An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but we prefer ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning. Persistent offenders will be banned.
Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.
I read that Zelensky’s regime, despite the favourable reporting of our dishonest and corrupt media, is effectively on life support. The idiot Biden and our own (albeit temporary) idiot Johnson have been pouring millions if not billions of our borrowed money into Ukraine, a totally lost cause from day one of the conflict.
Where is the accountability? How are we to put a stop to the insanity of our government funding a despot, a bad actor and a clown? They are putting Europe at risk of a nuclear exchange. There must be one individual amongst our elite who is alert to the hypocrisy of our politicians and the vital need to reel them in. Money usually talks.
But the Ukrainians are fighting, so damn the expense.
Yesterday a Nottler was trying to disrespect Nathan Mayer Rothschild whose financial acumen empowered the Duke of Wellington’s forces to defeat the French tyrant. Point is, you ain’t going to win a war without bankers, and yes, many of them are Jewish like President Zelensky.
Bankers may not be bad people but they finance bad people and good people equally. Profit is the only consideration.
Doesn’t the foreign office usually support one side against the other?
Morning everyone.
What will happen if drought is declared by UK government? 12 August 2022.
It looks more and more likely that parts of the UK will be declared to be in drought on Friday. Here we look at what this could mean, and how long it might last.
I caught bits of the BBC News talking about this last night. There was an unspoken understanding that there could be no drought unless the UK government said there was!
The measures proposed here (hosepipe bans, washing cars, filling paddling pools) are such as would be self-imposed by anyone of even limited intelligence.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/11/what-will-happen-if-drought-declared-uk-government
What will happen if drought is declared by UK government? 12 August 2022.
It looks more and more likely that parts of the UK will be declared to be in drought on Friday. Here we look at what this could mean, and how long it might last.
I caught bits of the BBC News talking about this last night. There was an unspoken understanding that there could be no drought unless the UK government said there was!
The measures proposed here (hosepipe bans, washing cars, filling paddling pools) are such as would be self-imposed by anyone of even limited intelligence.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/11/what-will-happen-if-drought-declared-uk-government
Good Morning Folks,
Blue sky again this morning.
Good morning all. A 10°start and, of course, it’s dry & sunny!
An early start for a run to Bury to pick up some machine tooling for t’Lad.
Housing, hospitals and water can’t keep up with demands of migration
Yes, but that has always been the plan.
That has been obvious for years, if not decades.
I also seriously doubt the accuracy of the Government’s own population figures.
They’re designed – like all government statistics – to give the state the answers it wants.
355038+ up ticks,
Morning B3,
As in a prior post the factory gate queue is a
manipulation tool, seemingly the plot is these last, near forty years an anti well educated, healthy, comfortable,
society, that is not a malleable society.
Today the electorate are supporting & voting for the herd Not taking life at a daily steady pace, but via fear stampedes on fear stampedes.
Oh my goodness. Isn’t that statement a MASSIVE hate crime?
Morning all btw. Geoff, just listened to The Sound of Silence by Voces8. Really lovely singing but for me the Disturbed version is really great, real passion.
Housing, hospitals and water can’t keep up with demands of migration
Yes, but that has always been the plan.
Good morning all.
What a hot sticky night , the only thing missing was the whine of anopheles and the muddle of mosquito nets that entangle as one shifts around the bed.
I left the seat covers out last night. Between midnight and 1am, we had 0.3mm of rain. Seat covers are now indoors, drying out…
‘Morning, Peeps.
It was 19°C here at 06:30, and we are promised another 31° today. I fear that Betty Swollox isn’t leaving at least until Monday…
Today’s leading letter:
SIR – Philip Johnston’s comment piece (“A conspiracy of silence about the impact of mass immigration has cost Britain dear”, August 10) is apposite.
Of the United Kingdom’s population of 67 million, about 10 per cent is a direct or indirect result of immigration over the past 20 years. Yet have housing, schools, hospitals, power, water and sanitation plants benefited from a 10 per cent increase in capacity over this same period?
To permit an ever-increasing population, while turning a blind eye to the need for corresponding increases in public infrastructure and services, is a recipe for societal breakdown.
Alan Stedall
Sutton Coldfield
Mark Steyn was saying much the same thing yesterday, but Westminster isn’t listening. No change there then.
Good morning everyone, and Hugh.
I adore adjectives, but they can be subjective, so I strive to avoid them where possible. But Alan Stedall could have done everyone a favour and used the word ‘official’.
You know, in that sentence referring to the United Kingdom’s ……. population of 67 million.
Apparently “adjective” is old hat (probably something to do with slavery). “Qualifier” is used now.
Confused? Me = yes, definitely…
Supermarkets know better. They have to as it’s their business to understand the potential customer base. The next census figures will be interesting. Many incomers will not have compared census information at all. The reality may be nearer 80m. Everything is crowded everywhere. That should be a clue.
But the state lies habitually. It cannot countenance the truth because that would show the abject failure and malice of it’s policies.
Malice and hatred for us is a given, but what if it isn’t failure ? What if this is all playing out as they hoped and planned ?
Supermarkets’ own figures were suggesting 77 million back in 2008.
Fourteen more years of inundation by new arrivals legal and illegal, all joining their present-in-2008 chums, and the whole lot breeding like billy-o on the natives’ money. 80M? The reality is nearer 90 million.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Morning, Phil. Had to stop green maintenance early. Too hot.
Blinken raises concerns over Hotel Rwanda dissident trial with Kagame, 12 August 2022.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has raised US concerns about the trial of the jailed dissident Paul Rusesabagina with Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, and other senior Rwandan officials during a visit to the capital Kigali.
Speaking at a press conference, Blinken said he had been clear about US misgivings related to Rusesabagina’s trial and conviction, particularly “the lack of fair trial guarantees”.
The only “fair trial” guarantee you get in the United States is that you will definitely be going to gaol! The US has the largest prison population on the planet. This is after all the land of Guantanamo. A country with a nearly 100% conviction rate mostly because there are no trials at all but a plea bargaining system that assumes guilt without the benefit of court oversight. Julian Assange would receive more consideration in Russia then the US!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/11/blinken-kagame-hotel-rwanda-paul-rusesabagina
Tw@ter comment made:-
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1557976024742256640
When did the US justice system start to disintegrate or has it always been broken? I remember, for example, being outraged by the injustice portrayed in that memorable novel To Kill a Mockingbird when I read it as an adolescent.
Whatever you think of Prince Andrew it would have been madness for him to have gone anywhere near the US courts. Just look at how Ghislaine Maxwell was treated, how Epstein committed suicide and how apparently Ms Maxwell had not a single customer for her trafficking business.
Good morning all. Good shooting.
Good morning – no shooting thanks.
Morning Bill
What on earth are you grousing about ?
“Glorious 12th” – game season starts today.
Err, why do you think she used “grousing”?
It’s the snow in Oslo – freezes his brain.
SoH bypass.
Tried eating grouse the once.
“Over-rated” was the word that sprang to mind.
You didn’t find it moorish?
Not even a ling ering taste.
Try drinking its more famous beverage instead, Annie. (Good morning, btw.)
How is it that wanting to leave the EU is considered xenophobic by remainers and the left.
Yet when there is a problem with privatised energy or water companies the default position it that foreign ownership is bad and they should be nationalised?
The Left are hypocrites who exist in a permanent state of doublethink.
Afghan refugees reject homes in Scotland and Wales because ‘it’s cold and they don’t speak English’
About 9,500 Afghans and their families evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban takeover of the country are still living in hotels a year on.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/11/afghan-refugees-reject-homes-scotland-wales-cold-dont-speak/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr
Comments are interesting .
It is reasonable that those who genuinely assisted our forces, plus their immediate close families, be given asylum here, but I fear that far too many have been included who did not give such assistance.
No it isn’t. They are traitors and should be treated as such. We were rightly quite hard on those British citizens who acted as traitors in WW1 and WW2 when we were fighting the Germans, We also acted brutally to those who chose to come here and become part of our society. People who were working and contributing (chip shops and cafes) were interned just in case.
Please see “Arandora Star” for details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Arandora_Star
PS This is a second posting. First one vanished.
Go back to Afgaff, then.
Any chance you could let us see some of the comments please?
It’s really all about the biting midges !
A selection:-
Thank you for this Bob.
mes McCorkindale
9 MIN AGO
Our system is broken. We have to retain the right to deport these chancers, but our laws have been destroyed by the ‘Human Rights Act’ ( or ‘the villains’ charter’ as most magistrates call it).
REPLY
Richard Tracey
JUST NOW
Reply to James McCorkindale
Message Actions
When this HR nonsense came into being in draft form Tony Blair assured us that the draft had no more significance than a copy of the Beano implying that there was nothing to worry about as it would never come into law.
But Cherie needed the money.
Cold ? What about the “brutal Afghan winter” that we were always hearing about ?
Cold ? What about the “brutal Afghan winter” that we were always hearing about ?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d85c8a9cbb38b35f3453b9d0076f2546acc587a3ed11c83566b4ead970e0b60d.jpg
Priceless, clever Matt.
Matt knows very well just what the Police’s priorities are.
Matt’s a Nottler!
I guess the caption “Would you consider investigating if I told you that the burglar left anti-gay, anti-immigration grafitti on the wall?” would have been too controversial.
355038+ up ticks,
Morning Each,
Friday 12 August: Housing, hospitals and water can’t keep up with demands of migration.
Now the electorate, these last three decades plus have in the majority,In name only party manner brought us to such an odious pretty pass where do they suggest the remnants of the indigenous peoples resettle, that is a question that MUST be answered.
This question is of some importance because at this rate of intake the indigenous WILL become en mass, the migrant.
Ogga, I simply don’t understand your second and third paragraphs.
355038+ up ticks,
Morning W,
As with water / rock erosion, only one hell of a lot swifter, the incoming force will, on getting the vote, consolidate in hamlets ,villages,towns, city’s, in doing so elect their own type peoples to power.
The lab/lib/con coalition have already laid the footings for that & before our very eyes tis happening.
Sorry mate, that didn’t help.
355038+ up ticks,
W,
The majority voter persist in supporting / voting for a party that no longer exists
in real terms but only as a political Q ship, concealing it’s true agenda.
Good Moaning.
One for the blood pressure: that didn’t take long, did it!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/11/afghan-refugees-reject-homes-scotland-wales-cold-dont-speak/
“Afghan refugees reject homes in Scotland and Wales because ‘it’s cold and they don’t speak English’
About 9,500 Afghans and their families evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban takeover of the country are still living in hotels a year on
By Charles Hymas, Home Affairs Editor11 August 2022 • 7:01pm
Afghan refugees housed in hotels have refused moves to Scotland and Wales because they believe the countries are too cold and don’t speak English, it has emerged.
Around 9,500 Afghans and their families evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban takeover of the country are still being housed in hotels a year on, at a cost of about £1 million a day.
This comes on top of the £3 million-a-day taxpayers’ bill for hotels for 26,000 asylum seekers including Channel migrants.
About 7,000 Afghan refugees have received permanent accommodation through councils but Home Office officials have yet to find appropriate housing for the remaining 9,500 evacuees.
Some have refused accommodation with reasons including that they do not want to go to Scotland or Wales because they believe they don’t speak the language and the countries are cold, according to sources.
Housing a ‘complex process’
Officials are understood to be “working hard” to break down misconceptions about life outside the south-east of England but admit that refugees coming to the country see the UK through the prism of London.
About 350 councils have signed up to house Afghan refugees but officials said it was a complex process, particularly given the larger size of many families. (Note those words: Larger Size of Many Families.)
Lord Harrington, the refugees minister, has appealed to councils to help get people out of hotels and into housing, saying that in June there were fewer than 100 properties available.
In a letter to councils, dated June 27, Lord Harrington said the Government needed another 2,000 properties including more than 500 four-bedroom homes for the remaining 10,500 people.
He said the Government was reaching out to landlords, developers and the wider private rented sector, including property listing website Rightmove, to encourage further offers of properties.
Insufficient local accommodation
It is also working with education establishments on converting properties to long-term accommodation, he wrote.
The Home Office said it faced a “challenge” of insufficient local housing accommodation in the UK, “not just for Afghans and those in need of protection but also British citizens who are also on a waiting list for homes”.
“While hotels do not provide a long-term solution, they do offer safe, secure and clean accommodation,” the Home Office added in its statement.
Several Afghans said living in hotels had left them unable to settle. “I know this is costing the British people but for what?” one refugee told BBC Two’s Newsnight.
Mohammad, who is in his 40s, said: “I want to settle and integrate but how can I when we are living in a hotel for months and months? I can’t start my life properly.”
He worked alongside the British Army in Afghanistan and came to the UK with his wife and two young children in August 2021.
He said his wife of 20 years was struggling after sharing one hotel room between the four of them since September.
“I don’t blame her [for struggling] because I know the situation. She is in that room for one year with two kids. These are kids, and she is depressed, so things are not good,” he said. ”
My sanity was restored by this corking BTL comment:
“To be fair, they are used to much more tolerant societies than Scotland.”
If they don’t like it here in the UK, they could always go back to Afghanistan…
Whit dae they mean, dinnae speak English?
I don’t understand why they brought them here. There’s plenty of country’s around that area with the same culture. Go live there. Why should we have to pay for a family of 9 with no appreciable skills?
SIR – Andy Cooke, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary (Comment, August 11), is correct that police are failing to tackle thieves. He mentions burglars but not retail theft – euphemistically termed “shoplifting” – which has been effectively decriminalised for years.
In 32 years as a police officer I found many shoplifters were burglars too, and intelligence gained from dealing with them helped solve burglaries.
What Mr Cooke fails to address is policing priorities. When everything becomes a priority, as a result of a knee-jerk reaction by ineffective police leaders, nothing is a priority.
The disproportionate time that police officers spend (because of failures by other services) dealing with those suffering from mental health problems, severely restricts police ability to tackle thieves and burglars.
A Royal Commission on policing is urgently required, to give direction.
Clifford Baxter
Wareham, Dorset
Good letter. The police are permitted to choose which crimes they pursue, something that should have been challenged years ago. Catch the crims early in their ‘career’ and some will be deterred from moving on to bigger and better.
Yo Hugh
perhaps we should practice Sharia punishments for a year
Thieves get their Right Hand cut off
Hate crime is clearly THE number one item.
Good grief, not another blasted commission. Yet another infiltrated placemen bundle of wasters and halfwits. What’s needed is a tougher criminal code and justice system.
Oh we’ve been cut off for a while! A warning from GCHQ?
It happened yesterday as well.
Morning Sos. They’re watching us!
Terrified of a break out of the common sense virus, which would require an immediate lock down and compulsory biting by psycho-soma-ticks?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7a79b4d44aa86ecb5727d0f860b113348981a70bb4cc45020cf9528f6e022b5f.jpg
I always found this song very sinister.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOGaugKpzs
It may be easy to misinterpret his lyrics but I don’t think his intention was malevolence.
Allison Pearson cooking on gas … um … er ….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/11/leaders-broke-britain-getting-blame/
“Our leaders broke Britain, but we’re getting the blame
Politicians expect voters to be grateful for ‘handouts’ made necessary by their own scandalous failures
11 August 2022 • 7:00pm
It could be the heat, but I find myself fuming at the use of the word “handouts”. It’s as if Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak were Victorian benefactors who, out of the goodness of their flinty mill-owner’s hearts, were minded to drop a few coppers into the outstretched cloth cap of the millions who can no longer afford their gas bill.
“Shall we give the poor mites a handout, Sir Godfrey, or should we, perhaps, make them set fire to Timmy, their pet Schnauzer, to take the chill off their humble abode?”
It’s hardly a charitable “handout” when people have paid their taxes in the reasonable expectation that the Government will make sure they have affordable energy. Is it the fault of the British people that their leaders have been seduced by the siren call of the Renewables Blob who keep claiming that green energy is incredibly cheap and storage will come along any day now?
Is it our fault that an average family will soon have to find in excess of £3,500 a year for such unimaginable treats as “putting the kettle on” and “grilling fishfingers” because the powers that be have run down our baseload capacity (nuclear, coal) and are now funding exorbitant emergency measures (paying our remaining coal-power stations to be on standby) just to keep the lights on?
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s our fault! The public is now to blame, or so it would seem, for every deluded policy or corporate failure and we must meekly take our punishment like the obedient boys and girls that we are.
The coming recession? All down to Peter and Jane in Sutton Coldfield for going over the top with the terracotta pots that Saturday in Homebase. Nothing to do with Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England. Did you seriously think it was his job to keep inflation at 2 per cent? The poor man’s only paid £495,000 a year. You can’t expect miracles for that.
Hosepipe ban? Look, obviously, we’re very sorry. But consumers really shouldn’t have been using water in the first place. Turning the sprinkler on that precious garden which gives you so much pleasure, keeping the lettuces, beans and Bishops of Llandaff alive – what were you thinking? And taking showers. SHOWERS! See, that is precisely the kind of cavalier approach to hygiene that got us into this mess.
Lacking any droplet of shame, Thames Water, the leakiest supplier in the country (600 million litres lost every day through cracked pipes and reservoirs), has come up with a list of hints to help customers survive the shortage, the one which Thames Water did so little to prevent. Hot tip: instead of taking a shower, why not apply a damp flannel to your perspiring parts?
Just to be clear, this is a monopoly provider which in 2020 awarded its incoming chief executive a £3.1 million Golden Hello after giving its departing CEO a £2 million Golden Goodbye when he was ousted by the board for failing to improve Thames Water’s performance. (Imagine what the fortunate fellow would have got if he’d been a success.) And this bunch have the brass neck to advise the 15 million people who pay them to provide their water that they should forego their daily ablutions for what my grandmother would have called a “strip-wash”.
Now, now, please don’t get annoyed. You do realise that this is all your fault, don’t you? Shouldn’t use the water that you pay for. Shouldn’t expect the Government to exploit our own bountiful coal and gas to guarantee bills that you don’t have to sell the car to afford. OK, so this net zero target is proving a bit trickier than politicians thought, but point that accusing finger at Peter and Jane. They didn’t insulate their loft, did they?
This is Britain in 2022. A populace taxed beyond endurance, punished like naughty children for the costly failures of the gilded, frictionless “Nothing To Do With Us” class. How much longer will we allow them to reassign the blame they so richly deserve?
I hope I speak for many when I say they can stick their solar panels where the sun don’t shine. Oh, and next time some patronising politician vows to give “handouts” for the horrible energy bills which their net-zero fanaticism and economic mismanagement helped to inflate, don’t scream and shout. Simply smile and say: “Thank you so much, but it’s not a handout. It’s our money, which you mis-spent. And we’d like it back.”
But, as ogga1 would point out, we keep voting them in and thus of course it’s our fault!
If nobody voted, they’d still get in.
Yes but nobody should be returned to office if under 50% of the eligible electorate actually cast a vote.
Remember that the Welsh Assembly came into being because the turnout in the referendum was only over the necessary 50% by the thinnest of whiskers. But of course national assemblies in Scotland and Wales were all part of Blair’s plan to destroy the UK and if the Welsh had not reached that magical 50% Blair would have used The Princess of Wails’s death – which occurred just before the Welsh referendum – to justify a rerun.
The Prime Minister is being chosen by as many people as live in Bournemouth. Yet the mass media campaign, reinforced by the BBC and the MSM to an extent that it obliterates any other “news”, would suggest that everyone had a vote. When I vote to elect members of the committee of the rugby club, I do not expect endless publicity in the newspapers and on TV.
This publicity is a hoax. It suggests to an unthinking populace that there is some kind of democratic aspect to all this. There isn’t, any more than at a gladiatorial contest in a Roman amphitheatre.
The only solution is to stop voting completely when there is not a candidate worth voting for.
This would be entirely futile unless votes only counted if more than say 50% of the eligible electorate voted and if NOTA (None Of The Above) votes counted and were counted.
This article is spot on. However, we Nottlers have been saying everything Alison says for years. Why has no prominent politician shouted it from the rooftops? Why did the vast majority of MPs vote for the Climate Change Act? Why did they all go along with the Net Zero objective?
The public could see all the pitfalls, drawbacks and ridiculously high energy bills. WHY DIDN’T THEY?
For the same reason they all refused to scrap fuel duty temporarily while fuel was unaffordable. They’re all troughers.
Because they have a different, sinister, agenda.
It’s also hardly a handout when it consists of money they have conjured up out of thin air, which will immediately have the effect of putting up prices even more.
I wonder how many people will convert their fiat handouts to real money? Close to zero, I expect.
It does raise the problem that the handouts are temporary – the enforced slide backward will never stop. The state is intent on making energy unaffordable. The state is desperate to meet the demented green targets at any cost – to us.
What a wonderful woman Allison Pearson is – spot on as usual!
It was astonishing that the water idiot on the toady programme this morning failed to mention that building reservoirs was explicitly forbidden by EU water directives. Instead the oaf started out saying it was – as the article postulates – our fault for using it. Good grief, the arrogance of these people.
Afghan refugees reject homes in Scotland and Wales because ‘it’s cold and they don’t speak English’
About 9,500 Afghans and their families evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban takeover of the country are still living in hotels a year on
FFS. While this is good news for Wales and Scotland, I can’t believe the ‘gees are given a choice!!
Most of these “refugees” are here on an extended holiday paid for by the UK taxpayer. They can return home whenever they wish!
Around twenty years ago, they were sending them to places like Plymouth or Glasgow, and the “refugees” were simply leaving the taxpayer-funded rooms in these cities empty and sleeping on friends’ sofas in the south east, because they could get jobs there.
I’m always surprised that all these people don’t immediately head for the nearest Pigshitistan to live in an environment that they know. /sarc
Bradford’s full up.
Why do they come here? More, why do we bring them here?
This is a graph of food production in the UK according to the chap who published it on Twit.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4eac8681a119e73bca8fd926ea962b165cdc35839908779cf661760ad093b62f.jpg
Note the downturn in the last year. What kind of population could be sustained on pre-war food production levels, I wonder?
Twit threat here in case anyone is interested
https://twitter.com/latimeralder/status/1557622928602193920
The state has done so much damage for so little return that one wonders what it’s up to. The consequences were so glaringly obvious that it could only be deliberate.
The only thing I ask of the state is to stay the hell out of my way.
“Oh but you need protection from the police” – what police?
We shouldn’t need protection from the police – aren’t they there to protect us?
Actually I meant protection by the police, but you make a very good point!
What an amazing upturn between 7 and 8.20!
It’s known as “the breakfast effect”…{:¬))
It roughly mirrors the human population explosion.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0d6ee56130d6ecd312a3e57a1387161ff7a47217577ddedb9cc2c11307f3795d.png
And what did “Band aid and Live aid” in 1985 produce?
Millions and millions upon millions more poor starving Africans.
Indeed. The cretin, ‘Cur’ Geldof, is partly responsible for increasing the population of Ethiopia from 33 million in 1984 to just under 124 million today!
If only he’d go and live there.
Indeed. The cretin, ‘Cur’ Geldof, is partly responsible for increasing the population of Ethiopia from 33 million in 1984 to just under 124 million today!
There’s a letter about the use of “Dad’ on a gravestone.
I absolutely hate the use of Mum and Dad unless speaking to one’s own parents. Mum is my mother’s name and Dad is my father’s name. The fact that everyone else’s mother and father have the same name is irrelevant.
Everyone else’s parents should be referred to as mother and father and let that be an end to it.
Mater and pater, surely…
On the weekends
‘your’ mother or father… Not just the noun, which has happened to me.
“In the minds of many, the average SNP voter is someone crimson-faced and bald, wearing a small wiry moustache and a stained anorak while shouting about Scotland’s oil as they load bargain biscuits into an Asda trolley. The men are even worse.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11104095/JAN-MOIR-Sturgeon-spent-lifetime-rude-English-Tories-bristle-Liz-Truss-hit-back.html
Jan Moir is sometimes very funny, but she writes such mean things that I can’t read her columns.
Hey! I thought that was me, until the last phrase.
Another amusing musing from Dalrymple.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-broken-publicity-machine/
( I particularly liked the name of the museum that removed Hirst’s “artwork”)
For the life of me, I have never understood how – under any definition – the rubbish produced by that ego-centric self-publicist could be regarded as “art”.
He makes the charlatan Emin look talented.
That’s just because you didn’t like how he treated a lawyer…
Friday RL:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11103997/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-need-medical-staff-instead-utterly-useless-NHS-diversity-courses.html
Just imagine, the Italians getting something right in politics, whoever would have thought it possible? And I wonder how the EU globalists will stymie her.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-rise-of-meloni/
She’ll be the victim of a nasty “accident”.
What is the Italian for “Attila the Hen”?
Lotlinala el Penguinia?
Ta muchly.
Our press will set out to demonise her at every turn. No doubt ‘Far Right’ will be said as much as possible.
Extreme far right. Or what we used to call middle of the road Conservative.
Almost certainly. Although, not so much Conservative, perhaps just ‘normal person’.
Not migration, massive, uncontrolled, state enforced criminal invasion.
Something totally off the plot… Rageh Omaar, darling of the Iraq war and not white appears to have become a news reader on ITV. His HANDS, they move with the story. Wagging fingers, sweeping motions, open palms, the lot. I was exhausted after listening to him and missed what he was talking about. Anyone else noticed!
Nope – never watch any telly news/politics/current affairs.
Makes me much calmer. CALMER, I said…
Calmer suits ya!
Calmer suit tra.
That’s the general idea….
It is very difficult to control what your hands are doing when speaking. You use them as emphasis, exclamation and punctuation all the time.
Speak for yourself!
🙂
But not to the manic extent that the BBC’s cretinous reporters are coached to use.
Hamlet’s advice to actors – particularly about ‘sawing the air’ with your hand should be taken to heart by newsreaders and tv presenters as well as actors.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o’erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be
players that I have seen play, and heard others
praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,
that, neither having the accent of Christians nor
the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of
nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them
well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
O, reform it altogether. And let those that play
your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;
for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to
set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh
too; though, in the mean time, some necessary
question of the play be then to be considered:
that’s villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition
in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.
I was told by one of my lecturers at college that if I had my arms chopped off, I’d be dumb!
Hmm….(keeps thoughts to self…)
That’s not like you, Uncle Bill!
Aah, testiculating.
Waving one’s arms about while talking absolute boll*cks.
Good Morning! Blue sky and the sun is shining like a red rubber ball. Yesterday there was not cloud in the sky, so when night came there was a great blue dome on which to spot the Perseids meteor shower. Normally the sky is blotted out by clouds, thick and black, so we only ever see shooting stars every six or seven years. Last night was perfect, except that the Moon was shining bright as day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kNisVmNj1Q
Just what King John wanted for Christmas even though he was not a good man and had his little ways:
AND, OH, FATHER CHRISTMAS,
MY BLESSINGS ON YOU FALL
FOR BRINGING HIM
A BIG, RED,
INDIA-RUBBER
BALL!
King John was not a good man
He had his little ways
And sometimes no one would talk to him
For days and days and days
As a king, he was Washed out.
And what happened to his crown jewels?
They were laundered.
It’s annoying for us astronomers that prolonged cloudless spell has coincided with the shortest nights of the year – it never ever gets truly dark atm,
Moffat, and several other towns, have called themselves the great dark sky towns and the streetlights all reflect down.
The more towns that do that, the better. My grouch is that the nights never truly get dark at this time of year snd, as such, these clear nights are almost wasted🙂
As dreich as it can get up here
Excellent! Cold, damp, drizzle, and darkness will always remind me of home.
Changed slightly, stopped raining but it’s now hot and humid (and midgy) so outside work has stopped
Beautifully warm – too warm – here in Moffat.
How are you settling in, Tom?
Slowly, slowly, J.
Still unpacking boxes but I now have the basic furniture and appliances – the beer machine is running – and Amazon are due to be sending all sorts of kitchen and household thingummies.
That’s good – get your priorities right!
355038+ up ticks,
I f only we had a party on par with the genuine UKIP under Batten / Braine leadership, but treachery via the current uKiP nec / nige put paid to that.
https://twitter.com/AgainBraine/status/1557998368726581248?s=20&t=Esn81Z5cedW66mNxuwW-Og
This is where I get my love of the bagpipes too – certainly brings back memories
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/385a5dbd74162a1569ae4d17cd5833e0f7f34b97f0e7a2dfeda54c6c4b42e10b.jpg
I enjoy the sound of the pipes too. I remember visiting Culzean Castle as a child and the lone piper coming out on the roof and piping tunes that made your hairs stand up.
In CT every year there was a Scottish Festival in a nearby town which was great fun and there was always a piper there. Used to make me quite nostalgic.
Aged 19, had a holiday on the shores of the loch, opposite Oban. Every evening, just as the sun had gone down and everything turned purple, a pier would play somewhere away in the hillside. Truly wonderful, it was, faintly heard across the heather.
I know it’s the longest in the World but it couldn’t possibly be Southend Pier?
morning Paul and all
The very first time I visited Edinburgh, I arrived about 10.30 am on a Saturday. It was – natch – raining. I parked and stated to explore. From every direction came the sound of bagpipes. I wondered whether it was always like that – something that the Tourist Board organised every weekend. Wonderful – if slightly discordant – music everywhere.
Turned out the be the day of the South of Scotland Bag Pipe Band competition was being held – and every group was under a bridge, or under a tree – anywhere out of the rain – to practice!!
Memorable – even after sixty years!!
My Uncle who was at El Alamein and other battles said the the sound of the pipers was his outstanding memory of them.
I like the sound of the uilleann and Northumbrian piples too. Heard Kathryn Tickell play the Northumbrian pipes at the Wigmore Hall and the Proms in the days when they were still interested in the indigenous music of these islands. (Try googling “indigenous music” and you’ll discover that only North America and the Global South are allowed that term. Britain has “folk”, since of course we have no indigenous people or culture…???)
I like the Northumbrian pipes.
Strange looking instrument, Spikey, and on a shoulder different to the usual.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cf2e4bfa13106b5d755935328fe27ea03045621ced67bdcc6e0960c1ab7dc0bb.jpg
Ouch, double ouch!
Central heating oil at 1.36 a litre, plus VAT at 20%
The delivery man thought it was sensible filling up earlier than normal, I hope we don’t run out before next Spring.
A belated “good Morning” to all on this site.
Good morning.
…and Good morrow to you too, Elsie.
Birdseye have teamed up with online retailer Bluebuck selling swimwear. I like the look of Breton style stripey shirts and blue shorts so i thought i would take a look. The material is made from 100% recycled plastic taken from the sea. All well and good until you see the price ! £75 for a pair of shorts. They can throw it back in the sea !
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11102711/Captain-Birds-Eye-goes-TOPLESS-model-brands-swimwear-line-recycled-plastic.html
Breton-style hooped shirts, please (I have a varied collection of them). Stripes are vertical.
Good morning, Grizzly. Didn’t the Beatles wear them for an early photo-shoot?
Greetings, Auntie Elsie. They may well have done but I can’t recall the photos.
I bet you have a beret too.
Ashes sends you hugs and kisses. I’m visiting her on Sunday for afternoon tea.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/69203cb1cc9e3be7b094b9e232e0f9b95d6b47c326cd820c4ec90528655c3a3c.jpg Beret? Moi?
Sacre bleu! Tell Katie I return her hugs and kisses.
Thought so. :@)
I will.
Plastic? Sweaty…Frozen peas would cool things down I suppose.
I think with the modern tech process they will feel more like linen. But at that price…no way José.
Plastic? Sweaty…
The most upvoted BTL
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e59cf8658c395d64f5e7c6183a0acfa2e4660d573485e8322c777bd48301a891.png
I had a work colleague* who turned down the job of being the first Captain Birdseye. I think he regretted doing so.
*I was in the fish finger business at that time.
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He/She/It. There are no others.
Their staff should have name badges. I was taught that it’s rude to refer to people in the third person. The name would ideally also be formal, as in Mrs Smith or Mr Brown but that’s asking too much in this day and age. The building manager where I live addresses me as Miss Edison when I need something from him and Sue when he wants something from me, which amuses me but it’s not a problem.
Is “building manager” what we used to call “caretaker” or “porter”?
Caretaker probably fits but there are porters as well, so he can be said to manage in that he manages staff. He’s also provided with a flat which is decorated and maintained at our expense, from the service charge.
Sounds more like a hotel than a block of flats.
If a middle-aged unmarried woman in Sweden is called “Fröken” (Miss), or the similar in France (“Mademoiselle”), Germany (“Fräulein”) or Spain (“Señorita”), then it is regarded as an insult to her.
Yes but women there are referred to as Mrs or the equivalent as a recognition of maturity, regardless of marital status. I’ve noticed when corresponding with contintental archive sources at work that apart from those with whom I’m on more familiar terms, I’m always addressed as Mrs Edison.
But cooks in quasi historical period English soaps on TV such as Upstairs Downstairs (Angela Baddeley – Mrs Bridges) and Downton Abbey (Lesley Nicol – Mrs Patmore) are always referred to as Mrs whatever their marital status.
One wonders why it is thus, purely female hubris one might think.
As I get older, I don’t shy away from people addressing me as Mr or indeed, ‘Sir’ on occasion.
I call it respect for one’s years and experience. Something that is now only visible in Asia.
Isn’t that bowing to the patriarchy?
A women only exists if she’s married?
No. Continental women take ‘Mrs’ (or its national equivalent) as a badge of honour for being mature.
You’ll never get a Frog (Dutch/German/Swedish/Italian/Spanish) single lady of mature years hissing “MISS” (à la Dick Emery in drag) if you call her “Mrs”. She expects, nay: demands, it.
“Patriarchy?” You’re starting to sound a bit like a bra-burning, Guardian-reading harridan … dearie! 🤣
Wow, and who, George, is beginning to sound like a first-rate misogynist?
Guardian-reading harridan? On a polite forum like this?
Nursey knows me.
You may think so – I don’t and I personally would expect an apology for such egresious comment.
The blokke has one of those flag things as his logo though. Isn’t that being a bit hypocritical?
Another load of woke, lefty nonsense.
Morning all.
Just watched this video about the discovery of the Eye of the Sahara which has been used by astronauts as a navigation reference. It has been found that the Sahara, once a green thriving area of Africa inhabited by sea creature predecessors of whales, is postulated to have as recently as 12,000 years ago been turned by humankind into the present arid desert by overgrazing the vegetation and burning what was left
https://youtu.be/E-SH9XVU4s8
This could present a new angle on how anthropomorphic influences could be changing the Earth’s climate. Global warmimg could possibly have nothing to do with vehicle emissions because there is no evidence of the use of the internal combustion engine in Atlantis, the suspected site of which was the Eye of the Sahara.
The conclusion would appear to be centred on not treating trees as an unlimited renewable resource and to let them perform their animal life sustaining function of water recycling and ground cover. Also to be prepared for a tsunami!
I remember when I was Tutankhamen in one of my previous lives, it was quite green. Cleopatra confirmed it, she never had any difficulty manoeuvering her barges round the waterways.
But she suffered from Aspbergers….
…and was in denile
But she didn’t give a fig.
Or even Aspbargers…
I remember when I was Tutankhamen in one of my previous lives, it was quite green. Cleopatra confirmed it, she never had any difficulty manoeuvering her barges round the waterways.
Deforestation and desertification are, IMHO, vastly more potent threats than the airborne plant food.
Yep.
The Americans turned the Midwest into a dust bowl.
The entire UK was once covered in forest. In our case, the deforested area turned into moorland, not desert, but that was mainly to do with us not being in the tropics.
Well, much of the deforested area had been turned into warships. Hurrah!
As heard at every divisions in Holbrook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwoYH20zdeQ
I think the lyrics give it more oomph, Anne;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NXFCDgyanA&ab_channel=BritainShallPrevail
Or, to put it another way, too many people of the wrong sort. Proud Eugenicist here.
Forgive me, but 12,000 years ago mankind was grunting at himself in numbers you could fit on the Isle of Mann with plenty of space to spare.
It is only recently that technology saw off our predators and advanced our civilisation that we’ve developed industry.
Bluntly, this is a pile of tosh designed by Lefties desperate to pretend that now is how it has always been, a la The Party from 1984.
Could it just be that intense solar activity destroyed the vegetation in Africa and the Middle East (asks a bear with not even a decent CSE grade in science)?
Closes one eye and puts on a monocle, Patrick Moore voice ‘” We just DON’T know”
The evidence suggests that whilst there may have been very few people around 12,000 years ago (and even fewer motor cars! 🤔) we cannot exclude the possibility of families keeping voracious dinosaurs as pets. 😉
A good yarn but me no tink so…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure
Russia is trying to ‘threaten the whole world’ by shelling Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zelenskyy warns. 12 August 2022.
Russia has reached a new low and is trying to “threaten the whole world” by shelling Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy has said.
Yes possums. A new low. They are shelling the plant where they are sheltering to avoid being shelled. What diabolical cunning!
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-russia-is-trying-to-threaten-the-whole-world-by-shelling-europes-largest-nuclear-plant-zelenskyy-warns-12670932
They are shelling the plant where they are sheltering to avoid being shelled.
The BBC didn’t make this point a couple days ago, but it was clear for all to see when you read the article.
Wonder who was shelling, then… (ponders)
Omaze UK Million Pound House
Omaze UK Million Pound House
Join us in congratulating our Cornwall Grand Prize Winner,
Uttam Parmar from Leicestershire
“Just cannot believe that we have won this Grand Prize, it will be life-changing,” Uttam said.
Watch the moment Uttam found out he’d won the Grand Prize.
Watch Uttam’s Reaction
Omaze UK Million Pound House
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Do something omazing!
Who is suprised?
The Cornwall one is beautiful. The Kent one for 2.5m would be a 2 bed terrace with no garden. Not that I’m cynical or anything.
A 2 bed flat in White City, London W12, costs 2.75m.
The Cornwall one is beautiful. The Kent one for 2.5m would be a 2 bed terrace with no garden. Not that I’m cynical or anything.
Oh dear, there goes Cornwall…
‘Morning All
Modern Life………
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Mars Today: “Is there intelligent life on Earth?”
Venn you have a moment could you explain this?
Well, it’s not looking good.
At least we’ve got memes which is more than they had.
Now here’s a thing,numbers are sooooooo inconvenient,I note much comment on the Afgaf ‘fugees who are portrayed as the plucky interpreters we owe a duty of care to
7000 already housed
9500 waiting for houses
What would be a reasonable ratio of interpreters to troops??
Perhaps 1 interpreter to 10 troops?? More,Less??
The MAXIMUM number of troops deployed was 10,000,that about 1.5 “interpreters” per soldier
“By 2010, UK troop numbers reached their peak with around 10,000 troops
deployed across Afghanistan. Later the same year, discussions began over
the withdrawal of NATO forces and in 2011, US President Barack Obama
announced the planned withdrawal of US soldiers. Over the next few
years, UK forces concentrated their efforts on training Afghanistan’s
own security forces, and began handing over key parts of Helmand
Province to Afghan forces”
.https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/twenty-years-of-british-troops-in-afghanistan
Once again we have been played for fools
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d847e92a2f8b694a48b53bd6e0b0f876b527f47a2dd5991701fef3796e63aec0.jpg
Sales site??
My wife and I bought a water bed when we first got married, but ever since, we’ve been drifting apart.
At least you get to wallow in bed in the morning.
What would Macbeth’s Porter make of this?
Stout fellow.
More ‘ale fellow and well met!!
Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?
Welcome to the FSU’s weekly newsletter, our round-up of the free speech news of the week. As with all our work, this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign up today or encourage a friend to join, and help us turn the tide against cancel culture.
FSU supporters catapult free speech to top of the agenda in Tory leadership race
The FSU’s new campaigning tool has been used by over 1,000 of our supporters to email the Tory leadership candidates urging them to adopt our Free Speech Manifesto. According to the FSU’s independent opinion polling, only two per cent of the public strongly agree that the Government is doing a good job of standing up for free speech, so it’s not surprising that candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have been paying attention. The FSU Manifesto outlines five policy commitments for the next Prime Minister that would protect free speech in the UK, and campaigning by FSU supporters has clearly helped to put free speech at the top of the agenda in the leadership race.
This week Liz Truss vowed to strengthen the free speech protections in the Online Safety Bill, criticising the provisions designed to protect adults from speech deemed ‘legal but harmful’. Sunak has also pledged to have another look at this. Truss said on GB News this week that she “strongly agreed” that adults must be allowed to say online what they can say offline, emphasising that protecting children online should not come at the expense of free speech
The FSU is delighted to see the leadership candidates addressing concerns about the Online Safety Bill, but we are looking for similar commitments in relation to the other issues in our Free Speech Manifesto. We want to see stronger protections for workers’ speech rights, the scrapping of the Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incidents’, an end to political indoctrination in schools and an amendment to the Equality Act 2010 to prevent its abuse by universities seeking to no-platform heterodox speakers.
If you’re a Conservative Party member and you haven’t already done so, please use our new campaigning tool to send the candidates an email. If you’ve sent them an email, remember that the template can be tweaked to accommodate whatever free speech issues you’d now like to raise with Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. And if you’re not a member the Conservative Party, please use our other tool to send your MP an email about the shortcomings of the Online Safety Bill. In both cases, it only takes a couple of minutes to send an email and there’s no doubt this campaigning is having an impact.
Gillian Philip fights for freedom of expression in publishing
FSU supporters may remember the case of Gillian Philip. Gillian is the author who brought an Employment Tribunal claim against her former publishers, Working Partners and HarperCollins, on the grounds that they terminated her contract to write children’s books because she stood up for JK Rowling on Twitter. She alleges unlawful discrimination and the case is a landmark in the fight for a woman’s right to state biological facts without fear of losing her job. Gender critical writers such as Kate Clanchy, Julie Burchill and Jenny Lindsay have all faced threats to their livelihood as a result of expressing gender critical views.
But the case has important repercussions beyond the gender debate. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of FSU supporters who donated to our previous CrowdJustice campaign, Gillian was able to bring her case to a preliminary hearing earlier this year. Despite top-drawer representation from Shah Qureshi of Irwin Mitchell solicitors and barrister David Mitchell, the preliminary hearing found that Gillian did not have rights under the Equality Act 2010 because she was employed as a ‘contract writer’ rather than as an ‘employee’ of Working Partners.
Whether contract writers are ‘workers’ is an important question of law. Without such status, writers do not benefit from employment legislation preventing unfair dismissal or the protections of the Equality Act against unlawful discrimination. Maya Forstater’s case established that gender critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act, but this judgement is rendered meaningless if workers can simply be described as ‘contractors’ and deprived of its protections. Unscrupulous employers are being empowered to side-step employment protections: by designating freelancers as ‘independent’ they have the power to silence writers and other precariously employed people.
It is therefore vital that we support Gillian as she appeals her case and defends her right to freedom of speech and the protections of employment law. The outbreak of creativity crushing close-mindedness in the publishing industry must be challenged and the legal rights of thousands of precariously employed people who make their living through creative expression must be defended. It is in everyone’s interests that authors like Gillian, who entertain and inspire us, enjoy the legal protections they need to express themselves freely and securely.
Once again, we need your help. This appeal could be of ground-breaking importance for the publishing industry, determining not only the freedom of speech of contract writers, but also pay and conditions. Please join the fight and support Gillian’s crowd funder here.
FSU General Secretary Toby Young speaks to the Christian Institute about free speech and the ‘woke church’
This week, the FSU’s General Secretary Toby Young was interviewed as part of The Christian Institute’s ‘In Conversation With’ series. The FSU has done considerable work to defend the speech rights of Christians, including writing to the Provost of Worcester College earlier this year after he acquiesced to vexatious student complaints and black-listed Christian Concern, preventing the organisation booking rooms at the College. An independent investigation by a charity lawyer found no evidence to support the student’s allegations of “aggressive leafleting” by attendees at last year’s summer school. In conversation with The Christian Institute’s Simon Calvert, Toby said:
We’ve embraced this new secular public morality, which is… much more puritanical and censorious and authoritarian than the seemingly much more gentle Christian public morality, which at least allowed for forgiveness and a path back.
Watch the interview here.
Victory for free speech in Scotland
The FSU’s Scottish branch welcomes the revised Defamation and Malicious Publication (Scotland) Act 2021 which came into force this week, a significant victory for freedom of speech in Scotland. The Act closes loopholes in the former legislation that were having a chilling effect on the free speech of journalists, publishers and others. Authors including Chris Brookmyre have previously reported pressure to tone down satirical characters that could be linked to real life individuals for fear that they might trigger a defamation suit under Scottish law.
Under the new Act, defamation claims can only be launched if the speech being complained of caused ‘serious harm’ to the plaintiff’s reputation, enabling courts to quickly dispose of vexatious and frivolous cases. A company pursuing a defamation case must prove ‘serious financial loss’. The length of time given to litigants to launch court proceedings has been reduced from three years to 12 months and social media users who could previously find themselves subject to a defamation case for sharing defamatory content on social media can no longer be targeted by defamation proceedings. The original author, editor or publisher must be held liable. Most importantly, the defence of truth or ‘honest opinion’ is joined by a new ‘public interest’ defence that protects the right of journalists to report what can be shown to be substantially true in order to inform the general public.
The FSU’s Scottish branch welcomes the amended Act and fully endorses the views of Andrew Tickell, senior law lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, when he said in the Times that:
The law of defamation should be about the legitimate protection of reputation against falsehood, not a tool to stop the truth coming out. This new act shifts the balance in favour of free expression.
FSU Online In-Depth: Free speech in schools
Our schedule of online and in-person events for September to December kicks off on 13th September with an Online In-Depth. A panel of experts and campaigners will be discussing how and why free speech issues are coming up more and more often in primary and secondary schools. Unlike our usual online events, this one will be open to anyone who is interested in this issue, so please feel free to share the details. You can register here to receive the Zoom link.
Universities ban books to keep students ‘safe’
A Times investigation has revealed that 10 universities, including Russell Group members Warwick, Exeter and Glasgow, have removed or made optional books that students might find ‘harmful’. The investigation also uncovered 1,081 ‘trigger warnings’ applied to texts across undergraduate courses. Incredibly, some academics used social media to try to block Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made by the Times, and some universities declined to answer FOI requests on the grounds that disclosure would have a “potentially negative personal impact” on staff.
The justifications given for this egregious censorship would be almost funny if it weren’t for the grave picture they paint of academic institutions more concerned with coddling students than opening their minds. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a novel intended to illuminate the horrors of slavery, was removed from a reading list by Essex University for containing “graphic description of violence and abuse of slavery”. Likewise, Miss Julie by August Strindberg, a play tackling themes of mental anguish, was removed from the Sussex syllabus because it “contains discussion of suicide”. As Trevor Phillips points out, the decision to erase the horrors of slavery to preserve the comfort of students is “a textbook case of institutional racism”:
The cancellation of black lives in order to make other people feel comfortable about their own past tells us what really matters to these self-styled anti-racists – their own refined sensibilities.
Phillips takes aim at “a wider wave of censorship on British campuses”, stating that “the trigger warnings, book removals and cancellations are just a disguised campaign of thought control”. Limiting the range of knowledge that students have access to because some people might be hurt or offended undermines the purpose of a university education. Students should be encouraged to explore the most diverse range of views possible and exercise their freedom of speech to confront uncomfortable realties fearlessly.
McCarthyite list of feminist academics proposed by University and College Union
Minutes from a University and College Union meeting leaked to the Times this week reveal a McCarthyite plan by Britain’s largest academic trade union to compile a list of heretical academics. The minutes detailed the plan of UCU to warn institutions about any gender critical staff employed in HR or as consultants on the grounds that “some of the EDI (Equality, diversity and inclusion) consultants are transphobes and prominent gender critical activists” likely to cause “problems” for the organisation. The minutes further recorded:
Supporting branches in combatting transphobia is important through education but there are a small core of people who are so entrenched in their views and the UCU needs to address this issue… It is important to look at ways of tackling these transphobes.
Whistle-blowers inside UCU report that a group of academics hostile to free speech are responsible for the censorious culture emerging in the union. As the feminist academic Jo Phoenix commented: “Now that we have trade unions who are prepared to sell women’s rights down the river, it is devastating, terrifying and very, very sad. What we are seeing is a very high intolerance to academic freedom and plurality of viewpoint.”
We encourage any of our members facing penalties for expressing their gender critical views at university to get in touch with our case team.
Was identity politics responsible for the grooming gang scandals?
Subscribers to Don’t Divide Us, an anti-woke educational organisation, can now purchase tickets for ‘Conspicuous Silence – How Identity Politics Caused the Grooming Gangs Scandal’, a panel discussion on the unintended consequences of identity politics chaired by Dr Rakib Ehsan. Dr Ehsan will be joined by commentators Khadija Khan and Hardeep Singh at 6pm on September 1st at Accent Global, 12 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3JA. Click here to donate and become a DDU subscriber in order to purchase a ticket.
Sharing the newsletter
As with all our work, this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign up today or encourage a friend to join, and help us turn the tide against cancel culture. You can share our newsletters on social media with the buttons below to help us spread the word. If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.
Best wishes,
June again. Poppiesdad has said she’ll have to watch it, otherwise she’ll be on the Twitter naughty step for saying it like it is.
https://twitter.com/juneslater17/status/1558014579271208961?s=20&t=QCnahDREkQ2H5PBn_9aEoA
Trouble is, a new incoming government will be exactly the same 🙁
I can’t tell where her hair stops and the wallpaper begins.
She doos (sic) drone on a bit
My local M&S Food Hall has reinstated manned (and womaned) tills because the remaining three self-service checkouts that will take cash are all broken. I’ve had a number of chats with their staff and other customers about CBDC while waitng and being served. Only one didn’t understand the control agenda. That was a younng woman who was completely stumped because contactless payment was down throughout Westfield shopping centre and she doesn’t even have a debit or credit card. Eveything is done with her phone. The card is virtual. She had to put her food shop back becasue computer said No!
I never use my phone to pay for things – parking, coffee, or anything. I do use my card, but last weekend at the Gatcombe event, quite a few people had no cash and we didn’t have a card facility.
I’ve had no cash in my wallet for ten years. I’ve not written a cheque in the same time-frame either.
I don’t use a lot of cash but I wouldn’t like it to disappear entirely.
Nor me,J, plenty of small businesses in Moffat prefer cash because of the high charges levied by card companies.
Canny Scots eh?
I carry quite a wodge of cash to placate the natives.
I don’t think it would be cost effective for a small charity like ours to use a card reader facility – because of the fees.
May be surprised Jules,Big issue vendors are using these
£10 to buy no ongoing rental
1.55% fees
https://uk.virginmoney.com/business/accepting-card-payments/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6_3n74nC-QIVi5ftCh1_zg81EAAYAyAAEgK1cPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
We may be forced to eventually – but this summer we’ve only done two outdoor events and we will do some Christmas markets – after two years with no events at all, at least it’s a start. But the fee per transaction would eat into our takings. PayPal takes a cut when people use it as well, thoug it is a very convenient method of payment. It looks as though the contract is only for 12 months as well – so do we buy another one after then?
355038+ up ticks,
Farmer , Protests: MPs Grill Government on EU Great Reset Agenda Forcing Farms to Close,
May one ask, this “grilling”is it in collusion with the government on their reset agenda or otherwise.
Another day, another Witch Hunt. It is becoming increasingly clear that not having a 500 page Racism and Inclusion Manual is, in itself, sufficient proof of systemic institutional racism.
However, there are businesses that can come to your enterprise and for a vast fortune make your enterprise less “racist”.
Last month it was Scottish Cricket, today it is the Wellcome Trust.
This is a scam, much worse and more expensive and damaging than American management styles, or the introduction of HR practices in the 70s and 80s.
Now, among other requirements, all businesses, enterprises, organisations, institutions and charities have to hire a certain proportion of coloured and LBVGTS staff to prove otherwise, even if these people are useless, or supernumerary, it seems.
Here is the report on Wellcome:
https://cms.wellcome.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/Evaluation-of-Wellcome-Anti-Racism-Programme-Final-Evaluation-Report-2022.pdf
Note: edited “Trust” replaces “Foundation”
Slight correction to your post. The Wellcome Foundation was a pharmaceutical company set up by Sir Henry Wellcome to provide income for the charity The Wellcome Trust, which is the ‘Wellcome’ alluded to in the article. The Trust sold all remaining shares in the Foundation to Glaxo in 1995, which in turn merged with SmithKline Beecham in 2000 to form GlaxoSmithKline. I worked in IT support for the R&D department of the Foundation, leaving a few years after the formation of GSK.
Thanks. I know nothing, but I am eager to learn.
This is idiotic.
If you work hard in school
Get good grades
Go to a good university
Work damned hard
Get a good degree
When you go for a job, get offered it
And take it, and work hard… what ELSE is needed?
If you’re hiring based on skin colour, you’re categorically a racist. If you’re hiring on whether someone is queer or not, you’re a total fool. Same as hiring some blonde hotness – it isn’t good for you or your company.
End this campaign of hatred and get back to hiring based on merit.
I agree. The job, whatever it is, should go to the best person for said job. Not because of some box ticking.
Try telling THAT to the Beeboids…
We had a group of students with us last week four of whom are at Winchester. They are all determined to get top grades in all their exams but they are aware that the cards are being stacked against them because they are in an academic independent school and that other applicants to Oxbridge with inferior grades will probably be chosen ahead of them.
The key question is:
Should university be more about social manipulation or should it be more about academic excellence?
To my way of thinking one of Blair’s most heinous crimes was done in his first weeks in office: he scrapped the assisted places scheme which enabled children whose state schools could not give them the tuition they needed to go to independent schools that could. I am all in favour of children from all backgrounds going to the best universities but by getting their standards up and not at the price of patronisingly lowering the entry requirement for them.
Far to many of our generation had better education than expected and we all started to question things with logic and common sense. Thats why they changed the system to ensure it did not continue, as we can now all see.. It worked.
I had just two requirements for my children growing up:
1. Education
2. Independence.
This morning I sent a letter of complaint to The Daily Telegraph on its declining standards. What triggered me was noticing that in the past few days they have renamed “Moderate” Sudoko puzzles as “Regular”. Grrrr!!!
Consequently I wanted to know why the DT’s execrable journalism is adopting more and more vapid Americanese instead of English. I cited two recent reports whereby one journalist incorrectly used the trite Americanese “alternate” when he meant alternative; and another (one of many) when the idiotic “train station” has supplanted railway station. Other examples, which did not come readily to mind, would have been cited if I had remembered them.
A few minutes ago I received this reply from the DT:
Dear Mr Grizzly,
Thank you for contacting The Telegraph in regards [sic] to our puzzles.
We will pass your comments onto [sic] the relevant department. Whether positive or negative, we always appreciate receiving the views of our readers; indeed it is this continual feedback that has proved so invaluable in our efforts to maintain the Telegraph’s position as Britain’s best selling quality daily paper.
We do pass on all feedback to our developers and as you can imagine some changes may take longer than others to implement, but I can assure you we do take all feedback seriously. May I offer our sincere thanks to you for taking the time to contact us.
Should you require any further assistance, please do reply to this email so I can help
Yours sincerely,
Bethany Bell
Customer Engagement
The Telegraph Subscriptions Team
I shall not hold my breath.
Stock reply with one header change. Poor lass. Imagine being the person stuck in front of customers and having no power to change anything?
Here is a good source of sudokus which come at 4 different levels. You can do them on your computer or print a few at a time and keep them in the lavatory.
http://www.websudoku.com/
Easy, Medium, Hard and Evil. I like them, thanks.
The DT’s were: Gentle, Moderate, Tough and Diabolical.
The Times’ were: Easy, Tricky, Difficult, Fiendish and Super Fiendish.
All sensible English words.
When is the wedding Griz.
Customer Engagement? Good one John! 🤣👍🏻
Drought declared in large parts of England as temperatures soar in heatwave. 12 August 2022.
A drought has been declared in large parts of England following the driest July in the UK since 1935.
Parts of the South West, parts of southern and central England, and the East of England are to be moved into drought status, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said.
Ooooher! Imagine that. the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is on the case! I’ll bet that’s made a real difference!
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/drought-uk-south-west-weather-latest-b2143047.html?src=rss
Working from home…sitting by their pools, no doubt.
What a great time to have a dry sense of humour
My iPhone, the oracle, says it’ll be 22°C and wet by Wednesday. Not much of a long hot summer. (Not that I want a long hot summer, I loathe the heat but I loathe all this catastrophizing even more.)
We’ve had a proper summer this year, the first for a while.
244038+ up ticks,
Gerard Batten
@gjb2021
·
19h
In the old Soviet Union dissidents were made ‘unpersons’, with no rights or the means to live a normal life. Hundreds of years ago people could be shunned, turned out of the village & left to die in the wilderness.
This is the equivalent in our politically correct cultural Marxist world. In a world founded on lies anyone who tells the truth is an undesirable & has to be punished, marginalised, & ultimately destroyed. Just look at Trump.
Closer to home look at the genuine UKIP party Batten & Braine
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-62506069
Swifts x
Yes. Nick Brown is a member of the Swifts Local Network, as are we. We also went to a local public meeting on Wednesday with planners regarding a large brownfield site near here, with plans for 150+ new dwellings, etc. The site has recently been cleared and the developers announced. We were assured that mitigation measures, including swift bricks would be put in place. We shall see.
Well done , and I do hope developers take that on board and planners insist on all the right things if and when they allow planning permission .
The late chicks in our nest box – they are 24 days old and won’t fledge for a couple more weeks yet. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e39a49ec053b68cf3a2a7efa8949bdae300474627c2f478d373fe4242f2bca97.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6f154d582a20c2e4e6021898bb28bc92f486ba6dd1314144c096aaaafb66e8ff.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c4055a141918924f402baa1eada052fb6db51121ef3c657feae68801d79ff563.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ce8efaff3b446173c98c6b61e2d40cc7797a99acf2673fbe40fa1372c24de3ee.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/384be29e86ca0fb4a47fa55634255ee53fbdc12799d72278fab0e500028369c3.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a984cbb76c2157a3c907ae931eecb43de013efd74b86bfabaa30a4749fa2ceec.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/34aa0df4d0bbaecc179158f8431357abdc93fdf1f004df3cf369b89098c0a162.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1216f502ff3ca0a22de00f79ccfeeb7bdfeda956c2863ab76a19cb22d7ad9f16.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a7676b3030d637ca64d8663caf79b6897de70ce7ded415e7aacdf06f116f6970.jpg
The Madam
https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/GettyImages-793004631-copy-scaled.jpg
Nah. Must be one of the girls being a half dressed slut.
Can you be accused of raping a bouncy castle?
Where’s Captain Ahab when you need him?
The Jocks might eat some weird food, but you’d never catch them dead eating crap like “Rock” salmon!
Dogfish, as was.
That’s a shark practice…
I know.
Who will be the first gimp to stand up and say the rising numbers are because of underfunding of the NHS? Lammy? Gobby Rayner? Abbot?
Amen to that!
And a thousand fold Amen to that.
A composer I had not heard of. Caught a piece of his on Swiss Classic, and liked it enough to dig out a you tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUSGHMX9UaY
Skimming through the DM I saw and misread this heading. I have no idea who Kylie is or why she should need a three tone merkin
Happy birthday, Kylie! Billionaire is gifted rare $100k three-tone Hermès Birkin by mom Kris Jenner as she marks her 25th by adding to her $1million handbag collection
Kylie celebrated her 25th birthday with a lavish party thrown on a superyacht on Thursday evening
The reality star, who has achieved billionaire status with her eponymous makeup line, was gifted a $100k bag
The rare Birkin handbag is the latest accessory to be added to Kylie’s whopping bag collection worth $1m
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4bac8982ab5c6e0765e71f691eac6fa412349ef20af6f0d3af2ccd4e0aa280d9.jpg
Should not the word be “murkin”?
Part of the Kardashian infestation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyuoUwxCLMs
https://static.standard.co.uk/2022/08/12/12/ADAMS20220812.jpg?crop=3%3A2%2Csmart&width=640&auto=webp&quality=75
The missus said she was leaving me because I keep talking like a news reader .
More on that story later.
Snowflake and Olympian Tom Daley has called out Britian for it’s homophobic history.
I’m sure if he was representing Iraq’s diving team he wouldn’t be landing in a pool of water.
Splat.
It would give a whole new meaning to belly flop.
The appalling thing is is that if you survive the fall they then chuck rocks at you. All i said was this fish was good enough for Jehovah !
I doubt he knows anything at all about UK history. Considering how far this country came up to 2020 and then the massive ramm backward the demented Left forced gay rights – by demanding special treatment – it’s truly revolting that a kid who has known nothing but absolute luxury and safety complain about it.
Producers of The Crown are said to be “on the lookout” for someone to
play Prince William in the next series of the Netflix drama.
The names on their current shortlist are said to include Danny Glover,
Wesley Snipes and Whoopi Goldberg.
It’s only fair.
Racist !
Wouldn’t they be better cast as Prince Andrew – the black sheep of the family?
Considering someone’s trying to bring back Quantum Leap with a trans who ‘leaps from life to life solving queer and LBGBZTYIA press * striving to make trans and gay what was once straight and normal, hoping each time the next leap, will be even more gay.’
You wonder why they bother. It’s just burning money.
https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/03/11/quantum-leap-reboot-announces-principal-cast-including-raymond-lee-ernie-hudson-and-mason-alexander-park/
I’m guessing. except for Goldberg, that the other two are as black as your hat?
They might also be female/trans, whatever.
Danny and Wesley normally play tough guy roles. And yes they are black. Not bad actors though. It’s just this idiocy of placing black people in historical roles which is stupid. Take Bridgerton…lauded by all and sundry except for the poor saps watching.
Completely OT – and to take your minds off the increasingly ghastly “news” (aka Project Fear Gone Mad) – here is a lovely article from The Spectator this week about a very agreeable and highly skilled man who loves his work:
The impact had shattered the churchyard path. Chunks of asphalt and mortar lay in the surrounding grass. Just next to the path, like a broken chess piece, lay the remnants of the church’s 150-year-old spire. A few hours earlier, it had stood at the very top of the church, towering over the churchyard. Mercifully, the Victorian construction had fallen to earth rather than through the church roof. For reasons now lost, St Thomas’ in Wells is one of the very few English churches with a spire to the north-east corner.
The list of people one can call for such emergencies is not long. In the event it was 37-year-old James Preston who picked up the phone. Preston is a stonemason and steeplejack whose work has seen him dangle from almost all the historic buildings you’d find in the Ladybird Book of English History: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, Longleat, the Radcliffe Camera and Whitby Abbey, to name but a few.
The spire’s fall, captured on video by a neighbour, took place at the height of Storm Eunice in February. When I meet Preston six months later, he shows me the workshop where the new spire is being made and takes me to St Thomas’ church itself. A 20-mile drive intervenes, and Preston – stubbled and tanned – tells me about the various stone varieties of the West Country. Geologically speaking, we’re at the bottom of a band of oolitic limestone that curves, via Oxford and Bath, all the way up to York, formed during the Jurassic period when much of the Cotswolds was under tropical seas. Look closely at the fine Georgian townhouses in Bath or the little Gloucestershire weavers’ cottages and you’ll see ancient shells and the fossilised remains of ancestral starfish. Bath stone is ‘a soft oolitic limestone’ – ‘oolitic’ meaning ‘egg stone’, referring to the spherical grains of which it is composed – ‘but then we’ve got Hamstone, and Doulting stone, and then you get rubbles. Historic buildings in this kind of area are generally soft limestone, with Bath stone features and maybe Lias rubble walling,’ says Preston.
Limestone is soft, crumbly and warm-hued, quite unlike the more austere Portland stone, to which we owe much of central London. Casual viewers can spot these types of stone, but Preston has a connoisseur’s eye. As we approach Wells, he points out buildings made with Doulting stone, the kind of which St Thomas’ is made. ‘Doulting is an oolitic limestone,’ says Preston, ‘but it’s more orange, and it’s coarser.’
He describes the different mortars used across Britain. They once varied according to local geology, then became brutally standardised in the postwar period, causing damp in buildings where impermeable mortar sealed in moisture. Preston and his colleagues pay close attention to the original mortars, disaggregating them so they can work out their ingredients en route to imitating them. ‘If you go around London, you can find buildings with tiny white [mortar] joints. You go somewhere else, and they’ll be pink, made up of pink sands, or red.’
Preston sees architectural subtleties where other humans would not. ‘I’ve been doing it for a long time,’ he says. He’s been working in the field since he was 16, when he left school to join the same firm he works for two decades later.
What kind of 16-year-old leaves school to become a stonemason? ‘I don’t know!’ he says. ‘It’s weird.’ School, he explains, ‘wasn’t really for me. I’m not a not-academic person, but I’m not really a sit-down classroom-learning type. I’ve always been practical with my hands, mending things and wanting to do things by hand.’
He found he enjoyed the geometry of masonry and its demand for precision. Put through college as an apprentice with Sally Strachey Historic Conservation (he still works for the company, known as SSHC, today), he learned to carve humans and animals, and also to cut a block of stone with an accuracy of one millimetre. This discipline is called banker masonry. ‘The tolerance is one millimetre in one direction, because if you’re still too high, you can take it down. Whereas if you’ve gone too low, there’s nothing you can do about it.’
Preston’s skill as a stonemason neatly dovetailed with another skill of his: climbing. As a teenager, he’d been a hobby climber; in his twenties, working at Farleigh Hungerford Castle for SSHC, he realised that the team had left a blanket at the top of a high wall. Rather than set up the scaffolding again, Preston used ropes to make the climb himself. His career as a modern-day steeplejack had begun – a career that has since led him to abseil down Buckingham Palace and to climb towers and spires otherwise untouched by human hands.
Done with care, he says, rope climbing is safer than working from a scaffold. But it’s still thrilling. ‘I love climbing church spires,’ he says. ‘As you progress up a church spire, the mass of what you’re climbing becomes smaller and smaller, and so you’re more and more exposed as you get up. It reduces up to nothing, and it never ceases to be exciting.’
And then there’s the reward at the top. ‘The views are something you can’t match, and very few people will have seen them. Climbing spires is the best thing, for sure, about working in rope access, or working in historic buildings.’ His favourite view is from Wakefield Cathedral, which has the tallest spire in Yorkshire.
Preston turns his van into a country lane, and we arrive at the workshop. It’s a converted farm building, open to the elements. Outside it stand two spires: the old one, which is grey, weathered and pieced together from lichen-coloured rubble; and the new one, which is sleek and cream-coloured. (It’s Doulting stone, Preston says; my unsophisticated eye does not detect much orange, but he says different beds of the same stone can come in different colours.)
Preston had to piece together the old one, having taken its constituent chunks back to the yard, in order to work out the dimensions for its replacement. ‘We spent a couple of days just sticking bits of stone back together to try to work out what it’s supposed to look like,’ he says, as we inspect the two spires in the sunshine.
Between the spire and the weathervane will be placed an ornamental component: a finial stone. Its three-dimensional floral form was carved by Preston, faithful to the shattered original, over four days. It’s standing on a workbench today, ready for its one-way trip to St Thomas’.
Before we leave, Preston shows me the yard-long steel bolt that, in the mid-1990s, had been implanted into the spire. The intention was to keep the spire secure, but the engineers hadn’t reckoned for wind speeds as high as those brought by Eunice. The bolt, thick as an exhaust pipe, has been bent into a C-shape by the force of the fall. Preston and his team will have to leave a more durable spire than the one they found, which they will do thanks in part to a better-designed stainless-steel tie-down rod. ‘We never intend to have to redo work in our lifetimes,’ he says.
On our way to St Thomas’, we drive past Wells Cathedral, another of Preston’s former projects with his team at SSHC. Above the famous astronomical clock on the north transept are several subtly cleaner panels of stone, put there by Preston and his team.
Stonemasons like to grumble about their industry. They cite the poor pay, the long drives, the contrast between the harried contractors and the unhurried in-house cathedral masons, of whom there are still a few groups. Despite his job’s shortcomings, though, Preston counts himself as privileged. On cathedral roofs, he sees grotesques put there for God’s amusement and nobody else’s; and seeing him climbing up spires like some sort of action figure delights and thrills his five-year-old son, Blake. ‘I think we’re lucky,’ he says. ‘I really do.’
There will always be plenty of work. The misguided postwar mortaring keeps stonemasons busy. Old buildings cope well with high temperatures, but if the Met Office is correct in its prediction that climate change will cause a higher frequency of wind storms, then the damage caused by Storm Eunice will be repeated several times this century.
We’re sitting on the low wall that borders St Thomas’ churchyard. With my hands resting on the wall’s top edge, I can feel the crumbling Doulting stone of which it’s made. We crane our necks to see the decapitated spire. Some time in the coming weeks – SSHC keeps the precise date quiet, lest spectators distract the climbers – Preston and his workmen will install the new spire.
They will do it with the help of a large crane, and they will just have to hope that their modern methods last the centuries. As Preston muses in the workshop, in 200 years’ time stonemasons might curse their forebears (‘21st-century idiots’) who went round putting stainless steel into our ancient buildings.”
Had to mention “climate change” didn’t they……
I know – but the rest of it….
Yes…….stonemasonry of this kind is timeless.
Just read that. Very interesting and oddly soothing.
I am signing off. About to go to meet eldest grandson – so will be occupied until Sunday afternoon.
Have a cool weekend, if you can.
A dimanche.
Have a good weekend, Bill.
Brilliant, enjoy yourself and stay cool Bill.
Have a smashing time together.
Are you taking him to Legoland?
Stupid Boy. He’ll be 30 next year…
………and…
Have you got any gobstoppers?
Have a great time, Bill!
Breaking: Huge heath fire tears through nature reserve in Dorset near upmarket Sandbanks – as people told to avoid the area
The blaze has torn through a nature reserve on Dorset’s Studland peninsula
Witnesses were shocked at how quickly the fire spread within minutes
Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue arrived at the scene at 1.12pm
The ferry at upmarket Sandbanks has been suspended temporarily to allow fire engines to get across.
Several fires have broken out … we can smell the smoke here .
The firemen are tending the fires in very difficult areas .
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11106277/Huge-heath-fire-tears-nature-reserve-Dorset-near-upmarket-Sandbanks.html
With the ferry out the traffic will be horrendous. Stay home. Drink cool drinks.
Your last two suggestions…. we are.
If there is a traffic jam outside your house set up a stall selling iced drinks at £5 a pop !
Hope the sand lizards, smooth snakes and other critters don’t come to too much harm.
https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/20626851.live-sandbanks-ferry-suspended-due-large-fire-studland/
Not looking good.
Only place in the UK that has all six British species of reptile.
Are you saying the HoC doesn’t?
I’m saying that reptiles are a far better life form than the average member of parliament or occupant of the House of Lords.
It’s odd to think that I have more types of reptile in my six acres than there are in the UK
I believe this stems from the last glacial period. The British Isles were more ice bound than the the contignong ( © Aneallen),
therefore after the melting ice cut us and Ireland off from any return of the poor cold bloodied fauna. I do envy you your location for the faunal variety that the UK has lost.
hadArson or carelessness?
Arson.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2022/08/12/1308-MATT-GALLERY-WEB-P1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.png?imwidth=640
Bad taste Laff
I’m told the sparkling range is very very gassy……
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7bc56df9eada615a552e785b68f226aa2ea15d8803f2ed89f507001c7ce787b1.jpg
Das vierte Reich, nicht wahr?
To be served in the best Crystal (nacht) ware…..!
Hopefully it’s peaked, but the temperature here is reported as feeling like 106, that’s just over 41 in new money.
Walking down to the pool and one is hit by a wall of heat when leaving the limited shade.
‘Satanic Verses’ author Salman Rushdie, 75, is stabbed before speech on ‘America being a haven for writers in exile’ in upstate New York – 33 years after fatwah was issued by Iran
By DAILYMAIL.COM REPORTER : https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11106479/Salman-Rushdie-injured-stabbed-ahead-speech-New-York.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field
I suspect that the special terrorist arm of Welby’s Church of England is probably involved in some way.
Not just stabbed, but stabbed to death
Yo Rastus
https://nypost.com/2022/08/12/salman-rushdie-stabbed-during-appearance-in-new-york/
Not yet confirmed when I just looked.
It has been changed since I looked
It has been changed since I looked
Dear life. They’ve no place in civilised society. None whatsoever.
Islam, the religion of peace unless one offends them
The religion of cutting to pieces.
An archaic and unacceptable culture, long past its SBD …
Slammers have time on their side so they play the long game. They know they will outbreed us and the Sharia will be upon all mankind. They already know the West will not fight for the few values it has left, so its just a matter of time. Depressing really. On the positive side, Pride week will be cancelled apart from those wanting flying lessons.
Comment on Tw@ter:-
https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1558193045958426630
For those of a sensitive disposition .. this will shock you x
https://twitter.com/Spitfiremk2/status/1558102532429418497
Errrk! How revolting!
“Madam, you’ve a nasty growth, let me slice it off for you before it gets bigger”
Will ‘ee or won’t she?
JFW
Had to hide that one – quite nauseating!
When I was walking along a Paris street in 1977 a ‘woman’ walked out of a building and got into a car right in front of me. Her body was that of a comely, busty woman who liked displaying her embonpoint.
Her face had a black zapata moustache!
Oh dear, another cock and bull story.
Yes, the world HAS gone mad!
Is he going to put it on the barbecue?
Is that Dick Tracey?
Are you casting turpins?
Edit for missing letter. Grr.
I doubt the above could stand and deliver!
How about all Christians being expelled from the Middle East in exchange for all Muslims being expelled from England?
The Christian community in Dubai would probably rather stay put. The Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem and the Middle East once demanded that their church in Dubai give financial support to the failing wishy-washy Anglican churches in Cyprus and they refused.
Some of the Coptic Christians have a long ancestry there.
Some of the Coptic Christians have a long ancestry there.
The tyranny of Justin Trudeau has finally been exposed – and by two Brits, no less
A lawsuit has shown Canada’s travel vaccine mandate had little to do with science and everything to do with politics
RUPA SUBRAMANYA
12 August 2022 • 2:28pm
On August 13, 2021, two days before Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called a federal election, his government made a major announcement that “as early as at the end of September” federal government employees would be subject to a vaccine mandate. Further: “no later than the end of October” a vaccine mandate for travellers would also be implemented.
The prime minister’s tough position in the fall of 2021 was a far cry from what he said in March 2021, when Trudeau asserted that every Canadian who wanted to be vaccinated would have a dose available by the fall, implying that it would be voluntary – at a time when Canada was struggling to procure enough vaccine doses and was lagging far behind the UK, US, and other major Western countries in its vaccination campaign.
The vaccine mandate proposal was to become a cornerstone of Trudeau’s re-election bid. Speaking in a suburb of Toronto, home to Canada’s largest, and one of the world’s busiest airports, the prime minister reiterated his government’s intention – presumably if re-elected – to impose vaccine mandates on all sectors under the federal government’s control, which boils down to federal employees and travel.
Trudeau always maintained his government’s Covid policies were based on the science and the latest evidence. Yet, his shifting rhetoric, before and after his election call, tells a different tale. Thanks to a civil lawsuit against the travel mandate by two British immigrants, we’ve now seen inside the guts of part of Trudeau’s Covid machinery, and it’s become abundantly clear that it has little if anything to do with science and everything to do with politics.
From recently released court documents, which I broke in a story for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, show us senior government bureaucrats scrambling to find a scientific rationale for the travel mandate mere days before it was due to come into force. We’ve had the opportunity to see into the inner workings of Trudeau’s vaccine machinery thanks to two British immigrants, Sean Rickard and Karl Harrison, who filed a civil suit against the Trudeau government in the Federal Court. Thanks to their efforts, and that of their attorney, Sam Presvelos, the affidavits, testimonies, and cross-examination of key government witnesses are now in the public domain.
These documents clearly show us that the bureaucrat charged with holding the pen, under repeated cross-examination, refused to go into details on who ordered the mandate, citing, “Cabinet confidentiality”. Exactly why the rationale for a public health mandate should be so confidential raises the disturbing possibility that there really was no rationale at all. It’s evident that a political decision was taken by Trudeau and his cabinet to go ahead with the mandates, and the hapless bureaucrats were charged with coming up with some rationale, any credible rationale after the fact.
As it happens, the bureaucrat in charge of crafting one of the world’s “strongest vaccination mandates in the world”, according to the bureaucrat herself and Trudeau, has an undergraduate degree in English literature and self-evidently didn’t have the scientific knowledge to take a call. Neither were there any doctors, epidemiologists and scientists on her team, a secretive panel whose membership is nowhere published, and which rates a passing mention on the government’s website.
The federal government’s vaccine mandates were only the icing on the cake on top of provincial vaccine mandates, masking and distancing requirements, and some of the harshest lockdowns in the Western world. Under Canada’s federal system, these fall under provincial jurisdiction, although they certainly had the moral support of Trudeau’s federal government. Canadians, especially the unvaccinated, were virtually prisoners in their own homes and in their own country. Except, of course, unvaccinated Ukrainians, who were allowed to enter Canada after the war started, even when unvaccinated Canadians were barred from travel. Perhaps, if they tried hard enough, someone could come up with a “scientific” rationale for this as well. They might also need to work a bit to find a scientific basis for why, if the vaccine mandate was necessary, it wasn’t imposed before the election, but afterwards.
The five million or so unvaccinated Canadians were, ultimately, pawns in a political chess game. Trudeau cleverly latched onto vaccination, and government mandates flowing from them, as a potent wedge issue in the lead up to the fall 2021 snap election he called. He was hoping to win his Liberal government a majority, which was languishing in a minority position in the House of Commons, having squandered a previous majority thanks to public disgust at corruption and cronyism scams in his government.
As it happened, Trudeau’s gambit didn’t pay off, and his Liberals returned, again, with a minority — although, given the quirks of Canada’s Westminster system, the Conservatives, two elections in a row, won the popular vote, but lost the election. Trudeau now clings on to power in an alliance with the Socialist New Democratic Party and likely won’t face the voters again until 2025.
The tale of Trudeau’s vaccine mandates has ramifications far outside Canada. The world over, governments have invoked draconian powers, heretofore only used in wartime, to control and regulate their people and curtain fundamental individual liberties, such as the right to gather or the right to mobility. Everywhere, people are told by their governments, much as Trudeau told Canadians, we’re so sorry, we hate to restrict your freedoms, but we’re just following the science and the evidence. We know, in the case of Canada’s travel mandate, that this is simply false. In the Canadian case, Trudeau’s ministers have made it clear that the suspended mandates could come back, as, indeed, could Covid-based restrictions the world over.
Thanks to two British immigrants, we now know how the Covid policy sausage is made in Canada, and it isn’t pretty.
Rupa Subramanya is a columnist with the National Post in Canada
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BTL comments flooding in:
Mark Thompson
Trudeau, along with Macron, Sturgeon, Dripford, Biden, Australia, New Zealand, most of the far east and, to a lesser extent, most other world leaders have ruined millions of lives for no gain whatsoever and the loss of freedom. Evil.
Nick Powell
1 HR AGO
Reply to Mark Thompson
No gain? Ask Bill and Klaus about the profits they have made. Actually you don’t need to they have recorded themselves boasting and patting themselves on the back at the wealth they have achieved by taking advantage of a few hideous narcissists and the basic good nature of the considerate masses. EDITED
Andrew Dodds
2 HRS AGO
Justin is a product of Klaus Shwab’s future leader school (like his female counterpart, Jacinta Adern) and is a bought and paid for WEF stooge.
The fact they hide behind a Liberal name tag whilst being the most illiberal group of politicians on the planet would be hilarious, if their end goal wasn’t so terrifying.
L Burt
1 HR AGO
Reply to Andrew Dodds
Isn’t Liz Truss a member of the WEF?
Antony Weller
1 HR AGO
Reply to Andrew Dodds – view message
Not as prominent as Rishi Sunak. The only two people who are not part of WEF are Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman. They were pushed out of the leadership election as fast as possible.
“…For 20 years or more, political discourse has been dominated by a shared
set of ideas: that the state should guide life through both tax and
regulation; that economics is best done by technocrats, and politics is
best done by judges and lawyers; and that it is the government’s job to
take care of everything traditionally considered important in life so
that we are insulated from risk and change….”
This is precisely why we are in the mess we are – because useless, moronic bureaucrats set about trying to control our every move from a remote, arrogant, ignorant position. It is little less than an attempt at a planned, communist economy and was doomed to fail from the outset.
Cut taxes, shred the state.
If the next PM has an ounce of sense David Frost should be their Willie!
I agree entirely. Someone with the integrity and steely resolve of Lord Frost is sorely needed.
Truss is now a shoe-in for PM and should offer a senior cabinet to Lord Frost as her first action.
https://twitter.com/shameontwiter/status/1558001840943673344
“To view this media, you’ll need to log in to Twitter”
WTFWTA?
How do they know it’s a Muslim rather than a common or garden enricher?
Were they muslims or just black?
Too late.
Anyone we know???
You OK, honey? Bear worse for wear after gorging on hallucinogenic treat
Turkish cub left feeling unbearable from bingeing on ‘mad honey’ before being nursed back to health by vets
By Nick Squires IN ROME
12 August 2022 • 3:18pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/world-news/2022/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000305642905_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqxb39oh8fFGrCAqFuiQgl8h4sJ9uZVPxLO1VGnHlD-bw.jpeg?imwidth=680
The stoned bear was loaded onto the back of a truck in Turkey before being treated by vet
A disorientated bear cub who got high after gorging on “mad honey” had to be rescued in northwest Turkey.
The young brown bear binged on an excessive amount of deli bal, or “mad honey”, a type made by bees from rhododendron flowers.
Visibly intoxicated and disoriented, the animal was found in a stupor on the side of a mountain and then loaded into the back of a pick-up truck in Duzce province, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast.
*
*
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telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/12/ok-honey-bear-worse-wear-gorging-hallucinogenic-treat/
Bosporus Bear Stoned In ‘Stanbul!
Well, they’ll stone you when you’re trying to be so good
They’ll stone you just like they said they would
They’ll stone you when you’re trying to go home
And they’ll stone you when you’re there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
Well, they’ll stone you when you’re walking on the street
They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat
They’ll stone you when you’re walkin’ on the floor
They’ll stone you when you’re walkin’ to the door
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
They’ll stone you when you’re at the breakfast table
They’ll stone you when you are young and able
They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to make a buck
Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll say “good luck”
Tell ya what, I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
Well, they’ll stone you and say that it’s the end
Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll come back again
They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car
They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar
Yes, but I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned alright
Well, they’ll stone you when you walk all alone
They’ll stone you when you are walking home
They’ll stone you and then say you are brave
They’ll stone you when you are set down in your grave
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
A nice bit of news coming out into the open here
Apparently the night before Trudeau invoked the emergencies act, Trudeau and his cabinet were told that progress was being made in negotiations to end the freedom convoy.
So not only had no police force requested the emergency act, cabinet had been told that it wasn’t necessary.
The village idiot is still on holiday in Costa Rica, hiding from questions no doubt.
Can he be charged with malfeasance?
OT Sos, hope you are not too close to the wildfires we have seen on tv, in SW France. Hope you get rain soon.
It’s miles away, but we can smell the smoke!
Rain is due soon, but with thunder storms, which might not be good news if lightning strikes before the rain.
How do you end a drought?
Book someone in to paint the outside of your house, next Monday
Everyone should go and wash their cars and their windows…..never fails;-)
Appoint a Minister for Rain. It worked in 1976.
Same here. Finally turning up at last on Monday.
Recently watching a few episodes of the old BBC comedy-drama series about confidence tricksters, Hustle, gave me a Eureka-moment about how we are being played.
Hikes in interest rates and the rising cost of food and fuel are examples of the “short con”. This, though, is just one small aspect of how we are being manipulated. The World Economic Forum; together with their hired help, the Global Corporations; and their useful idiots, the governments of the world; are now playing us with the “long con” of Climate Change; Covid with its associated lockdowns and inoculation programme; and the Electric Car hoodwinking.
This “long con”, which necessarily takes some time to be fully effective, is what is happening right now. We are all being taken for a ride and, what is worse, we all know it and are gullibly complicit.
355038+ up ticks,
G,
Not ALL.
“We are all being taken for a ride and, what is worse, we all know it and are gullibly complicit.”
If only that was true Grizz,a tiny minority like NoTTL and Going Postal are awake to the massive frauds being perpetrated on us,the vast majority are in complete ignorance and even when presented with incontrovertible facts and evidence and pleas to do their own research choose to stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la before they tune in to Love Island (incuding my own family)
Mark Twain nailed it
“It is far easier to fool someone than convince them they have been fooled”
A quote I suspect you’ll agree with……
“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Heinlein
This is the news….Eurovision, Strictly come Prancing, various panics re drought, fires likely deliberately started, polio, monkeypox & etc.
Not a sausage about immigration, strikes, the appalling NHS , fuel prices.
We are constantly treated like idiots; keep dumbing everything down so we pathetic plebs are kept in the shadowlands.
God rot this government .
Fuel prices – only $1.45 up on the reserve but I think that our health system can match the NHS with problems nowadays. The only thing we are good on is the lack of strikes at the moment.
I used to reject the WEF conspiracy theories but honestly, things are the same if I look at Canadian goings on and I compare them to the UK.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Rik. There are, indeed, many of us who are wise to the scam. The big problem is, though, that the majority are there to be manipulated like puppets [muppets?] and their gullibility is being used against them.
A great programme, Hustle. Particularly the first two series.
355038+ up ticks,
We hit the jackpot on the 24 / 6 /.2016, followed by the rhetorical death knell
“we” won now leave it to the tory’s .
https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1558109402586021890?s=20&t=2wI3m0dfpa_ivxr6kAY_jw
Another Cressida Dick?
Married mother-of-two becomes deputy head of the army as the highest-ranked female officer in British military history
Lieutenant General Sharon Nesmith is the first female deputy head of the Army
This means she is the highest-ever ranking woman in the Army’s history
She took up the role yesterday after being approved by The Queen in April
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said she brings ‘extensive experience’ to the role https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11106195/Armys-female-deputy-head-highest-ranked-female-takes-post.html
Better looking than Cressida though.
That’s not difficult.
At least the role was not bequeathed to
Dido Harding. (Her father once ran the Army).
We can be thankful for small mercies.
No, Maggie, HM as head of the armed forces – all of ’em – is the highest-ranking female in Military History.
About time she (HM) over-rode this bunch of wokeness and gave them a clear message – DEFEND THE NATION – IT’S YOUR JOB.
We must face facts, HM has promoted the WEF agenda for at least the last fifty years.
No, Maggie, HM as head of the armed forces – all of ’em – is the highest-ranking female in Military History.
About time she (HM) over-rode this bunch of wokeness and gave them a clear message – DEFEND THE NATION – IT’S YOUR JOB.
From Eugyppius
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/lauterbach-violates-berlin-quarantine
355038+ up ticks,
https://twitter.com/AgainBraine/status/1558118638254694400?s=20&t=LQguPSFt_yx8R3bhV25lhA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xN0hmNS_IU I really enjoyed this. A gang of old blokes who got together to have a good time, play excellent music and show just how talented they are when they get together to have a good time.
Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter (the guitarist with the white walrus ‘tache) was a mainstay in bands like The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. He is a personal friend of Hank B Marvin and is a United States defence consultant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Baxter
And Roy Dommett, one of Britain’s leading rocket engineers who worked on Black Arrow and other projects was not only an expert on the history of Germany’s V weapon projects, but one of the leading lights in Morris Dancing.
Not for me, Griz …
Should be a full moon tonight but I can’t see it and feeling too tired to howl.
After some of the BS on GB tonight I feel like howling.
You’d have howled at Justin Rowlatt waving his arms about with climate hysteria.
Testiculation?
I howled for you.
I am going to bed soon….and I am very weary of GB news. It has become tedious.
News everywhere is very disheartening, it’s not just UK. I’m almost at the point of not reading any newspaper! Already I do not watch tv news, if I can help it.
I’m not reading or watching any media at all, apart from what I overhear at other people’s houses! I just follow financial youtubers commenting on the latest developments in banking and the economy – that, together with the odd WEF presentation usually explains the rest of the news, and you get it without the sanctimonious media spin.
Me too!
Good night, Ann. I hope you sleep well.
28’c inside, far too hot. Thus, going to bed under AC.
Night all. 🤗
I never thought that this might happen to me, but covid has struck our family, I couldn’t even share the drive back home from Rock. Six and a half hours with two short breaks. Fortunately It’s not much worse than a common cold. I hope my tests will be clear for my cardiology appointment later this month.
And yes, housing hospitals and water can’t keep up with immigration. Nor can our creaking infrastructure. Let alone illegal immigration. So it’s Game set and match for all of our idiot political classes.
35538_ up ticks,e
Evening RE,
They could not have achieved their treacherous aims without support and they have received that all the way these past three plus decades.
Good night, Ready Eddy.
355038+ up ticks,
This is a leaving legacy doubled up with TB, from the lab/lib/con/ukip coalition party & supporter / members.
https://twitter.com/UkRoyalist2022/status/1558056775127126018?s=20&t=gzVs2BPzEGTN4cZ4M8wdGw
“Salman Rushdie: Man arrested after author attacked on stage”
A right wing nationalistic zealot Brit, no doubt.
Of course not. It was a mentally ill Swede, surely. Lol.
Amazing.
The BBC has stated that his name is Hadi Matar.
Matar is Arabic for airport, so should we assume that it is a false name to fool the stupid westerners?
I have just we’ed the dogs .. the moon is wonderful and I saw a few shooting stars.
What’s not to like . 19c now .. another warm night .
Good night everyone .
Shooting stars will be the Perseids
Good night, everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY2_l4yFRHM
I sang a bit of that (quietly, for me, and in Czech) to the golden, glowing moon last night!
Morning All.
Morning, Johnny.
Good morning, Herr Oberst.
Morning, Elsie 🙂
Good morning, Johnny – and all NoTTLers.
Good morning all – Saturday’s new page is here.
Thank you.
355069+ up ticks
Saturday 13 August: Truss and Sunak face urgent questions on energy policy and on mass immigration
On par with & just as effective as Canute in regards to the English Channel.
Also the play on words, AKA is very apt for this pair.
King of Norway and part of Sweden — Cnut also known as Cnut the Great and Canute, was King of England from 1016,