when he was away, an easier sort of gardening , and very productive .

    I am talking about the 1980s when the weather also misbehaved badly , we had sharp flurries of snow and sleet just when the pear blossom was flowering .. the pear crop was hit and miss as were the plums .

    Sky here is black in the S West, but sunny elsewhere .

    The Tank exercises are ongoing .. we can hear them in the distance on the ranges .. Will a new war be a tank fest
    or drones.

    Wind is howling down our chimney, brrrr.

    Moh due for his diabetic eye test later

  63. Car Insurance Wheeze

    Last Friday (12th April) I posted here that my 1-year-old car’s insurance renewal with a well-known Insurer had gone up over 250% from £378.55 to £949.87.

    I checked with Confused.com – their cheapest quote was £773.44 with a company called [REDACTED], but checking the reviews online they are a load of sharks who take your money but don’t answer the phone. Tried a few others including the firm of Brokers that I have used before and their best offer was over £1,000.

    So I rang my current insurers, reminded them that my house Insurance was with them and could they please try harder. The agent (working from home, naturally) said that his screen showed they’d already taken that into consideration and the best he could do was £923.42, that’s just £6.45 off.

    I then told him that one of his firm’s colleagues had told me that the price might go down If I added some extra drivers to the policy. I gave him my elder son’s name and Date of Birth first as an extra driver, which made it £886.28 (Son 1 is Self-employed). Then I added Son 2 as well (Employed, Senior NHS Manager), and the price went down to £773.17, which I agreed to and paid. Both of them had no outstanding charges against them and had long driving experience. Saved £176.70. A reasonable result, remembering that I am 83.

    Worth remembering – I believe it’s not widely known about extra drivers making insurance cheaper. Please correct me if you already knew this.

    Strangely, a few years ago I needed one of my sons to be added as a driver (for a 1 month period only, the minimum) while I was indisposed, and if I remember correctly, it cost me about £60 (extra) for that month.

    Insurance works in mysterious ways, doesn’t it!

    1. It sure does! It’s my belief that all these enormous prices hikes are to cover the cost of insuring the electric vehicles on our roads with their occasional propensity to catch fire.

    2. Speaking of sharks who take your money – I was with Admiral. They don’t answer the phone either.

      Nor do direct line, scottish power, octopus, HSBC, Barclays, esure, Southern water, Halifax…..Those are just the few I deal with.

    3. Did you try NFU Mutual? While I have long no claims and loyalty discounts I was shocked by the cost of my new sporty BMW – just £26 per month.
      Speaking to the broker she said the big thing now is the mileage you do a year as well as the excess. It makes little sense to have the excess below £500 in my view as a minor repair I can get done locally far cheaper. Don’t pay for a mileage you will not do!

      1. Thanks JD, agree with you about minor repairs. I had 4 BMWs over the last 20+ years and was paying around the same as you but NFU Mutual are not on comparison websites. So I visited their own website an hour ago to get a quote before my just-renewed £773.17 insurance’s 14-day Cooling-off period expires.
        As soon as I clicked the Age 80+ button I received this message:
        Unfortunately we might not be able to give you a competitive quote.
        However if you would still like to talk to us about getting a quote please feel free to call us on 0808 258 6552.
        At that point I gave up.

        1. To be honest I think they’re worth a premium but I guess you have to be with them a long time as they do reward loyalty.

    4. Can’t even go Third Party only to get it cheaper these days, as the quotes for that are often as much if not more than Fully Comp. The whole thing is a rotten scam.

    5. They’ve got you by the S&C’s with car insurance as it’s obligatory – at least home insurance, whilst desirable, isn’t.

    1. Yes. If the manufacturing is off-shored then it’s in China, not here. Then the civil service can say we have met net zero.

      Of course, that’s net zero jobs but big state doesn’t care about that. Stopping you driving – removing your personal mobility – is the goal. Not reducing emissions.

    2. Yes. If the manufacturing is off-shored then it’s in China, not here. Then the civil service can say we have met net zero.

      Of course, that’s net zero jobs but big state doesn’t care about that. Stopping you driving – removing your personal mobility – is the goal. Not reducing emissions.

    4. Even the doom goblin doesn’t attack China.
      I prefer real diesel cars but my favourite type car being a little classic MG in Racing Green or Continental Red doesn’t sound time polluting the atmosphere as much as the doom goblin .

      1. Of course not. She’s be mining uranium without gloves in the Gobi Desert courtesy of the CCP.

    5. United States is third in the world for the number of coal fired power stations after China and India. Mind you China is way out front with 1142. India 282, USA 210.

  65. It may be similar here. I certainly don’t wish the U.K. to be dragged into WW3, although plenty of our politicians seem eager for it. And it seems almost a majority of DT letter writers are eager for us to join the Ukraine/Russia debacle for some reason. But what the plebs want doesn’t count.

    1. What I cannot understand (or rather can completely understand) is why these boats are not being stopped on the French coast. They embark from a coastline less than 100 miles long, why are they not being stopped? That is a rhetorical question, I know the answer, sadly.

    2. What I cannot understand (or rather can completely understand) is why these boats are not being stopped on the French coast. They embark from a coastline less than 100 miles long, why are they not being stopped? That is a rhetorical question, I know the answer, sadly.

    3. I don’t think we are finished but we do need to start taking direct action that will force the government to act.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLOa8olyKRY

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70fIoX0XieA

      Although, I think, we could be a bit more creative.

      There are several formally inhabited Islands off our shores. I fail to see why we can’t build camps of Quonset Huts on them and house immigrants there, off the mainland and imprisoned for the criminals they are. I have the feeling that illegal immigrants would stop coming pretty quickly when they looked forward to a bleak existence on some cold Scottish island waiting for deportation.

      1. Don’t let them land here in the first place! They will eventually get the message.

    1. What about officer time – such as those in that parade?

      Plod aren’t bothered about upholding the law any more. Their masters far prefer to use the force backed state to suppress dissenting views.

    2. Whoever authorised this should forced to pay for it from his own purse.
      And then be sacked.

    3. Urgh… the very sinister rainbow flag on public display again. The flag of intolerance and cancellers everywhere.

  74. Bishop Mari Emmanuel who had a very large presence on social media has just been stabbed whilst filming live online

    1. It’s no coincidence that Iran is playing up at precisely the same time Islamic zealots are getting all stabby across the Western world. Most of our Lib wokey governments are asleep, trying to get Israel condemned at the UN while their countries are being undermined. If they cannot see what’s happening then they must be blind.

      1. None so blind as those who WILL not see.

        “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”
        [Paul Simon: The Boxer]

  76. Morning post has just arrived.

    Our pet insurance has doubled .. 1 dog now .. last year £700, now £1350..

    We are furious , enraged .

    1. The same with my dog. If it doubles again I will cancel the insurance which is no doubt exactly what they want.

      1. We have cancelled ours as of now

        We have been hit by huge council tax increase, water, and car insurance, home insurance and everyday living expenses .

        Life is becoming increasingly miserable .

        2. My dog is diabetic and requires two injections of insulin a day. Each phial costs over £50 and lasts two weeks (plus syringes etc). At the moment the insurance covers 90% of this, and I’m sure they would love me to go away.

          1. They are ruling by extortion , everyone is doing it , even the icecream vendors at seasides .. Gone up a £1 since last year, a cornet now costs £3.50 here at Lulworth.

          2. I didnt know your dog was diabetic, Im sorry to hear that she is so, insurance companies take advantage of dogs with long term health issues. My collie had a heart issue and needed medication which was so expensive. I shan’t send your labrador any more pictures of 🥩 as she cannot eat them .

          3. One of my cats has a heart issue but his medication only costs me €15 per month. The difference between vet’s bills in France and in England is huge. That same cat got acute pancreatitis a couple of months ago. The total bill for all the tests, medication and a week in “hospital” came to just over €600. Someone I know in England had a cat with the same thing and her bill was £2300!!

          4. She eats chicken breast and diabetic dried complete food. And the occasional rabbit’s ear as a treat!

          5. https://www.pureandraw.co.uk/ This is a very good link, for Dogs with heatth issues.
            such as diabetic dogs .It’s about suitable food and all sorts of help .

            They recommend chicken, turkey but also rabbit and even venison . There is something called ‘ green tripe ‘ which has nothing to do with veggies.

          6. Are you certain? Green tripe sounds like an extinction rebellion meeting. Or a vegan menu?

          8. The word ” Green ‘ is used to highlight the fact it hasn’t been bleached or processed in anyway, it’s good for dogs of all ages, from nursing mothers, puppies, finicky dogs who are fussy eaters and for those with health issues – it’s supposedly a ‘ super food ‘ for dogs. It’s made of the digestive tract and lining of grazing animals like sheep and cows but apparently the downside is that dogs will smell of the farmyard when they’ve done their business.

        3. We’ve also cancelled our pet insurance. Olly is 16, in good health for his age but £800 a year is extortionate. We have enough savings to pay if needed rather than line the pockets of corporates who are financial instututions who regard any sector as potential feeding ground. They are bloodsucking leeches on society.

          1. Pip will be 11 years old soon, so far good health .

            Olly has been lucky, when Jack was alive we cancelled when he was 13 because the premiums rose hugely, heart problems , so we financed his treatment until he died last year aged 15yrs 6 month .

            Pip is lively , and we knew when we had to fork out over £700 for tooth extraction that Tesco insurance would play up .

        4. What frustrates is that nothing improves for all the costs. Our roads should be immaculate smooth tarmac. Instead they’re pot holed ruins. Fuel is horribly expensive and the keep making it more so, yet comically demand we drive slower, causing more pollution, wasting more fuel. Nothing works. We pay and pay and everything gets worse.

          1. There is an American writer – Wendell Berry – who has an article about this. The essence of his argument is Government can do nothing other than centralise hence create more bureaucracy and regulation both of which grow further away from the individual. Where government tries to decentralise it places regulation and constraints on the decentralised organisation which need even more bureaucracy to manage. Government by definition is remote.

    2. Hi Maggie. Our Springer has just turned 9 and last year the premiums were £100 per month and we paid the first £90 of any claim.
      We cancelled and and started a savings account for vet bills. We now pay £150 per month into the account which has a healthy balance of £2800.
      Take that, Pet Plan.

      1. I did that with Oscar; I’d paid £700 the year before and all the bills had come in just under the excess so I got nothing from the insurance. When they whacked up the premium AND increased the excess I just put the money in a savings account.

      1. From my distance I was very surprised that Welby agreed to closing churches. It spoke to how far things have gone in the CoE leadership.

        1. Welby didn’t “agree” to closing the churches – he insisted on it. Originally services were banned but private prayer in churches was not provided distancing rules were followed. It was his idea to lock up all the churches even against the priests who were “allowed” to go in once a week to check for structural problems.

          1. Wow, I didn’t realise that it was Welby who had closed the churches for private prayer. Thank you for the clarification PetaJ.

        2. It was the most appalling decision, one he has now repented of. The English RCC did the same.

    1. I am told by someone who understands these things, its a few big companies taking over small vets and operating as cartels. They then charge what they like to the individual or insurance co.

      1. The insurance companies are in on the scam too, don’t kid yourself. It is no coincidence that vet’s bills started rocketing at the same time as pet insurance started to become much more widespread.

        2. The first thing they ask is “are you insured?” It the answer’s yes, they start ramping up the cost.

        1. Our council tax is about £2000 a year. Our water bill £60 (which is high for the three of us and we’ve 3 big drums for Mongo’s water).

          Electricity is the problem. With 7 laptops, the house services, as many tablets, phones and lights, heat that’s easily £200-250 a month.

          Its manageable now with two of us paying in, but it wouldn’t be if I were on my own. During winter January was heading toward £350 *before* the wife moved out.

          No, I am not on a pension, but I am still absolutely terrified of the cost of living. I honestly don’t know what we will do when we retire.

    3. Tesco import from Thailand, China, Hong Kong, South America, The Republic of Ireland and the EU. I very much doubt much of their beef, chicken or lamb come from England, Scotland or Wales.

      By including the Republic of Ireland they can say they buy British.

    4. Pure greed TB there is no other way to describe it.
      It happened to us when our lab turned 8 years old. We dumped the insurance. And took a chance.

  80. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/594740eba2414658246cb8b8eb63cac5d4fd2d6a4ccd5e73bfb4b4fb20ecf803.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6d9f73a86e0f6ac12baf01aff1e44e0f887a47bce04edcb1d7016e81fbbf9c8e.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/148d8525ea047166ca2bf82caa26037f13333fd8fb669b6334f927ab02a75b86.jpg

    Three of my favourite cars Austin Healey 3000 MKIII BJ8 , 1960 Bentley Continental Flying Spur and a Racing Green MG Roadster ( My favourite) I cannot find a picture of my 4th favourite being a 1960 Alfa Romeo Spider – perfect for twisting lanes . All of them proper stylish cars – not modern tanks and theyll all upset the doom goblin

    1. MGB Roadster, and GT, wonderful driving fun in my student and early pre marriage days. I had four over a period of time. Looking back they were woefully underpowered, but classic cars.

      1. I had a BGT it had a two speed overdrive. 6 forward gears. But at 1798 noticeably under powered.
        The V8 would have been best.
        Loved the sound of the exhaust.
        First off I wanted a triumph TR6 2.5
        But the boot was too small.

        1. The MGC and the V8 were the opposite of the B, vastly overpowered and out of balance – very easy to lose it!

          1. But great fun!! We drove back from a climbing trip to North Devon in a MGB GT V8 – all the climbing kit in the back and even in a snow storm that kept the back end where it should have been!

    2. Austin Healey 3000 , boyfriend of mine owned one in the 1960’s .
      We had a lot of fun ..

      I have been so lucky to have been a passenger in most of those early sports cars , including an E type Jag, purple colour in 1971 , down in Cornwall, a rarity for an area like that .

      Most young women in those days were petrol head / scarf wearing fans , it was difficult getting in and out especially in a mini skirt , but there were ways and means !!

    1. I drove one of those around Tuscany when I was 18; I knew at the time that life would never be quite so glamorous again! (The lady I was attempting to teach English to had said there was a runabaout in the shed at the villa that I could use if I needed transport… I can still remember my awe upon opening the shed door!)

      It took me a few stalls to work out the gears on the steep hills, but for some reason, Italian male drivers, usually so quick to beep their horns and bellow obscenities, kept leaping out of their cars to help… 🤣🤣

      1. Sounds sublime, uttetly glamorous from a more gentle time, very steep hills too. Italian men appreciate both cars and ladies 🙂 .
        The most wondrous thing would be to drive the Almalfi Coast within an Alfa Romeo car or the curvaceous English lanes whilst driving an MG Roadster but my ideal would belong to another time without caravans, Motor homes or SUVs coming towards me 😁.

      2. I was once given a company car a 3.0Ltr S Type Jag in Emerald Green ( just a shde brighter than British Racing Green. I had the pleasure of driving it from Volterra in Tuscany all the way along the Italian West Coast motorways and then over the Alps to Switzerland. Where it and I was embarked on a train to Belgium and thence the Chunnel back to Blighty….Sadly no Italian women fluttered any eyelashes in my direction!

      3. Any chance of a photo of you when you were 18?

        In fact it would be interesting to have Nottlers’ photos of themselves when 18 and now and see if they have improved or otherwise.

        2. I left my photo album in England. May have something in the.cloud, but probably not.

          I haven’t changed a lot since I was three… 🤣🤣

    2. Many years ago I had an Alfa GT Junior. A wonderful car to drive and perfect to sit in while waiting for the tow truck.
      It went through two engines in six months and the second time it went boom there were bulges in the bonnet where the flying bits made contact.

      For some reason the boss will not let me buy one.

      1. Oh my goodness, im so sorry about your delightful Alfa GT Junior, a truly wonderful car but unfortunate with yours and sorry youre not allowed another one.

      2. A friend was much into motorbikes in his youth and tried a good number. He said that the best handling one he ever rode was a Motoguzzi, even to the extent that when he hit a brick in the road when going fast round a bend – which on any other make of bike would have had him and the bike sliding down the road in different directions – it just went over it and carried on. But reliability? You must be joking. He couldn’t take it out in the rain because the wet got into the electrics and it packed up. Not much use in this country.

    3. If only Alfa would build an identical car again they’d sell in huge numbers.

      1. I’d hope to think they would still be popular cars but people are obsessed with driving tanks. There are far too many SUVs taking up the roads so therefore charming old roads are being adapted for the monstrosities that are being made heavier to cope with a EV engine .

        1. People buy MX5’s which are small agile two seaters. I had one myself quite recently.

          1. My summer car is a mini and it really is hard to drive in the land of big SUVs and trucks.

            There again, I have no trouble getting the car into a standard parking spot over here.

          2. As a well known motoring journalist said of the MX5: “the most fun you can have outside of a bedroom”.

          3. I thought driving in a scurry competition was the most fun I’d had with my clothes on 🙂

          4. And a quarter of the price . Do they come in Racing Green ?
            I love to drive around hills along curling lanes of rural England .

          5. No…..but the red colour (a particularly nice burgundy) like I had is nice too.

          6. The particular nice burgundy is known as Continental Red, the colour of Morse’s Jaguar in the Oxfordshire police series which was the colour of a mature wine – superb.

          7. I found a MG Roadster for sale in Oxfordshire £ 18, 500 . Racing Green – it was found by me In the car and classic magazine link below – I sent you or someone else the description last year when I was visiting the Italian lakes. The perfect car and perfect colour for some fortunate person.

      2. Not so sure these days. The roadster market dipped after the ’70s, then had a brief revival in the ’90s. It’s a tough sell these days. Jag’s F-Type didn’t sell very well. People want a larger 2+2 grand tourer, if anything, like the previous XK.

          1. Alfa Romeo 4 C Spider . She is beautiful curvacious and without a EV engine .

          5. https://www.carandclassic.com/list/8/3000%20mk3/ Lots of lovely classic cars here – I was trying to pursuade someone to buy a Alfa Romeo whilst i was in Italy .
            The Austin Healey 3000 MK3 is there – possibly my secong favourite car after the MG Roadster. You just keep an eye on those premium bonds 🙂

          8. I’ve found a MG Roadster for sale in Oxforshire £ 18, 500 shown in the car and classic magazine link I sent you . My perfect car and colour .

      2. I preferred the MGA which I had as a student.

        Had I had enough money at the time I might have bought a Jaguar XK 150 or a Triumph TR4A

      3. Rain and Italian automotive engineering just don’t go together – see my comment above about Motoguzzi bikes.

    1. Angela Rayner will know that she’ll get away with it, I’d imagine Manchester Police are raging lefties and the commissioner is a friend of Starmer .
      Mind you, I’m sure Starmer is afraid of Rayner and would like to see gone whereas the unions who put her in her place see Starmer as too moderate and would prefer her as leader of the Labour Party .

      1. The Labour Party and their tame media are quite happy to talk about the election law and CGT allegations as the rules are, to some extent, open to interpretation and neither the electoral commission not HMRC seems likely take action this long after the event. They hope all the noise distracts from the real issue ie whether Ms Rayner may have defrauded the council by obscuring the fact that she had moved to her husband’s house during the 5 year period when some repayment of the discount would have been required. It seems that Ms Rayner had, at most, owned her council house for 3 years when she married and protestations that she remained there, living apart from her husband and their children are wholly unconvincing. The electoral roll is administered by the council so failing to keep one’s name on the register for a given address is tantamount to telling the council that one no longer lives there.

  83. Better than an oxymoron of the day, probably one of the best illustrations of the type of individual in politics today : “I have always said that integrity and accountability are important in politics.” Angela Rayner.

  85. We had 2 hours of strong winds and heavy rain. Now its less indy and sunny. What is all the fuss about.

    1. Changeable weather during early Spring, traditionally English since we created the weather:-)

  87. Yep. All government does is get bigger and more expensive. Yes Minister joked about it but it’s true. Simply, the state doesn’t need to do almost all the things it pushes on us. It just likes to expand and do more, because politicians then get headlines and credit.

  88. The staff at BBCs Radio 4 Hamas support team are crying into their champagne glasses because of the failure of the Iranian bombs and rockets to kill more than the odd schoolgirl and blow the roof off a garage. Sarah Montague has just finished a tear filled interview with a ‘Slammer’ doctor who said that the evil ‘Chews’ are starving all the children in Gaza by blocking the food convoys and shooting Gazans who try to get to the few relief trucks that get through. The BBC have decided to increase their coverage and have recruited a thousand new reporters from Bradford and Rotherham to provide more impartial accounts of the ‘Fight for Free Palestine’. How lucky are we to have such a devoted and unbiased news media. (sarc)!

  89. I believe the BBCs Middle East correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, has fled Israel. He probably had advance notice of the hundreds of bombs and rockets being aimed at Jerusalem and the surrounding area. It pays to have pals with insider knowledge,

    According to Wikipedia, on 1 April 2019 Bowen announced that he had undergone treatment to remove a tumour in his bowel, Notice the date – it wasn’t in his bowel, it was in his brain and he had it moved to be near his heart – all the better to influence his reportage of his enemy in Tel Aviv and Chew-roo-sa-lem!

  92. Hopefully the crowd get to lynch the priest stabber – they’re shouting “An eye for an eye.”
    About time there was some rough justice as the state won’t hang these scum.

    1. 386082+ up ticks,

      Afternoon JD,

      Then maybe the only option left sad to say it has come to this, but hang the state politico’s, plus.

    1. I know a property where a ground source pump was installed. It lasted about 7 years before it seized and the cost of repair was not an economic option.

  95. Ross Clark really hates heat pumps…

    Anyone for free money? Yes, as the Prime Minister discovered when he was offering to pay for our pub lunch under the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. But his marketing genius seems to have deserted him when it comes to the seemingly more generous offer of thousands of pounds for a heat pump.

    Even with an increase in the grant from £5,000 to £7,500 per installation, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme has failed to capture the imagination of the British public. In the first two years of the scheme only £127 million out of a possible £300 million of grants have been taken up. Between May 2022, when the subsidies were introduced, and December last year just 18,900 heat pumps were installed – compared with 1.5 million new gas boilers.

    And no, it isn’t because the gas boiler industry has poisoned our minds with anti-heat pump propaganda, as the green lobby would have it. Rather it comes down to basic economics. A £7,500 grant doesn’t seem such a good deal when it comes in the form of a discount on something which remains fantastically expensive even after the grant is taken into account.

    The justification for subsidising heat pumps was supposed to be that it would allow the industry to reach a larger scale and thus bring down costs. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I first obtained a quote for a heat pump for my home in 2010, when it was going to cost £10,000. True, some things come down in price when they move from being a niche product to a mass market one, but it is foolish to assume that all new technologies will go this way.

    Moreover, with heat pumps there is the added problem of their questionable effectiveness in older properties. Some people seem to like them, while others have splashed out many thousands still find themselves shivering in a lukewarm home.

    So what exactly is the incentive for homeowners to rip out a gas boiler and replace it with a heat pump? One of the reasons you might do it is that you are concerned about climate change and want to make your own personal gesture. Is that what taxpayers are subsidising: middle class guilt? Paying £7,500 a time to help quite well off people feel better about themselves.

    At least Rishi Sunak’s subsidised pub lunches ended after a month. At some point he and his colleagues are going to have to ask themselves: how much longer are we prepared to sink public money into propping up an industry whose products show little sign of being able to achieve mass appeal on their own merits?

      1. 12 plus years ago I worked on two contracts where very costly ground source heat pumps were installed. Mid afternoon they home owners had run out of hot water. And had to switch their emersion heaters on.
        Perhaps should have had solar panels as well for such occasions. Similar to cloudy days.

      2. Efficient heat pumps are standard, here in Sweden, John. Mind you, our houses are very different. They are properly insulated and the outside pumps are not that noisy.

          2. Does the heat pump provide all your heating and hot water.? as my gas boiler does.

          3. It provides my heating but my water comes from an immersion heater. This system is pretty much standard throughout Scandinavia.

    2. A heat pump to replace a boiler in the average home is about as practical as replacing your fossil fuelled car with an EV.
      EVs have caused major non profitable investments into electric vehicle production by the motor manufacturing industry which hss now come to the inevitable decision to backtrack into fossil fuelled vehicle manufacturing.

      Drilling for fossil fuels is still the only sensible way forward for most developed economies – well, well, well!

    3. A heat pump to replace a boiler in the average home is about as practical as replacing your fossil fuelled car with an EV.
      EVs have caused major non profitable investments into electric vehicle production by the motor manufacturing industry which hss now come to the inevitable decision to backtrack into fossil fuelled vehicle manufacturing.

      Drilling for fossil fuels is still the only sensible way forward for most developed economies – well, well, well!

    2. When I get older losing my hair
      Many years from now
      Will you still be sending me a ULEZ fine
      Hurty feelings, another hate crime.

  97. Derek Underwood, great England and Kent bowler, dies aged 78

    ‘Deadly’ was England’s most successful spinner, famous for his remarkable partnership, for club and country, with Alan Knott

    Scyld Berry, CHIEF CRICKET WRITER
    15 April 2024 • 2:22pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/04/15/TELEMMGLPICT000003694105_17131861664920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqq6hJP7-7bhTn-PfuFS8tDdL-9dy8wuNXo6FW-1qq6IU.jpeg?imwidth=680

    Derek Underwood, a unique bowler for Kent and England, has died at the age of 78.

    Kent chair Simon Phillip said in a statement: “The Kent Cricket family is in mourning following the passing of one of its greatest ever players.

    “Derek was an outstanding contributor to both Kent and England, winning trophies for club and country and etching his name in the history books forevermore.

    “Watching Derek weave his unique magic on a wet wicket was a privilege for all who were able to witness it. His induction into the ICC Hall of Fame shows the esteem in which he was held in world cricket.

    “An advocate for growing our game worldwide whilst protecting our sport’s rich heritage, Derek also made substantial contributions off the field as well as on it, and he will be sorely missed by everyone at Kent Cricket.”

    His last public appearance was at Canterbury Cathedral in March in 2020 for Kent’s celebration of their 150th anniversary. His gaze was unseeing when he met former team-mates, but amid his battle with dementia, he found a few words: “They tell me Knotty and I made a good combination.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/04/15/TELEMMGLPICT000259590091_17131864053910_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqOGDzUl_0RKToLVaSTAw0BgOqsesN1C8MjbMuR6Sr2OY.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Underwood took 297 Test wickets and a further 16 in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket ‘Super Tests’ CREDIT: Getty Images/Patrick Eagar

    Underwood was a unique bowler in that he was the only left-arm spinner of note to have bowled at medium pace. How well he did so was summed up by the epithet by which he was universally known: “Deadly.”

    From his debut for Kent, aged 17, he ran in a long way for a spinner – almost the length of a pitch – with one arm floating in front of him, the other behind – and with a full body-pivot whacked the ball into the surface. There was nowhere for a batsman to hide. He could not run down the wicket, owing to Underwood’s pace, and if he went in the opposite direction he walked into the hands of Alan Knott, without much question the best wicketkeeper standing up to spin there has ever been.

    “Deadly was the ultimate professional with a ball in his hand,” said Paul Downton, Kent’s director of cricket, who also kept wicket to him. “He was fiercely competitive, hated giving runs away, a dream for his captain whether it be at Lord’s in an Ashes Test or at Derby on a Monday afternoon in front of nobody.”

    As a fellow spinner, though for Sussex, Robin Marlar analysed Underwood: most top bowlers have fast-twitch shoulder muscles, but Underwood was rare in that he had slow-twitch shoulder muscles, some evidence being that he did not have a strong throw. Hence his long run-up, to generate the pace which his left shoulder could not fully impart.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/04/15/TELEMMGLPICT000000786829_17131883972280_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqyILZCJqFaBEpuz3ivC4GSpgojZYlP8f0i9h2tPqCNsM.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Underwood takes seven for 50 to spin England to victory with six minutes to spare and square the Ashes at the Oval in 1968 after the great mopping up operation CREDIT: Central Press/Getty Images

    So instant was Underwood’s impact that he became the youngest bowler to take 100 first-class wickets in his debut season, aged 18 by the end of it. His statistical peak came in 1966 when he took 157 wickets at only 13 apiece.

    For the first half of his career, pitches in county cricket were uncovered if it rained during a day – and Kent used many out-grounds where covers were rudimentary. But even after pitches were covered, his spin and infallible accuracy kept chalking up a hundred wickets per season, until he finished his first-class career with 2,465 of them at a mere 20 runs each.

    There was a brief period when Ray Illingworth, as England’s captain, preferred Worcestershire’s left-arm spinner Norman Gifford on dry pitches. Not many were of the same persuasion, and Underwood otherwise was a fixture in the England Test side at home or abroad, until he joined World Series Cricket in 1977 and the went on the rebel tour of South Africa in 1982. John Thicknesse, cricket correspondent for the Evening Standard, had laid a bet when Underwood first played for England that he would take 300 Test wickets, as Fred Trueman alone had done, and was particularly disappointed when Underwood ended his England career – by touring South Africa – with 297.

    His most famous hour was the finale of the Oval Test of 1968 when he ran through Australia on a damp pitch to square the series, although Australia retained the Ashes. In 1974 the Lord’s pitch was not meant to have been damp at all, because Test pitches by then had to be covered at all times, but rain had leaked under the covers. Relations between England and Pakistan have often been strained and it was as well that more rain forced the Test to be called off, before Underwood ran through Pakistan’s second innings.

    What was almost unique, aside from Underwood’s method, was his personality. Most great bowlers are predators by nature; Underwood was as mild, as un-deadly, as a fellow can be. I remember emerging from an Indian Airlines toilet in 1981-82, after using all the facilities simultaneously, and Deadly was the only passenger whose smile was sympathetic.

    “Without the ball Deadly was the opposite of an athlete – ten to twos, a reluctant practiser, fag on with a cup of tea 20 minutes before the game and fag on with a pint of beer after the game,” Downton recalled. “A totally honest old-fashioned pro, one of the politest, most generous men you could meet. Always gave people time, loved talking cricket, incredibly humble, a really good man.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/04/15/TELEMMGLPICT000259587092_17131870708950_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtACOUEeAzxRxxCMcHBxx-zDe83dNETnOGw_rFkfC5IY.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Greg Chappell takes strike as Alan Knott keeps to Underwood during their last triumphant Ashes campaign CREDIT: Getty Images/Bob Thomas Sports Photography

    Hence, in spite of being a former professional, Underwood was president of MCC in 2008, nominated by his former England captain Mike Brearley. He had already received a MBE.

    Ball in hand, however, he was a dentist, drilling away at one tooth after another, maiden over after maiden, until the batsman was bowled or propped forwards once too often and was caught close in. Colin Cowdrey was the deftest of slippers, Knott his supreme henchman.

    There were no helmets in Underwood’s days until the first prototypes in 1977 and they were for batsmen. Knott had to stand up on dodgy pitches to medium-pace without a helmet or visor to protect him from a ball flying off the edge – or a flying bail, like the one that terminated the career of South Africa’s Mark Boucher. Knott was a human doll, flexible in the extreme. A look upwards to tell Underwood to toss the ball up, a look down at the pitch to tell him to fire it through: that was the only signal in their symbiosis.

    Yes, it was true. Knott and Underwood were a good combination.

    1. Probably England’s best ever spinner. The speed of his deliveries was surprising.

    2. Superb cricketer.
      I recall an ex-pro telling me that most club standard cricketers would think he was a fast bowler, let alone a spinner, his pace was so quick.

    4. One of my younger very attractive auburn haired cricket mad sisters met DU in SA decades ago

      She could score , you know and was in great demand .

    6. Thank you for that, Citroen1. I have never really understood the rules of cricket, but this tribute which you have posted here, has held me riveted. And I understood just about everything about the man and what he achieved.

    7. I have no interest in cricket, but even I have heard of Derek Underwood! Fame indeed 🙂

        1. Yes same as, there probably busy constructing a replacement double. They can’t look vulnerable if he does meet his demise.

    2. No matter how bad the opinion polls, an incumbent Prime Minister has to pretend that victory in the ensuing General Election is still possible. It’s bad enough to lose a General Election, but to concede defeat beforehand would be thought unforgivable by the party faithful.

    1. Its a shame that our governments are still tied to the climate myth.

      Does anyone want to buy a surplus battery factory or two, they have only cost the canadian taxpayer about 20 billion (so far).

    2. They may be the best EV technically, but my word their design is so boring.

        1. I always say they look like what a 6-year old would draw if you asked him to draw a cool sports car.

        1. BMWs are ugly. Teslas are just utterly uninspiring. The refrigerator of the car world.

          1. Too much bulbous dome of a cabin, to my liking. BMWs I never seem to notice at all, so perhaps a bit sterile in looks. But then I’m more of a Jaguar man myself, so I would say that. Guilty as charged.

          2. BMWs are too ubiquitous these days to be noticed, but look at any one from the last decade especially and you’ll see what a mess their designs are. I’m a Jag man myself. Pains me to see what they’ve done with the marque in the last 5 years.

          5. Oh yes, don’t start me. The XF was disappointing in looks, but at least it still feels like a Jag to drive. My son has an F-type. That is good, to my surprise.

          6. Love the F’s exterior – at least the initial version – but the interior always felt a bit uninspired to me.

      1. Where should all the scumbags go?
        Long time passing,
        Where should all the scumbags go?
        Long time ago
        Where should all the scumbags go?
        To the UN everyone

        When will they ever learn?
        Or will they never learn

    2. I scoff at Lucy Wordsworth’s ludicrous suggestion that “[t]he whole of the BBC are traitors and the Director General should be arrested and tried for treason”. Why stop there? Let’s sentence every BBC employee to 30 years’ hard labour then disembowel the DG and scatter his entrails on the doorstep of his family home. That’ll learn ’em.

  102. Straight into the Heffalump trap . The Beeb goes from strength to strength with its even-handed coverage…

    BBC’s Nick Robinson: I should have been clearer over ‘Israel has murdered Palestinians’ claim

    Today host issues statement after corporation faces criticism following his interview with Foreign Secretary

    Dominic Penna, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
    15 April 2024 • 1:29pm

    Nick Robinson has said he “should have been clearer” during an interview with Lord Cameron after a row over the BBC presenter’s claim that Israel had “murdered tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians”.

    The corporation faced criticism after Robinson, a Today programme presenter, put the claim to the Foreign Secretary towards the end of their exchange on BBC Radio 4 on Monday.

    He subsequently said he was not expressing his own view, “let alone the view of the BBC”, following the criticism.

    In his final question to Lord Cameron, he said: “Isn’t the real risk of where we are now that western governments appear to back Israel the moment that Israel is under attack, but when Israel attacks and murders tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, we say the words but we do almost nothing?”

    Lord Cameron replied “I don’t think that’s right at all. Actually, over this weekend and into this week, people can see that the truly malign actor in this region is Iran, a country that has launched a state-on-state attack, as you put it in your introduction.

    “And it’s this country, Iran, that is backing Hamas in Palestine, that’s backing Hezbollah in Lebanon, that’s backing the Houthis in the Red Sea.”

    tmg.video.placeholder.alt p9bZrNkyK-E
    Following criticism of his remarks, Robinson wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “There’s been some controversy about words I used when I was interviewing the Foreign Secretary David Cameron on the Today programme about Israel this morning.

    “My final question was about the perceived ‘morality’ of the Government’s position – in particular the ‘risk’ that their position could ‘appear’ to look like active support for Israel when it is under attack, but nothing other than words ‘when Israel attacks or murders tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians’.

    “I should have been clearer that I was not expressing my own view, let alone that of the BBC, when I used the words ‘murders’.

    “In this 15-minute long interview, I asked the Foreign Secretary why ministers had supported Israel militarily, why they didn’t go further and support Israel in confronting Iran, why they weren’t tougher in confronting Israel over Gaza and ended with that question about the perceived ‘morality’ and the ‘risk’ of how the Government’s position ‘appears’. It was a lengthy and detailed exploration of the policy choices made by the Government.”

    According to the Hamas-run health ministry, more than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 74,000 wounded in Gaza during the conflict, but the terror group’s figures are unverified and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

    Rishi Sunak said this month that there had been “too many civilian deaths” in Gaza, while maintaining that Israel has the right to defend itself.

    Stephen Pollard, the editor at large of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, claimed Robinson had asked a “shocking question, even for the BBC”. He wrote on X: “Murders? It’s one thing to accuse Israel of not taking enough care over civilians. But murder? Deliberately seeking to kill Palestinian civilians?”

    Nicole Lampert, a journalist and broadcaster, said: “The BBC’s Today programme just lies here – dangerous lies. Israel has not deliberately ‘murdered tens of thousands’.”

    A survey commissioned by the Jewish Chronicle in December found that more than three-quarters of Jewish people thought the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict was biased against Israel.

    The broadcaster has faced criticism since its refusal to describe Hamas as terrorists in the wake of the Oct 7 massacre, although it now states in its reporting that Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the Government.

    In response to allegations of bias, a BBC spokesman said the organisation “holds itself to high standards of impartial reporting and rejects the suggestion that we are biased against Israel”.

    The BBC has previously said: “The conflict is a challenging and polarising story to cover, and we are dedicated to providing impartial reporting for audiences in the UK and across the world. Our own audience research shows that BBC News is considered the most impartial provider for coverage of the conflict.”

    The BBC was contacted for comment.

    **************************************

    Lucy Wordsworth
    1 HR AGO
    The BBC did the same again in the 1pm news, questioning ‘why’ the UK bothered to intercept Iran’s missiles, clearly implying that it’s unclear who the UK’s real enemy is, Iran or Israel. The whole of the BBC are traitors and the Director General should be arrested and tried for treason.

    Matthew Vrancken
    1 HR AGO
    The Beeb should pull the plug on that disgraceful journalist and the government should defund the BBC.

    A Skeptical Observer
    1 HR AGO
    Reply to Matthew Vrancken
    Sadly, he’s not the only one.. Mishal Husein, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet.. Same school of Hamas lovers/ jews haters.
    And Nick Robinson is Jewish.. the worst kind of useful idiot!

    1. Oh, I have a little story about Lyse Doucet. Many years ago, back in the dark ages when there were landline telephones on BBC desks, I answered a call from a man at IRIB, the Iranian national broadcaster. They’d provided facilities for Lyse Doucet and he was demanding payment. He’d been put through to entirely the wrong department and there wasn’t anything I could do to help him but as well as getting nasty about that, he treated me to a spiel about how much admired and respected Lyse Doucet is, with the implication that I should be honoured to personally pay her expenses.

      1. I cannot listen to Lyse Doucet. Even if I were to agree with her every word, that voice is about as harmonious as a cats chorus.

        1. Also Orla Guerin. A certain kind of strident Irish accent with a hard edge that they both have.

          1. I call her “Gloomy” Guerin. Although she reports from the world’s troublesports, she always sounds morose.

    2. I scoff at Lucy Wordsworth’s ludicrous suggestion that “[t]he whole of the BBC are traitors and the Director General should be arrested and tried for treason”. Why stop there? Let’s sentence every BBC employee to 30 years’ hard labour then disembowel the DG and scatter his entrails on the doorstep of his family home. That’ll learn ’em.

          1. And portable barbecues. After hang draw and quarter their chitterlings were thrown on the braziers….waste not want not.

      2. Except for Sue, of this Parish, who is a fine, upstanding Nottler.
        I suspect from her comments that she is a stunner in the pulchritude department, too.

    3. Cameron got far more civilians killed in the Middle East while he was PM than Israel did. I don’t know why Robinson was asking him for his moral opinion, since it’s clearly worthless.

    1. Will that be the Pakistanis “lending” their fellow Muslims a nuke, or China selling them one?

      1. Could be traced back to America. Clinton’s did sell fissile material to the Russians.

          1. The Russians targeted the Laboratories. The Ukies targeted a Nuclear plant.

            The Americans have more than a thousand more Laboratories in Africa.

            If you know where they are…that is where Western troops are involved in fighting the locals who wish to get rid of their corrupt $$$governments.

    2. As long as it lands on his head.

      The idiots at Westminster ignore the fact that it will come from within and not from without.

      All those private jets allowed to land unchecked is my guess.

    3. It is difficult to be objective when considering the opinions expressed by a chap with a face like Tobias Elwood’s.

        2. Rory Stewart is on your list, he is rather effete , but in a grudging sort of way he knows more than the others.. and he is very knowledgeable on what matters in the Middle East .

          Not sure where he is or what he is doing now , and perhaps I am a bad judge of character , but I think other MP’s showed him disdain .. unfairly.

    4. What has he written that’s so controversial? A bandit nation will use a nuke? It’s possible. He does rail against Russia (again) but the threat lies elsewhere. China might well be tempted to grab land in Asia.

      Phizzee’s delivery by private jet is also possible but where would the mad Ropers detonate it? There isn’t a piece of urban Britain that doesn’t have a nest of them. How many of their own kind are they prepared to kill?

      1. How many of their own kind are they prepared to kill?

        So far,a whole Palestine’s worth, it seems.

    5. What do you expect. The clown has openly boasted about how he used to work for the 77th brigade.
      Hopefully another fake Conservative who will be annihilated at the forthcoming GE

      1. “…openly boasted about how he used to work for the 77th brigade.”

        As a reservist.

  104. The weather held for the funeral of my neighbour. A good service and professionally done. Only one family member, a brother and two friends came over from the Isle Of Wight in the downpour.
    I am so glad i went door knocking. We managed about 30.
    Music was. Always on my mind – Panpipes. You’re my best friend – Don Williams. Recessional, My girl – The Temptations.

    2. Oh dear! I would like Fauré’s Requiem myself, or better still Mozart’s one.

      Very unlikely however!

      1. I was just glad it was a short service with music they enjoyed. And Our Lord’s Prayer.

          1. I believe so. Though the music was modern…ish.
            I don’t think i know the modern version of the Lord’s prayer. Do they do a rap version now? with bitches and tings?…………….sorry. I really shouldn’t post this late.

      2. For me – be nice if anyone turned up at all. Mozart’s Requiem would suit – problem is, I won’t be there to hear it… 🙁

        1. I hear you can now do pre-funerals. You get to enjoy all the music and food. Obviously if you are not about to die it is incumbent on the mourners to kill you.

        2. Just as well…..if you were there to hear it then the prospect of being buried alive would be rather alarming.

        3. You don’t know that for sure. Anyway, it is so beautiful it would comfort those who will mourn for you.

      3. No need to be concerned. I am sure it is programmed into the Bontempi keyboard. :@)

        1. I have conducted both of the above and would consider a Bontempi requiem to be the act of someone who dislikes me very much. Quite a wide field….Remainers, feminists, lefties, alphabet soup people, hunt saboteurs etc etc. I trust none of these revolting people are in charge of my funeral!

          1. Lay down what you want while you still have the chance! I’ve chosen my music, my hymns, the Bible reading and the poem. I’ve also designed my order of service so I get the right photos included 🙂

          2. You also need to write your own epitaph (eulogy). That will stop the buggers, the sentimentalists and those who are really not your friends in their tracks. Also inventive vicars.

          3. I am considering writing my own eulogy and designing my tombstone. Just haven’t got round to it yet.

          4. Good plot! I am looking into “Swedish Death Cleaning”, as well. Boy, it’s challenging to tackle a lifetime of whatever (the stuff we always thought we would have the time for and the stuff that would come in useful, or that others would want. Hey Ho)

          5. A full requiem mass would be not only expensive but also a folie de grandeur wouldn’t you say?

            In a small churchyard?

            I will just imagine it.

          6. I am hoping my friends in the choir will sing for me. It will be a requiem mass because that’s the sort of church I go to.

    3. Bernard Cribbins had a few songs that are suitable for funerals.
      The advantage over here being that no one has here such masterpieces as Right said Fred or Hollywoode in the ground so I might get away with using them when carrying the coffin into the church or assembling round the grave.

  105. I have found it always a good idea to be friendly to neighbours. Even the grimmer ones.

      1. I suppose i am lucky here in bungalowland. The overwhelming majority are retirees. They all pretty much want a quiet life. I have lived in several cities and life can be frenetic, both good and bad, but the pressure remains.

    2. I agree, one reason being that at some point or other the daft postperson will put your post through their letterbox, and it helps to be on good terms so that they will return it to you.

      1. I don’t believe in coincidence but your post stretches that.
        I have been here quite a while now but in the early days as a young ‘pup’ i wasn’t universally accepted. They probably thought noisy party time.
        I received what was obviously a Barclay card and a second envelope. I could guess what was in the second one. I just popped them in their letterbox anonymously.

      2. I regularly get parcels for my neighbour two doors along, but mainly from couriers. Just because I live next to number 6 it doesn’t mean my house is number 8. I don’t have a number, which seems to confuse a lot of people. I had one company ring me up to tell me I hadn’t given them the number of the house! The answer, “that’s because it doesn’t have one, it has a name”, seemed to flummox them.

  106. The first versions were lovely – a blend between Jaguar, Audi and Aston Martin.
    Now, they are a bit weird, and dull.

      1. For both of those I think they’ve got in mind a One-State solution, Herr Oberstleutnant. And it isn’t the traditional one.

      2. For both of those I think they’ve got in mind a One-State solution, Herr Oberstleutnant. And it isn’t the traditional one.

  108. Robin Ashenden
    How was ITV’s trans drama Butterfly ever made?
    15 April 2024, 2:32pm

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/1_BUTTERFLY.webp

    In the wake of the Cass Report’s damning verdict on the reckless ‘social transitioning’ of children and the prescribing of puberty blockers to minors, it’s perhaps an apt time to recall a mini-series that appeared on ITV a few years ago cheerleading for both.

    Butterfly was broadcast in October 2018 just as Theresa May’s national consultation about proposed changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act was nearing its end, and dealt with the issue of trans children. Written by Tony Marchant and directed by Anthony Byrne, its lead consultant was Susie Green, the then-head of transgender youth support charity Mermaids, who took her son to Thailand for sex reassignment surgery on his sixteenth birthday.

    Butterfly, over three episodes, told a harrowing story for our time. Vicky and Stephen Duffy’s 11-year-old son Max believes he’s in the wrong body. At home he sometimes wears girl’s clothing but at school plays the part of a normal boy (though is bullied for being visibly different from the other kids). As Max’s adolescence approaches, the situation is getting worse – he’s begun cutting himself and attacking his penis with broken glass: ‘I don’t want it… It’s disgusting. I want to get rid of it.’ Max’s mother Vicky, brilliantly played by Anna Friel, is highly sympathetic: ‘I want to have a happy daughter, not a dead son.’ But his father is sceptical, hopeful it’s a phase Max (soon to be Maxine) will grow out of: ‘If only I was there for him and a proper role model… Kids, they change their minds all the time.’

    After being told by a doctor about puberty blockers – ‘they buy the child some time. To see what feels right for them. To see if they want to change their mind’ – the parents visit the ‘Ferrybank Clinic’ (presumably a nod to the Tavistock Centre).

    At the Mermaids charity they’re told by its director, an earth-motherish Felicity Montagu (Lyn from I’m Alan Partridge), ‘I know exactly how you’re feeling… Listen to your child.’

    The traumatic emotional journey which follows – taking this divided family through domestic strife, theft of money, abduction, and police arrest – culminates in the father’s third act embrace of his son’s new gender and the eleventh-hour prescription of puberty blockers, to whoops of jubilation on the car journey home. A final scene shows Maxine receiving her first injections, a look of peace, happiness and hope on her face. ‘A wonderfully delicate drama… truthful, beautiful and powerful stuff,’ the Guardian enthused in its review.

    In form, then, Butterfly was conventional enough – a family drama about a race against time – and arguably there was just enough ambiguity about mother Vicky’s behaviour to open up a debate. Was she using Max’s plight to fight marital battles of her own, or to channel some private, tangential anxiety? But that was just on paper. It was in the design and direction of the programme that its real, subliminal battles were fought, and where Butterfly blurred the line between objective drama and straight propaganda.

    While Max’s bedroom was a carnival of colour – a place full of brightly painted figurines (unicorns and seahorse among them, naturally), feather boas and lava lamps. Max’s gender-critical father Stephen stood out in gloomy contrast – heavily bearded, dressed in the dullest of colours and seeming to emerge, emotionally illiterate, from the turgid darkness. The programme appeared to lay down a challenge to viewers – do you want to belong to Stephen’s colourless, closed-minded view of life or embrace the rapturous rainbow of gender fluidity? ‘If it stops me becoming more of a boy it will be worth it, won’t it?’ says Max of puberty blockers, and you can only sympathise. You’d do anything, you feel, not to turn into a man like Stephen, if only to avoid being depicted like this in a TV drama or having to wear those muted lumberjack shirts.

    And in fact, for all its cutting-edge aspirations, there was a rigid sexism about the series. At the playground in Max/Maxine’s school, boys kick balls around and girls practise dance-routines. When Max joins in with the second group, the soundtrack swells triumphantly. Getting rid of the old Max means, for Vicky, dumping lots of ‘boy’s toys’ (dinosaurs and blue shoes) in a suitcase under the bed. Whatever the series was selling us – and it was selling hard – may have looked brand new but was also fustily out of date.

    Along with Max’s candy shop of a bedroom the Mermaids Centre was a riot of colour. A patchwork banner with the organisation’s name read ‘Embrace – Empower – Educate.’ Mermaids were everywhere in the series, cropping up repeatedly as symbols – one swimming up to Max in an aquarium to communicate with him, another as the pendant which the child falls asleep clutching for comfort. This may have touched hearts at the time (and been a great advert for Green’s organisation) but now it reminds you of the weird magical thinking of the movement. In fact, there was a profusion of ickily named trans children’s groups in the UK – ‘Allsorts’, ‘Butterflies’, ‘Transtastic’ – as though a great day out might involve a Happy Meal, Alton Towers and a light spot of infant transition therapy on the way home.

    But the series’ greatest propaganda coup was that it was made at all. Here the medium really was the message. Sexy nation’s sweetheart Anna Friel, cosy Felicity Montagu, salt-of-the-earth stalwart Alison Steadman as the grandmother, and all the backing of an established national network. With gorgeous, trustworthy company like this, Butterfly seemed to ask, do you want to be on this departing train or have it bear down on you, full-tilt and with no warning, at a later date?

    Butterfly isn’t just a textbook reminder of how insidiously agendas can be pushed by filmmakers but also seemed to have changed its meaning in the years since. Steadman’s meanly written grandmother – another sceptic about Maxine’s plight – reminds us of the ‘Be Kind’ brigade’s intolerance for differing views. Instead of a Neanderthal clinging to the past, father Stephen now seems to symbolise the battered voice of reason and caution, neutered into paralysis by the ‘feelings not facts’ world around him.

    Since Butterfly went out, much else has changed. The Tavistock was forced to close its child gender identity service this March and in late 2022 Susie Green resigned as Mermaids CEO. It’s time perhaps for TV production companies to start considering other forms of propaganda which, with all the creative resources at their disposal, they push at us – all for ‘our own good.’

    ‘Please darling… We only did what we thought was best,’ stammers Vicky at one point to Maxine’s furious and neglected older sibling. For all involved in this beautifully made, flawlessly acted and – in the light of what followed – shatteringly irresponsible and proselytising piece of television, that defence may now be the best one left to them.

    *****************************

    Mr R M Bellamy
    an hour ago
    Great article, sharply observed.

    The propaganda industry will just write off gender-fluidity and move on to ‘Net Zero’ or Mass Immigration.

    The important thing is ‘to overturn all societal norms by whatever means practicable’.

    Another day, another Cause.

    Squire Western
    7 minutes ago edited
    Perhaps a suitable punishment would be for them to be compelled to make a sequel in which Max now bitterly regrets the penisectomy which he has subsequently undergone and, realising that his life has been ruined, commits suicide? Meanwhile the clinic is closed down, the various practitioners dragged through the courts and his father is utterly vindicated?

  109. A well-appointed Birdie Three!

    Wordle 1,031 3/6
    ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟨
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. I was happy with a 4 today.

      Wordle 1,031 4/6

      ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨
      ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
      🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

        1. Blimey, well done! – I thought I was doing well with a birdie 3!
          Wordle 1,031 3/6

          ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
          ⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜
          🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. Respect, Sue Ed. (At least that’s what I think the current expression is these days.)

    3. Some of us (well me at least) think that par is good.

      Wordle 1,031 4/6

      ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
      🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
      ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  110. For whom the Bell tolls….:

    “harold bell
    5 HRS AGO
    Eternity is a really long, long time. Especially towards the end.

    1. I always thought it was rather oxymoronic to say there was a time limit on eternity!

      Seven whole days not one in seven
      I shall praise thee
      In my heart, though not in Hea­ven,
      I can raise Thee.
      Small it is, in this poor sort
      To en­roll Thee:
      E’en eter­ni­ty’s too short
      To ex­tol Thee.

  111. I thought that the UK – being free of the EU – would not have to put up with the screw tops on plastic bottles being still attached to the bottle when unscrewed. It can result in spills as the cap gets in the way when pouring; it can also cause cuts when one tries to circumcise the cap and cut if off from its bottle with a knife. I was very annoyed to find yet another surrender to EU green nonsense when I visited the UK recently.

    Is having the cap top attached to the bottle really of any benefit to the planet and if so how any why?

    Do any of my fellow Nottlers have views on this important subject.

    1. Afternoon Richard. My Bete Noir is the tabs on cans. They are a health hazard. They should detach completely when pulled.

      1. A merry post meridian, Minty.

        I agree especially when the tab comes off leaving the can still sealed.

      2. Sorry I have to disagree, Minty. One used to be forever treading on those damned ring pulls on beaches in the past. Also, rather less importantly, my uncle bought a metal detector when I was young and used to lend it to me to find coins on the beach. I found far more ring pulls than numismatic tokens!

      1. Sadly could be spot on , although Greece has been in the financial dwang for a number of years now, so no one can afford to have children, and that is why there are so many starving dogs .. In fact the whole of Europe is in a mess, isn’t it?

        1. The whole world, Maggie. With some small pockets of sanity, such as this site.

    3. IIRC, population in Italy has been falling for decades – well before Covid and jabs.

  114. 386082+ up ticks,

    He, like ALL of his odious ilk play very strongly on the short term memory span of the majority voter, and that really is taking advantage of the mentally afflicted.

    ALL political overseers alternately leave these Isles in a more distraught dangerous state, on a regular basis, every five years
    if re-elected to serve another term that encourages the party to try even harder to be MORE treacherous

    https://x.com/UnityNewsNet/status/1779900583165510052

    .

    1. A lovely work. The young pianist is not helped by the pretty gruesome instrument he is playing, but his teacher needs to tell him to stop thumping out the LH part which is much too emphatic.

    2. Another interpretation!

      https://youtu.be/_iaGcdlWk6k

      Very interesting provenance of (and hinterland to) this beautiful piece and others by Satie. Somewhere I have a recording of De Hartman playing it – perfectly, of course – which I cannot find online. The piano piece is very pared down, very precise and restrained. I do agree with the Squire on the bashing out but salute the little lad for learning it. Despite its simplicity, this is not easy music to play, requiring (as does all of Satie’s work) the utmost precision and restraint.

        1. She was a grandmother in her thirties and a mother before school leaving age I believe.

          1. Not quite the same as marrying very young as they used to do .

          2. Marrying young is a good thing on the whole. Better than sleeping around u til you’re thirtyish, surely?

        2. She is one of the very few working class MPs in the HOC so, on that qualification alone, it would be a pity to see her go. Mouthy, common, and all the other adjectives that can rightly be assigned to her but what you see, is what you get, which can’t be said of many MPs.

          1. In an observation of changing times a splendid cartoon about two jags and two houses was posted earlier

          2. ‘Protege of John Prescott’ – that is a most cruel and cutting remark. 🙂

      6. She has a certain something…
        It would be like going 15 rounds with a sex mad female gorilla. 🙂

        1. Something dirty and without the femininity, elegance and charm of Audrey Hepburn. Oh dear, Audrey would say, remember to take antibiotics to those who do the 15 rounds . * mind bleach and blushes * I’m very old fashioned dear JD . 😳 . Goodnight .

          2. She’d be very overpowering, don’t think about it anymore, use mind bleach 🙂

      7. A certain “Chavvy Charm”. I’d rate her a 3 or 4 pinter at the Brompton Stomp “Grab-A-Grannie Night”.

    2. I’d like to give them both power ⚡️⚡️ 10,000 volts each. And not votes.

    5. I feel a bit sorry for her – she’s done remarkably well given her background.

      She’s well and truly blown it though – you cant harangue everyone else for dodgy tax affairs and screw up like she has done herself with the (admittedly a little confusing) second homes rules.

      She’ll be history – she doesnt fit the Globalist narrative and was probably regarded as a loose cannon anyway.

      Queer Stammer will breathe a big sigh of relief………

      1. When initially questioned she showed no humility and doubled down. Then the Twitter gnomes got to work and uncovered the flaw in her position. She played her self.

        1. If she didn’t fit the globalist narrative (lying, cheating, venal grabber) i would champion her

        2. I’m not a fan, AA! Weeell, maybe just a tiny little bit for what she has achieved – I think it does show we still live in a relatively meritocratic society where most people have an opportunity to get on.

        1. I was listening to their Greatest Hits album on the drive back from work. Such great songs such as ‘Captain Jack’, Santiago, Country Life and Roots.

          2. Not come across them before. Redolent of Willie Nelson who is also from Texas, same town as Kris Kristofferson.

  119. Nice.
    The tiny town close to Firstborn’s place has been the scene for a woman to be robbed at knifepoint in her own home. The description of the perpetrator is “Den mistenkte gjerningsmannen hadde finlandshette, en frakk og snakket gebrokkent engelsk.” – the suspected perp had a balaklava, coat, and spoke broken English.
    Just up the road is a camp for “refugees”.
    Hope the arsehole doesn’t try it at Firstborn’s – he’d likely be chased outside then shot in the back with a pump 12-bore. The remains then fed to the badgers.

    1. It is already rife in Sweden. It is everywhere they are settled. Governments don’t seem to care. The suburbs of Paris are a hellhole.

      1. When are our ‘king idiot western politicians going to admit that they have effed up again.

      1. Likeminded, Squire. The most wonderful films, I’ve watched it again and again many times .

          1. Yes, the 1950 would have been very suitable. The best of times.

          2. Actually we’d both have been not born then. But I think it’s where we belong.😊

          3. I grew up in the fifties. Decent education, law and order, a homogeneous society, you could leave your door unlocked and not get burgled, homosexuality was a private matter behind closed doors, you knew your neighbour (and spoke the same language) …

          4. I could walk to school alone as a little girl along a busy main road. Coming home there was time to stop off and play with friends. I spent a lot of time alone doing my own thing, or with friends. The little village school had only three teachers – one often brought her dog to school. We learnt prayers, Bible stories and lots more. Of course, it closed years ago and is now a private house. The Church is also closed and in disrepair.

          5. I, too, used to walk unaccompanied to school – about a mile and a half along a busy road (had to cross it to get to school), over the canal and past the glass works (cut crystal). As far as I know, the church (a Victorian replacement for the 13th century one which was expected to fall down due to mineworking, but didn’t) is still there. It did get struck by lightning and lost the finial off one of the towers. I was confirmed in the 13th century mother church.

          7. No, we’d not have been born then but sometimes people feel they’d belonged to another time, I feel the 50s to have been the perfect time .
            It’s certainly not now for me, I feel totally out of place in this which is supposedly my time, it’s not a time I’d have chosen.

          8. What decade were you born, Squire, I f you don’t mind me asking, you don’t have to reply.

          10. Missed the sixties too, not born during the early part and a toddler during the later part .

          14. That’s not unusual not to ask, her childhood would’ve been the war years. Nevertheless the 50s would have suited you very much as they do myself.

          15. I think so too. And my (now departed) Morgan would have been seen as quite modern.🙂

          16. I think I responded to this. Yes it’d have been seen as quite modern
            but very suited for a picnic I the 20s . The modern European civilised world is lost now Squire, the best of times were before I and you were even born

  122. Israel plans ‘painful’ strike on Iran without casualties. 15 April 2024 • 6:24pm

    Israel is planning a “painful” strike on Iran that does not cause casualties, according to leaks from a meeting of the prime minister’s war cabinet.

    Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly asked the Israel Defense Forces to draw up a list of targets that Israel could choose to hit that the US would not object to.

    I knew that they wouldn’t be able to resist a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Prepare for WWIII.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/15/israel-hamas-war-iran-drone-attack-latest-news/

    2. Israel would be unwise to strike at Iran. The hundreds of drones launched into Israel by Iran and its proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were cheap and slow and thus designed to be intercepted and shot down.

      You may be assured that the drones will have given the Iranians precise positioning of Israeli defence sites. The drones preceded some fearful ballistic missile follow up which targeted specific Israeli installations. It is widely understood that the ballistic missile strikes had a hypersonic component and as such were unable to be shot down by the Patriot System and Israel’s Iron Dome.

      Iran has tested Israel and showed that it has powerful enhanced missile technology.

      1. Good points you make, Corim.
        Best shift the defence sites, now Iran knows where they are.

      2. As a cadet rifleman, we were taught to fire and move, fire and move, so you were less susceptible to return fire.

      3. Rather like the scene in Zulu, where the Afrikaner scout points out that warriors were being sacrificed to get gun counts.
        I console myself that the defenders still held out until the Zulu decided enough was enough.

    3. Well, let’s be straight here – if they dont take this golden (and justified) opportunity to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities now, we’re looking at WWIII in the not too distant anyway!!

  123. I often find Janet Daley’s writing so dry that I struggle to get to the end. Not this time.

    The human rights cult has replaced common sense compassion

    The noble belief that all people are entitled to basic freedoms has become a narcissist’s charter

    JANET DALEY • 13 April 2024 • 12:47pm

    The most shocking thing about the Cass report is that it had to be commissioned at all. Why in God’s name did it require an official government study to establish that medical interference in the sexual development of healthy children was unacceptable?

    The outrage over this absurdity has been thoroughly aired – not least by my colleagues on these pages – so let’s take that as read. Whatever benign inclinations there may once have been in this campaign, they were swamped by the most poisonous wave of personal and professional denigration that I have ever seen.

    That itself should have been a significant clue: the hysterical vindictiveness with which the militant trans lobby pursued any attempt to question its assumptions should have thrown up an immediate warning. People whose response to any challenge is to extirpate their critics are not well-intentioned.

    But it’s over. This whole bizarre phenomenon has imploded and nobody needs to be afraid to utter obvious truths any longer. The clinicians who went along with it (whose reasoning processes remain a mystery because many of them would not cooperate with the Cass investigation) must be made to pay a price and the victims (because that is what they are) must somehow be compensated.

    That last one will be difficult because many of them will have no idea what it is they have lost. And that, it has to be said, is possibly the most terrible and irremediable aspect of this. So before this extraordinary chapter of social history is just swept away in a tidal wave of self-congratulatory unanimity, we must examine precisely what it was that was so very mistaken and destructive at the heart of it.

    There seem to be two misunderstandings which are in danger of being overlooked in the immediate outrage over possible medical malpractice. First is the specific matter of pubescent depression and anxiety – which is what this form of treatment was supposed to remedy. The other is a larger political question to do with human rights and how that concept has now transmogrified into a parody of its original Enlightenment intentions.

    On the urgent matter of treating children who are traumatised by the signs of approaching puberty, we need a genuinely compassionate discussion. It is very important to note that although the most vociferous trans campaigners were men who claimed to be women, the overwhelming majority of children coming forward for transitioning are young girls who are frightened by the changes to their maturing bodies. And that, as most grown-up women have always known, is not abnormal.

    The shock of female puberty can be well tolerated by girls who are in supportive families or communities which cope with this process by shared ritual. But even for them, it is a sudden and dramatic change of condition.

    I remember an advertisement for sanitary products many years ago which showed two identical photographs of a young girl in a ballet pose. Under the first one, were the words, “Yesterday, Katy was a girl of thirteen.” And under the second, “Today, she is a woman of thirteen.”

    That overnight transformation has been the inspiration for mythologies and story-telling through the ages. The most recent version – Disney’s animated fairy tale “Frozen” – involved a young princess awakening one day with the magical, and inescapable, power to turn anything she touches to ice. So dangerous has she become, in her adult female sexuality, that she is hidden away even from her younger sister whose innocence must be protected.

    The fact of menstruation and its life-changing consequences are startling even for the well-balanced and emotionally secure. For the less fortunate who have mental disabilities or troubled histories, it can be terrifying.

    The answer to this must not be to collude with the disadvantage and reinforce the phobic reaction of the child. You don’t tell someone with an irrational fear of dirt that they are right to wash their hands hundreds of times a day and offer them an endless supply of soap.

    What these girls need is help to deal with physical reality, not a pharmaceutical remedy for avoiding it followed by mutilation to enforce the illusion that it has been conquered. How could anyone have thought otherwise? Was this the ultimate hubris – believing that in the modern age we had the power, and the responsibility, to alter even the most basic facts of the human condition if they did not, at any given moment, offer happiness?

    Or was it some kind of defiant ideological joke from the infiltration army: let’s see how outrageous a proposition we can sell to a credulous public using only crude moral blackmail and shameless bullying.

    That brings us to the larger political issue. Somehow, the idea of natural or universal human rights to which all the peoples of the world are entitled from birth, which was born in the 18th century and enshrined in the sacred founding documents of the great revolutionary republics, has turned into a narcissist’s charter.

    The reverence for the individual who, as the American Declaration of Independence states, is “endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was designed to ensure that no state or ruler could ever transgress the essential liberties of any citizen.

    But what every individual was being guaranteed was not his own idea of a perfect life: it was not happiness itself that the government was committed to deliver but the right to pursue it within rational limits.

    The state cannot undertake to deliver your own personal version of a contented life. This is exactly the contradiction that the European Court of Human Rights has exposed with its ruling that one group of protesting Swiss citizens must have their “right” to be protected from climate change enforced in law.

    You don’t have a right to be comfortable, or healthy, let alone happy. You only have a right to pursue those things in ways that do not damage others. That is the unalienable principle on which all of our freedoms are built.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/13/the-human-rights-cult-has-replaced-common-sense-compassion/

    2. This awful idea of transgenderism has not taken in the “credulous public”; the vast majority of the public were aghast at what was being carried out on these poor young innocent children to their own detriment. It was ideologically driven misfits and, in the case of the medical profession, the mother of all monstrous medical experiments. The so-called ‘experts’ who turned out to be anything but.

      1. And as in so many other matters, the vast majority of the public were told to keep their prejudices and primitive thinking to themselves.

      2. I’ve just been advised of a meeting for LGBT etc councillors. Why the heck do they have their own group?

    3. The Canadian establishment are fighting the findings in this report. Trudeau is saying that children’s rights are important.

      1. Anything that creature turdeau gets up too doesn’t surprise me ,, unfortunately.

    1. I don’t understand. After Adhern put on the headscarf and emoted to the ‘communities’ i thought everything would be fine.

    2. Paranoid schizophrenic hearing the voice of Jesus.
      ishhooosss atishoos, all fall down.

    3. It appears that he is a 15 year old boy; so guess what?
      All pictures of him are pixelated out, including his beard.
      I wonder if he really is 15 or merely stated he was 15 to get “child” status as an immigrant.

      Given how wrong my assessment was last time, I’m sure he must be a nice, white lad who loves his nan and is an outstanding pupil at school.

      2. It might make a person wonder if the person the police shot for the Bondi junction stabbings was actually the real son of the parent’s who came forward. I don’t trust any of them any more anywhere.
        It would have been quite easy to have made this up, to cover up the identity of the real culprit.

        1. At a glance his body type didn’t seem right against the pictures of the knife man. Dunno though, I’ve not got the time to jump down every rabbit hole.

        2. Oddly enough, I thought that too, but the total back-story would have taken a lot of preparation, so I discount it because it appeared too quickly.

          1. But the powers that be might have a list of cop-outs all ready prepared.
            With all the recent stabbings happening and various other previous observations in social unrest..

          2. I think such preparations would leak like a sieve.
            People can’t help themselves boasting.

          3. Such preparations are not shared with the ‘grunts’.

            Just remember every time the Met Police fucked up in a big way (De Menezes for one) and what their PR department came out with, then had to back pedal fast when they were caught out by independent witnesses.

    4. Christians engage in angry mob justice? I’d like a fact check on that please.

      1. They are not seeing justice in the courts. But I understand what you are implying, and the underlying implication.

      2. I question it as well. How did they know the 5000 were all Christians. Were they all bearing crosses? Stigmata perhaps?

    2. Well, there we are. i still prefer Janis’s version. All the others would have faded into insignificance if she hadna made it famous (and suddenly everyone sees the point of a mediocre country song)

    1. Tee hee! Course she is – but as said different tempora different mores. We have a huge, curated underclass that operate thus, alongside our uninvited and most turbulent guests

        1. I used to have a dog who loved rolling in cow-clap. He was less keen on the bath that followed but he didn’t learn.

    1. The doggies held a meeting,
      They came from near and far,
      Some came by motorcycle,
      Some by motorcar.
      Each doggy passed the entrance,
      Each doggy signed the book,
      Then each unshipped his arsehole
      And hung it on the hook.

      One dog was not invited,
      It sorely raised his ire,
      He ran into the meeting hall
      And loudly bellowed, “Fire.”
      It threw them in confusion
      And without a second look,
      Each grabbed another’s arsehole,
      From off another hook.
      And that’s the reason why, sir,
      When walking down the street,
      And that’s the reason why, sir,
      When doggies chance to meet,
      And that’s the reason why, sir,
      On land or sea or foam,
      He will sniff another’s arsehole
      To see if it’s his own.

      2. Mine must have been the one who shouted “fire” and thus kept his own. He is totally uninterested in sniffing other dogs’ bottoms!

  132. Evening, all. They don’t need to itemise the islamic states that want to destroy Israel, surely? Saying “islam” will be enough.

    I am now the proud keeper (for six months) of the ROCA Quiz trophy! We won the Master Quiz this afternoon. I only have it for six months because I’m sharing it with the other team members.

    4. Congratulations. When the six months are up tell them you sent it away to be polished. You can’t remember where you put it. You’ve been burgled…

    1. I was welling up by the time it had almost finished – it was those final strains of ‘Waltzing Mathilda’ that did it for me. ‘Waltzing Mathilda’ is so evocative.

  135. Well, chums, I am shortly disappearing to bed, because I shall be away for a short break tomorrow. I hope to be around during the break but that may not be possible. So don’t be alarmed if I don’t put in an appearance for a few days. And if anyone asks if they know where I am please do not ask them “Have you looked in the fridge?” Lol.

      1. We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside, Paul. Hopefully she won’t come home to a real fire.

    2. We’ll keep a welcome, Elsie – schlaf gut – see below for the full choir. May your dreams be sweet.

  136. Well, chums, I am shortly disappearing to bed, because I shall be away for a short break tomorrow. I hope to be around during the break but that may not be possible. So don’t be alarmed if I don’t put in an appearance for a few days. And if anyone asks if they know where I am please do not ask them “Have you looked in the fridge?” Lol.

  137. Two of them are a married couple (one of each – we are Salopians, after all) and the other one didn’t want to be bothered with it. I’d have a go at uploading a photo, but every time I try, it refuses to accept my pictures for some reason. Must be my ancient laptop.

    2. You might be able to upload a pic to email and send it to someone here who has a battery rather than steam laptop. :@)

  138. It will be the team’s name, I assume. The Duffers Mk II in case you’re wondering 🙂

        1. I think ‘ruined’ probably sums it up! But the views are lovely and Duffus has a nice little church! It’s just along the coast from where my husband was born! Quite close to Gordonstoun.

  139. Yes, I felt stupidly pleased driving home. I think my guesses in the “food and drink” round were the clincher, believe it or not.

      1. We could have done with Phizzee’s knowledge of foreign food. I was severely hampered by not eating Thai, Korean, Vietnamese or Brazilian food. Fortunately, I’m ok with French and I remembered my time in Greece (and no, it wasn’t octopus).

  141. It’s getting on a bit and I’ve had quite a busy day. Three phone calls and 4 emails.
    Put Two large bins outside and two small ones.
    Spent an hour or so on Nottlers. Cooked dinner, washed up.
    Played a bit with number 2 grandson. Made him two of his favourite paper airplanes from A4. Played a few old tunes on guitar.
    Flicked around on TV not much of interest I haven’t seen before
    So that’s that for today.
    So it’s good night from me. 😴

    2. I’m getting on a bit and i’ve had quite a busy day.
      Hearing about your day i’ve decided to put myself up for adoption.
      I like paper airplanes too !

      1. I learnt to make the planes years ago from my Rupert Books. They are great. ☺️

  142. Love him or hate him, the trial of Trump is a disgrace.
    Totally, completely and utterly politically driven.
    I doubt that there is anywhere in the USA where he could get a fair trial in front of dis (yes Grizzly, I accept dis and un have changed over the years) interested jurors.

      1. I neither like nor dislike him, but I think he is what America needs. On balance, I veer towards liking him. I think he has been treated disgracefully, I have never known anything like it and I am ashamed of my country for the way it behaved towards him when he was President.

      2. Trump’s policies were the right ones. They hindered the Left wing mob. He showed that lower taxes raised more revenue, that less government created jobs. The Left risked losing control to evidential facts so they did what they always do: they attacked the man.

        Problem is, Trump is an odious berk who’s not an especially pleasant character.

        1. “Problem is, Trump is an odious berk who’s not an especially pleasant character”.
          Name me a politician that isn’t…

    2. Mrs Allan gets more agitated when people conflate disinterested and uninterested than I do.

  143. It’s 22:15 in April. Sun just going down to the North of here.
    Love light nights!

      3. It’s still noticeably *not dark* much later in the evening and in the early hours here in South Wales. How I do love it!

        1. It must be lighter at night in the Welsh mountainous areas and with so many white wooley sheep around 🙂

          1. It does seem to be, but I don’t think it’s the sheep. i check the dawn and dusk times often – the sunrise and sunset and all the various rather beautiful classifications of the twilight degrees and there is always more light than one thinks.

    2. Aurora’s would be magnificent to see.
      I normally watch the stars and moon in bed but have never seen what you do

      Good night to you and everyone.

      Sweet dreams.

  145. Night night lovely ones. Off into my basket. Sweet dreams, all, and huge hope for everyone tomorrow.

  149. I am still here … READ THIS

    Dozens of Home Office staff under criminal investigation, FoI data shows
    Freedom of information request reveals potential offences include immigration crime, drug offences and fraud

    UK politics – latest updates
    Diane Taylor
    Mon 15 Apr 2024 10.43 BST
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/15/home-office-staff-under-criminal-investigation-freedom-of-information

    Dozens of Home Office staff are under criminal investigation for a range of offences including immigration crime, fraud and drug offences, the Guardian has learned.

    In response to a freedom of information (FoI) request about its little-known anti-corruption criminal investigation unit (ACCIU), the department revealed that 16 allegations were either awaiting charging advice or trial and a further 18 were under investigation.

    The data, which covers the past three years, also shows there have been two criminal convictions of Home Office staff after investigations by the ACCIU.

    In separate data disclosed by the Home Office in February 2024 to a civil servant, 60 staff were dismissed for a range of offences between 2019-20 and 2023-24. These include bullying, harassment, discrimination, abuse of position, theft corruption, fraud or forgery – while a further 63 received written warnings for these disciplinary offences.

    The disclosures come at a time when the Home Office is under unprecedented scrutiny for a series of expensive and controversial policies, particularly its plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.

    The government’s safety of Rwanda bill, which states that Rwanda is a safe country in contravention to a supreme court judgment, is expected to be passed into law this week.

    The ACCIU has dedicated investigators, and works with law enforcement partners to investigate allegations of corruption among civil servants in the department. It can also prosecute through relevant pieces of legislation.

    The ACCIU investigates immigration crime, fraud, computer misuse, theft and drug-related offences. Of 95 allegations investigated over the past three years, along with the 34 cases currently under investigation and the two convictions, 59 cases found insufficient evidence to progress to a criminal case.

    However, according to the FoI response: “If any part of the allegation was substantiated and the individual identified this was passed to line managers to consider disciplinary action.”

    In the second FoI response, relating to disciplinary action and dismissals, seven staff were dismissed for abuse of position and two received written warnings, 22 were dismissed for bullying, harassment or discrimination and 40 received written warnings, while 31 were dismissed for theft, corruption, fraud or forgery with 21 receiving written warnings.
    Louise Calvey, the executive director of the charity Asylum Matters, said: “It’s hugely alarming and worrying to hear that such a large number of people involved in making decisions on immigration status have such significant concerns being investigated against them.

    “It’s crucial that people working within government departments, with people made so vulnerable by the anti-refugee policy environment, behave in a fit and proper manner and government is transparent about problems when they arise. To hear that people entrusted and empowered to make decisions on people’s lives are being investigated for such significant concerns including immigration offences and fraud is shocking.”

    A Home Office spokesperson said: “We expect the highest standards from staff processing visa applications and assessing asylum claims to ensure decisions are sound and that protection is granted to those who genuinely need it.

    “While instances of staff misconduct are rare, when they do occur they are fully investigated with the necessary disciplinary action taken.”

    1. “While instances of staff misconduct are rare, when they do occur they
      are fully investigated with the necessary disciplinary action taken.”
      On past performance as in all other areas like the Police they will be promoted.

        1. I think the Tory Party has besmirched its own name to the point that I don’t want to be a regarded as one.
          This ‘Tories (In Name Only)’ business is redundant.

      1. Just the Somali community. Nearly all of them in England and the majority in London. 75% unemployed…

        What percentage of Somalis in the UK are unemployed?

        Still, even within this figure only 26,600 are estimated to be in employment indicating that nearly 75%

        of the Somali population is unemployed. Historically, early Somali

        settlers in the UK in the late 19th century worked as seamen and as

        naval work declined, they searched for factory work in industrial

        cities.

        Take a look for yourself….https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/somaliindividualsinenglandwalesandtheuk

  152. Just back from open mic. Discovered an ex-offshore worker who is a big ‘Reform’ supporter. I know his kids and ex-wife and will get to meet the 3 or 4 Reform Cornwall candidates. Got to be better than a NOTA vote.

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