Friday 19 November: Tory plans to curtail HS2 in the North are a betrayal of Red Wall voters

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
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701 thoughts on “Friday 19 November: Tory plans to curtail HS2 in the North are a betrayal of Red Wall voters”

  5. ‘Morning all! Up early to see the lunar eclipse! Can’t even see the blooming moon, let alone the eclipse!
    Warm, wet and windy here!

    1. Never Mind Sue you’ll be able to see the antics of lots of lunatics in the news as they eclipse democracy (which today is a shadow of its former self)….

    2. ‘Morning, Sue.

      I saw the moon at about 04.00. Apart from being very bright, it looked normal to me. I believe the eclipse is tonight.

      1. Definitely today Peddy! The peak eclipse occurs about 9am but the moon will have already set by then! (Not that you’d notice!)

    3. ‘Morning, Sue.

      I saw the moon at about 04.00. Apart from being very bright, it looked normal to me. I believe the eclipse is tonight.

  6. RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The Grand Tour presents Britain, the softest touch… in the wuurlld!

    The politicians have had at least two decades to come up with a plan to tackle the migrant crisis. They can’t claim they didn’t see it coming.

    Back in the year 2000, I invented a spoof game show called ASYLUM! after an Afghan airliner was hijacked and diverted to Stansted.

    Instead of arresting the hijackers and banging them up in Belmarsh to await deportation, the authorities decided to billet them in a local airport hotel.

    The rules of the game were quite simple: ‘The competition is open to everyone buying a ticket or stowing away on one of our partner airlines, ferry companies or Eurostar. No application ever refused, reasonable or unreasonable. All you have to do is destroy your papers and remember the magic password: ASYLUM!

    ‘Hundreds of lawyers, social workers and counsellors are waiting to help. It won’t cost you a penny. So play today. It could change your life for ever.

    ‘Iraqi terrorists, Afghan dissidents, Albanian gangsters, Kosovan drug-smugglers, Tamil Tigers, bogus Bosnians, Rwandan mass murderers, Somali guerillas . . .

    ‘COME ON DOWN!’

    That column was headlined: ‘Hijack an airliner and win a council house.’ It was meant to be a joke, not a Dummy’s Guide to settling in Britain. It’s been doing the rounds on the internet ever since. A columnist on another newspaper liked it so much she downloaded it verbatim and passed it off as all her own work.

    I can only assume that it went down well at the Home Office, too. For the past two decades, those charged with enforcing our borders have been rolling out the red carpet for migrants from all over the world.
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10218991/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Grand-T

  8. Ooh! The spammers are about early! Just took one down!
    Younger daughter and I are off to pick up her wedding dress today! After 2 years, a set of twins and the fiancé having a severe stroke, we are approaching the final furlong!
    Keep reading for further updates! Oops! One of the bridesmaids has Covid – confirmed yesterday!!

    1. I don’t have Covid yet – Phizzee or I could stand in for the missing bridesmaid at a pinch?!?

          2. Yep! You’ll need to keep drinking to save having to wear a mask! Remember, this is Natsi country!
            Oh, and it’s next Sunday!

  10. Andrew Neil is right – on climate change, the BBC is short-changing us

    The Cop26 coverage across TV and radio was wildly apocalyptic. This isn’t rigorous journalism, and it doesn’t help us face the future

    ROBIN AITKEN
    18 November 2021 • 3:00pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2021/11/18/TELEMMGLPICT000276208263_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtkVbH_JhwhKpOG03so4XGL6Xj2WECU5tGTp4vDMBGsY.jpeg?imwidth=680
    The BBC’s Andrew Marr talks to Greta Thunberg at Cop26 last week CREDIT: Jeff Overs

    One of the dismal side-effects of Cop26, the recent climate-change conference in Glasgow, is how it sucked the oxygen out of our national media. For weeks before it started, and throughout its duration, nearly every broadcaster, newspaper and magazine devoted lavish amounts of space to the deliberations of politicians, scientists, diplomats and officials.

    The cumulative effect was deadening. This wasn’t because the subject is of no importance or interest, but rather because when the media is in this kind of mood there is no tension, no quarrel, no edge to the debate. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the journalists were all on board with the “line”. The starting point of every interview was the implicit agreement that everything is getting worse and that climate change is an existential threat. Metaphorically – like the preachers’ billboard – the reporters were telling us “The End is Nigh”.

    What this meant in practice was that every time you turned on the radio or TV, you heard the same message relentlessly repeated, and that message, as Andrew Neil has complained, seemed to come straight from the Greenpeace press office. Neil’s complaint was aimed squarely at the BBC, but, in truth, none of the other big broadcasters was any better. There were a few hold-outs against the eco doom-mongering: GB News and TalkRadio, among other insurgents, struck a more sceptical note. But in general, our national media gave themselves over to an orgy of apocalyptic hair-shirt environmentalism.

    And this is self-defeating and wrong. Self-defeating because, confronted with pretty much the same headline hour by hour, day by day, over a period of weeks, the response of most rational people is to smell a rat – “I’m being sold a message here” – and switch off. And wrong because, despite the weight of the climate-change consensus, there are still important arguments to be had about anthropogenic climate-change, and what we should do about it.

    Here’s the interview you should have heard during Cop26:

    Politician, or climate activist, or committed scientist: So, if we cannot limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 1.5 degrees, we can expect more devastating weather events, more hurricanes and flooding and wildfires, and more people will die.

    BBC interviewer: In which case, how do we explain the fact that there has been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes in the past 150 years? And that far fewer people die now from weather-related disasters than they did in the 1970s? And that the amount of land consumed by fires worldwide is dropping year on year?

    Believe me, you did not hear that interview or anything like it during the Glasgow conference. And yet all the questions above are reasonable, and grounded in statistics issued by highly reputable government and scientific bodies.

    Andrew Neil has branded the BBC and Sky ‘the PR arm of Greenpeace’
    Andrew Neil has branded the BBC and Sky ‘the PR arm of Greenpeace’ CREDIT: Clara Molden for DT
    The frequency of hurricanes, for instance, was the subject of an historical study published by Nature Communications in July, which found no increase in the past century and a half. The number of deaths worldwide from weather events in 2010 was estimated at about 18,000; in 2020, as National Geographic reported last month, it was down to around 6,000, whereas in the 1970s it was not unusual for it to number around 50,000.

    On the subject of wildfires – which, as we know, make for highly visual and dramatic TV footage – the actual facts seem especially counter-intuitive. As the Royal Society reported in an authoritative survey in 2016, despite the perception that wildfires are hugely on the increase, “global area burned appears to have declined overall over [the] past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago”.

    I am not making these points to be a smart-aleck, nor because I am, in the cant phrase, a “climate-change denier”. Personally, it seems overwhelmingly likely that human activity must be having an effect on our climate. But what worries me is the way in which our media – and especially the BBC – has entirely abandoned the noble tradition of pugnacious journalistic inquiry here.

    This can be traced back to a decision taken in 2006, after the BBC convened a private climate-change seminar in which senior Corporation figures were briefed by leading scientific experts and climate activists. The following year, the BBC Trust stated: “The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.”

    I understand why the BBC feels that it can trust the global scientific establishment to the extent that it accepts climate change as a reality. And I think it would be absurd to “balance” every interview on the subject with someone who denies that reality. But – and this is an important qualification – while there’s no need for “equal space”, there’s an absolute requirement, in my view, that some space should be given so that the sceptics can make their case. Otherwise, the result will be what we got from Glasgow: supine, gutless, sycophantic agreement with the official line, which is the antithesis of what robust journalism should be.

    I do not know the answers to the questions I pose in my imaginary interview, but I reckon they would have made for more interesting listening than all that hyperbolic talk about “the clock ticking” and “five minutes to disaster”. Challenging questions bring out the best in most interviewees. Putting an expert on the spot, and demanding that they justify their assertions, sharpens their thinking: it forces them to explain themselves convincingly. Without that sceptical interrogation, too many Cop26 media interviews will have come over to the unconvinced as bland propaganda.

    One of the great hate-figures for climate-change true-believers is the Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, who has developed a sceptical critique of the demands of passionate activists. Lomborg does not deny the reality of climate change, but he picks apart the assumptions of the consensus, and demands that they justify the colossal economic cost of the remedies they advocate: green energy, electric cars and so on. He adds that those who forecast disaster consistently underestimate mankind’s ability to adapt and find new solutions. Yes, he says, global warming will force us to change, but we will because we can: that’s what humans always do.

    That optimistic, central insight was glaringly absent from all the pessimistic journalistic outpourings from the BBC and others in Glasgow. And their apocalypse-peddling has consequences. A recent global survey of 10,000 young people by the University of Bath found that 56 per cent think humankind is doomed because of climate change. Is it any wonder, given the diet of bad news they are force-fed? Who can be surprised that all this gloom is causing mental-health problems among young people who sincerely believe climate change will be the end of the world?

    It is a pernicious, one-sided, hope-extinguishing narrative – and it’s rank bad journalism to boot.

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

    Carpe Jugulum
    15 HRS AGO
    What do you expect when the head of the BBC, Tim Davie states the issue of anthropogenic climate change is ‘settled’. That a manifest scientific illiterate clutching a degree in English feels emboldened to state an outright lie shows just how far the rot of dogma has spread.
    It is not settled. Not even close, and will not be as long as there is not a single model that marries past and current data to actual conditions and future projections. The very fact that there is no such model is proof that there are factors in operation that we are unaware of. Those factors will not be found as long as the obscenity of suppressing and defunding sceptical research continues.
    Scepticism IS science, what is being peddled is dogma.

    1. Thank goodness people are questioning the BBC’s dogma in public now. Hope it’s not too late, as we are teetering on the brink of the cliff at the moment.

        1. Carpe Jugulum states that he is a retired policeman who teaches in secondary or further education, some science subject IIRC. His BTL comments are usually bang on the money.

    4. What the BBC doesn’t tell you is that it’s pension funds are heavily invested in green nonsense, so it has to promote it.

      It is a complete betrayal of trust by the BBC to present the issue of climate change as if no further debate were necessary but that’s the BBC’s problem. It has an agenda and wants to promote it at any cost.

  12. Watching The Highwire at the moment. Breaking news: although Austria has locked down i.e. excluded the “non-vaccinated” from society the covid situation is deteriorating to a point where the Austrian government is considering a total lock down to try and contain the surge. Coming to a country near you?

  13. SIR – With a cap on additional jobs we can expect the quality of MPs to decrease markedly. Politics should be a vocation, garnering experience from across the spectrum to allow reasoned debate. It should not be a profession attracting a succession of posturing, woke graduates who are incapable of listening to others’ views.

    Charlie Bladon
    Cattistock, Dorset

    Sorry, Charlie Bladon; the quality of MPs is already rock-bottom, although you are right about “…posturing, woke graduates…”

  14. Azeem Rafiq. This dates from 21st August this year:

    ‘Writing in the comments section of the aforementioned post, Rafiq says he “couldn’t stop laughing” after spotting the post
    on Facebook before proceeding to sharing it himself.

    The post in question is basically is a meme that’s a play on the popular superstitious saying in the Indian subcontinent “Buri
    Nazar Waale Tera Muh Kala“.

    In English, it translates to the curse of Evil Eye.

    Sounds innocent? Only, it isn’t.

    Buri Nazar Waale Tera Muh Kala roughly means the person casting an evil eye shall have his face blackened (black
    here is a symbol of ill luck on the person with malicious intent).

    Which now brings us back to what Rafiq has shared. The post literally translates to “If Evil Eye Would Result in a Blackface, 90%
    of Our Relatives Would’ve Been African.”

    No need to explain the meaning behind – it’s clearly a reference to the dark skin of people residing in the African
    continent.

    Rafiq accompanied the picture posted on February 23, 2017 with a caption that began with half-a-dozen smileys
    followed by “made my night.”

    In the comment section, he says to have been laughing since spotting the image on someone’s profile on Facebook.

    Nearly three months later, he posted the same image with the caption, “great timing for this to come back out”
    “100%not90%..actually most of them kalai hi hain (actually most of them are indeed black)’.

    https://www.news18.com/cricketnext/news/azeem-rafiqs-old-instagram-post-90-of-our-relatives-wouldve-been-african-emerges-amidst-yorkshire-racism-scandal-4107242.html

    1. Ah but the BBC Radio 3 News had a shock horror report of a white player who painted his skin black in 2009 ……”And may the Lord have mercy on you!”

    2. Throw in knee jerk anti-Semitism and apparently humungous gambling debts ….
      Ooops, I forgot; he’s neither Christian nor white, so all perfectly acceptable.

  15. SIR – In demanding that the British Army gives up using natural fur, it is clear that animal rights activists care more about pushing their ideological dogma than the health of British soldiers (“Guardsmen tempted by free fake fur to replace bearskins”, report, November 16).

    The Army conducted trials using fake or plastic fur and found that the synthetic material showed an unacceptable rate of water absorption, representing a health risk to soldiers.

    It is incredible that animal rights activists are pushing plastic alternatives rather than natural materials from sustainable sources.

    Fur used by the Army comes from animals whose populations need to be carefully controlled. The alternative is that this natural material simply goes to waste – but then this would appear to suit the agenda of animal rights groups.

    Frank Zilberkweit
    Chair, British Fur Trade Association
    London SW8

    Whatever type is used, it will still attract the attention of some protest group or other!

  16. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3fb991303b7ac2331394afad4b1f6ef137dc5059bcee6a958954ca816961e81f.png For your information, Zilberkweit, there is only one species of animal on this planet whose “populations need to be carefully controlled”, and that is the gormless population of (mainly) halfwits whose numbers are galloping out-of-control and are nearly at the 8,000,000,000 level. Sort out that abomination first, you cretin, before destroying the lives of other animals, thereby killing off biodiversity further, and for no other reason than to boost your bank balance.

    1. According to Hans Rosling, the population will continue to rise to ten billion but no further. Lord knows where those extra two billion are going to live, but I don’t fancy my chances of having a spare bedroom in twenty years time.
      https://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg

      1. Lord knows where those extra two billion are going to live,

        If Boros & Pratty Petal get their way UK

      2. Where are they going to live?
        Where will they find shelter?
        What are they going to eat?
        What will they drink?
        Where will all their effluent be disposed of?
        Where will all their material waste products be disposed of?
        How will they evade growing conflict?
        How will they survive with an ever-accelerating dwindling of all other plant and animal species?

        They will soon discover that a monoculture of humans on an ever-increasingly desolate planet will simply not work.

        1. The problem isn’t population, it’s technology, specifically western largess. When we give Africa vaccines all we do is encourage their already hiuge population to increase further. As unpleasant as it might seem, we have to stop being nice and let them live with their own tech level. Until they’ve the infrastructure and education all we’re doing is exacerbating the problem.

          As horrible as the famine in Ethiopia was, we shouldn’t have intervened. If they cannot feed a population ot ten million then they needed to use that event as a catalyst to change. Instead, we gave them more money.

          1. In 1984 (at the time of the famine) Ethiopia’s — a Christian country — population was just under 40 million. Today it is 119 million. A tripling of humanity in just 37years! That is an abomination to beat all others.

        1. Dr Bhakdi is pretty sure they’ve found it.

          At the moment it is not compulsory but soon, in some parts of Europe, it will be a criminal offence not to have the vaccine gene therapy.

    2. If you want to see what happens when animal populations are not carefully controlled, you only have to look at the suffering in LACS’ deer “sanctuary”.

  17. SIR – I do not share Alice Vincent’s desire for a squirrel-free habitat (Gardening, November 13).

    I am lucky to have a large garden. Much of it is wild, and it is visited by many kinds of bird as well as rabbits, badgers, deer – and squirrels.

    The squirrels take nuts from my hand and often enter the French windows to demand their breakfast. We have feeding stations with seeds, fat balls and peanuts. Custard creams are a particular favourite of theirs.

    The part of the garden that is not wild is well planted, and the squirrels leave the bulbs, flowers, shrubs and tubs alone. Even if they did start to dig up my beds, I would willingly put up with it. If you study these animals long enough you begin to love them for their cheekiness, cleverness and bravery. I would not swap my squirrels for anything.

    Wendy May
    Hereford

    Lucky old you, Wendy May. The tree rats did so much damage to two of four beech trees at our previous house they had to be cut down. They also steal eggs from nests. They are a real pest, not the cuddly-wuddly creatures you imagine them to be.

  19. The Black Death Cometh…..

    Austria’s Salzburg And Upper Austria Expand Lockdown To Include Entire Population

    The length of the lockdown is not yet confirmed, but Haslauer said it would last at least three weeks, and most likely four. As in previous lockdowns, it would be possible to leave home only for essential purposes including food shopping, exercise, and accessing medical care including vaccinations. Hotels, restaurants and retail stores will close.

    He urged everyone in the region who is eligible to get their first vaccine doses as well as boosters, “so that we can get out of this lockdown as soon as possible, before Christmas if at all possible”. Salzburg this week followed Vienna in making booster doses possible from four months after the second dose.

    Haslauer also said that all municipalities in Salzburg would be offering vaccination seven days a week. He noted that as of Monday, Salzburg already has the strictest measures in Austria, but said: “The time it takes for these to take effect is time that our hospitals do not have.”

    “Lockdown is an effective short-term measure, but it is not a solution. Vaccination is the only solution,” he said, even though it clearly is not.

    1. Wow, so the lockdown of the unvaccinated didn’t work?
      I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
      Never mind Austrians, only three weeks to flatten the curve….

      edit: just spotted “booster doses four months after the second dose”
      This is insane! It has now been shown that the spike protein can enter cell nuclei, where it inhibits the repair of DNA. This apparently increases your chances of getting cancer. If the spike proteins stay in your body for 6(?) weeks after having the jab, and you have three jabs inside 6 months, that’s a lot of time that you are exposed to the risk.

    2. Good morning Bill

      Moh and I had our booster on Tuesday, same with us , thankfully just a sore arm .

      Very murky weather here, no breeze , 10c, and because the leaves are still rusty coloured on the trees , they give the appearance of an old sepia photo with a dull misty background .

  21. Extremists using online gaming and Covid conspiracies to recruit youngsters. 19 November 2021.

    Rightwing extremists are using Covid controversies and online gaming as a way of recruiting young people, as data shows half of the most serious cases of suspected radicalisation reported by schools and colleges now involve far-right activity.

    Figures published by the Home Office show twice as many young people in education in England and Wales last year were thought to be at risk of radicalisation by the extreme right-wing, compared with those at risk from Islamic extremists.

    Ooooh I say! Those dreadful far-right extremists! Playing games. How wicked! Whatever next? You would think that they would stick to blowing up hospitals and assassinating MP’s. Have they no sense of decency!

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/19/extremists-using-online-gaming-and-covid-conspiracies-to-recruit-youngsters

    1. Actually that is pretty disturbing. I see an agenda that conflates opposition to vaccine passports with “far right wing extremism” and “terrorism.”

      1. Wow! That really moves me! Well, it moves me from the flying bridge of the socio-anarchist grouping to the extreme right wing along with Genghis Khan. Or it would do if I did online gaming… and if I was still at school.

      2. According to friends in the USA, if you object to CRT and Marxism being taught to your children the FBI put you on a list of extremists

  22. From today’s DT:

    UK’s busiest traffic camera snaps a driver every two minutes
    Brighton’s Green Party-led council accused of ‘cashing in’ as local people express their anger over the controversial bus gates

    By
    Poppie Platt
    18 November 2021 • 7:30pm

    Britain’s busiest traffic camera is catching a driver every two minutes in Brighton, as a Tory councillor criticised the city’s Green administration for “cashing in on confusion”.

    Brighton and Hove City Council has been accused of treating drivers like “cash cows” after experimental “bus gates” in the Valley Gardens area of the city caught out 310 people every day.

    The four traffic cameras – at Marlborough Place, St George’s Place, St Peter’s Place and York Place – were installed in June last year by the then-Labour administration to monitor traffic on the roads.

    The bus gates – which force normal traffic to turn left off the major road, only letting buses, taxis and bicycles to continue straight ahead – captured 9,618 motorists in the last month alone, raking in thousands of pounds worth of fines.

    More than half of the £60 penalty charge notice (PCN) fines issued in October were linked to just one of the cameras.

    ‘Ripping off the public’

    Robert Nemeth, a Conservative councillor, said his “jaw dropped” when he found out about the “extraordinary number of fines” that were being imposed on local people.

    He said that if traffic was busy for 10 hours a day then at peak times the council was fining 30 drivers an hour or one every two minutes.

    Speaking at the Green-led council’s environment, transport and sustainability committee meeting on Wednesday where the controversial bus gates were made permanent, Cllr Nemeth said: “The fact that one person is being fined every two minutes at these bus gates is extraordinary.

    “It is clearly being used as a revenue-raising measure by stealth, which sees the council cashing in on confusion and hurting the city’s economy.”

    Cllr Nemeth told The Telegraph that the council were “ripping off the public” and should be made to “return the huge sums that have been extorted”.
    ‘Money hungry’

    He said that some motorists who were confused by the new rules were being fined after driving on the unauthorised roads – despite some attempting to reverse once they had realised their mistake.

    He accused Labour and the Greens of making the traffic order permanent despite the issues because of their desire to create a “car-free city centre”.

    Local people expressed their anger at the traffic cameras in the report, which was shown to the committee ahead of their meeting.

    One objection labelled the bus lanes “completely unclear and unnecessary”, while another accused the council of being “money hungry”.

    A camera previously dubbed Britain’s busiest in Southampton caught 51,049 motorists driving over the speed limit between 2015 and 2017, triggering more than 320 times a week at its peak. But Brighton’s bus gate caught more than 2,170 a week.

    Brighton and Hove City Council has been contacted for comment.

    * * *

    Some years ago now we were regular visitors to Brighton. However, after the previous occasion when the greenies declared war on everything other than public transport, we gave up going there and haven’t been back since. At least we have avoided the piles of rubbish in the streets after their stupidity recently brought about yet another refuse collectors’ strike. They are surely the most inept council anywhere in the south, and that is against some pretty tough competition!

    1. My very first conviction was in 1977 on a motorcycle going through a Gotcha contraflow bus lane in Reading. It was on a three-lane one way street, with the gantries directing traffic going to Aldershot into the right lane. There was one white sign on the left under some traffic lights saying “Keep left of bus lane ahead”. I was looking for the right turn to Aldershot when I found a bus coming towards me and a police car on my tail to the left watching me go on the wrong side of a Keep Left bollard.

      What I was expected to do was swing into the middle lane at the lights, pass the two bollards on my right and then turn right to Aldershot. Not being a regular driver in Reading, I didn’t expect this convoluted system, so I was stung for £15, despite in my defence producing a letter from the AA stating that the roadsigns there were misleading.

      I deduced then this was a revenue generator, and no doubt has been copied many times since. At the age of 21, I lost any respect I had for the connection between the law and justice I had grown up with, acquiring the home truth that the law is best avoided, and it is primarily there to provide finance for lawyers.

      1. Good morning Jeremy and all
        Having worked as a Magistrate’s Court Usher for 10 years I can confirm that the law has very little to do with justice.

  24. Yo All and Good Morning

    A ponder point, in reply to a post on yesterday’s page, about squirrels, which will inevetably be Grey ones, in Hereford

    Some people think that the true name for a GREY Squirrel is Tree Rat

    The (refugee ?!) arrivals at Dover are mimicing the actions of the Tree Rats, ie driving the indigenous people
    out of their homes and changing the ways we can live our lives

    Halal slaughter/food
    Shariah Law
    Grooming Gangs
    An Army in waiting

    2. 341786+up ticks,
      Morning OLT,

      Yet the mass uncontrolled immigration coalition still has a great issue deciding following.

  25. Tim Paine quits as Australia captain after sending explicit messages to a female colleague. 19 November 2021.

    Tim Paine has resigned as Australia’s Test captain on the eve of the Ashes after an investigation by Cricket Australia into explicit messages he sent to a colleague.

    Paine told a press conference in Hobart on Thursday that he would give up the captaincy after admitting a text exchange with a female co-worker at Cricket Tasmania in 2017.

    Another one bites the dust without so much as whisper of public condemnation. At one time you had to wait to go to Hell before paying for your Earthly sins! I suppose with the Death of Christianity punishment had to be updated to the Here and Now!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2021/11/19/tim-paine-quits-australia-captain-sending-explicit-messages/

    1. Morning all

      … “After admitting a text exchange with … “. – Does this mean there was a reply of sorts? If so it Would be interesting to know what it was.

  26. Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence.

    Not a shred of evidence exists in favour of the idea that life is serious.

    The government cannot give anything to anyone that it has not already taken from someone else!

    EIGHT THOUGHTS TO PONDER

    Number 8
    Life is sexually transmitted.

    Number 7
    Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

    Number 6
    Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see a gleam in his eyes, do some baking.

    Number 5
    Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks, months, maybe years

    Number 4
    Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospitals, dying of nothing.

    Number 3
    All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

    Number 2
    In the 60’s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

    And Finally the Number 1 Thought
    Life is like a jar of Jalapeno peppers– what you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.

    …and as someone recently said to me:
    “Don’t worry about old age–it doesn’t last that long.”

  30. Curious bit of trivia. 56 years ago today, I was married at St Peter’s Church, Belsize Park. I was 24 – my bride 19; she was 20 the next day. We split up 11 years later. We have long resolved our differences and keep in touch regularly about the children and grand-children.

  33. In other news a famously shy woman who wants to avoid press intrusion has appeared on a chat show hosted by someone called DeGenerate [?] and says that her equally shy husband is loving the California lifestyle and climate – what her husband actually thinks isn’t clear as no one has asked him!

    1. I was a chubby child, but I didn’t eat fast food. I just ate too much of the wrong things, thanks to my mother’s inept cooking.

  35. “SIR – I do not share Alice Vincent’s desire for a squirrel-free habitat (Gardening, November 13).

    I am lucky to have a large garden. Much of it is wild, and it is visited by many kinds of bird as well as rabbits, badgers, deer – and squirrels.

    The squirrels take nuts from my hand and often enter the French windows to demand their breakfast. We have feeding stations with seeds, fat balls and peanuts. Custard creams are a particular favourite of theirs.

    The part of the garden that is not wild is well planted, and the squirrels leave the bulbs, flowers, shrubs and tubs alone. Even if they did start to dig up my beds, I would willingly put up with it. If you study these animals long enough you begin to love them for their cheekiness, cleverness and bravery. I would not swap my squirrels for anything.

    Wendy May
    Hereford”

    Get some cats and a dog, Wendy. That’ll sort your problem out.

    1. We have two large walnut trees – one each side of the house and each tree is the home of a red squirrel. Both of these are very lively but they are also very shy and don’t come too near us.

      Since Chaucer, the cat, and Rumpole, the boxer, have left us we have far more wild life in the garden and far more birds.

      If and when we sell Mianda we shall think about getting another cat and another dog but we would then have far fewer other animals visiting us.

    2. Just wait until the badgers start to undermine the foundations of her house. She’ll find they have more rights than she does and she might not be so gushing about the cheeky animals.

  36. Good morning my friends

    As many of my friends here must know I greatly enjoy clever satire and I am particularly fond of Jake Thackray’s songs and the songs of my friend, Jeremy Taylor, and I used to write my own songs when I was younger.

    This Azeem Rafiq nonsense brings to mind Jeremy’s brilliant song about The Liberal Man who keeps exposing himself as a hypocrite. The second verse is even more relevant today than it was in the 70s when he wrote it:

    I am a tolerant man and I do the best I can
    To set the world to rights so I can dream at night
    A chance I never miss to stamp out prejudice
    But that bloke next door from me – he’s got them all from A to Z (American Z)
    He’s a racist, an imperialist, a white man to the core
    A lousy Empire Loyalist and a monumental bore
    He talks about the Pakis and the Fuzzies and the Wogs
    The Eyeties and the Gyppos and the Chinkies and the Frogs
    And I hate him and I loathe him and I don’t know what to do
    I bet he isn’t even English – he’s just another bloody Jew!
    Not that I care – not that I mind (Six eight time)
    I believe in the brotherhood of mankind
    I sift information and study the news
    I’ve formulated my personal views

    Well worth a listen:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga4oFHu2hok

    1. My father had paroxysms of laughter when Jeremy came to stay with us years ago and sang this to us!

      I really recommend you actually listen to the whole song; it’ll cheer you up for the rest of the day!

    2. Good song and how accurate about the left. Unfortunately it isn’t satire anymore. His song is simply an iteration of how the left behaves now a days, things are worse, if anything.

    6. Same for any type of litter. One day, when the population is culled to remove the unintelligent, anti social and abusive (seriously, it just needs child benefit to go) litter will be a thing of the past – just like the savages who spread it.

      Hopefully also to go will be people playing music on their telephones out loud, spitting, and those who think walking straight in to me is not going to have them knocked over.

  38. ‘Imminent Russia invasion’ Katya Adler issues Putin warning that is terrifying. 18 November 2021.

    THE BBC’s Europe Editor Katya Adler has warned of “fears of an imminent Russian invasion” of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin.

    Reading the Express requires a suspension of belief equal to the 1945 Der Stürmer headline “Victory is Close” as the Russians shelled Berlin. One would not be at all surprised to access it and find, GENGHIS KHAN SEIZES SKEGNESS. Other than this it appears to have three Blizzards a week and WW3 twice a fortnight! Whence this astonishing fecundity of information? Most propagandists stick to the facts and twist them so as to be almost unrecognisable, though the informed reader can still make pretty good guesses about what is actually happening! Not so the Express; it is as prolific and remote as if its “Journalists” were from the Planet Zog; a Counter Earth orbiting a Double Star in the Andromeda Galaxy. Connected by sub-space links to the Express Offices it disseminates news from the Home World. This so closely parallels that here, that it is sufficient to fool its regular readers.

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1523332/Russia-invasion-Katya-Adler-Vladimir-Putin-warning-Ukraine-Nordstream-2-gas-pipeline

    2. Good morning Araminta. Thoroughly agree with you about the Express, the Mail is just as bad. The anti-Russian propaganda is so blatant they must take us all for fools. But I doubt that it fools that many of their readers. I suspect many read the Express as entertainment which is how I read it. I’m always intrigued by the headlines of their stories which often have a tenuous relationship with the story. The story, in turn, as you suggest, often has little to do with reality. They seem to be particularly attached to the declaration: “WWIII about to break out.” or a variation of than theme. Another is: “Queen furious!” which, inevitably turns out to be nonsense.

      1. Strangely, there was a BBC programme about Katya Adler about eighteen months ago.

        In amongst all the breathless admiration the BBC stated how close she was to all the top people in Brussels.

  39. Spotted on Twatter “Before you mock children who still believe in Santa Claus, remember that there are adults who still believe the BBC”

    1. The new culture secretary is apparently on the ball and already upsetting the far left, that’s got to include most people at the BBC, definitely channel 4 news.

  40. Tory plans to curtail HS2 in the North are a betrayal of Red Wall voters.
    Morning all as if we need any more proof ………everything our political classes and civil service come into contact with the Eff it up.
    Can you imagine have to have your family property compulsorily purchased and possibly even demolished ?

    1. Starmer. on Radio 4 News this morning, said he would complete the HS2 project if Labour became the Government. He also said any Labour government will be better than the present government but refused to say a Corbyn government would be better.

      2. That is an unsubstantiated statement if ever there were one! Given past evidence of Labour incompetence it would be a damned close-run thing.

      1. It might have been a better idea to have repaired some of Dr Breeching’s damage. Or run a passenger only service two way sky-rail around the middle of the M25.

  41. Latest News Black Death upgraded to Bubonic Plague:

    “Days after Austria imposed a lockdown on the unvaccinated, it has announced a full national Covid-19 lockdown starting on Monday.
    Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said it would last a maximum of 20 days and there would be a legal requirement to get vaccinated from 1 February 2022”

    Vorsprung Durch Pfizer!

    1. Stephen, this is very worrying. My daughter is in Austria. I have just messaged her – do you have a link to that information?

      Daughter says she’s heard rumours about compulsory jabs for all.

        1. Daughter has confirmed that it’s official in Austria. There is going to be the mother of all protests against this.

          3. That’s what worries me!! Vaccinated or not, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere where a gene therapy jab that never passed long term safety tests (words of Pfizer chief) is compulsory.

          8. Yes, very much so. They have had huge covid protests up til now – not covered in MSM of course

          9. Strange that bb2.
            There have been huge protests in Melbourne, yet we haven’t seen any mention of that in the MSM.

          11. Grundrecht (basic right) to demonstrate. They issue an “Anzeige” if they catch you breaking any rules like standing too close to other people. Then you put in an appeal. Apparently people hand write the appeals, with deliberate spelling mistakes. If it goes to court, they have to reproduce the text of the appeal without any changes, or the case can be thrown out on a technicality.
            They have issued hundreds of not thousands of these things, and apparently nobody has paid any fines yet. So I am told.

        2. Germany often copies what Austria does, and Germany is the biggest scalp in the EU. Especially as the Minister President of Bavaria which borders Austria is a very hard line pro-vaxxer.

    2. Stephen, this is very worrying. My daughter is in Austria. I have just messaged her – do you have a link to that information?

      Daughter says she’s heard rumours about compulsory jabs for all.

    3. Observation. If it is “unconscious” how does anyone know if it is racism or not? How are other people privy to your unconsciousness when, by definition even you aren’t conscious of it, how do they know your motivation for something when even you don’t if it is unconscious?

    4. My way of interpreting all this rather childish, invented, ongoing and abject nonsense is simple, one only has to look at nature to appreciate the colours of the most popular objects and other etc’s, perhaps the obvious fears of being certain colours has a terrible underlying psychological effect on some people. perhaps it offends them more than we realise. I don’t mind being a call whitey. It’s spot on, it’s what I am………..end of.

      I’ll get me white rain coat……………..

    5. My way of interpreting all this rather childish, invented, ongoing and abject nonsense is simple, one only has to look at nature to appreciate the colours of the most popular objects and other etc’s, perhaps the obvious fears of being certain colours has a terrible underlying psychological effect on some people. perhaps it offends them more than we realise. I don’t mind being a call whitey. It’s spot on, it’s what I am………..end of.

      I’ll get me white rain coat……………..

  43. Several people on this forum have been discussing the lunar eclipse.

    I was rather apprehensive about trying to see it because a poor old chap with a terminal disease was set upon by six policemen for mooning a traffic camera – something that was on his bucket list.

  44. OT – if you can catch this on PBS America – it is a stunning programme about something of which we knew absolutely nothing.

    https://www.pbs.org/show/harbor-holocaust/

    There is a comment by one of the ladies taking part – who fled Austria as a child; and then had to flee Shanghai a few years later – with absolutely NOTHING except what she stood up in and expecting that she might die – “There are many things much worse”. When I heard that, I thought of the perpetually offended slammer creekiter….

    2. It is interesting that no one “pulled the plug” on the performance, but meekly left.

    3. MC Angel (real name: Shauna O’Briain) is described on the Midi Music website as ‘a talented wordsmith, performing as a spoken word artist and hip-hop emcee as well as writing page poetry.’

      Which branch of the O’Briains would that be: Dublin or Cork?

    4. I am glad they have suffered a backlash and have been embarrassed. Let us hope it continues with other organisations.

  46. O/T Met up with some Nottlers and stayed at https://www.thefalcon-castleashby.com/eyas/eyas-restaurant

    The Chef Russel Bateman trained under Daniel Clifford and Marcus Wareing among others. He is also listed on Great British Chefs.

    The food was truly astonishing. I have never tasted anything so good. Chef even came out to our table to explain the dishes.

    The amuse bouche was incredible. Some Turbot in tempura batter with micro herbs running through it was out of this world.

    £75 for what was easily a Michelin Star dinner was a bargain.

    The rooms have all been remodelled by Lady Northampton and were so pleasant and relaxing i wish i had booked for the week and not just one night.

      2. Sir Basil and Lady Rosemary, Bayleaf the gardener, Sage the owl, Dill the dog and Parsley the lion.

      1. A long way from the urban areas and in beautiful rolling countryside. Too hilly for a football pitch. Lucky them.

  47. More important news on Global Warming. Very cold air about to arrive on the French Riviera. Oh how sad!

    1. In other news, Government announces 1 billion poound investment in research to extract blood from stones.

      1. Which quick witted trougher MP would have set up his shell company within seconds of the news?🤣🤣

    4. Yep, the TPA was all for this measure; for me it was yet more tax to pay on my pension (for which I saved from taxed earnings).

    1. But anyone who flees Austria in fear of compulsory jabbing will be hailed by the BBC as a far right wing extremist, and they will try to keep them out.

  50. Ollie Robinson – cricketer punished for messages sent when he was a silly teenager.
    Azim Rafiq – cricketer excused for messages sent when he was a silly teenager.

    I just can’t work it out…

    3. I think it’s time for all of these people to STFU on this matter, it’s getting very stupid and totally out of hand now.

  51. Ollie Robinson – cricketer punished for messages sent when he was a silly teenager.
    Azim Rafiq – cricketer excused for messages sent when he was a silly teenager.

    I just can’t work it out…

  52. On the continuing HS2 shambles – here’s a summary of the proposals from RailForums.co.uk:

    So what we’re left with is:

    HS2 Euston to Manchester to relieve WCML, coming in 2040s – going to happen anyway.
    Highspeed line from Rostherne to Warrington, coming in 2040s – plenty of time to scrap.
    Highspeed line from Manchester to Marsden, coming in 2040s – plenty of time to scrap.
    Highspeed line from Birmingham to East Midlands Parkway, coming in 2040s – plenty of time to scrap.
    Electrification of existing TP route between York and Manchester – previously planned, then scaled back, now recommitted.
    Electrification of MML to Sheffield – previously planned, then scaled back, now recommitted.
    Upgrades of ECML – most of it previously planned, then scaled back, now recommitted.
    Electrification of Leeds-Bradford – would likely have happened eventually anyway and unlikely to make much sense without doing the Calder Valley line.
    A study into West Yorkshire mass transit – yet another proposal after decades of failed attempts.

    So ultimately only two ‘new’ projects (the last two) both of which are making up for past failings with the rest resurrected plans from years previously to make up for the scrapping of the HS2 east leg.

  53. I’m still mortified by my emergency ambulance callout
    Covid has made the entire nation feel like their health is a burden on the NHS

    Judith Woods
    Since July, 10,000 more people have died from non-Covid illnesses than is usual in England and Wales, according to figures from the Office for
    National Statistics. We are in crisis on all fronts.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/11/18/survived-pandemic-see-sickly-nhs/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-onward-journey

    2. Doesn’t surprise me; an ex-neighbour had a fall and was badly injured. He nearly died because the ambulance took FOUR HOURS to get to him! The first-aider thought he was going to expire. Then A&E were going to send him home without treatment! It turns out he had a punctured lung as well as broken bones.

  54. Afternoon All

    There’s a sequel to “The Sound of Music” coming out.

    It’s about Nun who’s trying to get a family of children out of Austria to safety

    in order to avoid the terrible ReichsPfizer Jabbengruppenfuhrer.

    https://twitter.com/selfbankt/status/1461656478910238723?t=R_1FUfjvq8jesQLxHvzF_g&s=19

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4cbc904997d43d354b409bb65b81a5fedb157d6b8781b271900c34d0e7fe7d41.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c468dec92f49e47a55802d7a701db9dcb4f3a294ef0dcca5c4a4f62852ceabef.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8c799ee5a8ed8229e0a91276c405baec55d9ba12e3b28312e4a4d623e96b575a.png

    I am minded of the quote

    “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have
    been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make
    an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to
    say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as
    for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire
    city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror
    at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the
    staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had
    boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people
    with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs
    would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport
    and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would
    have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even
    more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and
    simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

    ―

    Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ,

    The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

    1. Hold on a moment. Hasn’t Pfizer been told it can keep its trials’ research secret until 2076?

      The CEO is probably more worried about the truth coming out than he is about “misinformation“ being spread.

  55. I wonder whether all these continuing “waves” of the plague (which show that vaccination was completely useless) are simply the Chinese releasing more and more different versions of the one they stared at the end of 2019.

    That’s to say, their biological war is alive and well and continuing.

    Just a thought.

    1. I think they are making it all up. It was the “be mindful of the pollen because the covid virus can get mixed up with it, roll along with the pollen” that really got me during the summer months. Hay fever.

    3. Its odd that the mutating virus rapidly became the Indian variant (D) some while ago and seems to have stopped. Maybe curry is the secret weapon.

  57. La Palma volcano, live updates today: eruption, tsunami warning and latest news. 19 November 2021.

    Cumbre Vieja eruption has been active for two months, having started on 19 September

    Thursday saw number of tremors spike, with over 300 recorded in 24 hours.

    Largest earthquake since eruption began – magnitude 5.1 – registered on Friday morning.

    Just an update folks!

    https://en.as.com/en/2021/11/19/latest_news/1637317873_935314.html

      1. Doom Goblin Greta should be dispatched to the Canary Islands immediately so that she can tell The Cumbre Vieja to its face that it is a very naughty volcano and how dare it pollute the air with its belching.

      2. Why isn’t she telling the world’s men to keep it in their trousers; and telling the world’s women to stop dropping them?

  59. Caroline is wearing a very smart new skirt this morning purchased from Marion’s charity shop in Corseul. It has an integral pettycoat and I noticed that a cm or two of this was showing beneath the skirt’s hemline. So I said, as one does: “Charley’s dead!”. At this moment Caroline is busy at her sewing machine making the necessary adjustments.

    And who amongst us men could honestly claim that they have not at one time or another left undone those flies that they ought to have done!

    Caroline has told me that she was once flashed by a man on a train when she was about 18 years old. She immediately contacted the guard and the flasher was ejected from the train at the next station. How many other Nottler ladies would admit that they too have been flashed? This reminds me of a joke I heard from my study-mate at school about 50 years ago:

    There are two people in a railway carriage compartment: a very plain, severe-looking woman and a man smartly dressed in a business suit who is busily engaged with the Times Crossword Puzzle.

    “Excuse me,” says the woman, “but you are disgracing yourself and insulting me. Your penis is sticking out.”

    The man looks down from his crossword and sees that indeed his penis is visible. He replies.

    “I am very sorry, madam. But I must add that you flatter yourself – my penis is not sticking out, it is hanging out.”

    1. My first boss told me that, when she was just 14, his sister was flashed by a bloke. Her response: “Put that away you silly man!”

      2. I had a Saturday job and later a vacation job in a jewellers in Peckham, south London. One of the women I worked with, who was great fun, had been a bus conductress for some years. She told us about the time a girl came down from the top deck and said that there was a man with his “thing” sticking out. “Lulu” (our nickname for her) stormed up the stairs and confronted the man. She also rang the bell to stop the bus. “Is that all you’ve got?” she asked, “Not much is it?” Then the driver appeared, Lulu’s husband, and the man was removed from the bus.
        She was not only great fun but fearless; I was very fond of her.

          5. It wasn’t too bad then. There was quite a large Jamaican community but they were nice and didn’t cause any bother. In fact, one day, a large Jamaican lady came in and was served by the assistant manager, quite a character. She asked if he had any fish knives and forks. “Yes, thank you,” he replied to her puzzlement.
            We used to like seeing their weddings as the ladies always wore such colourful dresses and hats; a real difference from all the navy blues and pastels at the weddings we went to.

          6. A good friend of mine went recently to a West Indian funeral of a popular ex-colleague. She said it was different, colourful and very moving.

    2. My first boss told me that, when she was just 14, his sister was flashed by a bloke. Her response: “Put that away you silly man!”

    3. There used to be a narrow alleyway that ran alongside the old Scarsdale Hospital, in Chesterfield, and it was a haven for the dirty-mac brigade. Nurses, in particular, were flashed at on their way to and from work. It was never easy to keep observations on the place due to its topography, though we did catch a few of the perverts by a pincer movement, leaving them nowhere to run.

      It was mainly the younger nurses who were distressed by these men; the older women knew how to handle them. I was investigating one occurrence when an older nurse told me that she had once been approached by one such perv, who took out his todger and waved in in front of her, asking: “What do you think about this then?”

      She said, “I didn’t even bat an eyelid. I simply replied: ‘Well, it looks a bit like a penis … only smaller.’ I never had any trouble again”.

  60. Caroline is wearing a very smart new skirt this morning purchased from Marion’s charity shop in Corseul. It has an integral pettycoat and I noticed that a cm or two of this was showing beneath the skirt’s hemline. So I said, as one does: “Charley’s dead!”. At this moment Caroline is busy at her sewing machine making the necessary adjustments.

    And who amongst us men could honestly claim that they have not at one time or another left undone those flies that they ought to have done!

    Caroline has told me that she was once flashed by a man on a train when she was about 18 years old. She immediately contacted the guard and the flasher was ejected from the train at the next station. How many other Nottler ladies would admit that they too have been flashed? This reminds me of a joke I heard from my study-mate at school about 50 years ago:

    There are two people in a railway carriage compartment: a very plain, severe-looking woman and a man smartly dressed in a business suit who is busily engaged with the Times Crossword Puzzle.

    “Excuse me,” says the woman, “but you are disgracing yourself and insulting me. Your penis is sticking out.”

    The man looks down from his crossword and sees that indeed his penis is visible. He replies.

    “I am very sorry, madam. But I must add that you flatter yourself – my penis is not sticking out, it is hanging out.”

    3. BOB is an absolute star; a cartoonist and humorist in the same league as Matt, and a thoroughly sensible and decent bloke.

    1. Nor is it particularly advisable for gay men to hold hands in public in certain areas. (unless obviously muslim)

      1. In Bangalore in 1996/7, where I spent 3 months, it was a common sight to see teenagers and young men holding hands ,,,, their sisters were usually kept indoors, as they would be difficult to sell** to any family if they were “soiled goods”. (** dowries were the custom … and in India women (negative value) were much less valuable than cows).

          1. I remember arriving in Bombay at 2 in the morniing and having to wait 2 hours for my case to arrive in the baggage hall (no other aircraft being processed).

            I visited India once … and afterwards I reckoned that was once too often.

          2. I didn’t like Bombay very much, although MiL lived in a leafy suburb. We went up to Marbleshwar (a former Hill Station in the Western Gats) for a few days & that was very enjoyable.

  63. How Britain and France learned to live with terror. 19 November 2021.

    Emmanuel Macron told his people last summer they would have to learn to live with Covid. A year-and-a-half on, France is unrecognisable to the country it once was: Covid passports are in force and face masks remain mandatory in many places. The president of France is not alone among Western leaders in his uncompromising approach to the pandemic: Holland, Austria and Germany are re-imposing restrictions and Boris Johnson, who used the ‘learn to live with it’ line in July, has refused to rule out a Christmas lockdown.

    Yet while Europe’s presidents and prime ministers appear ready to go to any length to protect their people from this virus, their approach to another threat – the danger posed by Islamist terrorism – is far more insouciant.

    In 2015, shortly after Islamists had slaughtered 130 people on the streets of Paris, Manuel Valls, the then prime minister of France, announced that this form of terrorism is ‘a lasting threat we are going to have to learn to live with’.

    Valls repeated his message in the summer of 2016 after 86 people had been massacred in Nice. His declaration prompted the New York Times to invite several prominent commentators to debate his remarks. Michael B. Mukasey, the United States attorney general from 2007 to 2009, was scathing, accusing the French prime minister of ‘shaming himself’ with his weak words. He then added a warning about the Islamists’ strategy:

    Islamist attacks are now so commonplace they come and go in media outlets within 24 hours.
    ‘Their goal is to impose their will on the world…by shaking the confidence of citizens that their governments can do what governments principally are there for, which is to keep them safe.’

    Islamist attacks are now so commonplace they come and go in media outlets within 24 hours. This indifference, this banalisation, is part of the ‘learn to live with it’ approach espoused by the French government under Socialist president Francois Hollande.

    Last week, Hollande, head of state at the time of the Bataclan attack, testified at the trial of 14 men accused of conspiring in the co-ordinated assault. He admitted that his government knew that Islamists were preparing attacks on France: ‘Every day we were under threat,’ he told the court. ‘We knew that there were operations being prepared, individuals who mixed with the flow of refugees, leaders in Syria. We knew all that.’

    In the lead-up to the assault on Paris, at least one member of the terrorist cell commuted between Europe and Syria as the operation was finalised, exploiting the route effectively opened up by Angela Merkel in August 2015.

    Hollande’s confession was seized on by Eric Zemmour, who, in a rally in Bordeaux last week, told his audience that the authorities ‘were aware of the danger and preferred that French people should die rather than prevent migrants coming to France’. Zemmour’s remarks elicited a strong response from Hollande and also Valls, who accused him of trying to ‘sow doubt and hate’.

    Yet this is what Islamists have been doing in France for decades. That they have been so successful is because of decades of institutional complacency. There has been some pushback from Paris under Emmanuel Macron, a realisation that a parallel society with values antithetical to Republican ones, has taken root. But it is too late? A 2018 report by the intelligence agency, the DGSI, stated that ‘Islamic fundamentalism has reached a critical threshold in France that from now on presents a veritable danger to the nation’s democracy.’

    Is something similar happening in Britain? Less than a fortnight after the murder of David Amess, police officers visited an MP who had expressed support for halal meat reforms. Strengthen your security detail, the MP was advised, and ‘be careful what you say publicly on this issue’.

    This is the terrifying ‘new normal’ that few are prepared to acknowledge: a Britain where terrorist attacks remain a constant source of fear for many. Sixteen years after 52 people lost their lives in the London bombings, Britain has made no real inroads against radical Islam in any shape or form. The Prevent programme is no longer fit for purpose. Britain’s asylum policy is not only ‘dysfunctional’, as the Home Secretary put it this week, but a danger to the nation. Meanwhile, the fear of being labelled racist pervades society to such an extent that a security guard at the Manchester Arena, on the night of May 22 2017, was wary of reporting his suspicions about the suicide bomber because he was scared he would be labelled a racist.

    This is what learning to live with terrorism looks like; not so much Keep Calm and Carry On but keep cowed and carry on. We hope it doesn’t happen to us, that we are not in the wrong place at the wrong time or, if we are, we have the incredible good fortune of the Liverpool taxi driver last Sunday.

    Instead, our leaders go to war against a virus, which they find much easier to fight. How strong and authoritative they feel as they curtail our liberty; for our own protection, they tell us. Yet when it comes to keeping us safe from Islamist extremism they offer us nothing other than evasions and empty promises.

    It’s not so much the people but an utterly decadent ruling class who would have nothing disturb their predominance.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-britain-and-france-learned-to-live-with-terror

    1. “…police officers visited an MP who had expressed support for halal meat reforms…”

      Do we know who this is?

      3. The friends, associates and families of jihadis who hav bombed, murdered and raped are never rounded up and questioned.

  65. I do hope that the thousands pouring across the Channel from yer France show their French double-vaccinated covid passports to Border Farce – as well as their Passenger Locator Forms….

  66. Andrew Marr to leave BBC for LBC to ‘get my own voice back’
    Published37 minutes ago

    Marr’s departure comes weeks after culture secretary Nadine Dorries questioned his impartiality following his interview with Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

    1. “…questioned his impartiality following his interview with Prime Minister Boris Johnson…

    1. The cashless society will make all the thousands of cash dispenser machines and bank robbers redundant.

    3. We have one family member who is so weird that nobody else is in danger of being the weird relative….!
      (and no, it is not me!)

  70. With apologies if this has already been posted:

    The Spectator has published an article citing official data from Public Health England, which states that for the over 30’s, “the rates of Covid infection per 100,000 are now higher among the vaxxed than the unvaxxed.”

    Well, this is awkward.
    The article, written by Lionel Shriver, is titled ‘The absurd theatre of vaccine passports’.
    It points out that according to official data, vaccines only offer about 17 per cent protection for the over-fifties.
    “As I observed then, this would mean the vaxxed and unvaxxed pose a comparable danger to each other,” writes Shriver.
    “All Covid apartheid schemes are therefore insensible.”
    She then clearly explains how the official data undermines the entire argument behind vaccine passports, which ban the unvaccinated from entering innumerable venues.

    “Fresher information has fortified this conclusion of the summer. In every age group over 30 in the UK, the rates of Covid infection per 100,000 are now higher among the vaxxed than the unvaxxed. Indeed, in the cohorts aged between 40 and 79, infection rates among the vaccinated are more than twice as high as among the unvaccinated. PHE’s fruitlessly rechristened body, the UK Health Security Agency, frantically clarifies that the data ‘should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness’, a caveat which I include for the sake of accuracy. But the differences in the infection rates are drastic enough for you to draw your own conclusions.”
    Shriver then summarises how that data demolishes the reason for implementing vaccine passport schemes.

    “Gatekeeping of pleasure palaces promotes the wrong impression — statistically, the lie — that the unvaccinated riff-raff exiled to the pavement pose a far graver threat of communicable disease than the diners in the nearby banquette who, like you, have righteously got the shot. In truth, the double-jabbed airline passenger in 24A can be just as risky a seat-mate as the great unwashed banished from the flight.”

    Meanwhile, the Times reports the results of another study which “found the double-jabbed are just as likely to pass on Covid-19 as unvaccinated people.”

    After Public Health England published the data, government bureaucrats begin to panic that people would use it to suggest vaccines were not that effective.

    Office for Statistics Regulation director Ed Humpherson called an urgent meeting with U.K. Health Security Agency during which he worried about the data having “the potential to mislead.”
    “We noted that these data have been used to argue that vaccines are ineffective,” Humpherson subsequently wrote.

    Isn’t it strange how the government and associated regulatory bodies appear to be afraid of raw data?
    If the vaccines are as effective as they tell us, why would they be worried?

    1. They haven’t had this week’s jab yet, that’s why. Ergo, they are No Longer Fully Vaxxed, and will be issued with bells to ring while they shout “Unclean!”, and will only be allowed out on the way to the booster jab centre.

      1. Would this be one of those tables where everyone is counted as Unvaxxed until 14 days after their second vaccination, thus neatly including vaccination side effects in the “unvaxxed” column?

          2. A 17 year old boy who needed to be double jabbed before he came to us had to go to hospital for myocarditis. Two of his schoolmates who had the second jab at the same time as he also ended up in hospital with the same disease.

            The MSM is extremely shy about publishing such information.

          4. It’s quite shocking the number of heart problems this stuff has caused young people, especially young men.

  71. Politics latest news: ‘Determination’ on all sides to end Brexit stand-off without Article 16, says Michael Gove

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/11/19/brexit-boris-johnson-frost-europe-article-16-ni-protocol/

    Let us not forget that just as the deal with the EU was about to sorted out and it seemed that Britain was going to stand firm on both Northern Ireland and fishing Michael Gove arrived in Brussels and the following day the deal was struck in which Britain allowed the N Ireland Protocol to be agreed, EU law to have prominence over UK law in Northern Ireland and much of our fishing industry to be betrayed.

    Gove is an extremely nasty piece of work. We must never forget it.

    I am sure that Gove must have some very damning blackmail material on Boris Johnson and that he would be happy to use it if Johnson does not do exactly as he is told.

    Britain must stop faffing about, invoke Article 16 and go for WTO terms.

  72. Politics latest news: ‘Determination’ on all sides to end Brexit stand-off without Article 16, says Michael Gove

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/11/19/brexit-boris-johnson-frost-europe-article-16-ni-protocol/

    Let us not forget that just as the deal with the EU was about to sorted out and it seemed that Britain was going to stand firm on both Northern Ireland and fishing Michael Gove arrived in Brussels and the following day the deal was struck in which Britain allowed the N Ireland Protocol to be agreed, EU law to have prominence over UK law in Northern Ireland and much of our fishing industry to be betrayed.

    Gove is an extremely nasty piece of work. We must never forget it.

    I am sure that Gove must have some very damning blackmail material on Boris Johnson and that he would be happy to use it if Johnson does not do exactly as he is told.

    Britain must stop faffing about, invoke Article 16 and go for WTO terms.

        2. I agree.

          But I quite like a lot of people with whom I disagree and I dislike a lot of people with whom I agree.

          I used to find that if I agreed strongly with an article in the Daily Express it made me think that I ought to examine that opinion more carefully. But I don’t think I have actually looked at the Daily Express since the cartoonist Giles was last in it.

      2. ‘eez a woorkin class geezer from Lower tarn………….That’s what the name Luton stands for.

    3. He’s absolutely right.
      Can someone send him the photo of the green shirted Paki team displaying their own Logo.

      1. I was depressed and called Lifeline…
        It connected to a call centre in Pakistan. I told them I was feeling suicidal. They got really excited and asked if I could drive a truck.

  75. Larf of the day:

    “Ireland places hospitals on war footing”..

    Know much about “war”, Paddy? Apart from you home grown IRA, that is…

    1. I have in my possession the service medals, including Boer War and First World War medals (Pip, Squeak and Wilfred) of my maternal grandfather – born in Dublin in 1877.

        1. After he retired from the army immediately after the end of the war, he settled in London and met the woman who was to become his wife and my grandmother.

    2. Two families meet on the road in the middle of the Afghan desert
      “Peace be with you,brother “, says one man, “pray, tell me, why is your wife walking in front of you, when the Koran says the woman must follow her man”

      “Well, when the Koran was written, there were no antipersonnel mines buried in the desert”

      1. I saw a clip of that foul old bag Esther Ransome saying that she thought an unvaccinated person who got Covid should be denied treatment and left to die.

      2. People are utterly stupid then. Even the government has said that, after being jabbed, you can still catch the disease and you can still pass it on. Why are they not listening?

      3. To borrow from the song:

        How did we believe him when he talked of Covid when we know he’s been a liar all his life?

      1. Because it seems most people have the memory and attention span of a Mayfly…..
        Thank God for the internet

        1. Sometimes I get the impression that the internet destroys more memories than it might create.
          It makes people more flippant in their views. Perhaps established views are less frequent.

  77. Meanwhile over in the US the term Shill will soon be redundant in favour of Bills…

    “On page 1,957 of the reconciliation bill, Democrats have included a $1.67 billion special tax handout to media companies, under the guise of helping “local” journalists.
    In reality the provision is a product of the DC lobbying swamp and will benefit large media corporations.
    Interestingly, when the AP reporters asked an AP spokesperson whether or not their own company would benefit, the AP declined to comment.”

    1. Slightly before that spot in the bill is a little snippet providing massive rebates for electric cars built in the US using union workers. Never mind the trade deal between the US, Canada and Mexico that has encouraged cross border cooperation, votes in Detroit are more important.

      At least Biden was honest when asked about the conflict, he repIied “I don’t know“

  78. Europe is stripping the unvaccinated of their rights and exploding the EU’s claim to be a champion of liberty

    As European governments introduce lockdowns only for the unjabbed, Brussels has been notably silent

    SILKIE CARLO
    19 November 2021 • 6:00am

    Europe is in the midst not only of a public health crisis, but also of a dangerous shift towards authoritarianism. The Austrian government’s introduction of a lockdown only for unvaccinated people this week was a precedent-setting assault on human rights: liberty, privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom from discrimination. And yet, if you follow the work of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, which sits in the heart of Vienna, you wouldn’t know that it is even happening.

    To this backdrop of institutional silence, other European countries are following in the footsteps of Austria, which now looks set to reintroduce lockdown for everyone. Slovakia and the Czech Republic have also imposed restrictions only on the unjabbed, while Germany did the same last night. Across Europe, two new classes of people – the vaccinated and the unvaccinated – were already being afforded differential liberties, thanks to passport schemes. Now, rather than persuade people of the benefits of vaccination, governments are opting to take away even more of their rights.

    Clearly, some part of the European dream has died. The heart of the European project was meant to be the human rights framework we share – a universal safety net “guarded by freedom and sustained by law” as Winston Churchill proclaimed, as he boldly led the first Congress of Europe in The Hague.

    But today, as parts of Europe slip into a period of illiberalism, it seems as though that safety net has failed. It has morphed into a safetyist catch net that is constricting rights beyond recognition, supposedly for “the greater good”. Over recent years, populations in Europe have been increasingly surveilled and censored. Now they are being discriminated against based on their medical status.

    The EU purports to be a guardian of individual rights and equality before the law. But European institutions have barely uttered a word of criticism about vaccine segregation, or indeed the enduring impact on social division, discrimination, and civil liberties that centralised medical identity systems, like vaccine passports, will have for years to come.

    Rather, the EU has proven a managerial power centre that administers vaccine IDs more efficiently than the vaccines themselves. The truth is that many in the EU establishment wanted vaccine IDs long before the pandemic. And to date, more than 590 million EU Digital Covid Certificates have been issued, meaning that the majority of European citizens now negotiate their freedoms and opportunities through a medical ID.

    The result is that millions of healthy people, who happen to be disproportionately working class or from minority ethnic groups – many of whom will have immunity to Covid anyway from having contracted the virus – are being turned into a new European sub-class, denied leisure, free movement, and social and economic opportunities.

    As Europeans are thrust into this new two-tier society, the human rights balance is supposedly this: that unvaccinated people pose a health risk to others, and so it is proportionate to take away their liberties to protect public health. Yet this assertion lacks a logical or scientific evidence base.

    Data from around the world – including Israel and the UK, where the overwhelming majority of the adult population is at least double-vaccinated – shows that the vaccines do not provide perfect protection against infection, even if they do significantly reduce the risk of death and hospitalisation.

    Most disturbingly, there does not appear to be even an air of regret among those cheerleading vaccine segregation. It is as though they are relishing the opportunity to police the unvaccinated, to treat the dissenters as diseased, and to make this unwanted component of society invisible.

    Now, the draconian vaccine pass policies of Europe are on our own doorstop. Already, unvaccinated people in the UK are losing their jobs and, as of last week, English law requires unjabbed care workers to be sacked. Wales and Scotland have mandated Covid passes, and Northern Ireland is set to require Covid passes even for pubs and restaurants in coming weeks.

    The UK has a de facto travel ban for many unvaccinated people, owing to the 10-day quarantine rule on return and extortionate PCR test requirements – demands that some would-be holiday-makers will struggle to meet. Could there be lockdowns for the unvaccinated in Britain? Dominic Raab refused to rule out Austria-style rules yesterday.

    This is a perilous moment for liberalism in Europe. Britons must maintain the courage to go our own way and defend liberty with all our might. Sadly, the institutions we expected to protect our rights are failing. Instead, we will have to fight for them.

    **********************************************************************
    2148 BTL comments

    Phil Beharrell
    19 Nov 2021 6:30AM
    Keir Starmer is a renowned human rights lawyer. He should be all over this, yet he is silent.

    The Liberal Democrats make a lot of noise about inclusion and discrimination. They should be all over this, yet they are silent.

    Boris Johnson seeks to emulate Churchill, yet he is overseeing discrimination and division in the UK right now.

    The last paragraph is right. We are going to have to fight for this. Incompetence only gets you so far. This is not about a virus.

    Ruth Fry
    19 Nov 2021 6:44AM
    The recent developments are extremely sinister. Thank you Silkie for this article . Many people are terrified to take more so called vaccines due to previous adverse reactions and also their own personal principles. I never ever thought in my 74 years the world would come to this . Little wonder suicides are increasing along with untreated serious illnesses . The world we once knew has become a frightening place and our only recourse is to fight back and fight back HARD to regain our rights and liberties. Do not let the control freak pro lockdowners gain control.

    Stephen Smith
    19 Nov 2021 6:42AM
    Being vaccinated does NOT stop you from catching and transmitting the virus! The vaccine only protects you from it’s worst effects. The young unvaccinated – who are unaffected themselves by the virus – therefore pose no threat to the vaccinated. What is the problem here?

    John Bankhead
    19 Nov 2021 6:57AM
    “The EU has shown its illiberal double standards”

    Scratch the surface of modern liberals and you will find a totalitarian underneath.

    Owen Sanders
    19 Nov 2021 6:28AM
    Thank you Silkie for the excellent work you do.

    It amazes me that opposing voices to these measures come largely from the political fringes, whilst supposedly liberal institutions like the EU treat such radical political interventions as totally normal and acceptable. Such cavalier disregard for the consequences.

    Silkie Carlo is the director of Big Brother Watch

    2. This is already happening in Scotland. Entry to certain venues is only possible with a vaccination certificate. The Scottish government is looking at clamping down even further. So they probably will.

  79. Had a doctors appt this morning .

    Need blood tests etc next week .. have been experiencing aching muscles , long walks have become difficult and climbing the stairs a real pain in the past 9 months or so .

    A form of Mylagia , hope to goodness it isn’t associated with the Oxford jab.

      1. polymyalgia rheumatica, possibly.

        An environmental exposure. New cases of polymyalgia rheumatica tend to come in cycles, possibly developing seasonally. This suggests that an environmental trigger, such as a virus, might play a role. But no specific virus has been shown to cause polymyalgia rheumatica.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

  80. Friday afternoon distraction

    Rod Liddle
    Prostitutes are stigmatised because their trade is filthy
    From magazine issue: 20 November 2021

    Exciting news from Durham University, which is helping its students to become ‘sex workers’. This noble institution is offering two courses in the various forms of harlotry. My only concern is that at present they do not actually offer an academic qualification in these subjects — at the very least an undergraduate degree in, say, Practical Whoring. Perhaps followed by an MA in Deconstructing the Topless Hand-Shandy1897-1913. Such courses would probably result in more lucrative career opportunities than many of the more traditional subjects which students pay through the nose to study. I am attending a dinner at Durham University next month and fervently hope that some of the ambitious young ladies on these courses will be in attendance.

    The university has reacted to the inevitably outraged press coverage by insisting that it is not encouraging students to enter the sex industry, merely helping them to do so more safely. I would therefore expect similar courses are in the pipeline — on how to shoplift safely, for example. The university authorities have also said that they wish to ‘destigmatise’ those people they call sex workers. It is my contention that prostitutes, rent boys, escort girls and so on are stigmatised because their trade is filthy, immoral, exploitative, illegal and spiritually demeaning for everyone involved. I think it would be useful, then, for us as a society to continue to stigmatise whoring and suspect that for most normal people that stigma will not abate, as the university for some reason wishes.

    A good thing too. Very little annoys left-liberals more than stigma occasioned by judgmental morality (what other kind of morality is there?). So for the past 40 or 50 years those busy little monkeys in the fields of sociology, psychology and politics have been attacking stigma with machetes wherever they can find it; almost always to our general detriment.

    Most obviously, the stigma once associated with divorce has been all but expunged, and the consequence is that we have much, much more divorce, with all the anguish, bitterness and economic deprivation which almost always follows, not to mention the huge damage inflicted on the children. Similarly there is no longer a stigma attendant upon ‘living in sin’, and so people do it with happiness and impunity and would think it hilarious that anybody should cavil.

    And yet in the case of both divorce and unmarried parents, the stigma — devolved from Christian teaching — existed primarily to protect the children. And now that protection has gone. Children born to unmarried cohabitees are likely to see their parents separate much earlier than if they had been married, and separation damages a child’s education and future life chances.

    For decades we have been lectured about the need to remove the stigma from single parenthood and so we have many, many more single parents, at enormous cost to the taxpayer. Every longitudinal study I have seen — by which I mean studies which examine actual outcomes — shows that children brought up by a lone parent tend to get worse grades in school, are more prone to addiction, far less likely to secure high-earning occupations and rather more likely to end up in prison or with serious mental health issues. The stigma against single parent-hood, in other words, was beneficial to our society and potent in dissuading the young from making that particular life choice.

    Then there is mental illness. Once again we are warned not to stigmatise people who are a bit doolally and certainly not refer to them as a bit doolally. The grammar of mental illness is now very rigorously policed. The result has been a veritable explosion in mental health afflictions, especially within schools which now consider themselves, rather than the parents, the guardians of each student’s mental health. In a sense, some over-diagnosed conditions, including stress, anxiety and depression, have become desirable afflictions for young teenagers, marking them out as being ‘exceptional’, much as is being pansexual or wishing to transition. Except it isn’t exceptional any more; it has almost become the norm.

    We have also been instructed not to attach stigma to more serious mental health conditions such as schizophrenia. Being scared of a schizophrenic, we are told, is simply wrong. The academic Dr Peter Morrall addressed this issue in a paper written in 2002, entitled ‘Madness, Murder and Media’: ‘I argue here that the media is not simply engaging in yet another a “moral panic” by highlighting “mad murders”, but reflecting justifiable anxiety about the perceived danger from mentally disordered people in the community and the apparent ineptitude of mental health services and personnel.’

    The most recent — and most ludicrous — manifestation of stigma-banning is of course ‘fat-shaming’ or ‘body-shaming’: a dreadful thing which we should never, ever do. The state of being a sweating, wheezing, gargantuan lard-bucket, you see, is not a question of personal irresponsibility and thus a matter for guilt and shame; that weightiness has been imposed on the individual by nameless external agents.

    As a consequence, 40 per cent of kids in London and more than 36 per cent of British adults are classified as overweight. The reason they are overweight is that they eat too much and get too little exercise. It is the individual’s fault, not the fault of multinational food companies or — even more ridiculously — poverty. I wonder what the rate of obesity would be if there was a bit more vindictive and pointed fat-shaming around?

    What Durham University and the rest of them get wrong is that stigma is not arbitrary, but a function of social cohesiveness. It works.

        1. I disagree slightly. Naturally, I can’t find the images – but I distinctly recall photographs of chubby (hush my mouth) women looking a bit like Ena Sharples serving meals and being out and about during the Second War.

          1. I haven’t come across such images, but I bow to your superior knowledge (after all, I wasn’t born until after the war).

    3. Rod Liddle talked about stigma on GBNews a couple of days ago.

      His point about how people can be pushed into a better place by stigma reminds me of my views about boredom Boredom is a useful tool which schools should use more often.

      When I was at Blundell’s in the early 1960s there was an hour between tea and prep called Quiet Hour. In this hour if you stayed in your house you could not play records or listen to the radio – you had to be quiet and read a book or do your school work. This was very boring for many of us but we did not have to stay in our houses – we you could find other things to do outside the house.

      You could book a squash court or a fives court, the gym was open, the woodwork shops and metalwork shops were open, the music school and practice rooms were open, the pottery was open, the Art School was open and the library was open. In the summer term the swimming pool was open as were the cricket nets and tennis courts. None of these things were compulsory so you decided for yourself what interested you. Of course things which needed the presence of a teacher such as workshops, the gym and the swimming pool were supervised by a member of staff. (And of course there were choir practices and school play rehearsals during this hour which you had to attend if you had committed yourself to do so.)

      Several of the things that I found for myself out of boredom during Quiet Hour have remained firm interests throughout my life.

  81. Flying over the Atlantic
    An Airbus 380 is on it’s way across the Atlantic. It flies consistently at 800 km/h at 30,000 feet, when suddenly a Eurofighter with Tempo Mach 2 appears.

    The pilot of the fighter jet slows down, flies alongside the Airbus and greets the pilot of the passenger plane by radio: “Airbus, boring flight isn’t it? Now have a look here !”

    He rolls his jet on its back, accelerates, breaks through the sound barrier, rises rapidly to a dizzying height, then swoops down almost to sea level in a breathtaking dive. He loops back next to the Airbus and asks, “Well, how was that?”

    The Airbus pilot answers: “Very impressive, but now you look !”

    The jet pilot watches the Airbus, but nothing happens. It continues to fly stubbornly straight, with the same speed. After 15 minutes, the Airbus pilot radios, “Well, how was that?”

    Confused, the jet pilot asks, “What did you do?”

    The AirBus pilot laughs and says, “I got up, stretched my legs, walked to the back of the aircraft to use the washroom, then got a cup of coffee and a chocolate fudge pastry.

    The moral of the story is:

    When you are young, speed and adrenaline seems to be great. But as you get older and wiser, you learn that comfort and peace are more important.

    This is called S.O.S.: Slower, Older, but Smarter.

    Dedicated to all my friends who are like me, now realising that it is time to slow down and enjoy the rest of the trip. dedicated to the seniors

    2. And then the Airbus crashes – “Pilot error”. Never the fault of the manufacturer. A chap I know who has been a pilot with KLM for over 30 years says that – if possible – he will avoid either piloting – or being a passenger in – an Airbus.

      1. Christo (ex Gresham’s) is now an aerospace design engineer. He is currently working for a firm in Leighton Buzzard and has been busy on projects to do with Airbus.

          1. I remember seeing the crash at the air show. I have always thought that the pilot thought, “need to pull up sharply to clear these trees” and the computer said “outside the envelope” and over rode the command.

          3. The plane actually did exactly as designed. With the power deliberately retarded it flew gently into the trees whereas without the computer it would have plunged (stalled) into the forest. Little difference at the end of the day I admit, but humans will always find a way of defeating technology!

          4. The plane actually did exactly as designed. With the power deliberately retarded it flew gently into the trees whereas without the computer it would have plunged (stalled) into the forest. Little difference at the end of the day I admit, but humans will always find a way of defeating technology!

    3. So all the cobwebs and dust aren’t so bad after all eh TB 😄

      That reminds me of an airline pilot who says, Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking, we are now flying at 35 thousand feet speed of 520 miles per hour clear skies and will be arriving at our destination in 4 hours thirty five minutes. Please relax and enjoy your flight. I am switching over to the fully automatic pilot now and nothing can go wrong….click …can go wrong….click can go wrong…..

      1. The weary pilot and his co have just made their final announcement before the landing, after having a busy week backwards and forward to Spain and Tenerife. A day on the beach is next the co says, what are you going to do Captain ? Well I wouldn’t mind giving that new young cabin crew lady a night out and having a few (or words to that effect) voluptuous moments with her, but first I have to take a dump and a snooze when I get the the hotel. The cabin crew realise that he has left the mike open and the young in question lady rushes forward to bang on the door and tell them. Towards the front A man in the isle seats reaches out to stop her and says give him a chance my lovely he’s going for a crap and a snooze first.

      2. That reminds me of an airline pilot who says, Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking, you are now flying at 35 thousand feet speed of 520 miles per hour clear skies and you will be arriving at your destination in 2 minutes thirty five seconds. Please relax and enjoy the rest of your flight. I have switched over to the fully automatic pilot now and if you look out of the starboard windows you will see me in a life raft.

        1. During the Bosnia wars a group of chaps had boked a 5 day golf holiday in Ireland. !6 of us met up at Stanstead and boarded to fly to Cork. The pilot announced “Good morning ladies and gentlemen this is Captain Milosevic speaking we are now flying towards Birmingham and I think we all shouted TURN LEFT, TURN LEFT !!

      3. “….and if you look out of the starboard windows you will see a dinghy in the ocean – that’s me waving!”

    4. Reminds me of the story about the old bull and the young bull surveying a field full of cows.

      Young Bull: Let’s run down to the field and have a couple of cows!
      Old Bull: Let’s amble down and have the whole damned lot.

      (This one must be just as old as some of NotoNanny’s jokes!)

      1. A bit like the farmer whose cockerel was not too good at servicing the hens. So he brought in a new one in. In one afternoon the new red rooster had sorted 40 plus hens and was laying down as the farmer approach he thought the bird had died and then looked up to see 4 buzzards hovering above. The farmer bent down and gave the rooster a prod assuming it was dead from exhaustion. The rooster opened it eyes and said i’m all right and I reckon they’ll be down in a minute. 🐔🦃🦅

          1. I saw him live once at Hendon rugby club folk night, great stuff.
            Sister Josephine was one of my favorites. A blood funny Nun she was.

        1. I feel about 30 until I try to leap out of bed in the morning…arthritic knees reminds me that I am indeed 67 🙁

          2. Full of puff……..
            Have you every played Easy Like Sunday Morning Richard ?……..It’s almost the same as Puff the Magic Dragon.

  83. ‘Sexist’ Benny Hill is back on TV for first time in nearly 20 years: Freeview channel serves up Christmas season of old favourites.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10221053/Sexist-Benny-Hill-TV-time-nearly-20-years.html#newcomment

    BTL Comment

    Yes, Benny Hill was vulgar. But he lived in a kinder and more tolerant age than today and for all his naughtiness there was a certain innocence about him.

    I would add that he was a personification of a seaside postcard by Donald McGill.

    1. I saw this announcement. I’ll bet you a farthing that the programme will be edited “so as not to offend”….

      2. #metoo! I hated him but please bring him back! A fabulous antidote to the moronic, joyless b*stards!

  85. Evening, all. The cancelling of HS2 in the north is probably the most sensible thing Bojo has done – a pity he didn’t cancel the whole thing. It was never viable, it didn’t benefit more than a few and was a huge white elephant, not to mention wrecking pristine parts of England.

    1. Good evening, Conwy. But HAS he cancelled it? Really? He is the walking personification of the U-turn.

  86. Two beggars in London

    Ali and Habib are beggars.
    They beg in different areas of London …

    Habib begs just as long as Ali does, but only collects £2 to £3 every day.

    Ali brings home a suitcase FULL of £10 notes, drives a Mercedes, lives in a mortgage-free house and has a lot of money to spend.

    Habib asks Ali
    ‘I work just as long and hard as you do but how is it that you bring home a suitcase full of £10 notes every day?’

    Ali says, ‘Look at your sign, what does it say’?

    Habib’s sign reads
    ‘I have no work, a wife and 6 kids to support’.

    Ali says No wonder you only get £2- £3

    Habib says ‘So what does your sign say’?

    Ali shows Habib his sign. It reads:

    ‘I only need another £10 to move back to Pakistan’.

  88. That’s me for today. At this time 56 years ago I was at London Airport (as we used to call it) waiting for a plane to take me and my bride to Glasgow and then drive to Comrie for a week’s honeymoon. It snowed the second day!

    Four miles on my bike in the sun this arvo. Arm still a bit sore but I’ll risk some red medicine.

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain.

        1. Don’t tell me that’s where you spent your honeymoon! No wonder you’re on missus number – what is it, three?

        2. Goodness me .

          Aunts and Uncles used to stay at Dunira in August for you know what , and I stayed with them , I was 12 years old . I hated plucking grouse !

  89. The BBC again (pt. 731), 6pm news, Radio 4, Austria: by describing the Freedom Party as ‘far-right’ and ‘vaccine-sceptic’…well, you can complete the sentence.

  90. An Afghan escaping from Taliban walks in through the Pakistani border…

    He is immediately stopped by Pakistani border patrol agents and asked to identify himself. He stops and says he’s the Minister of Ports & Shipping of Afghanistan.

    Pakistani border officer: “But there is no sea in Afghanistan. How can you be the Minister of Ports & Shipping?”

    Afghan: “Don’t you have a Minister for Law & Justice in Pakistan?”

    1. BTL comment:
      ‘Congratulations to the jury for having the courage to do the right thing…’

      1. I fear that they are all in serious danger now.
        To encourage future jurors to give the “right” verdicts.

    1. Thank God.
      Poor kid.
      What a disgusting abuse of process. I’d say I hope he sues for millions for the malicious prosecution but their taxpayers would pick up the tab.
      Really Bingham and others should go to prison for this.

  94. Very sad, but I’m afraid QED.
    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/irfan-halim-tributes-doctor-died-covid-frontline-b967135.html?itm_source=Internal&itm_channel=homepage_trending_article_component&itm_campaign=trending_section&itm_content=4

    It came just two months after he had taken up work on the Covid intensive care unit (ICU) wards at Swindon Hospital, where it is believed he contracted the virus before collapsing during a shift on September 10. Dr Halim was fully vaccinated and wore full personal protective equipment (PPE) at all times during his time on the wards.

    1. The victims look like typical arrogant left wing bullies, I am sorry to say. One of them was armed and pointing a gun at Rittenhouse. Reading the accounts of what happened, it appeared that they (three grown men) ganged up on a 17 year old and came off worse.
      The whole episode is terrible, but it does seem to be the right verdict.

      1. Having watched the tapes of the incident and listened to much of the trial, it was the only possible verdict. I assume you are aware that the judge on three separate occasions went for the prosecution for its abuse of law?

    2. Didn’t he have the gun illegally? If he is free or not depends on how vindictive the prosecution is.

      2. No, he had the gun legally. The judge tossed out that count because it was completely false. The law in question pertains to sawn off shot guns and the like, Kyle’s gun had not been tampered with and was a 100% legitimate weapon. The false accusation that he was not supposed to be carrying the gun was an entirely media driven piece of false information.

  96. Number of Channel migrants hits record 4,000 this month – with eleven days still to go – as Macron takes swipe at Priti Patel by accusing UK of ‘provocation’
    A total of 78 people crossed by small boat today, according to official figures
    Came as Emmanuel Macron branded UK ‘provocative’ over the migrant crisis
    Priti Patel attacked the EU’s open borders, pointing finger at Brussels for crisis
    Agreement with France for drones and trackers to be used to monitor smugglers

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10221387/Macron-accuses-Britain-provocation-Channel-migrant-crisis.html

  98. I wonder whether the inevitable riots in the USA will feature a white lives matter (as long as they are antifa/leftists/wokeratti) motif.

  99. Rittenhouse:

    This is the BBC’s lead:
    “A US teenager who shot dead two men during racial justice protests has been cleared of homicide and all other charges after claiming self-defence.”
    Bastards.
    He was found Not Guilty of all charges!!!

    1. Indeed, but was the comment true?
      Yes, even though the truth was shrunken rather than stretched in this case.

  101. Do we know of the make-up of the Rittenhouse jury beyond it being of five men and seven women?

      1. Here’s CNN on the case:

        The family of one of the victims, Anthony Huber, said in a statement “there is no accountability for the person who murdered our son. It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street,” the statement said of the verdict. “We hope that decent people will join us in forcefully rejecting that message and demanding more of our laws, our officials, and our justice system.”

        Was Rittenhouse a rioter?

        https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/19/us/kyle-rittenhouse-trial-friday/index.html

        1. Tucker Carlson provided the most eloquent answer to your question a couple of days ago.

          I think Kyle perhaps ought to consider joining one of the armed services – it might offer him a degree of protection from any numbskull ‘Social Justice Warrior’.

          1. Have you seen the latest army recruitment ads? They’re absolutely nuts. The sort that would put off those normally wanting to serve.

            The idea of the sort of pathetic, wet, Left wing, anti nation, wokist drip their adverts might recruit being in combat is laughable.

          2. I’d add that the real danger Kyle Rittenhouse faces is having his life destroyed – the Left do not forgive those who defeat them. Lady T broke them, Trump defied them, he’s actually killed their army.

            They – social media, the twitter mob will never ever leave him alone. He’ll either need a new identity – and they’ll set out to expose that – or they’ll kill him virtually or more likely, physically. Their hatred is never ending.

        2. No, but I suspect that what will happen tonight will make “his riot” look like a gentle stroll.

        3. Perhaps Huber’s parents might want to accept that their criminal son if he hadn’t been there looting, rioting and attacking people would now not be injured and that he is a victim of his own actions.

          Decent people wouldn’t have rioted to destroy other people’s property. Decent people didn’t set fire to rubbish bins and run them toward the police. Yes, we demand more of our laws – to be enforced and to have arrested Huber. Yes, your officials should have acted by arresting the rioters. Ditto plod.

          You see, what you’re calling for would have prevented your son being killed. Blame them.

      1. And I fear he has worse to come. That Democrat politician in the NYT piece is a disgrace.

        Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, a Democrat, has released a statement in response to the Rittenhouse verdict: “No verdict will be able to bring back the lives of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, or heal Gaige Grosskreutz’s injuries, just as no verdict can heal the wounds or trauma experienced by Jacob Blake and his family. No ruling today changes our reality in Wisconsin that we have work to do toward equity, accountability and justice that communities across our state are demanding and deserve.”

        1. Incredible. They are still going with the narrative, blatantly ignoring the facts and the verdicts.

        2. Given the Not Guilty verdicts, perhaps, just perhaps those tempted to Riot will think twice about the possibility of being shot?

          1. The national guard are there en masse to stop the expected rioting. It’s as if the Left can’t control themselves when they don’t get their way.

        3. OK, let’s look at the facts then:

          If the three – all with a string of convictions, Rosenbaum for paedophilia – had not been there, destroying private property then they wouldn’t have been shot at.

          If they had not been set on attacking Kyle then he would not have shot at them.

          If the police had stopped the looting, rioting and thuggery of, well, scum from the outset, Rittenhouse – and lots of other citizens – wouldn’t have felt (however misguided) it necessary to protect property.

          The fault, therefore, lies with the Left wing democrats for allowing the mob to rule because 1. They have never worked a day in their lives and didn’t care about property destruction, 2. They liked the protest as it annoyed their political enemy – Trump.

          It is very hard to reconcile the abject and utter failure of the state – a deliberate failure. We saw the same here. The looting mob should have been shot as soon as they got together. It was just the usual sewage whinging. That the Left did nothing out of spite immediately makes Rittenhouse inncocent and the real criminals are the Democrats.

    2. So one of the ‘victims’ was armed and pointing his gun at Rittenhouse when he was shot? Er, isn’t that the definition of self-defence?

    2. Is the massive spike in cases not directly related to the testing cycle that is part of the vaccination process?

      1. The case numbers just need to be seen in comparison with hospitalised covid patients in graphical form over the last 18 months to show the scaremongering for what it is.

          3. Thanks. The BBC just shows graphs that appear alarming. One just has to look at this site to see that the world is not ending. At least, not from Covid-19.

    1. Supper?

      I curried the leftover lamb casserole we had last night , Moh cooked the rice , followed by a pair of small ripe paw paw , with a squirt of lime

      2. Sounds good. In fact I had a chicken curry with a lot of fruit & a saag aloo gobi maans. Missy got most of the chicken after I had sucked away the spice.

  105. Has it occured to the geniuses in Whitehall that what the North might want is lower taxes and jobs? I know council management think they’re the centre of the world, but if those fools were limited in budget and grants offered in the form of say, no corporation tax, business rates or VAT for, say 10 years that business would set up there and employ the locals?

  106. I am calling it a day, too. Early start tomorrow. Unlike peddy, it seems, I am not going to bed sans supper; tuna pasta bake with salad and a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Goodnight, everyone.

  109. The latest conspiracy theory. The earthquakes we are seeing in La Palma and as far as Heraklion on Crete are different. That on La Palma in the Canaries are a grid cluster and unnatural. Those on Crete are in a natural pattern.

    Either way potential eruptions will wipe out the East Coast of America with tsunami waves of 30 metres.

      1. Chinese are probably now ahead of the game technologically. They have been embedded in American military, research institutes and ‘Democratic’ government for decades.

        In the UK the Chinese are running our supposed places of academic excellence such as Oxbridge, now devoted to medical research having dropped the Arts, Pharma such as Wellcome and GSK laboratories and Imperial College. How else would a dud like Ferguson be given credibility after a career signposted by monumental past failure.

        Whitty, Vallance, Van Tam and their seniors are boughten men. Bezos is behind much of it with the lesser henchmen including Gates, Soros and our wretched politicians.

          1. I hope so but doubt that Chinese infiltration will serve the American cause. Quite the reverse. The carrier fleet are WWII responses and are essentially redundant and prone to destructive attack from missiles and lasers mounted from satellites orbiting in space. They are no platform for fighter jets anymore.

            With Biden in the White House, a senile bag of bones, America is now on the brink.

            Edit: Our lot are no better. The Johnson government have no understanding of geopolitics. They understand nothing except grifting and graft for their own reward at our expense.

    4. If you’re referring to eruptions in Crete and La Palma causing a tsunami then it would be the east cost of America being wiped out, wouldn’t it?

    5. I’ve been yipping on about the La Palma volcano for ages now (it started on September 19th)
      It has spewed out millions of tons of hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere for nearly 2 months and the lunatics at Crap 26 think we can control anything!

  110. I know I am going to met with a barrage of disagreement but, what the feck was a 17 year old doing with an assault weapon? Like the 20 year old moron who shot and killed numerous primary aged children and staff members in Sandy Hook School in CT- how was he able to amass such an arsenal of weapons? I’ll tell you why- because the NRA and others encourage gun purchases. You can buy guns in sodding Walmart FFS.
    That could have been my school, my town and the kids I taught.
    I loathe guns and the gun culture. The 2nd Amendment was written when bears, mountain lions, native Americans and even the Brits, on occasion, were a threat.
    Have fun abusing me- I don’t give a damn, frankly.

      1. Or to have guns to threaten Rittenhouse and the family property he was defending. The rioters should have been stopped by armed Police.

        In the UK the criminal fraternity have knives and guns whereas the rest of us are reliant on armed police for our protection. America is as fractured a society as we are. I am not keen on guns but would like to have a Glock
        under my pillow given the lawlessness we are witnessing and the total absence of traditional policing of serious crime.

      2. Or to have guns to threaten Rittenhouse and the family property he was defending. The rioters should have been stopped by armed Police.

        In the UK the criminal fraternity have knives and guns whereas the rest of us are reliant on armed police for our protection. America is as fractured a society as we are. I am not keen on guns but would like to have a Glock
        under my pillow given the lawlessness we are witnessing and the total absence of traditional policing of serious crime.

    3. Trouble is how can you possibly reduce the number of guns in the US?

      Even with the regular school and shopping mall massacres, people are still not prepared to give up their guns, in fact it gets worse with the standard reaction being to buy more arms for self defense.

      I suppose that they were lucky that this kid only had a shotgun and not one of those military grade assault weapons.

      You are being unfair to Walmart, they have come up with a lot of restrictions on gun purchase that go beyond government rules. Far easier to go to a gun fair and buy a nice handgun or semi automatic sporting (?) gun where there are no controls.

      1. Re Walmart- I am only saying what it was like when I was in NC. No, gun control in the US is never going to happen.

      2. How many lives are lost in “school and shopping mall massacres” compared to those lost in day-to-day murders in the streets of DC, New York, Chicago, Baltimore etc. – I think the latter well outnumber the mass mall/school shootings

        How many lives are lost in the Democrat held counties compared to the 90% of counties which are Republican held – the former HUGELY outnumber the latter

    4. Lotl,

      Please calm down. Life in UK is different to life in the USA

      Here, we have a basically an unarmed Police Service , the (un)Armed Forces, who if they shoot at any Terrorists,
      will be pursued for 50 years,, however those immune to prosecution work in Ali’s Snack Bar or/for Drug Dealers

      We, like the Red Squirrels,need to get our country back

      1. Tryers, I agree with you about getting our country back and I thoroughly dislike what is going on here. But I cannot and will not support guns.

    5. Lotl,

      Please calm down. Life in UK is different to life in the USA

      Here, we have a basically an unarmed Police Service , the (un)Armed Forces, who if they shoot at any Terrorists,
      will be pursued for 50 years however those immune to prosecution work in Ali’s Snack Bar or for Drug Dealers

      We, like the Red Squirrels,need to get our country back

    6. Your view is as valid as any other and I would certainly not disagree with you. But, from what I can see parts of the US are like the wild west… Only even more wild and dangerous these days. Perhaps we are very lucky in the UK to have never had much of a gun culture.

    7. The 2nd Amendment is certainly flawed, Lotl. An arms escalation that only the manufactures benefit from. The UK’s weapons restrictions are not a bad idea, but it often seems that villains have few problems circumventing them and obtaining whatever ordinance they want.

      1. That’s the problem, isn’t it? If the police are unarmed then, of course, the bad guys can always get hold of weapons. I heard today, or read, that some guy had been apprehended near Buck House with a machete and cocaine. Now cocaine I can kind of understand but machetes? When did they become part and parcel of life on the streets in the UK?
        One of my issues with guns, Mola, is that there are so many people in the US who do not secure them. Too many kids are killed or maimed by being able to get hold of loaded guns that stupid idiots have left unsecured.
        My life has been in education and when I read about that school massacre in CT, where I used to live and teach, I wept. I was in NC at the time but I cried buckets.
        And do you know, there are bastards out there who say it was all a hoax.

        1. One of the trade offs used to be that if the police did not carry guns then the killing of a policeman would automatically be punished by the death penalty.

          Anyone have views on that?

          1. They don’t even give them whole life these days – unless the perpetrator is a cop (Wayne Couzens). I’m thinking of the case where a body builder/bouncer/thug killed a police officer in cold blood with a concealed handgun and had his whole life term reduced to 40 years as it would have ‘breached his human rights’.

          2. We also need to leave the ECHR and the ECJ while repealing the Human Rights Act.

            Does that make sense? It does to me and stuff the shyster lawyers.

          3. They don’t even give them whole life these days – unless the perpetrator is a cop (Wayne Couzens). I’m thinking of the case where a body builder/bouncer/thug killed a police officer in cold blood with a concealed handgun and had his whole life term reduced to 40 years as it would have ‘breached his human rights’.

          4. They don’t even give them whole life these days – unless the perpetrator is a cop (Wayne Couzens). I’m thinking of the case where a body builder/bouncer/thug killed a police officer in cold blood with a concealed handgun and had his whole life term reduced to 40 years as it would have ‘breached his human rights’.

          5. My view, Richard hasn’t changed. The Death penalty for any taking of life and also for rape, that leaves some distraught for the rest of their lives.

            I also would bring back flogging for 15 – 25 year-olds, on the bare backside, in public, for any form of ant-social behaviour.

            Humiliation is the only way to curb this ant-social behaviour.

        2. Now I live out in the ‘sticks’, many of my friends own shotguns. The rules on owning them are very strict. Steel locked cabinets, and fairly frequent checks.
          Believe it or not, I was once an armourer in the RAF. They, and I, came to the conclusion that it really wasn’t my metier.

          1. I can understand people in the country owning guns…in the wars, country folk largely existed on what they could grow or shoot.
            Maybe I am jaundiced because of what I have seen in the US.

      2. …and, despite our gun laws, how many criminals are already armed – and willing to use them?

    8. The US is a very different and more violent society than here. I hate the thought of ordinary people being armed. Riots are bad enough without the participants being armed with guns.
      This young man appears to have seen himself as some sort of vigilante, but the men he shot would have got him first had he been slower.

      I don’t blame you for feeling angry.

        1. So what prompted your opening sentence? Why did you feel you’ll be met with a barrage of disagreement?

          1. A gun would be pretty useless to me because I am such a bad shot.

            When my mother went to stay with one of her sisters-i-law in Nairobi she was given a revolver to take to bed with her. She was horrified as she had never handled a gun let alone fired one in spite of the fact that she and my father lived in the Sudan for many years where he was in government service there.

            Ironically, some years later Aunt Vera was shot and killed by a burglar who broke into her house.

          3. Which is why I cannot countenance a gun in any house I live in. My eyesight is so poor that I would cause too much harm.

  111. Are the Austrians permitted to have guns? How will the Austrians (government led by UNelected Chancellor) implement the compulsory vaccination programme in February …. will it involve the building of special camps near to Austrian cities (perhaps under the guidance of German consultants).

    1. Are they going to drag reluctant people in to give them jabs? How will they enforce this invasion of people’s bodily rights?

      1. Pretty much as is happening in the U.K. continuation of fear campaign, gradual restriction of freedoms, passport only entry everywhere – straight forward really.
        ETA: As David says

      2. I see someone responding by claiming there were 39 deaths from covid today. Note, not ‘with covid’, but ‘from covid’.

  112. Have had a fun evening with MH- he’s trying to teach me how to dance. Watching your hubbie prancing around in his pjs- priceless;-))

  113. Good night all. In spite of the problems we have in the UK I’m still glad to live here and not in the US or Europe.

  114. Right, having dropped my tuppence worth into the Death Penalty and flogging discussion, I shall wish you all a very Good night and God bless.

    ’til the morning light.

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