Monday 21 March: Barbaric Putin won’t stop at Ukraine now he has seen Nato’s weakness

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.

573 thoughts on “Monday 21 March: Barbaric Putin won’t stop at Ukraine now he has seen Nato’s weakness”

  1. Good morning all! Will I get this typed and posted before someone else turns up?

    2. Yes, it’s a bit of a bugger spending a minute or two typing something of interest only to be pipped at the post!

  3. Morning, all Y’all!
    Bright & sunny, about -5C. The thaw continues (slowly).

    1. Morning Oberst et al…

      I guess you could call your post: ‘Thaw’t for the day’……..

  5. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    Heavy frost here but the sun, forecast for all day, will soon chase it away.

    For those darn sarf.who heard about the convoy moving 2 x 300 ton items of National Grid equipment from Shoreham to Ninfield (41 miles) over the weekend, the following photos may be of interest if, like me, you are interested in ‘big engineering’… https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/800b69e6ebe93482b8fa00b307fa76257942011ad4f11f4d6b883c60101593ef.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/97dd785f6deb8c59e43fb90b96f0c3e2b641bda89deb0c9e81d89fce906de344.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e1d31d5b965c44520b6915ca3757f5dd30de3f540a82c41da484831bb715368.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/176a719127b62a2466b3b533049f44747fb5acc2771fec0f0e7c5db786d81406.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d33d73dd9ca07194edf417957966a66d69a26c156eeed8f0963a877bea5710f1.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fde02509e4fe77ab9da93125819175f138dd21a43895cdffb9608c01087f25da.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a1d9b7072be72b934fdcd2fa12bb18af09d3ec351dabd5a07f188e43f27332be.jpg

    It was supposed to go through on Saturday, but thanks to a mechanical problem and both loads getting stuck leaving Shoreham, it trundled through here yesterday early afternoon. It took the best part of an hour to get it past the roundabout in the village, and that was with the earlier dismantling of a complete Pelican crossing so that they could use the full width of the road. A few hundred people enjoyed the spectacle of probably the biggest load ever to be moved in Sussex.

    1. Yo HJ

      I was going down a Motorway a while ago, when I could afford to drive, and ended up behind one Abbotopotamus’ , which we found out later weighed in at about 500 ton.

      Traffic were permitted to overtake it, until the road became a bridge, then the police stopped all traffic behind Diane and also on the carriageway going in the opposite direction The infrastructure could not take the weight of the Diane plus normal traffic.

      Well done, that man you thought ahead

      1. The planning for yesterday’s move must have been considerable, and I dread to think of the final bill for the 5 tractor units, both cradles each of 20 axles (steerable) and a couple of dozen drivers and operators, as well as the alterations carried out by the highway authority…

          1. A Flyover?
            I just had a picture of the overtaking traffic being held back at every bridge rather than a specific bridge.

          2. Every bridge, that supported the motorway, in any way, over rivers roads and even flyovers, bot not those above it

            The weight of Diane and road traffic could have put you into freefall

          3. Given the number of bridges on some motorways, especially in urban stretches, that could have been rather a lot of them having to hold the overtaking traffic back!

          4. Yes, but given the length and weight of the load, it is beeter safe than sorry,

      3. When I drove to Liverpool to take my Morse test, I got stuck behind a Leviathan crawling along. It was a hot day, the MG didn’t like creeping along in second gear so was close to boiling and I had my eye on my watch all the time. I got there eventually, with very little time to spare. The test room was on the 3rd floor and no lift! Thank goodness it was the receiving part first or I’d have failed because my hands were shaking so much!

      1. Cost and logistics. It would have been, quite simply, an unfeasible proposal to move an entire steel fabrication factory to a site for one project.

        1. Spot on Grizz – I was involved in moving many large items to Sellafield and it was a nightmare getting some through the narrow roads of the Lake District , nothing as big as this bit of kit though

      2. That was my thought, too, but this isn’t Birmingham or similar where they may have been built. They were probably constructed abroad and shipped to Shoreham.

  6. SIR – The mass redundancies by P&O Ferries bring shame to the brand. Founded in 1837, P&O is part of British history, one of few survivors from the time when our Merchant Navy was the world’s largest.

    Next month marks the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, during which P&O provided 10 per cent of requisitioned merchant ships. Lieutenant Colonel Nick Vaux and 42 Commando Royal Marines took passage in SS Canberra. In his March to the South Atlantic, he wrote of how the liner helped bring the 3,000 troops on board together, P&O being “a disciplined, motivated and extremely professional company, with its own long-standing traditions and morale”.

    How a captain handles the ship’s company is central to its being a happy ship. In 1943, the captain of HMS King Alfred, training wartime Royal Naval Reserve officers in Hove, advised: “Never forget that the ratings have few rights; but they definitely have got a right to good officers.” For “officers” read company directors. P&O Ferries has failed its seafarers – its “captain” unfit for command.

    The pandemic put shipping and merchant seafarers in rough waters, and the war in Ukraine is another blow for sea trade. DP World has owned P&O Ferries since 2019 and clearly prefers to keep its wealth in Dubai rather than run a ferry concern properly, employing British seafarers. DP World is not fit to operate in our islands. As shipping navigates a course to normality, it is ironic that Big Ferry Fortnight 2022 starts next week.

    Lt-Cdr Lester May RN (retd)
    London NW1

  7. SIR – As I am over 70 and a coach driver, I need to have my licence renewed annually, which involves the completion of medical form D4.

    The DVLA acknowledged receipt of my documents on August 21 2021. On Saturday, 30 weeks after first submitting my application, I received a letter with a copy of one page of the D4 form on which the doctor had missed ticking one box. I have been given 14 days to trace the original doctor, get an appointment and return the page to the DVLA.

    Some delay due to Covid was expected, but the sheer incompetence that I and many of my colleagues are experiencing is staggering. Surely it is long past the time when Covid was an acceptable excuse for shoddy performance. It’s time the Civil Service and its associated agencies got back to their desks full-time.

    Alan Gilmour
    Wimborne, Dorset

    The DVLA still appears to be up a certain creek sans paddle, and with no sign at all of anything resembling an adequate service. How come this organisation is permitted to continue in this way?

  8. SIR – My mother sometimes presented us with “brain soup” (Letters, March 19), made from whatever came into her head.

    Paul Berry
    Bishop’s Tawton, Devon

    SIR – We have ferret soup, after I’ve ferreted about in the fridge for ingredients.

    Sally Goulden
    Ashford, Surrey

    SIR – Soup made from leftovers is known in this and many homes in Fife as intaeit soup, because everything goes intae it.

    Linda Campbell
    Upper Largo, Fife

    Souper!

  9. Despite the World going to the toilet at Warp Factor 10 I can find nothing of real interest to write about. The MSM is filled with repetitive propaganda that would make a child weep while Zelensky keeps making comparisons with Hitler’s Germany that bears no resemblance to reality. The domestic scene is an illustration of the relentless march of Cultural Marxism with the announcement that the Welsh have banned smacking children and the Scots are going to put an end to Misogyny. In a pigs ear to both!

  10. SIR – I recently sought a heat pump quote from a local supplier. The installation costs were projected to be over £11,000, with a government grant of £5,000 on top. Electricity needed to run it was estimated to be over 10,500 kWh, costing around £2,900 per annum (at present prices, and not including VAT), raising our electricity bill by about 400 per cent. This did not include additional costs for improved insulation and possibly replacing existing radiators and pipework.

    The fact is that heat pumps do not, and cannot, pay for themselves. The running costs are at least as great as oil or any other source of energy, and the installation costs far greater.

    I abandoned the plan on the spot. Instead, I ordered an additional battery for our solar-panel system, which has paid for itself by harnessing free energy without having to use any more energy to do so. Our bills have drastically reduced and we receive payments for the power we generate.

    For heat pumps to cease to be a leisure pursuit for the affluent and ideologically misguided, they will have to become vastly cheaper and more efficient. Until that day comes, I shall stick with our oil boiler.

    Guy de la Bédoyère
    Grantham, Lincolnshire

    Yet another letter setting out how utterly useless heat pumps will be when they are forced upon us. Besides, if Guy had bothered to read the DT and Nottle then he wouldn’t have wasted his time seeking a quotation!

      1. ‘Morning Minty. According to Mr Google:

        “Guy Martyn Thorold Huchet de la Bédoyère FSA is a British historian who has published widely on Roman Britain and other subjects; and has appeared regularly on the Channel 4 archaeological television series Time Team, starting in 1998.”

      2. Interesting name Bédoyère – translates as ‘bed boy’. One of his relatives was a famous French/Breton General who started of as aide de camp de Maréchal Jean Lannes, ‘qu’il accompagne en Espagne’, The family originated in Ireland. Camp bed boy eh?

    2. I’ve a nasty cold. Sitting in 17.6’c office isn’t sensible, so I turned the heating on. I’m also having to tumble my clothes as having damp stuff floating about isn’t fun either. Boris doesn’t care. He and the demented green fanatics want to force us back to the stone age.

      The good thing about that is there will be no fuel for his security men and we can burn him and his chums for fuel. Think I’m joking? A green fanatic I know who makes it very clear and loud that he is such grows his own vegetables in his big garden. He bugged off on holiday as spoiled Lefties are wont to do and had someone break in and steal all he’d harvested. They smashed his greenhouse and picked all the tomatoes. They also stole a couple of fence panels and left a note saying they were cold and hungry.

      He complained bitterly about how unfair this was. I said it was what he wanted. Like all Lefties, he’s a hypocrite.

    1. It’s a welcome speech, but I was disappointed that he referenced only the recent case of rape on a hospital ward – he should also have mentioned a woman prisoner who was raped in a women’s prison by a fellow prisoner, about three years ago. Maybe I am too idealistic, but I don’t like the concept that there is an underclass and it doesn’t matter if they are targeted, we only sit up and take notice when “nice” people are abused.

      In any case, this whole pantomime is only there to distract us from the death rate from all causes increasing in 2021, our rapidly diminishing freedoms and the US Navy funding the development of a microchip that interfaces with Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency.

      1. I did take issue with one point of his talk:-

        An excellent commentary, Andrew, but I would suggest caution in politely accepting someone’s trans-delusion as that was the thin end of the wedge which is now being hammered home to deliberately cleave our society.

        1. It’s a difficult question.
          What do you do if you meet someone, and assume they are a man or a woman, and then later you find out by chance that they’re not?
          Should someone be denied using a women’s bathroom if they look and act completely convincingly as a woman? How would you even know in that case? Is it acceptable to call a suspected man out in a women’s bathroom?
          Does it matter if your male colleague prefers to wear a skirt? Where does the cut-off point come? When he wants you to call him Shirley? When he wants you to call him “she”?

          Personally I’m not happy at the point of the pronouns, because that’s forcing me to lie. Andrew Doyle thinks it’s politeness to call someone by their desired pronoun, but I think it’s not very polite to force me to lie.

          Ironically, it’s feminism that is responsible for creating the trans boom; not many men wanted to be women when women had no rights, and men were not blamed for everything.

          1. Yo bb2

            In future, in all rooms allocated for ‘those of the female ilk’ to carry out their personal business of #1 or #2,

            one sink will be allocated in each such place, for ladies with Willies to take the PI55 out of the system

          2. What would you do if you suspected that there was a trans man in the men’s bathroom?
            There are loads of them around, but they are usually more convincing that trans women because they can grow beards to look the part.

          3. One of the reasons ‘they’ are desperate to trans young children is that they want to get to them before puberty and male hormones gets them – so that they maintain their softer features and look more feminine. The other reason is that by the time their own natural sex hormones kick in they may well change their mind. Many girls do grow out of the ‘tomboy’ phase when that happens.

          4. In my experience, trans people project their own experience onto others and genuinely believe that these children will suffer if not allowed to transition. They dismiss Keira Bell as “someone who made a mistake and is trying to wreck trans people’s lives”.
            They are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

          5. They’re no different to any other fringe group of zealots. Whether Green fanatics, remoaners, communists, unions – they believe fervently in their cause because challenge means obliteration.

            They lack of fortitude to be challenged. To have someone say ‘the emperor’s got no clothes on’. Thus they find others who think the same as they do, then more, then eventually a group who all think the same forms and reinforces their own opinions. Outsiders are attacked – ‘cancelled’ because difference cannot be tolerated.

            We heard that before with the Nazis and white supremacists, the black looting mob: It’s horrible whenever such occurs.

          6. Yes. Society is balanced as long as people are allowed to challenge extremists. Sometimes the so-called extremists are right, and can even pull the whole of society over to support their cause.
            But what we have at the moment is a toxic situation where nobody is allowed to challenge a very small group that has NOT persuaded the majority to support their cause – in fact, they seek to punish those who don’t support it.

          8. Been like that here for ages.
            A load of unisex cubicles, each with sink, leading off a vestibule. Since nobody goes to pee / poo with company, it’s not a problem.

          9. If someone asks me, politely to call them Jane instead of John I will. If they start wearing a dress I will respect their choices

            .

            What I won’t do is not point out that they look daft, nor that they remain a man. Such infringes on my rights. Once we put ourselves above others we have tyranny. Once we demand special treatment for our own ego we start to think of ourself as different, deserving, more worthwhile than others. That’s a route to a deeply unfair, divisive and destructive society. What do you do when someone says no? How far do you use force to ensure they cannot disagree with you? Trudeau trampled people with a horse. Hitler attempted to control Europe. Stalin murdered millions. Mao… Mao was a different level of psychotic.

            Until we are prepared to discuss our differences and to walk away disagreeing, but respecting we are monsters of the worst kind.

            We are servants to each other, not rulers.

          10. That’s broadly my position too. In my experience, the politics is a lot about control – it’s weak people seeking to control others by forcing them to do things they don’t want to do.
            It’s sort of “now, cruel world, finally you will dance to MY tune!”

          11. I wouldn’t have a problem with a bloke who wanted to wear a skirt (or Scotsmen for that matter ), as long as he didn’t pretend it made him a woman or try to use female facilities. Like you, I object to being made effectively to lie by being forced to use the wrong pronoun to describe someone.

      2. Woah there, that’s sexist.

        Although don’t forget the man who said he was a woman and got into a women’s refuge and raped his wife. The prison rapes has occurred more than once.

        But it’s sexist to say they’re not women – when they clearly are not. For some insane reason, we’re no longer allowed to tell the truth.

        1. I wasn’t aware of the abuse shelter one, and that does surprise me. Abuse shelters are usually very careful. But I also know a trans woman who claimed very convincingly to be the subject of violence from his ex wife, and another one who claimed the same about his family. I do not believe either story.

        1. The implication is that instead of waving your iPhone to pay with pounds, you will wave your hand with its implanted chip to pay in XRP.
          XRP is not money, it is the government graciously giving you permission to buy milk because you haven’t broken any rules today.

        2. Governments exist by being able to destroy the value of currency. It allows them to borrow, to print and generally manipulate their own currency.

          It’s why Greece is so stuffed. Well, Greece, Italy, Spain… a. n. other EU nation.

          Cryptocurrencies are, by default, decentralised. Their value is set upon an external element that cannot be manipulated. They cannot devalue the currency, cannot manipulate it. Inflation cannot be managed to ensure the state can continue borrowing because there’s no state intervention whatsoever.

          However, to ensure some measure of control over the currency – and whatevery statist, Left wing government has ever wanted : to know what you buy and to ensure you pay the most for it possible in tax, and prevent fraud and theft (by, you know, not paying their taxes – they want to link crypto to biometrics. Every transaction monitored and logged and audited. You fart and the state wants to know what. That level of control would, of course, render crypto currency valueless (the clue’s in the name) and thus ensure the currency were brought completely into state control and all the devaluation, inflationary, printablility nonsense we suffer now.

          Governments are terrified of crypto currency because once we realise we don’t have to bother with their national nonsense and have a solid, tradeable, untouchable universal currency there is no way for them to touch it, no way for them to tax it. No way for them to borrow and waste our wealth. Taxation would evaporate and with it big government.

          Amazon are looking at taking bitcoin and other currencies, especially from third world nations. It has more value. Imagine if the AWS machine were then used to manipulate crypto currencies using their *own* reactors?

          The future is both bright and worrying because governments have proved themselves utterly untrustworthy and incompetent, greedy and useless. The next step is to abandon them to global corporations with more power.

          1. You’re beginning to sound, Wibbles, like an advocate for the Great Reset, NWO and WEF.

            Though I doubt you support any of it.

          2. Quite the opposite. I believe government should be collared and chained – literally – until it learns to obey. Then shred it. Drive a combine though it, shred the remains, burn the rest. What survives is necessary and essential. Then you start looking at that.

  13. SIR – It should not be difficult to deprive a peer of a title (Letters, March 18). It was done in 1919 by the Titles Deprivation Act (1917) to a group of lords who, incredibly, served the enemy or fought for it in the First World War.

    Some of these were Royal Highnesses, so removing a mere peerage should present no problems. They were: HRH Prince Charles, Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence and Baron Arklow; HRH Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale and Earl of Armagh; HRH Prince Ernest Augustus, heir to the Duke of Cumberland (who was in his own right Duke of Brunswick, a German title he had inherited from his father who renounced it in 1913 in favour of his son); Henry Viscount Taaffe of Corren and Baron of Ballymote (these viscounts had emigrated in the 18th century and served the Austrian emperors since then).

    The princely styles and titles were in the gift of the monarch, so were removed by letters patent issued by the King in 1917, but the peerages, as Lord Lexden notes, required an Act of Parliament to be removed.

    The holders were deprived of these by the Act, which gave power to a committee of the Privy Council to investigate and make a report of people with peerages who had been disloyal during the war. The report was to be laid before both Houses of Parliament and if neither dissented to it within 40 days, it would be presented to the King who, by an Order in Council, could remove the peerages from the named individuals, which he did on March 28 1919.

    The titles were not abolished, but removed by order of the King in Council. The holders could petition for their reinstatement at any time, but this has never been done and the Taaffe titles expired when the last heir died in 1967. The dukedoms remain and the current heirs could petition for their revival.

    Surely something similar to this system could be established now, the committee being called as necessary and named individuals deprived of titles. In the case of a life peerage, it would expire on their death, and hereditary ones could be revived by an heir through petition to the Privy Council.

    David Pearson
    Haworth, West Yorkshire

    You learn something new every day! It’s a pity that the trough now seems to welcome dud peers instead of ejecting them.

    2. Those were the days when serving a foreign power was considered not the right thing to do.

  14. SIR – There was a petition raised in August 2021 in an attempt to prevent the removal of telephone landlines (Letters, March 19) which do not rely on a local power supply. It was rejected on the grounds that it dealt with an issue that was not directly the Government’s responsibility.

    An alternative communications network relies on a reliable local electricity supply. Recent devastating storms, which left consumers with no electricity for long periods, together with the frightening implications for electricity supplies of recent world events, must surely constitute a matter of national security, for which the Government cannot duck responsibility.

    What about another petition?

    Christopher Pratt
    Dorking, Surrey

    Quite so, Mr P. Besides, what are we paying yet another ineffective regulator for??

    1. All the publicity around the new broadband/wi-fi telephony and the necessity of a local battery to maintain communications during mains power outages jogged my memory back to the ’60s and the archaic system we once had. This latest move takes the communications network back a step; the technology may have come on by leaps and bounds but having to rely on a local battery for communication security is not a good move.

      ‘Local Battery’ power was the method to power speech way back in time and I can remember removing redundant dry cell battery boxes from a number of homes in West Mersea when preparing the system for the move to automatic switching. The existing local exchange had earlier been upgraded to a ‘Central Battery’ manual exchange but the battery boxes had never been recovered.

      LOCAL BATTERY (LB)
      All the original telephones were powered by a local battery. This was because the transmitter needed power and the local battery provided the right power irrespective of the length of line or bad external wiring. But as the batteries were installed in customers premises this was a major expense for the maintenance team and many of the original batteries were wet cells which could leak. These were were latter superseded by dry cells, but the expense of replacement mounted as the telephone population rose.
      The LB system was superseded by the Central Battery system which used a large set of batteries at the local exchange and this became possible because of savings made by economies of scale.

      Local Battery Telephony

      1. When I were a teenager a friend and I were cycling past the telephone exchange in the next town when we decided to be a bit nosey and look through the windows to see what was inside. Eventually someone came out to see what we were up to. Realising that we were interested in how an exchange worked he took us in and gave us the grand tour, including a demo of the Strowger equipment and a visit to the battery room. On the floor of the latter was a bank of lead/acid batteries for backup in the event of a power failure. We must have been in the building for at least an hour and it was fascinating.

        Can you imagine this happening now? Of course, the tech has advanced greatly now, and I imagine it’s just a bank of remotely controlled computers now. How dull!

        1. Ah, good old noisy and dirty Strowger: dirty because in the early days the ratchet and pawl mechanisms were lubricated with oil-dag, a suspension of graphite in oil. Noisy due to all the relays and the magnets linked to the ratchets and pawls driving the selectors. I majored on Strowger before moving to TXE2 electronic common control and then on to the new digital systems: System X, the British design and AXE10, Ericsson’s system. With X and AXE10 there was nothing to see except rows of racks that resembled large filing cabinets and little to break the silence.

    2. The regulator lobbies for the industry, not the customer.

      The eneergy crisis is irrelevant to these fools. They do no forward planning, no capacity planning (there’s less than 10% of possible bandwidth in telecoms towers – saves money on bandwidth and power) so in an emergency it’s no signal time.

      Everything in this country is done on a shoestring and charged at the absolute highest cost. We are lied to habitually. Our infrastructure is crap and creaking, ancient beyond measure but soaked for maximum cash value by troughers who sit on OFComs board. Oh we’ve got 5g, but the coverage is poor, the bandwidth limited and expensive. Why? Profit, protected by big government.

      It’s partly why the adverts pretending ‘fibre’ in an internet connection annoy me. It’s a lie. The infrastructure hasn’t changed for decades, but the marketing bods pretended it was better than it is. I put in a bit of fibre the other day (after coughing on it) and it carries 10GB/sec. In fact, I ran 10 such bundles to ensure that each switch had enough bandwidth and I told my client that as each switch at capacity would generate at full load 24 GB/sec that it wasn’t sufficient and he was happy, and we used it as a failover rather than backhaul. It’s basic honesty so the customer isn’t ripped off.

      Our entire regulatory systems, the endless quangos, the faux charities, the other wasters are utterly opposed to providing value for money and we, the customer of government services, suffer. WHy, for example is so much money poured into inner city black kids? Stuff them! If they want to knife one another and be single parents due to appalling ethics that’s their fault.

        1. Yep, it’s shameful. The cost to replace the clay pipes with plastic is prohibitive though.

          However, as with many things, we wouldnt have such a problem is our population were half what it is.

          1. We recently had our gas main renewed. The new plastic main was passed through the old decaying metal pipes. Can this be done with water?

  15. ‘Morning again.

    Another courageous aviator has left us. Lady Luck certainly worked her magic in his case…

    Flight Lieutenant Esmond Farfan, Lancaster bomber pilot who survived a disastrous raid on Nuremberg and provided vital back-up for D-Day – obituary

    He was awarded the DFC but later commented: ‘To complete a bomber tour, a crew required skill. But more than skill, they needed luck’

    By
    Telegraph Obituaries
    20 March 2022 • 4:24pm

    Flight Lieutenant Esmond Farfan, who has died aged 99, left his native Trinidad to fly Lancasters with Bomber Command, which earned him a DFC.

    On the night of March 30/31, the Lancaster crews of 12 Squadron were surprised to see that their target was the German city of Nuremberg. For the newly commissioned Farfan and his crew, it was their fourth operation.

    The bomber force would normally have been stood down because of the full moon, but the raid on the distant target was planned on the basis of a weather forecast for a protective high cloud on the outward route with clear conditions over the target.

    In the event, the cloud failed to materialise, providing ideal conditions for German night fighters, and as Farfan dropped his bombs, one ranged alongside his Lancaster. He put the plane in a dive as his gunners opened fire and the Messerschmitt veered away, probably damaged.

    The raid resulted in the loss of 96 bombers and their crews, Bomber Command’s heaviest of the war. Farfan later described it as “One fateful moonlit night”.

    Early April saw the beginning of the preparations for D-Day. Bomber Command was tasked to attack railway targets to isolate German forces in Normandy and the Pas de Calais regions and prevent reinforcements arriving by rail. Ammunition dumps and military camps were also attacked and, as the date of the invasion approached, coastal gun batteries and radar sites were bombed.

    Farfan was one of four West Indian pilots on 12 Squadron and they formed a close friendship. On the night of May 3 they were all on the battle order when the target was the main German tank repair and maintenance depot at Mailly-le-Camp, east of Paris.

    The control of this raid failed due to radio problems and many of the Lancasters had to orbit in the target area, where they fell prey to the German night-fighters. Farfan was flying in the second wave, when the casualties were high. Although the depot was badly damaged, 42 bombers were lost, more than 11 per cent of the force. 12 Squadron lost four crews, but Farfan’s West Indian colleagues survived after some intense battles over the target.

    In the weeks running up to D-Day, attacks against the French railway system, coastal gun batteries and radar sites continued. On June 4 Farfan bombed the heavy gun battery at Sangatte, near Calais, and the following night, ahead of the Allied amphibious and airborne assaults, the target was the coastal gun emplacement at St Martin Varreville, overlooking Utah beach, where the US amphibious landings were to take place.

    By the end of the month, the first V-1 flying bombs had started to land on London, and attacks against the launch sites in the Pas de Calais region became a priority. Farfan attacked a number, including the huge underground support site at Marquise-Mimoyecques.

    In addition, operations in support of the 2nd Army held up at Caen were flown until July 23, when Bomber Command returned to Germany. The target was the important naval base at Kiel, and the first major raid on a German city for two months.

    The following night the target was Stuttgart. Farfan had just three more operations to complete his tour of 30; he had recently lost his three West Indian friends, and years later he wrote: “My thoughts were my own. I seemed to hold on to my equanimity as most of us would do.”

    He encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire and there were numerous combats with German night fighters. Four days later he returned to Stuttgart, when he came under heavy enemy fire and when three Lancasters from his base were lost.

    Farfan and his crew successfully completed their 30th operation on July 30. As they approached to land, over the radio they heard the applause of the control tower personnel. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the DFC.

    In later years, he commented: “To complete a bomber tour, a crew required skill. But more than skill, they needed luck.”

    One of nine children, Esmond Knox Farfan was born in Montserrat, Trinidad, on October 11 1922. His ancestors, the Spanish Farfan de Los Godos family, first arrived in Trinidad in 1640, where they settled. He attended St Mary’s College in Port of Spain.

    Too young to follow his brother into the RAF, he spent two years at Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad before enrolling as a cadet pilot in June 1941. He joined the sixth and penultimate course of the Trinidad Air Training Scheme run by the Trinidad and Tobago Flying Club, where he completed 50 hours of elementary flying training.

    After completing the course he sailed for England and joined the RAF in September 1941. He continued his training before heading for Canada, where he graduated as a sergeant pilot on December 4 1942.

    Back in England he trained as a bomber pilot and joined 12 Squadron in March 1944. Before the fateful operation to Nuremberg, he bombed Stuttgart, Frankfurt and the Krupps factory in Essen.

    After completing his tour on 12 Squadron he became a pilot instructor on Lancasters. After six months he transferred to the Mosquito, before joining 627 Squadron at Woodhall Spa near Lincoln. When he was discharged from the RAF in September 1946 he returned to Trinidad, where he immediately joined British West Indian Airways (BWIA), the third Trinidadian to do so, his elder brother being the first.

    Initially flying converted bombers, the airline acquired the Vickers Viking in 1948. On a passenger flight from Jamaica to Miami, one of the two engines of his airliner fell off the wing. He managed to make an emergency landing at a small airfield in Florida.

    The Farfan brothers made history in 1955 when they piloted the airline’s first Vickers Viscount on a flight to London. “Captain E K”, as he was known, was the first to fly Boeing 707s with BWIA in 1963 and later became one of the company’s senior training captains. He was appointed the Boeing 707 fleet manager in 1968 and retired in 1978 after 33 years’ service.

    In addition to his job as a pilot, Farfan was one of Trinidad’s business leaders. He became the chief executive officer of the family business FT Farfan and Sons, a wholesaler of machinery and equipment. He assisted his brother, who had founded Sun Island Aviation in Port of Spain, and provided aviation advice to foreign embassies and companies. For his services to business, the Trinidadian government awarded him the Public Service Medal of Merit Gold in 2010.

    In 2005 he made an emotional visit to France to stand by the graves of his three West Indian colleagues who died while serving with him on 12 Squadron. A compassionate man, he also visited the small French towns that had been targets, and he was deeply moved to learn of the scale of losses among the civilian population.

    Esmond Farfan married his French wife Helene in 1949 and they were married for 53 years. They had a son.

    Esmond Farfan, born October 11 1922, died March 10 2022

    2. It wasn’t just the lack of cloud cover that did for the bomber stream on the Nuremberg raid; the altitude at which they flew produced con trails which gave the German fighters a signal where the bombers were.

  17. 351526+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Monday 21 March: Barbaric Putin won’t stop at Ukraine now he has seen Nato’s weakness,

    If this be so is it not the same the whole world over ?

    For instance the United Kingdom is IMO in NO position to be casting judgement on others

    The three party lab/lib/con political overseers over the past near four decades, with peoples / members / voters consent have repeatedly returned this political treacherous trash to power with NO attempt at forming an opposition , as a matter of fact ANY opposition was
    put down via treacherous channels for the protection of
    the close shop coalition.

    We cannot in any shape or form sort out foreign troubles when standing eyebrow deep in political tripe who are aided time after time by an electorate riddled with insanity hell bent in destroying what remains of our homeland.

    1. This is, of course nonsense, propaganda of the lowest sort that completely ignores a rather vital component of actions, motivation.

      1. What is nonsense? Government’s deliberate inactivity or ogga’s post?

        Numerous political parties have started up and been defeated by the statists. However the last one, the referendum party achieved a significant goal of scaring the entrenched state.

    1. That two men of their competence in those roles are squabbling publicly in the press is petulant and silly.

      Sunak, led by the treasury wants every penny from the worker to enforce some demented socialist nonsense. The treasury has long thought itself the centre of the economy. It needs reminding it isn’t – harshly, by sacking the top bods in it. The Keynesian tax and waste attitude is utterly idiotic.

      Boris, led by his wife wants a high tax, big state, wasteful impossible pointless green agenda. However, he’s facing electoral obliteration – and rightly so. Sunak doesn’t care because the treasury never has. It’s attitude is to take as much as possible, regardless of need.

      Burn them all.

      1. There have always been tensions ‘twixt PM and Chancellor.
        Cue photos of them buying each other an ice cream.

      2. “The village inn, the dear old inn,
        So ancient, clean and free from sin,
        True centre of our rural life
        Where Hodge sits down beside his wife
        And talks of Marx and nuclear fission
        With all a rustic’s intuition.
        Ah, more than church or school or hall,
        The village inn’s the heart of all.”

        [John Betjeman]

  24. Good morning all

    Dull day, no breeze 5c.

    I found this poem by O Henry

    Nothing to Say
    “You can tell your paper,” the great man said,
    “I refused an interview.
    I have nothing to say on the question, sir;
    Nothing to say to you.”

    And then he talked till the sun went down
    And the chickens went to roost;
    And he seized the collar of the poor young man,
    And never his hold he loosed.

    And the sun went down and the moon came up,
    And he talked till the dawn of day;
    Though he said, “On this subject mentioned by you,
    I have nothing whatever to say.”

    And down the reporter dropped to sleep
    And flat on the floor he lay;
    And the last he heard was the great man’s words,
    “I have nothing at all to say.”

    2. I used to love O Henry’s stories when I was a boy. The Gift of the Magi and The Cop and the Anthem were my favourites; I also loved Damon Runyon’s stories: The Lemon Drop Kid was surprisingly moving.

  25. ‘Mispronunciation ain’t wrong – and to point it out is prejudiced’

    CORRECTING children who mispronounce words is a form of prejudice, a group of academics have suggested. Linguists at the University of Essex say there is no such thing as “correct” language, and there is nothing wrong with saying “aks” instead of “ask”.

    The academics argue that “many of the pronunciations bemoaned as “wrong” are, in fact, just examples of language changing.” Pronouncing “ask” as “aks” is common in multicultural London English, a dialect spoken mainly by people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the UK today.

    In a blog post, the linguists say that viewing variants on what is perceived as standard English pronunciation as lazy or ignorant is “accent prejudice” towards poorer socioeconomic groups. They also insist that using “ain’t” instead of “is not” or “am not” is simply an example of “multicultural London English” developed through contact between different dialects and immigrant tongues, such as Jamaican patois.

    Prof Peter Patrick, Ella Jeffries and Amanda Cole say that what we think of as “correct” pronunciation is more about fashion than it is about rules. The linguists point out that in the first English Bible, dated 1535, Matthew 7:7 was written as “Axe and it shall be given you” with royal approval. “Decades of research shows that the idea that any variation from standard English is incorrect – or, worse, unprofessional or uneducated – is a smokescreen for prejudice,” say the academics.

    However, some academics and educators disagree. Prof Alan Smithers, director of Buckingham University’s centre for education and employment research, said that, as a Poplar-born Cockney lad, he benefited from learning the “correct” pronunciation of English in grammar school. Prof Smithers says that what he describes as a “common core” of language “is extremely important”. “It enables people to think precisely and communicate accurately,” he said

    However, Ms Cole, a co-author of the blog post, who also grew up with a Cockney accent, said that her colleagues’ position on linguistic prejudice is “not a niche opinion”. Ms Cole, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Essex, points out that Prof Smithers’ argument “leans into a completely falsified notion that people can change the way that they speak”. Ms Cole said it was true that attempts to teach people “in a way that is perceived as being ‘correct’ … can in some way feel that it can produce advantage. “But that is because society is structured in a way that places unfair advantages on certain ways of being, including speaking.”

    Yet another clear example of how useless, clueless idiots, masquerading as “academics” have hijacked education and are doing their damnedest to accelerate stupidity among the population.

    Time is ripe for a complete clear-out of all manner of cretins in authority, in every echelon of society.

    2. That’s fine, let them carry on speaking their mangled version of English. Just don’t expect me to give a job to someone who can’t represent themselves in a professional way.

    3. You will need a machine gun for that clear out.

      Aks is common among the white Birmingham underclass too. Not just the black mongs of London.

    6. Cole is another word for cabbage and rape and has the same origin as the Irish word for faggot. Many surnames are derived from personal characteristic. Which of these relate to Mz Cole? Perhaps it is a corruption of the word ‘coal’ by her ancestors and relates to a family characteristic? One can only surmise.

    7. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him”. George Bernard Shaw.

      2. Some would say it is all down to [kla:s]; Grissly would say it is down to [klæs].

    8. Dear God, such blether.
      “a completely falsified notion that people can change the way that they speak” – that’s bollocks, too.
      My Father was brought up in West Hartlepool, son of a mine worker, and was very broad in accent, but when he went to University, he dropped the Hartlepool and moved to almost pure Received Pronunciation, Hartlepool not being a good qualification to help you up the academic career ladder in the 1950s. And, as son of a mineworker, it was quite difficult enough as it was.

      1. Oh yes. This Southern Girlie – born in Surrey and brought up in London and Essex – still remembers, at about the age of seven, confusing a Geordie with a Polish refugee.
        I could not understand a word the boy was saying.

      2. My youngest brother, born in Chesterfield, got his first job in the south after qualifying. He got picksig of the others, down there, taking the mick out of his accent, so he started talking “RP” and saying things lke “grarse”, parth” and larf”.

        I asked him why he was talking like a poof.

      3. I was brought up in the Black Country, but I don’t have a BC accent, I speak RP. My brother, however, speaks broad Black Country.

    9. So, I suppose intelligibility no longer matters. It does seem to be the case quite often now. Broadcasters and people on the phone that you can’t understand because they don’t speak decent English. Mind you sometimes small children do come up with some charming mispronunciations. My daughter used to call mashed potatoes, smashed potatoes, which struck me as pretty accurate and a rather more adventurous depiction of the fate of the potato’s in question. Aks instead of Ask is Black American English and anyone that uses is should be immediately removed from ones life. Ebonics, the Urban Dictionary, which sums it up in all its gruesomeness. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ebonics

    10. These wazzocks don’t appear to understand that language is a means of communication. If everyone pronounces a word differently the communication breaks down. They must be extraordinarily dim.

      Edit breaks not breads.

    11. I remember, when I was a snivel serpent for a couple of years, receiving an email that had been ‘cascaded’ from Whitehall down to the lower echelons, were I resided, that was full of unintelligible acronyms. I replied to the sender saying that although it was headed as a communication all I had received was an email.
      It wasn’t a communication until the recipient understood it.
      I was given a talking to but asked if my boss understood it. The answer was no.

    13. Correcting children when they are wrong is how they learn to be right. The more they are taught, the more they are challenged the more they learn.

      A bright and thinking workforce is a good one. Ah, I forgot. It’s the year of the woker morons. Cripes alive. A nation of stupid kids, abandoned by their parents, unchallenged, unthinking, ignorant and dim.

    14. Yoo be aksin’ fo de aks in yer skull if you criticise how dey Jafaicans communicate. Articulacy dem belong to whitey’s world.
      Apologies for my efforts at patwah.

      1. Mortality amongst that demographic is rather high. Perhaps there’s a link between low intelligence, poor parenting and bad outcomes?

        1. It’s nothing to do with ‘low intelligence’ (that is snobbery) but yes, poor parenting leads to sub-optimal outcomes.

    15. No surprise that it’s Essex university. I did my MA in Applied Linguistics there – mind you, they weren’t in as bad a state back then.

      1. My moggie, Caticus, would kill me rather than get in the water. I have never attempted to wash him, I wouldn’t dare it would be claws out at 30 paces then death and destruction.

    2. Our last cat, Magnificat, used to love water, but only if it was as cold as liquid nitrogen. Warm – hated it.
      He’d sit under the outflow f the downpipe during rainy weather, with water running over his back… daft, but still very much missed, moggy.

  27. Morning all, ringing the out patients appointment line 16 minutes no answer, but they are all busy, yeah right !!!
    The hospital is only that far away in the car. 5 more minutes and i’m on my way.

    1. That’s it, 25 minutes and only number 6 in the queue. I’m off to the reception desk.

      1. Good for you Eddy. We all need to be proactive when it comes to the NHS, no use just sitting back and accepting the rubbish service.

  28. Boeing 737 carrying 133 people smashes into mountains. 21 March 2022.

    A Boeing 737 carrying more than 133 people has crashed in mountains in China, with smoke seen billowing from the scene.

    Chinese state television says the plane, flying from Kunming to Guangzhou, had an “accident” over Guangxi.

    The China Eastern Airlines flight had 133 passengers onboard at the time of the incident.,

    Covid 19? Vlad? Racism?

    https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-boeing-737-carrying-133-26516055

          1. I can’t remember the proper name for it, Anne but this forward looking radar in the nose of most civil aircraft warned of thunder clouds ahead and of land masses higher than the aircraft’s current altitude. Hench the slang name adopted (It might have been Cloud and Collision Warning but I won’t swear to that).

          2. Half correct. The terrain map is produced by from a mapping database. If the aircraft is below the ground ahead, it will shout at you. The clever bit is that it knows were you are going to land but if yr going down too fast, it will also shout?

          3. Changed quite a bit from the 1960s and the rare occasion I came across civil aircraft.

        3. Measures air pressure due to forward motion of the aircraft and converts that to airspeed by the differential with the static air pressure.
          The static vent gives the “static” air pressure.

    5. Remember the Polish airline crash 10th April 2010 with half the government on board ?
      The guy who arrived at the scene and filmed some of it with somebody shooting dead the survivors and he was run over on a street corner ‘by accident’. ‘Black Box’ was never recovered. Well it actually disappeared.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster

  29. Good Moaning.
    And what a corker.
    If this continues, I can zap the green stuff that blights terraces etc. during the winter. There is no point in spraying it around until the sun is high and strong enough to work with the …. warning – evil word approaching …. chemicals.

    Oh dear, who are these batey people with white faces and red outfits storming Allan Towers?

    1. Yo anne
      I can zap the green stuff that blights

      are you allowed to do that to the
      Greens
      Bumblibs*
      XR
      etc

      I will leave theTypo!!!

    2. No sun here today………have you stolen it? Yesterday was glorious – today it’s grey skies.

      1. Same here – the Rayburn went out last night (it was 3.5 degrees C, but I couldn’t be bothered to relight it). I certainly noticed the lack this morning.

      1. In the mid 50s the UK had more useable nuclear power available than the rest of the world put together.

      1. I thought that the Indians were experimenting with Thorium. Do you know what happened there?

      3. Slight modification (for UK)
        Say it loud, say it clear,
        Economic immigrants NOT welcome here.

        There, fixed it for you.

        1. Ten minutes ago the picture was not there and it said something about being removed by the source.
          Quite a few strange things seem to take place on the website.

  35. Just been sent this ………..Can this be true ?

    Now the media are talking about phase 4 boosters.

    Not good. :*(
    https://www.naturalhealth365.com/who-begins-takeover-of-global-healthcare-systems-paving-way-to-total-control.html

    WHO begins takeover of global healthcare systems paving way to total control
    ( NaturalHealth365 ) For the past two years, all eyes have been on the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the globalists who likely orchestrated the entire fiasco are now quietly proceeding to the next phase in their plan. In phase one of this global experiment, people were conditioned to accept the idea that to keep others safe, they must give up their fundamental liberties, personal freedoms, and right to bodily autonomy. The experiment was quite successful as the vast majority acquiesced and went along with tyranny, complying with unscientific COVID-19 mitigation measures and blindly following authoritarian government mandates.
    When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, countries implemented almost the exact same measures, following the same playbook – locking down citizens, destroying economies, and suspending democracies in the name of public health. But was this the end game? Not even close; it is only the beginning.
    On February 18, 2022, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of the book “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey,” published an article that warned humanity about the globalists’ next move, the takeover of the entire world’s healthcare systems. The egregious COVID jab passports pushed in most countries are the first step towards seizing total control.
    Their next step is to legalize this takeover and monopolize health systems by creating an international pandemic treaty. If this treaty goes through, it will have insurmountable consequences on the world’s population, as the World Health Organization will become the sole decision-maker on pandemic matters.

    Get ready for universal healthcare organized by WHO and say hello to total control
    Under the new universal healthcare, the WHO will have the power to implement mandatory jabs or health passports for billions of people worldwide . If you think this would be impossible to carry out, think again. The plan is clearly defined and once executed, it would replace individual nations’ constitutions with the constitution of the WHO – all under the disguise of “pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.”
    If it does not sound frightening enough, consider that the WHO recently changed the definition of a pandemic , now classifying any “worldwide epidemic of disease” as a pandemic without the need for the disease to be severe or cause high morbidity. Using this newly revised definition, anything could be called a pandemic and put individual rights, political liberty, or national sovereignty at significant risk.
    Do NOT ignore the health dangers linked to toxic indoor air . These chemicals – the ‘off-gassing’ of paints, mattresses, carpets and other home/office building materials – increase your risk of nasal congestion, fatigue, poor sleep, skin issues plus many other health issues.
    Get the BEST indoor air purification system – at the LOWEST price, exclusively for NaturalHealth365 readers. I, personally use this system in my home AND office. Click HERE to order now – before the sale ends.

    Trust WHO? Past performance raises several red flags about the organization
    Although the WHO describes itself as the “global guardian of health,” it has been accused of failing to uphold its mission. For instance, we don’t have to go very far back in history to see evidence of the WHO’s catastrophic handling of the swine flu pandemic in 2009.
    The swine flu injection left thousands of people injured, thanks to the fearmongering campaign the WHO launched to further its global vax agenda. The organization was accused of exaggerating the risk of the disease and creating undue fear in the population to drive vax sales for the pharmaceutical industry. Sounds familiar?
    So if you are still on the fence about whether the WHO can be trusted, consider its ties to Big Pharma, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and China. For instance, the WHO gets most of its funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    WHO makes move on international COVID jab passport
    Did you know that while the media has been keeping us busy with the events in Ukraine, the WHO has launched an initiative to create a WHO-backed global health passport? According to reports, the WHO has entered into a contract with T-Systems – a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary – to build the first international digital jab passport.
    Startling enough, the SMART Health Cards system is already widely used worldwide, including 12 different countries, 25 US states, DC, and Puerto Rico. The US Congress is also trying to pave the way to total tyranny through its “Trusted Digital Identity Bill 2021,” which, if passed, will undoubtedly take us one step closer to the ultimate end goal – an Orwellian society defined by a global social credit system, total surveillance, punishment and forced compliance.

    Vax passports are the first step to global control and surveillance
    So for anyone who still believes that the purpose of vax passports is to keep us “safe,” it is time to wake up because time is running out. It is critical to recognize that digital health passports have nothing to do with public health. Instead, they are a free trial to social credit score, digital currency, total control, and surveillance over the entire global population.
    And don’t think this idea is far-fetched. China has already rolled out its version of a centralized digital currency, which will be integrated into its social credit system. If you are unfamiliar with the Chinese social credit system, imagine a world where the government monitors your every move. If you misbehave – litter, badmouth the government or commit similar offenses – your punishment may be the partial or complete restriction of your ability to participate in society.
    Today, vax passports are paving the way to creating a One World Government where digital money combined with a social credit system will eventually force humanity into global enslavement.
    If this is not the future you envision for yourself, your children, and your grandchildren, it is time to say no to vax passports, mandates, and the central bank digital currency. It is time to question everything and stop acquiescing to tyranny.
    Sources for this article include:
    Articles.Mercola.com
    Media.Mercola.com
    NPR.org

    ————————————-

    1. From skim-reading it, it all looks like stuff that is known to be in the pipeline to me.

      1. In order to go to Kenya, I had the first two jabs. Before we could travel, we had to upload our Vax status to a global health website and get a QR code. Also had to have a negative PCR test within a couple of days of the flight for another QR code. There was also a Kenya Health surveillance form – for another QR code.

        I don’t think I will be travelling anywhere again if all these become the norm for ever.

        1. Stopping us travelling appears to be one of their goals. As plebs, we’re allowed to eat, sleep and play video games and that’s it. And be jabbed of course.

    2. 351526+ up ticks,

      Afternoon RE,

      Before treachery struck there was a party that the time had long past on calling time now, the damage has been well & truly embedded in the current society via the polling booth and the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella
      coalition party & their continued support these last treacherous decades.

  36. 351526+ up ticks,

    It’s that “So” far right, fruitcake again, Gerard Batten,

    Gettr,
    European Defence Union – European Army to you & me. You know, the thing UKIP said was coming & we were called ‘fantasists’ by Nick Clegg.

    ‘To rapidly deploy forces around Europe’ This has been planned since 1954. The Treaty on European Union (1992) called for a ‘Common Foreign Policy leading to a Common Defence’ – that meant an Army.

    The absorbtion of Britain’s armed forced has continued post Brexit, which is one of the reasons I’ve said we haven’t really left.

    Nato is there to provide a common defence against agression, if Russia threatens Nato members it will respond.

    The EU Defence Union is implenent the EU’s foreign policy. The Ukraine war just provides a convenient excuse.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ukraine-conservative-european-forum-defence-b2039136.html

  38. Back from the hospital I was there in less time than I spent trying to contact them on the phone. Straight to the main reception first floor the cardio reception and i explained the problem showed the paper work i already had been sent. And the lady printed off a letter I clearly should have been sent last week. Looks like an admin error was to blame for this very worrying predicament. I now have the letter in my hand, appointments now confirmed and that’s all it needed, what a relief.
    I duly thank Nottlers for your support and assistance.

    1. Well that’s a relief. Just a small “admin error” but it has a major impact on the person concerned!!

      1. I’ve just been talking to an old childhood mate who now lives in thart zummerzet (Somerset) he’s had very similar experiences with his local GP practice and appointments etc. But he’s not as polite as me he did rip into them.
        But changes were made all the same.

        1. I can be polite to a point but I will not put up with stupidity and incompetence.

    3. As usual the ‘process was followed” but the outcome , which should be the measure, might have been disastrous.
      Well done you.

    4. Well done Eddy. Alf had a very similar experience over one November/December. It may not have been the admin people at fault at all. He found out that the consultant had not signed any letters for 3 months!

      1. Some weeks back, MB received a letter signed by a consultant.
        Apart from being for another patient, with a very different cardiac problem and a totally different hospital number, it was all in order.
        We were already reading it with a marked degree of perplexity, but it was the description of MB as a retired paratrooper that confirmed our doubts.

  39. Any techy folk on here who might know why my old iPhone SE is refusing to back-up to the iCloud even though there’s plent of storage space and the WiFi signal is good enough for everything else to work? I was wondering why the battery was draining and now see it’s because it was constantly trying to back-up but not succeeding. Probably time for a new phone. Drat!

    1. Hello Sue, I’m not particularly tech but have you tried these?
      Plug it into the mains?
      New battery required? Cheaper than a phone.

      1. It’s plugged in to the mains most of the time and the battery is at 93% capacity, which should be sufficient. Not looking good.

          3. Thanks. No but there’s an Apple store just across the road in Westfiled shopping mall. Will take it in there and see what they can do.

  40. Russia responsible for hoax calls to Ben Wallace and Priti Patel, says No 10. 21 March 2022.

    The Russian state was responsible for hoax calls to Ben Wallace and Priti Patel pretending to be the Ukrainian prime minister, Downing Street has said.

    In its first statement attributing blame to the call, No 10 said it believed Russian state actors were responsible, without giving more details on who linked to the Kremlin had been identified as being behind the calls.

    It is understood there are fears in Whitehall that Russia could release doctored quotes of his comments for propaganda purposes.

    The horror!!!

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/21/russia-responsible-for-hoax-calls-to-wallace-and-patel-says-no-10

    2. How does that work? I don’t imagine for a moment I’d be able to get through to these people.

      1. An interesting point Horace. What do you do? Just call the Ministry and say; “I would like to speak to the Minister please”. “Yes Mr Pendleton. Of course. We will put you right through!”

        1. Hi Araminta. If this happened out of the blue, to use an unfortunate phrase, yes another nutter. No one seems to be saying that there was an indication of a warning or malfunction.

  42. Afternoon All

    Something different,after Yorkshire Tea went woke,grovelled and made donations to BLM a group of employees were so disgusted they left and set up their own tea company

    “With so many brands prioritising virtue signalling over the wellbeing

    and happiness of their customers, we decided we’d had enough. Because if

    you can’t enjoy a hot, tasty beverage in the morning without funding

    the dismantling of our police and the pulling down of our monuments,

    then what can you enjoy?”

    https://www.grandmatowlers.co.uk/homepage/why-grandma-towlers-launched/

  45. ‘I should’ve been back six years ago’: Emotional Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe speaks after return to UK.

    In an impassioned statement during the press conference, she criticised previous foreign secretaries for their lack of action in securing her return to the UK.

    Although her husband praised Liz Truss for bringing his wife back home, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, said her release “should’ve happened six years ago”.

    She was a Spook wasn’t she? They probably told her that they would get her out if she ran into trouble. Not the first person to be lied too by the British Government!

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe-news-conference-iran-tulip-siddiq-london-b989490.html

    1. She probably was a spy. But to give her the benefit of the doubt, regimes like that are in the habit of kidnapping people to use as pawns. It is, as you know, a favourite activity of North Korea. And quite a lot of long term Western residents of China have fled the place for exactly the same reason.

      1. The best chance you have in these situations is to have a partner who won’t lie down and let you be forgotten. I have no doubts that it was Jill Morrel who got John McCarthy out of Lebanon. This contrasts with the families of the men captured in Iraq who accepted the government’s assurances and kept quiet. They were all subsequently murdered!

      2. The best chance you have in these situations is to have a partner who won’t lie down and let you be forgotten. I have no doubts that it was Jill Morrel who got John McCarthy out of Lebanon. This contrasts with the families of the men captured in Iraq who accepted the government’s assurances and kept quiet. They were all subsequently murdered!

    1. What is AMAB? Don’t tell me that means ‘a man at birth’? They are still men, just in a dress. Being trans doesn’t change reality. A man is a man – bigger muscles, lung capacity, heart rate, adrenaline response all the way down to the basic level.

      It’s time we stopped letting the mentally ill have such air time.

      1. Worse. It means “Assigned Male At Birth”. Not even identified as but assigned. Cuckoo!

    1. Cutting council manager salaries by 10% would provide enough funds to feed, clothe and house a homeless veteran. Providing them the care they need would take more.

      Hell, the pigs are disgustingly overpaid. Start shredding the troughing wasters, end their six figure salaries.

      1. Back in 2008 when the financial crash happened IIRC Ireland cut public sector salaries by 15%. Right across the. board. That’s what we should have done. We should also have furloughed the MPs and Lords during the scamdemic.

    4. The saddest part is that most of them in that queue think they are going to get £350 per person per month – and they also know it will probably be an African Ukrainian too. They don’t care as long as there’s money in it for them.

      1. They are deluded if they think £350 a month will cover the costs incurred. Have they even thought about how much extra shopping will be, leccy, water bills, gas bills, not to mention the inconvenience of having some stranger in their house for six months? That’s if they can even understand what they’re saying! I love my family dearly and love them coming to stay but after a week or so, now, I am pleased when they go home. Is that horrible of me? I just like my own life and habits and sometimes slobbing around.

        1. It will be hunky-dory for a while; hosts welcoming and guests grateful. It won’t take long for it to change.
          I have had up to 10 Welsh visitors, ex’s family staying, and after 3 days I used to go and hide from them. Expecting big meals, unlimited booze etc
          Will all end in tears- or worse.

        2. Don’t forget all the locks on internal doors then when you’ve had enough you won’t be allowed to evict them.
          Caveat Emptor.

          3. Strange, there have been locks on the internal (bedroom) doors in my house since it was built (in the thirties).

          4. That’s not unusual, maybe. We’ve lived in older houses (1890, 1870,1920) and most internal doors had locks. The difference is if it is shared with non family, I think – I have not ploughed through the rules.

        3. No, you are not horrible. Most people feel like that. Lovely to see you and lovely to see the back of you.

        4. Sometimes a couple of days is enough, much as I love our two boys and their wives. And I would lay down my life for them. It’s just that we need our own space in which to recharge our batteries.

        5. In the first place, they’ll lose the 25% discount if they live alone. In my case that amounts to £517.

    5. Don’t forget a Ukrainian ‘refugee’ is not just for Christmas it’s for life.

    1. 50 migrant species. I have a list of the original homeland of some of them here:

      Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco
      Sudan, Tunisia, Benin, Burkina Faso
      Cabo Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea
      Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia
      Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal
      Sierra Leone, Togo, Angola, Cameroon
      Central African Republic, Chad, Congo
      DR Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon

      Not forgetting Equatorial Ukraine.

    2. Many cuckoos have been heard since the beginning of the year – in the House of Commons.

    1. The French authorities are said to have intercepted assisted 248 people. Will try harder tomorrow.

    2. Truly, it’s time we got all the small boats and patrolled ourselves. When these scum are seen, we shoot them.

    1. They’re not refugees though. They’re illegal economic migrants. They turn up, claim welfare, breed and do nothing for their entire lives, living off the tax payer.

    2. Bloody great! We have all had to wait 2 years for any care/treatment by which time things are far worse than they would have been. These people will flock in and, no doubt, get to the front of the queue.
      I have had it.

    3. We don’t want them, no matter how you paint them, dress them up, LIE!

      They’re not welcome.

    3. H’mmm ….. apart from travelling on her Iranian passport – ostensibly to visit her parents – to a country from which she was glad enough to flee some years back ……. This whole thing stinks.
      Would the word “ungrateful” sound a smidge judgemental?
      p.s. Maybe it would be cheaper, and less troublesome, to send the Iranians a few tanks produced in the 1970s.

      1. I suspect we will be hearing from this Nazanin bint for many years to come.

        The case puts me in mind of the dreadful McCanns, victims of their own negligence and stupidity but for some insane reason singled out for special indulgence and attention.

        Thousands of journalists and spooks are arrested each year just as thousands of children go missing.

    1. A common 4 for me. Bob3 got it in 2, he’ll have to be renamed Bob2.
      Or perhaps Florin (2Bob?).

          1. I get that but how does that turn into what you posted? Do you have to share it or something?

          3. It’s easier to share it in WhatsApp, which I do most days. But Disqus won’t accept a direct paste from the clipboard. Hence the ‘save as jpg’.

  54. Loss of Panic Buttons

    My wife and I both have ‘panic button’ pendants. I asked the service provider what to do when the analogue phone service is withdrawn by BT some time before 2015.. They told me simply to plug my ‘old-style’ telephone into my BT Hub.

    There are, unfortunately, at least two problems:

    Like millions of Pensioners, I don’t have a BT Hub (for my Broadband). Mine is the latest Sky hub which, fortunately, has a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) telephone-enabled socket. Many older hubs may not be fitted with these

    The VOIP connection for our pendant devices will be fine until there is a power cut, when the hub will cease working and so will the pendants. And we won’t be able to call 999 via smartphones if the local cell tower is also out of action with the power cut.

    I am not sure whether the emergency service provider’s technical people are aware of this. If they are, they are probably praying that the power cuts will last only 5 minutes, rather than the 5 days that some folks in the north experienced during the recent storms.

    I write as an 81 year old who, before I retired from the NHS in 1999, was responsible for a Wide Area Network of linked routers (hubs) connecting 18 GP practices all over East Kent, so I know how fragile the network is.

    I can envisage that elderly patients who experience a power cut that stops their electrically-powered beds, ceiling hoists, Oxygen Concentrators etc from working, will press their Panic buttons and expect a call-back. Unless they can retain their technologically ‘old’ analogue copper telephone lines, nothing will happen.

    It is the HUBS that will need to continue to be powered if the 230 volt mains cuts out. An Uninterruptible Power Supply (something the size of a small car battery, fitted with an inverter to produce 230 volts AC), could be provided to take over the mains feed to the hub automatically, but my researches into these UPS devices tells me that most of the domestic versions can sustain 230volts for only a few hours, certainly not days.

    Can any VERY techie Nottlers suggest a solution? And does anybody know if all Cell towers have emergency backup power?

    2. I think cell towers do have power back up but it wouldn’t last 5 days. Then it is up to the company to get a generator to it.

      The point about calling 999 if you can get a connection has its own difficulties. With the power out and trees down a lot of people will be calling the emergency numbers. They are already swamped.

      1. Most of our cell phone towers have backup generators.
        Trouble is last time there was an extended power failure, the wise guys stole the generators

    3. When the internet and digital ‘phones went off in this area the transmitter for mobile ‘phones couldn’t take the amount of traffic.

      Either you couldn’t get a line, or you fell off line within a minute or so.

      1. Circa 1988, on a building site in Norwich, BT were dragging their feet over a phone connection. Mobile phones in those days were about the size of a steam iron, and in constant use, you’d be lucky to have any power left by lunchtime. So we did precisely that. Bought a car battery, and charged battery and phone overnight. It got us out of a hole.

    5. If it is vital that you have the service an expensive alternative could be a satellite phone.

      1. Sos, you imply that Satellite phones are ‘expensive’. My older son has just spent around £1,300 (on a contract, naturally) on the latest iPhone 13, while Amazon UK offers a number of Satphones, including their Best Buy Thuraya at ‘only’ £490 and Garmin inreach Mini at under £270. There’s extra to pay for contracts, but some of these offer short contracts if you want very low (i.e.emergency only) usage.

    6. A quick look at Amazon shows some small UPS’s designed for this very purpose. They’re not 230V, but have variable output voltage, and a set of different power plugs. How long they would last would very much depend on the UPS’s capacity, and the router’s current draw.

      Whereas all analogue BT exchanges have battery back-up, plus an emergency generator, my experience suggests that mobile cell towers have no back-up at all. When Eunice struck the other week, my power went off for around twelve hours. My copper, analogue landline still worked, and I plugged in a wired phone which I keep for these occasions. Unfortunately, no-one I tried to call has done the same.

      As soon as the power failed, my mobile signal vanished. It’s poor at the best of times, but – both here and at the last place – I’ve lost mobile signal (or had a much weaker one) in every power cut. With Eunice, I eventually discovered that if I risked life and limb and stood on the footbridge at nearby Wanborough Station (I was trying to find out if trains were running. They weren’t) I could pick up a weak 4G signal, and voice. Oddly, my Accuweather app decided I was in Hindhead, and I suspect that’s where the nearest working cell tower was located.

      The last place had a succession of power cuts when I moved there. In the end, I bought a cheapo Chinese petrol generator from Focus DIY (remember them?). It was good enough to keep a few lights on, plus the router and – most importantly – the central heating, which had been wired in such a way that it could be unplugged from the mains and into a generator-fed extension lead. Left out in all weathers, it eventually died. But I’d certainly consider having another, if power cuts looked like being a regular occurrence.

      1. As I am slightly mad, we have a 4g modem router with it’s own battery in it in addition to the 2 dsl lines. If the worse comes to the worse, devices connect to the 4g.

      2. Standby Power
        I have been researching dual-fuel generators (petrol and propane) and inverters for several weeks, but the problems seem to begin when you have one, unless you live a long way from neighbours. The main one is NOISE – most of the ones with a meaty output that could run your fridges, freezers central heating etc are pretty darn noisy, even if you surround them with a noise-deadening enclosure (which needs adequate ventilation).

        Then most petrols seem to contain ethanol, which allegedly picks up water when stored and rusts the generator motor. Also you seem to be legally allowed to store much more propane than petrol, resulting in a longer activity between refills.

        Then you need to arrange (and fork out for) either a manual or an automatic switchover when the mains power goes off. If you don’t have these, three or four extension cables from the ‘genny’ could run your freezers and maybe even a camping cooker, but beware of the MAXIMUM ratings of these generators which, like car mpg figures, are a good deal more optimistic than their continuous use ratings.

        There seems to be no easy answer. The Jackery Explorer 500 Portable Power Station (£503.50 from Amazon UK) with a lithium-ion battery inside instead of a motorised generator seems to be one option that you can at least bring inside the house to power your freezer(s) and stop it/them slowly losing their contents. Its 500W continuous, 1,000W surge output, seems enough for a few devices.

    7. A WAN is only fragile if there’s no redundancy. And a router is not a hub. It’s not even a switch. I know he’s simplifying for the audience but still.

      1. Hi Wibbs,
        Just read your comment. If I had said I managed a total of 36 Cisco 2503 Routers and TCUs, VERY few readers would have had any idea what I was talking about, so yes, I did simplify. In 1994 (that’s 28 years ago) we spent £82,000 on these routers, big heavy bu88ers of which I still have two in my loft. And the BT connections were 64kb kilostream lines (the fastest then available at a reasonable price). My collection of half a dozen domestic ‘hubs’ was growing all the time (and they are still getting smaller and cheaper) as people used to ask me to fix their ‘dead’ Broadband equipment. I’ve long since given that up, thank goodness.
        In the 1980s I was involved in purchasing a quarter of a megabyte of extra memory for a DEC PDP Minicomputer. It was on two large circuit boards and cost £10,000 plus VAT. Now I can get a 1 terabyte SSD (Solid State Drive), which holds 4 million times that amount, for under £75 on Amazon. That’s progress.

        1. And yes it definitely is. I can’t remember kilostreams – I came in when we were starting leased lines.And I apologise – I thought it was an article entry.

          My frustrations these days are not hardware, they’re software. I find most software appalling optimised, bug ridden, badly laid out and despite having endless power (really) to play with, it’s still slow.

  55. Groaners!

    1. Scientists have proven that there are two things in the air that have been known to cause women to get pregnant: their legs……………

    2. When Biden dies, his brain will be donated to science.
    I hear that for years they been trying to come up with the perfect vacuum.

    3. A lady comes home from her doctor’s appointment grinning from ear to ear.

    Her husband asks, “Why are you so happy?”

    The wife says, “The doctor told me that for a forty-five year old woman, I have the breasts of a eighteen year old.”
    “Oh yeah?” quipped her husband, “What did he say about your forty-five year old ass?”

    She said, “Your name never came up in the conversation.”

  57. Switzerland is urged to extradite Putin’s mistress. 21 March 2022.

    Opponents of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are uniting with a petition demanding that Switzerland expels the strongman’s ‘lover’ Alina Kabaeva amid claims she is hiding with their secret children in a luxury villa.

    Kabaeva, 38, is a former Olympic gymnast and gold medalist who is widely believed to be Putin’s mistress and mother to secret children whom he has never officially recognised.

    There is something now inexpressibly ugly about the West. It is more like a Lynch Mob than an alliance of Democratic Polities. It’s thieving of Oligarchs assets and now the hunting down of a young woman and her children because of an alleged relationship with Vladimir Putin give an unflattering insight into its real nature. I do not recall Churchill calling for the apprehension of Eva Braun or Pitt talking about laying Josephine Beauharnais by the heels. Such a course would have struck them as ungentlemanly and vulgar not to say actually unjust.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10635187/Ukrainians-call-Russian-Presidents-gymnast-lover-extradited-Switzerland.html#comments

    2. Reading some of the comments on the article in the mail. I am ashamed to think that these people actually call themselves English.

      2. I’m not sure it necessarily gets to proven innocent.
        It’s just guilty, and straight to lynch the bstd.

    4. Government doesn’t have many levers it can play with. Our reliance on Russian energy is comical because of their obsession with green. Thus they resort to playing games.

  58. Grandson called a few minutes ago.
    He’d had a ‘prosection session’ where they had to point out different parts/organs/arteries/veins/nerves/muscles/bones on real dead bodies. They also had cross section of a head where he saw half a brain, one eye etc. He’s really enjoying his Master’s in Pharmacy degree.
    We’re extremely proud of him.
    The half brain he saw was greater than the sum of all the brain cells of our current political class.

      1. He did say it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be as he had no emotional attachment. A very mature young man who has blossomed at university. He’s had a letter sent to the university praising him for his knowledge and saying he knew thing they wouldn’t expect a second year student to know. He’s only in his second term. An amazing young man.

        1. You both have every right to be proud. He has obviously been studying. I do hope though that he doesn’t take his work home with him. :@(

    4. Dr. Daughter used to enjoy her dissection sessions when she was a student.
      Hard to believe she was 30yo earlier this month.

      1. GS wanted to be a doctor but his assessment in 2020 was 1 mark short. He still wants to be a doctor but would be another 4 years after this 4 year degree. Early stages yet.

    1. Yup, anti-vaxx Twit is all over it.
      The whole issue is too divisive – schadenfreude is not fun.

      1. I hope that was a joke!
        On the other hand, half the animals slaughtered have them…someone’s gotta eat ’em….

        1. They can put them in sausages and faggots. I don’t mind that, but i don’t want to see them.

      2. Back in the day there was a local shepherd who used to castrate the ram lambs using his teeth (and a sharp knife); as he had a long straggly beard it was said to be quite a sight by the time he had finished; afterwards he would fry the pile of delicacies for his breakfast.
        Then someone invented tight rubber bands, aka elastration, and ruined his treat.
        Mind you, shepherd probably continued to help out with the same little op. on piglets.

    2. I think I’m travelling on a different bus to him, in a vastly different direction.

      1. I heard the expression “travelling on a different bus” (to mean the equivalent of “batting for the other side”) for the first time today – just sayin’ 🙂

    1. MH has been suffering from Brussels sprouts wind today…doesn’t make any difference which direction it comes from 🙁

      1. A good botty blast is a thing to celebrate! A symphony on the butt trombone!
        I fart, therefore I am (shunned).

        1. If you’d been here today, you wouldn’t have been shunned. stunned more like.

        2. Shakespeare could be lavatorially vulgar from time to time as he knew it went down well with the groundlings :

          Othello : Act 3 Scene 1.

          Clown: O, thereby hangs a tail.

          First Musician: Whereby hangs a tale, sir?

          Clown : Marry, sir, by many a wind-instrument that I know

          1. Now will he sit under a medlar tree
            And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit,
            As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.
            Oh Romeo, that she were!
            Oh, that she were an open arse
            And thou a poperin pear.

            R&J Act 2- if I recall correctly…. don’t know any more.

        3. Shakespeare could be lavatorially vulgar from time to time as he knew it went down well with the groundlings :

          Othello : Act 3 Scene 1.

          Clown: O, thereby hangs a tail.

          First Musician: Whereby hangs a tale, sir?

          Clown : Marry, sir, by many a wind-instrument that I know

    3. The Yanks call wind (flatulence) ‘gas’. So what we will be getting is Russian gas. Whoopee!

    1. Hopefully the parents will choose not to expose their young children to this and the film will bomb. Being gay is a fact of life for some but young children should not be sexualised.

      1. I agree but try telling the government and NHS that….and schools.
        Wouldn’t last 5 minutes in a school here anymore despite my experience and knowledge.

    2. Those employees – do they like their jobs? As go woke, go broke is an actual thing. When the film flops, will they be sacked?

      1. No. They’ll just blame the audience, or lack thereof, and call them toxic, homophobic, etc, etc. It’s the usual ploy/excuse.
        The people at Disney who are busily destroying the brand will never accept any blame. One could be forgiven for thinking it’s deliberate….

    1. The 400 million was owed. The Shah ordered weapons that were never delivered. Though why the ungrateful baggage couldn’t travel on commercial airlines is beyond me.

      1. She came back on a charter flight, approximate cost £400,000. (I got a quote.)

      2. Beg to differ: the money was owed to the Shah’s regime/government. After the students of Kalashnikov College seized the US Embassy and mistreated its diplomats, the Americans suggested that the British govt might like to temporarily withhold that advance payment for tanks etc.

        As for the charter jet, I can only suppose that there were other passengers aboard who had requested privacy.
        As for Naz Zag, she looked remarkably well for someone who had been incarcerated for a few years.
        My guess is that she was a double agent, and that there are many more of her ilk within the UK and EU.

      1. Foreigner just released from a prison after imprisonment for activism, released after massive funding from the tax payer brought back to the UK, gifted a massive house as a temporary stop off.

        Of course she didn’t.

  64. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe says “How many foreign secretaries does it take?”.

    Indeed. The chaos of government from 2016 onwards contributed to the merry-go-round. I blame Call-me-Dave. The BBC cannot contain itself – its indignation is almost joyful. Stick it to the Tories, eh?! More to the point, the towelheads of Tehran engage in more kidnapping and blackmailing and the FCO lives up to its alternative title.

    Meanwhile, in the Islamic republics of England…

    PS Has N Z-R played the race card yet?

      1. Yes, it was the UK Government who forced her to go to Iran and it was they who imprisoned her.

    6. If anyone is wondering why she appears so healthy and well groomed, apparently for at least the past two years she has been living with her parents.

      2. I got shot down on the DT BTL for wondering why the stupid woman went back to see her parents at least 3 times!! I was called hard-hearted and callous! I prefer pragmatic and sensible!

          1. Ah! But it’s quite amusing to wind them up! Adam Hill anyone?
            Ooh! And John Buxton thingy! He’s a real easy target! I googled him!

  67. Gawd ain’t life difficult.
    Trying to do ferry and hotel bookings using credit cards.
    P&O and I assume half-term has meant the websites crash and there are few crossing when I need to travel, all very expensive.
    New restrictions mean one-time codes have to be sent to a mobile or an email address, pre-registered.
    I doubt Putin gets as much hassle as I’ve had. What used to take a few minutes has just taken 3 hours.

  68. BLOW, BLOW THOU WINTER WIND,
    THOU ART NOT SO UNKIND
    AS MAN’S INGRATITUDE!

    Richard Ratcliffe admits paying £400m debt to free his wife creates issue of ‘moral hazard’
    He said Nazanin’s Iranian captors would be ‘patting themselves on the back’ after Britain agreed to honour the payment

    Henry Bodkin: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/21/richard-ratcliffe-admits-paying-400m-debt-free-wife-creates/

    She has not exactly done anything to endear herself to the British taxpayer. Perhaps we should give her back to Iran and get our £400m back

    BTL from Anthony Coyne

    During her gushing thanks to all her supporters she omitted thanks to the British State and it’s people who brought her back to the safety of a country that will keep her and her family secure in the future.
    She made no apology for putting herself in the predicament that she found herself in.
    She has chosen to criticise us instead.
    All too typical of some coming from foreign hell holes who repay our generosity by sneering and attacking us.

    (Anyone notice in the photo the red mark on her husband’s face? Maybe she gave him a slap!)

    1. How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful Iranian rescued from Iran!

      1. She seems to embody the worst characteristics of both Goneril and her sister, Regan.

        1. I’d love to give you an up-vote for that, Richard, but alas I have never read nor seen a production of King Lear. That’s something to put on my “To Do” list. (I presume the two sisters were not very kind to their father, the King?)

    2. The BTL comments in the Tellygraff, Daily Mail and the Spekkie suggest that her ungrateful comments have gone down like a lead balloon.
      At this rate, she will create sympathy for the Ayotollahs.

  69. https://www.rt.com/business/552323-russia-ukraine-milk-prices-surge/

    “Supply chain disruption due to Covid has already caused the price of products vital to dairy production, such as whole milk powder and anhydrous milk fats, to skyrocket.”

    I buy two kinds of milk, one is from small farms, and I believe is just pasturised. The other is lactose free, and heavily processed. But surely the whole milk powder and anhydrous milk fats are ingredients in processed food like cakes and biscuits rather than milk in a carton?

    1. Perils of writing in a second language. “Production” should read ‘produce’. Edit; agricultural inputs have increased in price, so the end product, food, is likely to be MUCH dearer later this year.

      1. True, but dairy produce would still be cheese, butter etc. Perhaps the whole sentence is so badly constructed that the meaning is completely lost.

  70. Someone once said to me that there is nothing which is completely good or completely bad. It is a tricky philosophical question, but I am reminded of it occasionally.
    Telegraph report:
    “Sir David Amess murder trial: ‘Terrorist’ plotted to assassinate Gove while jogging, court told”

      1. Both of them I imagine. But sometimes there are plain clothes people around in the background, so any fruitcake might get tackled just in time.

      3. What a fertile imagination you have;-) Pellets to you, young man.
        Enjoy Open Mic Night and do your duty and have a pint and half for us;-)

          4. As a post-graduate, yes.
            As undergraduate, the only spare cash ran to a pint a week.

      4. Gove reminds me of a slug. This is a description of Wagner, but just as apt.

        Creeps in half wanton, half asleep,
        One with a fat wide hairless face.
        He likes love-music that is cheap;
        Likes women in a crowded place;
        And wants to hear the noise they’re making.

        His heavy eyelids droop half-over,
        Great pouches swing beneath his eyes.
        He listens, thinks himself the lover,
        Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs;
        He likes to feel his heart’s a-breaking.

        The music swells. His gross legs quiver.
        His little lips are bright with slime.
        The music swells. The women shiver.
        And all the while, in perfect time,
        His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.

    5. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

      [The Prince of Denmark]

  71. I see Partygate is still ongoing, with 100 now being interviewed. Reminds me of how they got Al Capone for tax evasion, because they couldn’t do him for murder and racketeering.

    1. What will Johnson do this time to distract attention, start a nuclear war with Mars?

        3. “Never give up, never surrender”
          ““By Grabthar’s hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged”

    2. “Have you heard?
      It’s in the stars
      Next July, we collide with Mars
      Well, did you evah?
      What a swell party, swell party, swellegant, elegant party this is      !”

      [Cole Porter]

        1. A brilliant exchange betwixt Bing and Frank, Lotty!
          I love Cole Porter’s sense of humour …

          1. Oh, me too. Love his songs.
            Kevin Kline made a movie about Cole Porter which the critics panned. I enjoyed it and if you can find it, it’s worth a watch, IMO.

  72. Well, I have a new phone. Still an iPhone SE but the latest version. Thankfully, Safari opened Nottl without me having to login to Disqus. Only the banking apps were awkward.

    3. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

  73. Just a thought regarding the Iranian woman.

    “Tells ya wot, Nazanin; you’ze come here and we’ll pretend to arrest ya and keep ya in looksury, pretending you’ze in prison. The Brits will pay up soon as you like and you can go home”

    A slight miscalculation?

    1. Did you happen to catch her having a whinge about the UK and the Government? How much did we have to cough up to get the ungrateful little *itch back?
      Edit : Oops! Notreadundery! Sorry to all! Have been a busy girl today!

  76. ‘No one will marry your children,’ Pakistan PM warns ahead of vote
    Imran Khan cajoles and threatens his own and opposition lawmakers on eve of no-confidence vote

    With a vote of no-confidence looming over his government, Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan warned those planning to vote against him that they risk social disgrace, and that “no one will marry your children”.

    The no-confidence vote is expected to be tabled on Friday 25 March, backed by a coalition of politicians who accuse Khan of bad governance and economic incompetence. In January inflation reached 13% and the cost of fuel and food rocketed.

    The opposition party claims that it has the support of more than 20 lawmakers of Khan’s Tehreek-i-Insaf party (PTI) and its allies. Khan also appeared to have lost the backing of the military establishment credited with bringing him to power. The votes would be enough to oust him.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/no-one-will-marry-your-children-pakistan-pm-warns-ahead-of-vote

    2. East is east…
      I like that style actually. I would like it if our MPs stood up and told Johnson that he is a disgrace and nobody will marry his children.

    3. I recall John Arlott commenting decades ago that some of the most successful cricketers had tyrannical natures. I think he referred to them as fascists. A discerning man John Arlott.

  78. Well, thank you Boris. Our energy bill used to be £146 monthly, it’s going up to £265. Thank you very much. You absolute idiot.

      1. Our water bill is £24 per month. We’re on a meter and when we switched to metered water it saved us a lot of money. Just the two of us. Much cheaper than the old water rates.

    2. My local rag had an article entitled “what can Sunak do to help the cost of living crisis?”. How about cutting taxes for a start?

      1. He can’t conceive of the importance. The treasury only thinks of taking money from people. It doesn’t know why, it just wants more.

        I hate them all.

      2. They must reverse the net zero stupidity. It’s them that has pushed up energy prices. HMG has fallen hook, line and sinker for the crazy green activists. That would help industry too. HMG should also restart North Sea oil production and exploration and commence fracking. It is the Government’s fault that energy prices are so high.

  79. Half a brain was the subject of an earlier thread. This from a BTL comment over on The Slog a couple of days ago:

    “The human brain, I read, sits in total darkness and silence inside the skull. It knows nothing of the world outside that realm of total darkness and silence , save the picture it creates of it constructed from electrical pulses passing down neural pathways which are connected to the brain.

    Thus, the author wrote, for all we know, if the signals which are passed to our brains down the optic nerve and so on are false, the world which we believe to exist could in fact be wholly imaginary, and non-existent.

    Everything and everyone that we have seen, touched, heard, smelled and felt could in fact not exist in reality at all.

    I read recently that the key news presenter on one of China’s biggest TV channels does not actually exist. ‘He’ is a computer-generated image, and everything that he says is constructed using artificial intelligence.

    And nobody among their audience of millions realised this fact.

    Think about that – and its mind-boggling implications.”

    3. I watch it through gritted teeth and get pissed off when Paxman frequently says “pronounciation”, and when contestants are “doing” or “studying” their subjects instead of (traditionally) reading them.

  82. Evening, all. Why should Putin go any farther than Ukraine when all he wants is a buffer state? Still, that doesn’t suit the narrative, does it?

    1. A fascinating article, thank you.
      https://www.rt.com/business/552206-russia-avoids-default-reports/
      Here is a report about Russia paying its debt – according to RT, the debt was paid in dollars.
      Earlier, RT reported that Russia had simply instructed its bankers in the US to pay the debt, placing the ball for the default firmly in America’s court. It seems that the Americans blinked and paid the debt.
      I suppose the plan of the US globalists is that Russia defaults, and the German banking system collapses under the weight, if the Slog article is correct, thus ushering in digital currencies.

    2. PS: the author is clearly a man of discernment, as one can see from this sentence alone:
      “I further suspect that the fat idler in Downing Street lacks the focus to grasp any of this reality. “

  84. Can anyone explain to me why the situation in The Ukraine is more important than what is going on here in UK?
    We don’t seem to exist any more- why cannot the fool Boris and his ineffectual government focus on what needs to be done here? Because they don’t sodding want to.

    1. It isn’t, but deflection allows them to busy troubled minds with foreign quarrels.

      It’s not just that they don’t want to – they actively want to do the precise, exact opposite of what needs to be done: deliberately. These people are malicious.

      I still hold the intent is to do so much damage to this country, to crush the economy, send unemployment soaring, to do absolute complete carnage that we’re forced to the IMF and from there to the hated EU and the state overturns Brexit by popular demand. At that point a surprising power station building program will occur, state spending will reduce and all the damage done will be undone – as EU legislation pours back in to Whitehall to joyous applause.

      2. But EU legislation hasn’t poured OUT yet.
        Pretty close to nothing has happened as a result of Brexit – apart from blue passports (whoopdy-doo).

    1. Sorry to hear that, Ann. My hip has been causing me a lot of trouble today, so I’ve been at the pain killers.

    2. With their policy of unlimited immigration I really do wonder whether folk in the US will eventually find themselves in a second civil war?

      Great song – super lyrics.

  89. Morning Folks.

    Critical Race (to the bottom) Theory – A gift from the US that will keep on taking:

    “‘Operating in a Panopticon’
    The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.

    Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.

    Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools. Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. The argument went like this: Since the United States was systemically racist—since racism was baked into the country’s political, legal, economic and cultural institutions—neutrality, the conviction that the system should not seek to benefit any one group, camouflaged and even compounded that racism. The only way to undo it was to abandon all pretense of neutrality and to be unneutral. It was to tip the scales in favor of those who never had a fair shake to start with.

    But critical race theory, until quite recently, only had so much purchase in legal academia. The ideas of its founders—figures like Derrick Bell, Alan David Freeman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw—tended to have less influence on the law than on college students, who by 2015 seemed significantly less liberal (“small L”) than they used to be. There was the Yale Halloween costume kerfuffle. The University of Missouri president being forced out. Students at Evergreen State patrolling campus with baseball bats, eyes peeled for thought criminals.

    At first, the conventional wisdom held that this was “just a few college kids”—a few spoiled snowflakes—who would “grow out of it” when they reached the real world and became serious people. That did not happen. Instead, the undergraduates clung to their ideas about justice and injustice. They became medical students and law students. Then 2020 happened.

    All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America’s law schools. It was mandatory.

    Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality” and assessing its “differential effects on subordinated groups,” according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them.

    As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the start of law school and “at least once again before graduation.” That’s in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to “eliminate racism.” (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)

    Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate—and an illegitimate legal order. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse—the 17-year-old who killed two men and wounded another during a riot, in Kenosha, Wisconsin—was “further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system.” At UC Irvine, the university’s chief diversity officer emailed students that the acquittal “conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies’ matter.” (He later apologized for having “appeared to call into question a lawful trial verdict.”)

    Professors say it is harder to lecture about cases in which accused rapists are acquitted, or a police officer is found not guilty of abusing his authority. One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he’s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.

    “I got into this job because I liked to play devil’s advocate,” said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family.”

    Other law professors—several of whom asked me not to identify their institution, their area of expertise, or even their state of residence—were similarly terrified.

    Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School, told me: “I massively self-censor. I assume that every single thing that is said, every facial gesture, is going to be recorded and potentially disseminated to the entire world. I feel as if I am operating in a panopticon.”

    This has all come as a shock to many law professors, who had long assumed that law schools wouldn’t cave to the new orthodoxy.

    At a Heterodox Academy panel discussion in December 2020, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy said that, until recently, he’d thought that fears of law schools becoming illiberal—shutting down unpopular views or voices—had been overblown. “I’ve changed my mind,” said Kennedy, who, in 2013, published a book called “For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law.” “I think that there really is a big problem.”

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