Wednesday 10 April: Europe can’t rely on American power alone to resist Russian aggression

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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991 thoughts on “Wednesday 10 April: Europe can’t rely on American power alone to resist Russian aggression”

  2. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) Story

    HOLY PROSTITUTES

    A man is driving down a deserted stretch of highway when he notices a sign out of the corner of his eye. It reads:

    SISTERS OF ST. FRANCIS HOUSE OF PROSTITUTION – 10 MILES

    He thinks this is a figment of his imagination and drives on without second thought. Soon he sees another sign which reads:

    SISTERS OF ST. FRANCIS HOUSE OF PROSTITUTION – 5 MILES

    Suddenly he begins to realise that these signs are for real and drives past a third sign saying:

    SISTERS OF ST. FRANCIS HOUSE OF PROSTITUTION – NEXT RIGHT

    His curiosity gets the best of him and he pulls into the drive. On the far side of the parking lot is a stone building with a small sign next to the door reading:

    SISTERS OF ST. FRANCIS

    He parks the car, climbs the steps and rings the bell. The door is answered by a nun in a long black habit who asks, ‘What may we do for you, my son?’

    He answers, ‘I saw your signs along the highway and was interested in possibly doing business…’
    ‘Very well, my son. Please follow me.’
    He is led through many winding passages and is soon quite disoriented. The nun stops at a closed door and tells the man, ‘Please knock on this door.’
    He does so and another nun in a long habit, holding a tin cup answers the door. This nun instructs, ‘Please place $100 in the cup then go through the large wooden door at the end of the hallway.’

    He puts $100 in the cup, eagerly trots down the hall and slips through the door pulling it shut behind him.

    The door locks, and he finds himself back in the parking lot facing another sign:
    GO IN PEACE. YOU HAVE JUST BEEN SCREWED BY THE SISTERS OF ST. FRANCIS.
    SERVES YOU RIGHT, YOU SINNER

        1. Good to have time to read the comments in the morning – currently waiting in horsepickle for a nurse to wind the clockwork on my pacemaker, so a bit of stillness available.

  3. Our ailing NHS needs fundamental reform. Stella Braverman. 10 April 2024.

    Part of the answer is to integrate health and social care, so that patients in care homes are properly treated to prevent chronic conditions requiring a hospital admission. This should save money, since beds in acute care are more expensive than those in care homes. To make it work we need, as the think tank ResPublica has argued, to pool all health and social care funding in one ring-fenced budget so that savings in one part of the system lead to benefits for all parts.

    This is futile drivel. The NHS like the UK itself is beyond any reform.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/09/our-ailing-nhs-needs-fundamental-reform/

    2. When has ring-fencing money ever been implemented in government or any of our institutions? The money never is ‘ring-fenced’. Just a bit of dough lobbed about to make the electorate think something is being done. Meanwhile, some unaccountable upper class chav squirrels said money away in overseas accounts/investments or some such. Or spends the money on more paper-clips.

    3. Good morning, futile drivel indeed. I suspect that any saving that ‘should’ be made will be swamped by costs for the integration team and their consultants. When any contracts for the liaison body is set up, I wouldn’t be surprised to find those taxpayer-raking stalwarts Crapita or Serco front and centre, with ‘new’ IT equipment and staff to administer the integration based on a state of the ark system that Fujitsu had lying around taking up space in their warehouse.

      Of course, I’m only going off past performance, perhaps this time a government will bring in an affordable system that works and saves on manpower costs.

    4. How would they square that policy with the fact that large swathes of the places in care homes for the elderly are occupied by self funders because social care eligibility is means tested?

  5. Good morning, chums. I hope you all slept well. My Wordle result for today was posted on last night’s page this morning before Geoff opened the Wednesday page. I only just made it in six.

      1. He always looks like a flabby Home Counties stockbroker with pretentions…which is just what his father was. (Miaow!)

  8. MEPs to vote on divisive migration policy in ‘big moment for Europe’. 10 April 2024.

    The European parliament is to vote on Wednesday on sweeping new laws to overhaul its migration policy amid renewed criticism that it is feeding the agenda of the extreme right rather than protecting vulnerable people.

    Ylva Johansson, the home affairs commissioner who was the driving force behind the legislation, said on Tuesday that with the reforms aimed at “managing migration in an orderly way”, the 27-member bloc was taking a step towards neutralising the populist far right.

    “managing migration in an orderly way.” In other words no change.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/10/meps-to-vote-on-divisive-migration-policy-in-big-moment-for-europe

    1. Yo Minty

      What they mean is that the invasion Task Force, queueing for boats at Calais, will be made more ‘orderly.

      ie, it will become like the Deli-Counter in your local supermarket. On arrival at Calais each displaced person will be given a Queue Number to enter on their (latest model) mobile phone. They will then spend money locally until their number is called for them to embark.

      Win/win for the frogs

    2. Yo Minty

      What they mean is that the invasion Task Force, queueing for boats at Calais, will be made more ‘orderly.

      ie, it will become like the Deli-Counter in your local supermarket. On arrival at Calais each displaced person will be given a Queue Number to enter on their (latest model) mobile phone. They will then spend money locally until their number is called for them to embark.

      Win/win for the frogs

    3. ‘The populist far right’ are revolting! Quick change the rules, we can’t have the electorate becoming involved in our scam.

  9. Par 4 here

    Wordle 1,026 4/6

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

    1. Thought I was going to blow it.

      Wordle 1,026 5/6

      ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  10. How did a man that called over half the population, closet racists and knuckle draggers ever get a job representing our country?

    2. Because Sam Cameron’s clothing brand continues to lose money, she wanted him out of the house but it was too cold in his shepherd’s hut, he couldn’t hack it like Gideon O, and Rishi was told to give him a job by TPTB.

    4. That’s when you know a good supply of red meat is essential for human health.

  12. The Cass report lays bare what we all knew about the trans brainwashing cult

    The indoctrination of impressionable youngsters by dangerous cranks has been revealed thanks to this landmark review

    ALLISON PEARSON
    10 April 2024 • 6:00am

    Not long ago, I was told by a surgeon that a team at his hospital was performing mastectomies on young women who were transitioning. My first thought was for all those women with breast cancer who were having that devastating surgery to potentially save their life. What would they make of younger females opting for “top surgery”, a jarringly jaunty term for such a brutal procedure? My second thought was, what the hell is the NHS doing performing (and presumably paying for) all those operations when there is a queue of millions for essential surgery?

    We know for a fact that more and more girls are claiming that their bodies and sense of self don’t align so they opt to be trans men. Taking large amounts of testosterone both lowers the voice and encourages the growth of body hair, including on the face. Famously, it also bestows a temporary sense of euphoria, perhaps because well-behaved girls suddenly have more of those vroom-vroom “boy” chemicals coursing through their veins. (I applied a dab or two of testosterone gel during the menopause and it temporarily turned me into Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races; thank God for oestrogen!) The removal of surplus-to-requirements boobs completes the new manly look.

    I find this horribly upsetting, as I’m sure do many of you. Why do tomboys have to become infertile “men” when, in generations past, they usually ditched the dungarees and grew up to be marvellous wives and mothers? When did this sudden urge come upon thousands of young women to cry, like Lady Macbeth, “Unsex me here!” before proceeding to what looks, to the rest of us at least, like mutilation? It is a question that is part medicine, part metaphysics, part modern morality play.

    In September 2020, the consultant paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass was asked to conduct a review into how the NHS should care for children and adolescents who are either questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender incongruence (a mismatch between body and sex at birth). In part, the review was a response to a huge increase in the number of referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. There was certainly cause for alarm. In 2011-12, there were just under 250 referrals to the service; in 2021-22 this had risen to over 5,000.

    In particular, there had been a disproportionate increase in girls experiencing gender dysphoria and seeking specialist attention where, historically, it had almost always been little boys who expressed dissatisfaction with their sex.

    Gids had moved from a therapy model to a service that controversially referred children for the prescribing of puberty blockers to delay the onset of adult masculine and feminine characteristics. Supposedly, this gave them time to pause and work out who they were and whether they really wanted to change gender. In practice, that early intervention invariably led to more hormone treatment and surgery.

    In February 2022, Dr Cass published an interim report whose recommendations had a seismic impact. It led to the closure of Gids, which was criticised for the lack of data collection on what happened to children and young people who were prescribed hormones. Her findings also led to NHS England deciding last month to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children because there was “not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty-suppressing hormones, or to make the treatment available at this time”.

    It was, by any standards, an extraordinary admission. You could almost hear the lawyers going: kerching! Undertested medicine, linked to impaired cognitive development and leading to long-term bone frailty, had been given to children because, as critics like me saw it, a bunch of social-justice cranks had taken up trans as their cause du jour and indoctrinated impressionable youngsters without caring what the costs were. In the future, this will be regarded as one of the most egregious acts of medical malpractice of all time, of that I am convinced.

    ‘This must stop’
    Today, Hilary Cass’s final report is published. Once again, there is an insistence on evidence-based care to protect children, as well as a new emphasis on the over-representation of youngsters with mental health problems, with autism or autism spectrum traits as well as eating disorders and tics, among those claiming to experience gender dysphoria. Might the trans epidemic be rooted in generational mental health problems, given rocket boosters by social media, rather than any startling new desire to become the opposite sex? She suggests that it may well be.

    Dr Cass raises an eyebrow at the widespread adoption of “affirmative care”, which basically means going along with whatever the child claims they are regardless of family problems, bullying or other potential trauma. More sinisterly, it means therapists and even parents are not supposed to query a confused adolescent’s choice. In fact, they are told to celebrate it, although hearing from your 15-year-old daughter Jessica that she’s now Jonah, and she’ll kill herself if you don’t ditch her “dead name” and address her by the correct pronouns is not generally music to the ears of most mothers and fathers.

    “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop,” Dr Cass says firmly.

    Little hope of that if a Labour government legislates for a ban on trans conversion therapy. That would make the broader, rational conversation Dr Cass tries to encourage impossible. She admits her review “stepped into an arena where there were strong and widely divergent opinions unsupported by adequate evidence. The surrounding noise and increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate has made the work of the Review significantly harder and does nothing to serve the children and young people who may already be subject to significant minority stress.”

    Conflicting views about the “correct” clinical approach has “made some clinicians fearful of working with gender-questioning young people,” Dr Cass observes. Yes, but what she doesn’t mention is people like James Esses, who was training to be a psychotherapist and was thrown off his university course because he believed that biological sex was binary and immutable and that children should not be taught otherwise. “Nor do I believe that children should be unequivocally affirmed down a path of potentially irreversible medical transitioning,” Esses wrote in The Spectator.

    Undoubtedly, Hilary Cass is walking through a minefield and she does well to defuse some of the more explosive issues, insisting her review is “not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities”. The fundamental problem is that what she is dealing with is not a healthcare issue. It is a cult that effectively brainwashes lonely, awkward or bewildered children, separating them from their loved ones and promising them they’ll be their “best self” if only they cut off their breasts and grow a beard.

    Towards the end, Dr Cass apologises to the teenagers who have effectively been kidnapped by trans ideology (although she would never put it that way and I doubt she even thinks it). “Others of you have said you just want access to puberty blockers and hormones as quickly as possible, and may be upset that I am not recommending this. I have been very mindful that you may be disappointed. However, what I want to be sure about is that you are getting the best combination of treatments, and this means putting in place a research programme to look at all possible options, and to work out which ones give the best results. There are some important reasons for this decision. Firstly, you must have the same standards of care as everyone else in the NHS, and that means basing treatments on good evidence. I have been disappointed by the lack of evidence on the long-term impact of taking hormones from an early age; research has let us all down, most importantly you. However, we cannot expect you to make life-changing decisions in a vacuum without being able to weigh their risks and benefits now and in the long-term, and we have to build the evidence-base with good studies going forward.”

    In conclusion, Hilary Cass is saying quite firmly that as a society we cannot and will not do as the trans ideologues demand. Children and adolescents will not be given life-altering drugs and surgery without proof that it will leave them happier and healthier than before. If a young woman is depressed and anxious, we don’t believe that, in the majority of cases, a double mastectomy is the route to recovery. In its quiet, scientific way this is a vital and revolutionary document.

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

    Richard Kenward
    53 MIN AGO
    This is an even more traumatic scandal than the Post Office and subposties. Children have had their lives wrecked so that the evil “social justice warriors” and perverts can score another point for their Marxist “caring ideology”.
    The efforts to mutilate young peoples bodies for unfounded ideological reasons is sickening. This has been aided and abetted by parts of the NHS and worst of all by teachers.
    Teachers should protect children not covertly work against parents to fulfil some mental anxiety a child may have, as we probably all had at one point.
    This abuse must stop now and the abusers – teachers and medical staff – who have participated in the gross evil ideology sacked. End of.

    1. I was told by a surgeon that a team at his hospital was performing mastectomies on young women who were transitioning.

      These things are of course crimes just as Mengele’s experiments were.

      1. A colleague’s daughter had it done as soon as she was 18 and is starting to regret it. She’s highly autistic and her parents had a bad divorce as she was coming up to pubety, both linked to the whole Trans madness.

      2. I’ll go with Jordan Peterson’s description of the surgeons and psychiatrists who are doing this work: Butchers and Psychopaths.

      3. The ghost of Mengele must be kicking itself.
        He didn’t have a taxpayer funded ‘health service’ and several ‘charities’ doing his dirty work for him.
        He had no chance to spread the blame.

  13. Repeat shoplifters to be tagged so they can be banned from shops. 10 April 2024.

    Repeat shoplifters are to be tagged so they can be tracked and banned from high street stores under a package of measures to crack down on an epidemic of thefts.

    Persistent shoplifters will face “three strikes and out” where judges and magistrates will be expected to make them wear GPS tags if they are sentenced on three separate occasions.

    Police and probation officers will be able to impose exclusion zones banning repeat shoplifters from shopping centres and harness the minute-by-minute data on their movements to link them to any crime.

    Let’s pass a law! It won’t make any difference but it will look like we are doing something!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/10/repeat-shoplifters-tagged-banned-shops/

    2. More concerning is whether tagging ‘naughty’ members of the public will be restricted to repeat shoplifters. Meanwhile, Crapita and Serco will be champing at the bit to manage yet another government IT failure.

    3. Hah! I seem to recall that in the US there was a ‘three strikes and out‘ system that meant the 3rd conviction was a life sentence.

  16. Bad Boy Bates? Stick that on a T-shirt for a Kafkaesque flavour of this Post Office skewering

    The ‘unmanageable subpostmaster’ whose wry temperament emphasised his delightful tenacity was a joy to behold

    TIM STANLEY
    9 April 2024 • 8:39pm

    So, now we know: the Post Office sacked Alan Bates because it called him “unmanageable”. Stick it on a T-shirt! Whack it on a hat! There’s no greater compliment in bureaucratic Britain than being impossible to manage, and at the Post Office Inquiry hearings in Aldwych House, we learnt how Bad Boy Bates gained his reputation.

    His answers were short, precise, often funny. The TV show made him seem tireless but a tad tiresome; dramatists think everyone’s grim up north. Here we saw the Scouse humour. Did you follow the Post Office’s instructions to the letter, asked the inquiry? “[You mean], did I try to bankrupt myself?” replied Bates with a smile. “No, not to that extent.”

    The Covid hearings could take tips on how to run an inquiry. This one has biscuits and dogs (a Chihuahua and a Yorkie in a green jumper). Its lawyers don’t feel the need to play to the gallery. While the Covid circus is a celebration of elitism – “if only we’d listened to the statisticians!” – the Post Office scandal is its greatest indictment, a story of common sense crushed by ignorant expertise.

    Take poor Mr Bates who, at his post office in Wales, was forced to install the Horizon accounting software, which quickly turned out to be about as reliable as a Soviet dishwasher.

    It declared a mysterious shortfall in money; Mr Bates let it roll over, and told the Post Office what he was doing. Suddenly, the Post Office demanded the cash, ended his contract and attacked his character.

    Its methods, claimed Mr Bates, were “Stalinistic”. If you take out the element of mass murder, he’s basically right. I’m not saying that if the Post Office could have sent Mr Bates to a gulag, it would have… but this was Kafkaesque stuff.

    tmg.video.placeholder.alt XVhIl6Mgykw
    The National Federation of SubPostmasters turned out to be a Potemkin union: they did nowt. He wrote to Ed Davey, then the responsible minister, who replied that the Government preferred to keep the Post Office at “arm’s length”. This was bizarre, given that the Government owns the wretched thing, but at some point also ceased being true, for evidence was presented of backchannel communication between the two entities.

    Officials continued to insist that Horizon was working two years after the Post Office had written to their insurer to let them know it might be faulty – by now probably in danger of gaining sentience and waging nuclear war on mankind.

    This organisation, concluded Bates, is “atrocious… It needs removing… It’s a dead duck”. Unkind to dead ducks, I’d say, as they don’t make you queue for 30 minutes and then, when you come to write a label for the parcel, announce they’re all out of pens.

    Mr Bates left the inquiry to be surrounded by cameras and confused tourists. “Who is he?” asked an American. “He’s called Matt Hancock,” I replied. Let’s see what they make of that in Wyoming.

    “What did you think of the hearings?” shouted a hack. “Nice sunshine,” Mr Bates beamed. “Nice day. Plenty of friends.”

    And what will he do when justice is won and his battle over? He said: “I’ll go and buy a little post office somewhere.”

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

    Mike Beale
    10 HRS AGO
    I saw a fair bit of this this afternoon. Mr Bates was without doubt absolutely excellent. Totally unflustered and humorous. Black humour it may have been at times but my lord what a fantastic man.
    Compare and contrast with the POL and its operation Sparrow.
    Compare and contrast with the POL thugs in suits.
    Ad nauseam.
    That dreadful Vennels woman, Davey(laughably a Knight of the Realm), Jo Swinson (wannabe PM) and the various shocking civil servants.
    And they would have happily seen all these Post Masters rot.
    Alan Bates is worth more than the entire Houses of Parliament and beyond.

    Penda of Mercia
    9 HRS AGO
    Reply to Mike Beale
    The heavily redacted minutes of the Project Sparrow minutes are here:
    https://www.postofficetrial.com/2021/03/project-sparrow-first-board-minutes.html

    Timothy Daniels
    9 HRS AGO
    Reply to Mike Beale
    Perhaps Starmer should ditch the HofL and make Mr Bates the second chamber. And he could still run his little post office. I’d also add JK Rowling and Peter Hitchens, a splendid combination of creative fantasy and relentless pursuit of truth. That should cover it. And I’d watch its proceedings for a dose of sanity.

    Mike Beale
    8 HRS AGO
    Reply to Timothy Daniels – view message
    I’d agree Timothy on the proviso that Starmer would ditch his entire shadow cabinet and also stand down immediately. Hitchens & JK can carry on regardless. I have a huge admiration for both of them so it would be a great improvement I’m sure.

    1. There are many horror videos on the fentanyl and tranq epidemics in the US. The Youtube series on Kensington Avenue Philadelphia is truly shocking. Douglas Murray has done one as well. They a killing over 100,000 American per year and, unlike the pumped up covid pandemic, the authorities don’t seem to be doing much about it. Where the US leads, we always follow.

      1. The gaping spiritual void is causing societal decay and cultural rot, things weak people try to fill with drugs etc. There’s only one solution.

    2. To be honest, if people are going to be stupid enough to take these drugs, then I’m not going to weep or lose any sleep over them.

    1. But the EU does nowt about French and German state subsidies to their companies. I don’t see why we should join a trade war with China in order to support more expensive and now less reliable German solar panels JD.

        1. True JD, but we have a ruling class that is doing everything it can to destroy British manufacturing and impoverish most of the population.

  19. Good day all, and the 77th of course,

    Bright start at McPhee Towers, wind in the Sou’-Sou’-West, 6℃ to 11℃ so cool again. Rain expected from 1200. Again.

    Not what the farmers want, is it? Emma Gatten, Environment Editor, is doing her bit to scare for England with this piece:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/35215c0ea19f2a34c0efbdc180287cb9e868f9db2d20505492b22512ed886505.png

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/09/farmers-warn-food-shortages-no-harvest-world-war-two-rain/

    Farmers are warning of food shortages as record rainfall threatens to bring the first season without a harvest on some farms since the end of the Second World War.

    On some farms.

    “Unless it basically stops raining today and then it becomes nice and sunny and windy, we’re not going to get any crops in this year. That’s a real danger,” he said. “Many farmers will be in the same situation.”

    It might happen, it might not, and to ‘many’ ( how many is ‘many’) but not all.

    Farmers are also facing the prospect that crops planted during the autumn will not have survived the flooding brought by repeated storms, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said

    ‘Facing the prospect’ not that crops have failed to survive. It’s April now.

    And you’ve just gotta keep plugging that climate change schtick.

    Mr Stanley said farms were facing “an existential moment” because of the changing climate, which could put many out of business, reducing UK food security.

    “The problem that we’re facing is that weather is becoming so extreme that it is overwhelming our ability as farmers to continue to grow crops at all in some places,” he said.

    I’d say the weather we’ve been having is within normal bounds. It’s just that over the last decade or so we’ve become used to winters that have been drier than usual.

    1. Good morning ,

      How many acres of farmland are now covered in solar farms , how many acres of land have been converted to huge housing estates , more concrete, more run off , more mobile home sites , acres of caravans .. and of course .. don’t forget the population has increased.

      1. And our rotten government is paying farmers not to grow crops but to ‘rewild’ instead. The woke lunacy marches on.

      2. There’s a proposal for one not far from where we live at Shaws Corner. WGC Council has been pushing for it. But as many people have pointed out the only gain will be the farmer/land owner and China where most of these ugly contraptions come from. If people want solar energy they can use their own roofs or those on carpark or other public buildings.
        We don’t really have enough sunshine to make these ugly pieces of kit worthwhile.

        1. Where I live in SW France we do get far more sunshine that you do. Solar panels have proliferated on the roofs of houses and farm buildings which makes sense. There are schemes to put them on agricultural land which are more often than not fiercely resisted by local people.

      3. Good Morning. I think the solar farm thing, and the growing urbanisation, while a concern, is vastly overdone. You just need to fly over the country to see how relatively small the solar farms actually are, or just do a virtual flight on Google maps satellite view. The cause is driven by the economics of solar farms and the benefit to the landowner who instead of having to work the land leases it for a guaranteed income far in excess of what he would get from agricultural use, all due to taxpayer funded subsidies.

  20. Wry humour.

    https://twitter.com/juneslater17/status/1777675994440114267

    Now, talking of councils, here is the video of a Sudbury Town Council meeting I mentioned in an earlier comment.

    For information, Sudbury is a small town on the Suffolk bank of the river Stour, the latter providing the border between Essex and Suffolk. Sudbury is a pleasant town and some people prefer to travel from the Colchester area to shop there rather than visit the ‘city’ of Colchester which, in my opinion, is a bit of a dump these days.

    I’ve nicked Angelina’s Green picture from yesterday…

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5126f0fe35e8d9659308b6459146ef0310a3dff70c209bc252cf258eeaed53b9.png

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH9l9ZcgRc0

  21. Angus Colwell
    The lazy corpspeak of the Foreign Office establishment
    9 April 2024, 3:37pm

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Screenshot-2024-04-09-at-152759-VSCO.jpeg?resize=1536,986

    Mark Sedwill is a serious man. He has a master’s in economics from Oxford. He worked in Cairo, Nicosia, Baghdad and Islamabad over several decades as a diplomat. He was a UN weapons inspector, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and served as the Nato senior civilian representative there. He became cabinet secretary in 2018 after the death of Jeremy Heywood, and left just two years later after the first wave of Covid.

    Throughout the document, thoughtless language produces thoughtless thinking

    A shame then, considering his pedigree, that he has entered the world of corpspeak and insubstantial guff. He is the co-author of a UCL report called ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs’, in which he and his co-authors call for the Foreign Office to be abolished and renamed the ‘Department for International Affairs’. They also blame our foreign policy failures on the aesthetics of the Foreign Office: ‘modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial era pictures on the walls – might help create a more open working culture and send a clear signal about Britain’s future.’

    The first clue that little thought has gone into the document appears before all that. On the first page, the co-authors declare that ‘the world is in flux’, and that ‘history did not end after the Cold War, as Fukuyama had predicted’. This is a cliché, and a lazy one at that. Francis Fukuyama did not predict that world events would end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama actually said in The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy could probably reconcile most conflicting values in the ‘perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’. With nothing to fight for, we would all become ‘men without chests’, and the end of history would be a ‘very sad time’. In a later afterword, Fukuyama clarified his thinking: following the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘there didn’t seem to be a higher form of society that would transcend one based on the twin principles of liberty and equality.’ There is a ‘broad historical trend’ towards liberal democracy, he said, but that does not mean it’s inevitable, or easy. In the end, even if spasms against it occur, rival modes of government cannot offer as much satisfaction as liberal democracy.

    Sedwill’s lazy citation of Fukuyama isn’t the only off-the-shelf, rote-learned bureaucratese in the report. There are sentences like: ‘a functioning global order is a core national interest. And we must be in shape ourselves to shape it’.

    The meaningless word ‘engage’ (engage how?) is used 13 times, along with airy talk of ‘harness[ing] combined levers’ and ‘engagement with domestic stakeholders’. The City of London, the greatest financial centre of the past 30 years, is reduced to a ‘hub’. We are told that ‘the challenges and trends shaping the UK’s future prosperity and security are long term in nature’. When has that ever not been true?

    It goes on. Throughout the document, thoughtless language produces thoughtless thinking. The co-authors write, as if it is a bad thing, that ‘all too often the National Security Council looks at the world through a security lens’. What?

    It’s fitting that Sedwill’s report was sponsored by UCL, a university at which I spent three years. The university’s own rickety buildings around Bloomsbury are treated as an outdated quirk to be forgotten: the university is moving many of its facilities to a £151 million site in Stratford called ‘UCL East’. The talk at uni was that UCL wanted to sell off the valuable central London real estate.

    Britain’s cultural power owes far more to these antiquated buildings than modernisers would have us believe. They root our foreign policy in a chain from past to present, hopefully furnishing our politicians and civil servants with historical knowledge. Sedwill would have the Foreign Office forget all that, move out of King Charles Street, and into a modernist slab of landfill.

    The UK faces real, moral foreign policy troubles over the next ten years. How to split the bond between Putin and Xi? How to balance human rights concerns with the economic necessity of Middle Eastern oil? How to find an end to the Ukraine war? History’s lessons are not clear cut, but they expand the minds of those who know them. Sedwill would have us forget them.

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

    An0nymousBosch
    16 hours ago
    London’s Remainers are determined to denigrate Britain in general and our history in particular.

    You’ll notice that since 2016, our diplomats, academics, charity leaders, quangocrats and the rest of the Left Establishment have concluded that Britain was exclusively responsible for slavery, for example.

    They say the British Empire was an abomination, of which no good whatsoever came, and is responsible for virtually all the world’s current problems.

    In which case, I think Sir Mark Sedwill should probably return his knighthood, given it’s an embarrassing and anachronistic badge of England’s male, pale and stale past, just like all those portraits in Whitehall he wants rid of.

    He also appears to be a member of the Royal Geographical Society, founded at the height of Empire and itself full of oil paintings of awful white imperialists. Time for Mark, as I shall now call him, to quit that club too.

    Hungerpang
    14 hours ago edited
    Officially he “resigned”, but Sedwill was effectively sacked as Cabinet Secretary because when the PM was hospitalised with Covid he jumped on the first train to Brussels and tried to stitch up the trade terms in the EU’s favour, in case the PM died and there was a leadership void. He also blocked changes to the civil service initiated by Cummings. To describe him as a toerag is an insult to toerags.

    reader xyz
    15 hours ago
    “…Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” (Winston to Julia in Orwell’s 1984)

    1. One of the greatest and most far sighted thinkers of Anglo Saxon England was the Venerable Bede.
      He entered Jarrow monastery at the age of seven and never left it for the rest of his life.
      “Experiences” are only as good as the brains that process them.

      1. Well said. Bede’s influence is difficult to overstate – the effective inventor of the BC AD dating system and the man who first conceived of the English as a people at a time when they were warring tribal kingdoms with different ethnic heritages, a people who went on to be arguably one of the most important handful in history – alongside the Greeks, Jews, Sumerians and Arabs.

  22. Good morning good people.
    A brighter start today, sunny with a hazy overcast, not a lot of wind and a rather cooler tad above 1°C outside.
    A trip to Manchester to pick up a Nikkor lens I’ve bought on auction. A bit miffed as I missed the end of the auction and didn’t realise I’d been outbid on the camera body I was also going for.
    As the van is VOR I’m having to pinch the DT’s car.

  23. https://thecritic.co.uk/love-in-a-remotely-controlled-climate/
    Thought provoking if depressing article, albeit the very last part draws the right conclusions. Resocialisation through going to church – something that is very noticeable through our under attack village church which is growing ever closer and drawing more people in, book groups and local volunteers groups are increasingly important in counter the effects of screen based life which renders people passive, isolated and feeling overwhelmed. The role of local pubs is also crucial as neutral hospitable space.

  24. Good moaning.
    Yellow thing in the sky.
    We’re all dooooooomed.
    Or I could take Spartie for a walk and get a life.

  25. Good morning , a bright sunny early morning earlier, but what a shock, grey clouds , low grey clouds , everything is looking brilliantly green , apart from the purple lilac and other shrubs ..

    Moh has just left the house carrying waterproofs , just in case he needs them , golf game shortly .

  26. Europe has nothing to fear from Russian aggression, so long as we leave Ukraine neutral. We have more to fear from American woke globalism.

    1. No threat from a gangster warlord who regularly threatens nuclear war on us? lol
      Vlad’s a larger version of Kim’s Korea.
      The further back we drive back his sphere of control the better.

      1. No threat at all. Putin maybe a gangster, as is Biden and the rest of the west, but he has not threatened nuclear war. He has stated that the US might push the Ukraine conflict into becoming a nuclear one, but no more. Russian (and Soviet) nuclear policy has always been one of deterrent only and not first strike. The US has also made similar noises. Only the propaganda is different. In fact, the US is more aggressive, regularly flying nuclear capable bombers right up to Russian airspace. They do the same to China as well.

      2. Vlad and Russia are ironically the last remnants of a dying West. Only they are fending off the Globalists.

    2. Sadly after the Russian invasion it is impossible to see Ukraine ever being neutral, if indeed it ever was.

      1. I think it’s difficult to see it being anything else Peta, the bit that survives, if any does. If the West had not stopped Zelenski making a settlement based on neutrality in March 22 it would have survived intact. Not now though.

        1. I don’t believe it would have survived intact. Putin wanted the Donbas and the ethnic Russians there wanted him to have it. Even if a settlement based on neutrality had been on offer, and we don’t know for sure that it was, it would have included formally handing over Crimea and the Donbas. That aside, it is my view, as you know, that Putin wanted the Ukraine, full stop.

          1. We half agree. There was no chance of Crimea being ‘returned’ to Ukraine. Putin would at one time let the Donbas remain in Ukraine if Ukraine had agreed to give it a large amount of autonomy. It is very unlikely Ukraine can now retain it, under any circumstances. The question is how much of rump Ukraine will Putin take. He is a very cautious man, and does not want war with the West, but if the US keeps up its fight to the last Ukrainian policy my guess he will take all Ukraine east of the Dnieper, probably including Odessa, a very Russian city.

          2. Then he would end up with his very own Gaza strip although somewhat larger. And need his very own Iron Dome.

          3. His Gaza strip lies west of the Dnieper Peta. East of it the folk are mostly Russian, as is Odessa.

          4. I am aware of that Tom, but not sure what your point is. Mine is that the war won’t end, the Ukrainians will keep on fighting back, just in a different way.

          5. That remains to be seen. I don’t know whether or how the war will end. It all depends on how long the US is willing to bankroll the corrupt Zelenski. My guess is that sense will prevail in the US and they stop shoveling money at Ukraine, followed by a coup in Kiev and then peace talks with Putin. My point is that Russia has won, and that the war was started by the US.

    1. A thoughtful read, especially the comments about defence spending funded by debt. But surely Russia cannot be any better off? The implication being the costs of all these wars benefit the military industrial complexes and by implication a select group of individuals and investors, but based largely on debt. You can only run on debt for so long until something breaks. The western world must be in for some form of massive reset in the not too distant future?

  28. “Flesh-eating ‘zombie drug’ sweeping US is linked to 11 UK deaths

    The drug, also known as “tranq” or “tranq dope”, is a powerful animal tranquiliser. When injected by humans, it can cause a dangerously slow heart rate and large open skin wounds such as ulcers and abscesses.”

    Unless we now have ‘non human veterinarians’ all drugs adminstered to animals is done by Humans.
    The consequenses being: dangerously slow heart rate and large open skin wounds such as ulcers and abscesses.
    For the animal.or the human?

    When injected into humans, solved

    Buck up DT writers and subbies…….again

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/09/flesh-eating-zombie-drug-from-us-linke

    2. You may have overlooked Rowlf the surgeon in ‘Veterinarians Hospital’ and his fragrant assistant Miss Piggy.

  29. Morning all 🙂😊
    Lovely sunny start today calm wind but rain possible later. Not warm but the rest of the week looks good.
    I don’t think ‘we’ need to worry about Russian aggression it seem to have been all engineered by the white house. Someone needs to put the real aggressor in their place. All along Zelenskyy appears to be the problem. And of course his ‘mentors’.

  30. Signs of a Country in decay?

    These photographs are from around the Crewe area. Here, in and around Colchester there have been plenty of flooded roads and it’s clear that the drains aren’t coping with the rainfall. Some of the material causing the blockages is probably the debris from the eroding road surfaces being washed into the drains.

    No money for ongoing maintenance but do councils have money for Sustainability Chief Officers and managers? Colchester council has and a future video will expose them. I suspect that ‘sustainability’ is focused solely on climate change issues and the basics e.g. drainage/flooding are on an unlit backburner these days.

    Courtesy of:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/170f8411155ce0690bac6a77c7e7ea1d25c3c505dcb084813fece04503c3ff7e.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b4b54b9519b3358add1c8ea7c9a18e43e3d850a8c428a19ac0a8d80286c881b9.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fac2cf7bf7525638dbb45e1a80d4c5cb866cbb3e1596f9a7439e2464d9ec08a5.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/535852d4ed5bdd5435fc962780cecd11ce57b4f9e5ae49250d7884298f6bc7d2.png

    2. And the government has a policy of not clearing ditches or dredging rivers – all in the name of ‘the environment’.

  31. Eid today here. Evidenced by lots and lots of bescarfed ladies wandering about, all dressed in bright, all-covering clothes. My God, so many!

  32. I don’t think they’re actively trying to do these things, they’re just taken up by fake ideologies like free trade, internationalism and greenscam which are destroying them. Our elite are deeply ignorant parasites, scimmers from money circulation, not wealth creators from industry.

    1. “Our elite are deeply ignorant parasites, scimmers from money circulation, not wealth creators from industry”.

      I like that description. Do you mind if I use it?

      1. Please feel free. I see from your posts that your understand the fiscal aspects if what is happening and are a fiscal conservative like me.

    2. I think that they are doing it deliberately, for a variety of reasons such as their maniac net zero policy, and to punish us for Brexit.

      1. The whole global warming scam and Net Zero policies long predate Brexit, which they never saw coming, and which affect much of the world.

    3. They are stupid and lazy. It’s another thing on Bliar. Before he insisted on “reforming the Commons” to sit in the day (and thus exclude the intelligent people who are able to get proper jobs), and “professionalising politicians” , we have a bunch of no-experience no-nothing kids all trying to do as little as possible while taking as much out as they can. Politics needs older people – like me, you – mortgages paid off, pension pots kicking in, children off our hands, plenty of experience. Precisely the people Bliar kicked out of politics.

      1. Who can forget Bliar declaring that Britain is a “young country” and then inviting groups school-children into No 10 to give their “advice” on how to run the country? We are now reaping the “rewards”.

  33. Did anyone else in the UK get a message from their GP practice saying, Dear……. you are eligible for a covid spring booster, please book on line for your appointment.
    Sorry, no compendium.

    1. Prof Angus Dalgleish, arguably Britain’s top oncologist, has been warning from early 2020 of the cancerous risks of MRNA drugs.

      1. I wrote about Andrew Bridgen’s letter to the police saying that he had evidence of government vaccine policy result in death, even murder, in the first week of March. I was then abroad for a month and came back to – nothing. The whole thing buried completely with the efficiency of a KGB/Soviet censorship.

    2. Not yet but I got a text mentioning some changes at the practice. There was a link to download the information but I was unable to get past the bit telling me to upgrade my app. So I haven’t a clue what it was about.
      I won’t be bothering with a spring booster.

    5. My GP, here in Sweden, rang me again yesterday afternoon and asked me for my latest self-read blood pressure readings. He has done this once a month since December.

      I told him about all the tales I keep hearing about the decline of the NHS in the UK. He simply told me that as far as he was concerned, giving the best possible care to his patients had always been his priority and nothing would stop him from continuing.

      I have never received any cajolement to have a “Covid” jab, from any source.

      1. ‘in Sweden’, Grizz. Sweden, which didn’t lock own, had a short, effective enquiry and got on with life. Your health system is also different to that of the NHS – better, in my view.

        1. I get three months’ worth of prescription drugs each time (instead of the idiotic one month I used to get in the UK). For consultations I pay SEK200 [£15] each time up to a maximum of SEK1,100 [£82] in any calendar year. All further appointments (GP, clinic or hospital) after that are free.

          1. Will the system be able to cope with the doubling and then quadrupling of the slammer invaders and their enormous families?

      2. I think I read that our GPS are no longer required to commit to the Hypocratic oath. I know from personal experience that some of the doctors in the UK are hovering on the edge of theNHS.¹ Many have taken on private sector practice alongside their NHS connections. Getting a face to face appointment is almost impossible.
        They are now phoning their patient’s. for so called appointments. 10 minutes max.
        But it’s not always possible to take in everything they tell you. Especially if they have a strong foreign accent.
        Mistakes in medication can be made.
        On certain occasions It’s almost become dangerous.

      3. I get the text exhortation to get a BP done about every three weeks. Duly ignored naturally.

    2. Good morning JD and everyone. Napoleon and AH were ‘of the West’, so Russia has been bitten at least twice in modern history.

      1. Indeed but both were hostile to Christianity, freedom and constitutional law, and were anti West in those terms.

        1. The West, under the woke globalists, is now hostile to Christianity, freedom and constitutional law, and they are far more of a threat to us than Russia.

          2. True enough, but it has never been intentionally appallingly governed before. It is now, and the intention is to destroy us as a nation state. And that is what Russia is fighting against.

          3. I don’t buy that at all. It’s not a giant conspiracy although that makes it very simple but wrong.

          4. Oh, I think that it is a giant conspiracy JD. It took me a long time to get there, but it the only thing that explains the concerted and widespread lunacy. It might be possible to have an outbreak of political lunacy in one country, but not in almost all English-speaking and European countries simultaneously.

          5. What’s changed is modern travel and communication technology. A madness in one country, usually starts in California, will now quickly infect others before it is exposed and dies away. We also have too many under employed bureaucrats and vast masses of pointless higher education in which these madnesses are hatched. The times they have a changed.
            “The Devil makes work for idle hands.”
            If there is anyone behind it directing it, it’s Old Nick himself.

    3. Neither has Ukraine.

      But both have western heritage, as well as Mongol and Turkic. And the West was glad to call them brothers in 1812, 1914 and 1942.

      1. Ukraine wishes to become a full part of the West and is wholly within Europe. Russia is Eurasian and very different.
        Ukraine has also been Christian far longer than Russia.

        1. Not really. It is very difficult to split early Russia and early Ukraine (the word means borderland). Ukraine was also ruled by Tartars and, at least half of it by the Mongols.

      1. We have certainly had the wool pulled over our eyes.
        All this has certaily been organised.

    2. Thy simply shouldn’t be here. These wasters have been forced on us. Far too many do nothing, don’t contribute a penny and they are simply out breeding us at a horrific rate – because they’re paid by the state to breed at the local’s expense.

      1. I totally agree.
        I don’t want our grandchildren growing up in the country my parents and own grandparents fought wars to stop our country being invaded and taken over.
        But due to our idiot political classes I feel that it’s already too late.

          1. People of Britain vs the rest, including the government that has caused all these ongoing worsening problems,

          2. The “People of Britain” – I’m assuming you mean the indigenous and descendants of those who first settled here centuries or more ago – would be fighting one another. The “People of Britain” includes many who would fight alongside “the rest”.

          4. Sounds like a plan but unfortunately, I’m too old, at rising 80, to lead it or partake.

    1. Not so. That is the way the west’s propaganda machine twists things, but it is not the truth. The war in Ukraine is the direct result of US policy push into Ukraine and nothing else.

      1. Come on Tom. Medvedev is a high ranking Russian politician, albeit a drunk, and is repeatedly on the record of making such threats.

        1. He is on the west’s propaganda record JD. He has said nothing that has also been said by the likes of the unlamented Victoria Nuland and Blinken, but that does not get reported.

      2. Come on Tom. Medvedev is a high ranking Russian politician, albeit a drunk, and is repeatedly on the record of making such threats.

  38. But true. Look around you. It has abandoned those things that made it great. It is now a parody of the Soviet Union. A totalitarian Police State that dare not allow its citizens to speak.

    1. It is currently in a period of decline, but has been before and has been rejuvenated. At heart it’s a spiritual crisis causing a loss of cultural self confidence.

  39. Someone needs to get to work Korky.
    I don’t suppose it will be the water company. They’ll be busy disgusing it with the local council. Until next time.

  40. 385726+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 10 April: Europe can’t rely on American power alone to resist Russian aggression

    lets face it as a proven fact we in England cannot depend on Europe as in, the eu in any shape or form.

    In our present state as a defenceless nation, one that is on par with taking a knife (very apt) to a machine gun battle and open to the gang rape of a country by the dross of the world, daily, we really should be asking ALL sweat shops to knock out PPI white flags en masse.

    At this moment in time Russia is the least of ordinary, decent, indigenous folks troubles the root and branch of our troubles are, in point of fact daily, treacherously pulsating in what passes as parliament and the daily workings of political gangsterism.

    May one ask “just who did continue to vote for this these last forty years” it cannot be the left wing alone as the right wing has seemingly joined them ?

  41. WHAT CAME FIRST: THE IDIOT … OR THE “FOOD” THAT MADE THE IDIOT?

    SIR – Yesterday morning for breakfast we could choose between toast made with ultra-processed bread (Features, April 7) or ultra-processed cereal with fruit that was full of pesticides.

    The latter used to be our healthy alternative. I give up.

    Ann Warde
    St Ann’s Chapel, Devon

    If you are so vacuously stupid, so irredeemably air-headed, is to to voluntarily purchase — and then consume — ultra-processed items of “food”, then my question (above) will forever be asked … and seldom answered satisfactorily.

    Excellent quality bread, made from nothing other than flour, salt, yeast and water is readily available in good quality bakers’ shops. Otherwise bake your own. There is no excuse — whatsoever — for anyone to buy, and then consume, ersatz food. It is shit such as that which makes you ill, keeps you stupid, and then kills you. Wake the fuck up!

      1. A few Nottlers already (as I do) make their own bread.
        And eat porridge, with nuts raisins and half a banana.

        1. I bet there’s sugar on it too.
          Ukk. 🙁
          The only addition to porridge should be a little salt.

          1. When I used to eat porridge I would salt it, but also add a little Acacia honey (my favourite) to sweeten it a little.

          3. Acacia honey is lovely, but for something a little less sweet and runny, I like wild heather honey. I have also recently discovered one made by our local “miellerie”. They keep hives in the Pyrénées and in the late spring have honey made from the wild rhododendrons that cover some of the slopes there. It is very special – but VERY expensive!

          4. I also like lime tree (linden) honey.

            Having said that, I don’t like many other honeys (especially Manuka!) and I eat very little of any type of sugar these days.

          5. In France that is “tilleul” honey I think, and I like it too. I tasted Manuka honey in NZ and it was nice, but not nice enough to justify the outrageous price! I seem to be eating more sweet things as I get older than I ever did when I was younger 😕

        2. Now then, porridge:

          Jumbo organic oats
          Salt
          Add some seeds (pumpkin, sunflower)
          Full fat milk

          bubble and simmer

          A goodly shot of a decent single Highland malt
          Sweeten with a spoonful of heather honey
          Sprinkle with your choice of dried fruit/nuts and/or blueberries to taste

          A cracking breakfast.

        3. Now then, porridge:

          Jumbo organic oats
          Salt
          Add some seeds (pumpkin, sunflower)
          Full fat milk

          bubble and simmer

          A goodly shot of a decent single Highland malt
          Sweeten with a spoonful of heather honey
          Sprinkle with your choice of dried fruit/nuts and/or blueberries to taste

          A cracking breakfast.

        4. I’ll take the bread, nuts, raisins and half a banana but you can keep the porridge – never been able to stand the stuff :D!

          1. The electric bread-maker may well do so, Maggie. However I like the tactile feel of kneading dough and I doubt you could successfully bake large cobs, rolls, bagels or baguettes (my favourite types of bread) in a bread machine. I seldom bake or have use for the standard sandwich loaf.

          2. For people who don’t want to do the kneading, most bread-makers have dough only settings for rolls, fancy breads etc.

          5. If I want to show off I just life the Warqueen over my head. She wanted the last scene from Dirty Dancing mostly because her Mother hated it, and the only ones in on it were her Dad, the vicar and me.

            And she got her wish.

          6. My first view of the bicep squeezing the orange looked like buttocks squeezing the orange… I’ll get me to Specsavers!

          7. If ever I get my hands on a dollar again
            I’m gonna squeeze it until the eagle grins!

      3. My Morphy Richards breadmaker’s instructions add milk powder and sugar to the mix, with a legal get-out clause saying it will not work without the proper ingredients in the advised quantities.

        Now this may be a British manufacturer, made in China and sold in America, and that there is no market any longer for something made in England for English customers. Who do I believe?

        My kitchen is not big enough to make bread properly, and my oven never worked since my parents gave it to me after using it in a flat they let in the 1970s (but it does have an eye level grill).

        Waitrose used to sell organic wholemeal bread, but first off Duchy Organics discontinued it, and then Cranks did, after putting up the price. It seems that there is no market any longer, so they assert.

      4. That depends on how much bread you eat. I used to make all my own bread in a machine but found that since I’ve been on my own far too much went to waste. Well, not quite, I gave it to my cleaner to feed her various animals! I still make it if I have people staying and it is always very popular :))

          1. I know, but they are not worth making in small quantities and also go stale quite quickly. They can of course be frozen, but that isn’t the same as fresh.

    2. I really don’t want to go back to medieval times and start keeping pigs and cows, chickens, drawing my water from a well, gathering firewood thatching the cottage every five years. This sodding winter was cold enough with electricity, let alone burning horse dung.

      For a start, wool makes me itch and I’ll give up my dishwasher and washing machine when I’m dead.

      1. You described Firstborn’s smallholding, apart from the thatch. Tiled roofs better.
        Water from his own well – pumped up by submerged electric pump.
        Still eating his own pork which, as I’m sure Grizz will confirm, actually has flavour and colour to the meat.
        Doesn’t eat bread or cereals, but for example, makes his own pizza – base hand-made, but tinned chopped tomatoes and purchased onion.
        Firewood grown in the hillside by the farm. Due to time pressures, delivered in huge sacks by tractor.

        1. It does sound great. All credit to his life choices. If I had the time it appeals but the idea of bringing the city girl and Junior into that and telling them that Dad’s asthma means he can’t chop enough wood so we’re going to be cold would have them kill and burn my remains for fuel. If there’s not hot running water there’s a riot.

          Yes, Soton’s water is mostly chalk with iron filing in it, but short of turning a quarter of an acre into a reed bed and re-routing the mains around that we’re stuck with it.

      2. No one is asking you to do that. But people in those days were stronger, fitter and more mentally alert than today’s pathetically feeble excuses for humans — who feed themselves on chemical concoctions masquerading as food — will ever be.

        It is so easy to buy your meat from a decent butcher (and don’t tell me there aren’t any); fish from a decent fishmonger; bread from a decent bakery; and greengrocery from a decent greengrocer. No excuses.

        1. Stronger… maybe, but then if I spent all day tilling an acre of land I would be. Fitter, yes, for same reason. They also died at 45.

          Mentally more alert – not really. Maybe at a primal level because of the proliferation of outlaws and thieves. Most were illiterate and innumerate (arguably I still am). It was NOT a better time.

          Yes, I completely, totally agree that processed food is not good for you. It isn’t. I make a lot of effort to buy food as fresh as I can from the farm shop and the bakery (as they sell rock cakes I, err, I mean Mongo likes) but the whole point of mechanisation, specialisation and efficiency from that is mass production.

          1. Wool (which I love) doesn’t make me itch. Having said that I never wear a suit or pullover made from it next to my skin, always wearing a layer of cotton (T-shirt) underneath it.

          3. Indeed. I bought a long-sleeved merino vest and matching leggings prior to my winter trip up into the Arctic Circle five years back. They were utterly superb.

          7. They died at 45 because they didn’t have clean running water or antibiotics, and they didn’t eat a lot of meat (not well nourished).
            We have those advantages. The trick is using them, whilst not compromising on quality. Most mass production compromises on quality. Good for you buying from independent shops and farm though!

    5. I don’t understand the letter. So she has bought two unhealthy choices, and she gives up because someone points out that they are both unhealthy?
      Adapt and survive, Mrs Warde …

  42. I bet a great many of the councillors who “administrate” your area enjoy many freebies, jollies and “educational sojourns” courtesy of your council taxes!

  43. You have a crystal ball clearly.
    Look at the crisis on the ninth century when it was far more endangered. It’s a uniquely resilient and amazing culture.

  46. Mrs A just made some bread from rye flour, yeast, salt, molasses and water. I was sceptical, but it was delicious.

    1. My daughter persuaded me to experiment with a loaf of marmite and cheese bread at the weekend. I didn’t have chance to taste any – apparently it was delicious, in a strange way. Just a lb loaf tin, 2oz cheddar and a heaped teaspoon of marmite dissolved in about 1/4 pt water.

  47. One for Phizzee. Letter from a Mr Graham Ashen who once was employed at Marconi. IMHO Arnold Weinstock was not demanding an extra five minutes work, but he would have wanted to avoid arguments involving 16:59:58 and red time stamps. I’m no saint, but Google & the Argus inform me that someone with the name of Ashen was convicted of causing serious injury by dangerous driving back in 2021.

    https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/19648361.video-citroen-van-driver-sentenced-paralysing-motorcyclist/

    1. 1. It’s not their country.
      2. They can leave.
      3. It’s not an irrational fear, muslims are responsible for endless terrorism and slaughter here and around the world.

      Get. Rid. Of. Them.

    3. Why can this idiot not work out why people do not just dislike Islam but they are frightened of it?

      He should tell this to somebody who has lost a friend or family member to Islamic terrorism.

      Who, other that Muslims, are the members of rape gangs targeting underage white girls and perpetrators of terrorist atrocities?

      Understand and remove the reasons for Islamophobia and you will solve the problem. Preach to us and you will not.

    4. “As leader of the Labour Party, I am indebted to the contributions of Muslim members, activists and politicians who make our party what it is today…”

      Too bloody right – utterly in the thrall of it.

    5. How utterly chilling. Just another way of saying for the Muslim not the Jew (nor, it seems, those that are neither) a la Corbyn. Combined with the disturbing lurch into Islamophilia that the Reform party seems to be embracing I am beginning to feel genuinely scared. Everything he said there is a diametric opposite to what is really happening.

      1. Well said dear opopanax. Have you ever seen V Is For Vendetta? Leftist love to think they are the brave people on the streets. Yet I am seeing echoes of John Hurt’s dear leader character and policies in Keir Starmer.

      2. Well said dear opopanax. Have you ever seen V Is For Vendetta? Leftist love to think they are the brave people on the streets. Yet I am seeing echoes of John Hurt’s dear leader character and policies in Keir Starmer.

    6. This is consistent with the overall philosophy of the Left. Their new victim group is Islam. Anyone who has a problem with that is “Islamophobic”. The Left have rarefied and polished the ability to take offence when necessary and blindly look the other way when not. Remember Owen Jones “I want proof of October 7th rapes”? There’s an obvious deep concern in the UK regarding Islam and the Left with the resulting anti-Israel marches, with its anti-Semitism bubbling beneath the surface. These marches started the weekend after October 7th whilst Israel was still collectively reeling from the attack. But calling out Israeli flags daubed with a swastika becomes Islamophobic.

      When it comes to minorities the Jews win hands down, worldwide their numbers are a few million, not hundreds of millions. But the Leftist doesn’t see the Jews as an oppressed minority because of its strange deep seated materialist paranoia. This video should be about don’t bully and intimidate Jews.

      I am reminded of DARVO: Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Starmer blames the UK public, stop making me hit you. Get in line. He is preparing the ground for his the English version of the Scottish Hate Speech /backdoor blasphemy law.

    7. Muslims feeling unsafe “in their own country”??!! So it’s more their own country than it is ours – that figures. B*st*rd.

      1. 385826+ up ticks,

        Afternoon HL,

        The only primary ones with any right to feel unsafe due to self inflicted actions, are politico’s.

        Secondary, due to said actions via the
        politico’s / muslims the indigenous have every right to feel unsafe as any one would with murder / paedophilia etc on the menu.

        Lest we forget Fusilier Rigby RIP.

  49. That damn’d first letter:
    Wordle 1,026 5/6

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

    1. Wordle 1,026 5/6

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

    2. Wordle 1,026 4/6

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

      Morning all 🙂

    3. Lots of no hit lines today.

      Wordle 1,026 4/6

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

      1. Me too

        Wordle 1,026 4/6

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

      1. 385725+ up ticks,

        Morning G,

        But surely they do a stretch on the rack first
        prior to the final act.

      2. The leaders of the opposition parties and the devolved administrations, and the media, need to be added as they were screaming “harder faster longer”

      3. Give them all every clot shot in one go before being taken to the gallows 14 days later.

    2. Nothing will happen, nothing will change. The entire system will ensure they are never, ever held responsible. If that starts, the entire edifice of government collapses.

    1. This reminds me of a scene in King Lear.

      LEAR : Dost thou call me fool, boy?

      FOOL : All thy other titles thou hast given away that thou wast born with.

      Lord Cameron is not a genuine lord – he is not even entitled to be called Mister as he is sub-human.

  52. Kevin Pietersen hits out at Sadiq Khan as he removes watch and ring for London trip
    Former England cricketer has been an outspoken critic of the capital’s Mayor over rising crime rates in the city

    Kevin Pietersen has taken a swipe at the Mayor of London by claiming he has removed his watch and wedding ring for a visit to the capital and declaring “thanks Sadiq Khan!” in a post online.

    The former England cricketer appeared to criticise crime levels in the city as he revealed he had ditched his gold band for a plastic ring.

    Mr Pietersen, 43, has become an outspoken critic of Mr Khan in recent months and called London “an absolute disgrace of a place” in March.

    On Tuesday, he took to X, formerly Twitter, to share a photograph of his left hand, saying: “Gotta go into London today. NO WATCH and a plastic ring! Congrats, Sadiq Khan!”

    Mr Khan has been accused of losing control of crime in London as he pursues an third term in office, having first been elected eight years ago in 2016.

    Susan Hall, his Conservative opponent in May’s mayoral election, released figures earlier this week showing thefts and robberies involving a knife have almost doubled in London during his mayoralty.

    The statistics show that “theft from person” has increased by 96 per cent since Mr Khan took office, from 33,983 incidents in the year ending March 2016 to 66,649 in the year ending September 2023.

    During the same period, robberies involving a knife have increased by 97 per cent, with 4,215 incidents recorded in the year ending March 2016, rising to 8,307 in the year ending September 2023.

    Shoplifting has also increased, with 43,755 incidents recorded in 2016 compared to 52,436 in 2023.

    Mr Pietersen, 43, lives in Surrey and also has homes in South Africa, where he was born.

    On March 28, he posted on X: “London was once the most amazing city. It’s an absolute disgrace of a place.

    “You cannot wear a watch of any value. You cannot walk around with your phone in your hand. Women get their bags and jewellery ripped off them. Cars get smashed in for a quick smash and grab.”

    He added: “Sadiq Khan must be really proud of what he’s created?!”

    Later that day, Mr Pietersen, who won 104 England caps between 2005 and 2014, posted for a second time about the Mayor of London.

    “This bloke has been in charge for years now and all of this London nonsense has been on HIS clock,” he said.

    “Blame everyone else, Sadiq Khan – we all know what the greatest leaders DON’T do.”

    Having got to the capital on Tuesday, Mr Pietersen once again took to X and said said he was “having the most wonderful day” as he congratulated Mr Khan.

    “In London and having the most wonderful day,” he wrote. “This city is absolutely incredible. Congrats Sadiq Khan.”

    The Mayor’s office was contacted for comment.

    Related Topics

    1. Kahn, of course, denies all this. Nothing to do with the infestation of diversity, is it? Just a big city problem. Then we could look at the demographics of who is committing these crimes and start to see the obvious patterns.

    1. This is terrible. I mean, these poor migrants, just looking for a better life in a compassionate country. Why should they be forced to defraud the benefits system, like that? If they just paid out more to these people as they walk up the beaches at Dover, none of this would be necessary.

      1. Yes, it’s awful after all,, we need all these gimmigrants to sit on welfare because our own unemployment rate is so low.

        1. Yes quite. Spaff the cash on behalf of the workers. And if it goews wrong it is down to the miscreant population of scroungers. If it goes right then “we” the government spent our money wisely. Either way, government does not see itselfr as the trusted stewards of what is after all our cash, not theirs.

    2. Cripes. If they found out about that one, it’s more or less guaranteed that there are 1000 more that are bigger and undetected.

    3. What were the DHSS doing during this time? When will those responsible for handing the money out be dealt with? Will processes be changed? When, when will this sodding firehose tsunami of my money to unwanted criminal scum be stopped?

      1. The successors to the DHSS (current version DWP) have sought ‘efficiency’ by using computers rather than human beings. They have saved money by closing offices and removing the obligation to present in person to make a claim or to sign on. Unfortunately, this has been a gift to organised crime and to those individuals who find it very convenient that their sickness or out of work benefits continue to be paid into their British bank account regardless of where they are in the world.

    4. Meanwhile, genuine claimants find it hard to access adequate support.
      These include those unfortunate enough to be made redundant over aged 50ish and unable to find new jobs because of age discrimination (valuable experience and knowledge & proven track record irrelevant), then their prudent savings block them from additional help. MH was made redundant aged 50, and had to take contracting work away from home. The travelling and hotel costs (he was sent all over) ate into our savings, but without those savings, we couldn’t have managed until, luckily, the 2nd employer took him on after he proved his worth.

    1. French police have guns, don’t they? Well bloody well use them – it’s self-defence!

    2. Do we really want this slime in this country, in any form? Perhaps that’s the solution – put agents in there and have them kill one another.

    3. They should have kept the British in the Sudan.

      When my father was the governor of the Northern Province none of his people wanted to desert their country and take a risky rubber dinghy ride to Britain.

      Water was dangerous – my father hated crocodiles – he said that each year hundreds of people were taken by crocodiles in the Nile.

  55. China has suffered a downgrade in the latest blow to its economy, after agency Fitch cut its outlook to negative over concerns about rising debt levels. Fitch said the world’s second-largest economy was likely to keep amassing debt in an attempt to pull itself out of a property-driven slump.

    The rating agency noted: “Fiscal policy is increasingly likely to play an important role in supporting growth in the coming years which could keep debt on a steady upward trend.”

    It comes after China’s public debt has soared in recent years, as the Government has tried to push up growth rates by pumping money into the economy. It recently announced new stimulus measures like financial support to help families and businesses upgrade appliances or machinery while suggesting more would follow. China criticised Fitch’s downgrade, saying it failed to reflect that its interventions would help spur growth and stabilise the debt burden.

    It’s everywhere and worse for China, no one believes the official statistics.

    1. This daft idea of borrowing for growth is backward. It runs counter to common sense but it is this daft Keyensian obsession Left wing globalists have.

      1. Similar to our dysfunctional Chancellor who believes, like all socialists, that he can tax us into prosperity.
        All part of the stupidity epidemic ((c) Grizzly).

    3. The growth of the church in China is interesting. Officially around 23 million identify as Christian but unofficially there are closer to 100 million Christians in China. Most stay away from the state sanctioned churches and there is a huge growth of house churches operating below the radar, just as there were in Europe in the early days. This means too that we can’t be sure of exactly what they believe. China needs a Constantine to call a Council of Nicea. Possibly the Chinese house groups still hold with the Nicene Creed but who knows?

      1. Christianity was winning an estimated 5000 converts a day which is why Xi launched the crackdown and began demolishing churches. One wonders who will be the Chinese Constantine?

  56. A Polish priest has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for sex and drug crimes after a man collapsed during an orgy at his home.

    According to Polish media, the victim had taken too many erectile dysfunction pills. An ambulance was called but when paramedics arrived they were refused entry and were only able to administer aid after police arrived.

    The priest, referred to as Tomasz Z, was sentenced for sexual offences, supplying drugs and failing to provide assistance to a person in danger of loss of life or serious bodily harm.

    He was also ordered to pay the victim 15,000 zlotys (£3,000) in damages and several thousand zlotys to a fund set up to help crime victims.

    The trial took place behind closed doors, state news agency PAP reported, adding that sources had indicated there would not be an appeal.

    The Diocese of Sosnowiec in southwest Poland has been engulfed in scandal since reports of the sex party in the town of Dabrowa Gornicza emerged in 2023.

    A Polish priest has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for sex and drug crimes after a man collapsed during an orgy at his home.

    According to Polish media, the victim had taken too many erectile dysfunction pills. An ambulance was called but when paramedics arrived they were refused entry and were only able to administer aid after police arrived.

    The priest, referred to as Tomasz Z, was sentenced for sexual offences, supplying drugs and failing to provide assistance to a person in danger of loss of life or serious bodily harm.

    He was also ordered to pay the victim 15,000 zlotys (£3,000) in damages and several thousand zlotys to a fund set up to help crime victims.

    Grzegorz Kaszak, bishop of the Diocese of Sosnowiec, stepped down in 2023 following the scandal CREDIT: Fot. Grzegorz Celejewski /Agencja Wyborcza.pl via Reuters
    The trial took place behind closed doors, state news agency PAP reported, adding that sources had indicated there would not be an appeal.

    The Diocese of Sosnowiec in southwest Poland has been engulfed in scandal since reports of the sex party in the town of Dabrowa Gornicza emerged in 2023.

    Grzegorz Kaszak, the bishop of the diocese, stepped down but the Vatican gave no reason for his resignation. Tomasz Z was discharged from the clergy in 2023 after the media reports.

    The diocese’s press office was approached for comment. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/09/sex-party-priest-jailed-dabrowa-gornicza-poland-drugs/ https://media1.giphy.com/media/3ohhwMULIutDIMNh28/giphy-downsized-small.mp4

      1. I prefer to hear when politicians, celebrities and civil serpents have disgraced themsleves.

        Of course it is both sad and disgraceful when a priest is found to be corrupt. Christians are easy Aunt Sallies.

        1. That was my first thought. Sexual ethics are amost non-existent in Islam since the great Mahomet had none himself. By contrast such things are rare in the church but will always attract blaring headlines.

          1. Spot on. That is something people seem always to miss.

            Additionally, as a proportion of the total population in Parliament compared to the population at large in the country, it’d be very interesting to see how much bigger the percentage who commit crime, especially sexual offences, actually reside at Westminster. Yes we get the blaring headlines when a politician does it, but do we really need so many anti social deviants running the country as we seem to have?

          2. There does seem to be a prevalence of perverts, homosexuals and crooks – especially frauds – in the Commons (and Lords, I imagine). I think that’s why they’re attracted to the job.

          3. Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.
            Filths savour but themselves.

            [The Duke of Albany: King Lear]

  57. ‘We row for Britain but guys in the gym still mansplain to us’

    Lightweight double sculls duo Imogen Grant and Emily Craig discuss Olympic aims and unsolicited male advice

    ‘They’ll sit down, peek over at my split time, and double their speed for a couple of minutes trying to match it’

    As a junior doctor, Imogen Grant has a high tolerance for the unpalatable. Hospitals are her safe space. But put her in a public gym and her stress levels spike. The reason? Mansplaining.

    “One of my friends was doing intervals on the ergo [rowing machine],” Grant tells Telegraph Sport, during a break from training at British Rowing’s Caversham headquarters. “Six sets of 500 metres, something like that. A guy came up to her and said, ‘You’d be able to keep going for longer if you don’t go so hard’.”

    Grant and Emily Craig, her partner in the lightweight double sculls, look at each other and chuckle ruefully. Then they start discussing Georgia Ball’s recent viral video. The one in which Ball, a Professional Golfers’ Association pro from Lancashire, was working on her technique at the range when an unidentified male told her she was swinging too slowly.

    Is “mansplaining” the male equivalent of nagging and whining?

    1. Do men make that sort of patronising comment to each other, or only to women?
      One thing I have noticed on my travels is that German men cannot resist telling other people how they could be running their lives better.

      1. Very interesting! The MR’s Loopy Friend (English who lives in France – see NoTTL over many years passim) was married to a German – a real bastard whom, I am glad to say, is now dead. The MR suggested that LF – who is very musical – joined the local Catalan choir. Some time later, the MR asked LF how the choir was going. LF said that she hadn’t joined because her German neighbour Gerd (a neighbour ffs) had told her that it was not the sort of choir for her…….

        Gerd also looks after LF’s house when she spends three months in England. LF asked him to feed the cat but NOT to let cat into the house. There is one outside door with a catflap. LF shut the door from the room into the house.

        On her return the whole house was full of cat shit. Gerd told her that it was cruel not to let the cat have the run of the house and so had opened the interior door…

        1. yep that’s a German man!
          My neighbours used to make similar patronising comments. After a while, I got very quick at deflecting them. Big smile…”If you had bought this house when it was up for sale two years ago (you snotty bastard, I know you earn less than I do!) you could have done xxxx better!”

      2. I’ve been a member of gyms where other men have tried to give me unsolicited advice, which I reject and ignore. Bloody sexists!

    2. Men do that, they constantly nag , doesn’t matter whether I’m driving , mashing potato, roasting meat, reversing a car, shopping , stopping to chat to someone , or even trying to hit a golf ball there is always a do it this way clause ..

      Men cannot stop interfering , why is it that THEY always know best?

      Back to the driving bit , my newish car has six gears and other gizmos , so I am nagged because I haven’t got the windscreen wiper on automatic , or why don’t I use cruise control , or why don’t I use my gears to slow down ?

      I am in a 30mph to 50mph are anyway , and drive carefully and in a competent way. Speed wagon moves round the area .. and we have tractors , lots of cars , tanks and quarry traffic .. driving on my gears instead of using the brakes when needed is a constant nag from Moh ?

      What am I doing wrong ?

      1. Ummm …… being too nice.
        Don’t drive him anywhere. Leave him to bloody well walk. And do his own sodding cooking.

    3. “As a junior doctor, Imogen Grant has a high tolerance for the unpalatable. Hospitals are her safe space. But put her in a public gym and her stress levels spike. The reason?” She’s an arrogant narcissist. I’m guessing she wasn’t wearing her Team GB uniform. Even then a polite explanation would of been sufficient. But no this privileged woman plays the victim card.

  58. How woke policing betrays ordinary people. Spiked 10 April 2024.

    The cops now care more about offensive tweets than burglaries.

    To make matters worse, many police forces really do seem to believe that countering ‘hate speech’ should be their top priority. This is driven by an almost pathological fear and loathing of the mass of citizens in society, who cops assume are only one mouse click away from committing violent acts against minorities. Police Scotland gave the game away on this recently when, during a training session for officers on the new Hate Crime Act, they drew up a hypothetical scenario about a gender-critical feminist called Jo (widely believed to be based on JK Rowling). In the exercise, Jo suddenly goes from posting about her concerns about gender ideology and its impact on women’s rights to saying that trans people ‘all belong in the gas chambers’.

    I’m not so certain about that. Though the Police have been “reconstructed” in the last few years; more women and ethnics, one suspects that it is mostly on the surface. When I was working I had to do what I was told because I was paid to do so and if I hadn’t I would shortly have been looking for another job. One of the most interesting aspects of the downfall of oppressive Regimes is that they revert to normal with very little trauma. The Anti-Nazi program set up by the Americans after WWII was wound down early because it wasn’t needed. Once the leaders were overthrown the people behaved as though they had never been.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/10/how-woke-policing-betrays-ordinary-people/

    1. What did all the tyrannical wokes do in years gone by though?
      Prolly all in the slave trade in the eighteenth century…

      1. Morning BB. The trick is to overthrow the leadership because while they are there they will maintain their control.

        1. But where will they all disappear off to, Minty? What will happen to their authoritarian desire to make everyone else’s lives a misery? It will have to come out somewhere, even without leadership, surely! I try to spot them in old novels.

    2. Hate speech is an invention brought about to control what people can say to protect unwelcome enclaves of deeply racist, intolerant and prejudiced ‘communities’ which the state has forced on us to create a client state.

    3. Historically, the Conservative Party was closely associated with the protection of private property. For conservative thinkers, private property provides financial security as well as emotional security. Thus, burglaries were always viewed as a heinous violation of personhood.

      But today concerns about private property are increasingly seen as an expression of ‘privilege’. These crimes are seen, consciously or unconsciously, as less important. Hence why shoplifting is on the verge of becoming socially acceptable, looting is viewed by some as an act of rebellion and TikTok terrors like Mizzy can barge into strangers’ homes with near impunity. Caring about violations against private property is now considered out of touch and gauche.

      Once again: “If all cannot have it, none shall have it.”

  59. How woke policing betrays ordinary people. Spiked 10 April 2024.

    The cops now care more about offensive tweets than burglaries.

    To make matters worse, many police forces really do seem to believe that countering ‘hate speech’ should be their top priority. This is driven by an almost pathological fear and loathing of the mass of citizens in society, who cops assume are only one mouse click away from committing violent acts against minorities. Police Scotland gave the game away on this recently when, during a training session for officers on the new Hate Crime Act, they drew up a hypothetical scenario about a gender-critical feminist called Jo (widely believed to be based on JK Rowling). In the exercise, Jo suddenly goes from posting about her concerns about gender ideology and its impact on women’s rights to saying that trans people ‘all belong in the gas chambers’.

    I’m not so certain about that. Though the Police have been “reconstructed” in the last few years; more women and ethnics, one suspects that it is mostly on the surface. When I was working I had to do what I was told because I was paid to do so and if I hadn’t I would shortly have been looking for another job. One of the most interesting aspects of the downfall of oppressive Regimes is that they revert to normal with very little trauma. The Anti-Nazi program set up by the Americans after WWII was wound down early because it wasn’t needed. Once the leaders were overthrown the people behaved as though they had never been.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/10/how-woke-policing-betrays-ordinary-people/

  61. Just been denied access to Facebook unless I subscribe to use my Facebook account without ads, starting at €9.99/month (inclusive of applicable taxes). If I want to access it without subscribing my details will be used for targeted adverts. It appears to have changed name/ownership to Meta. Anyone else got the same demand?

    1. Nothing would induce me to join Facebook or any of these other sochul meeja. NoTTL is quite enough!¬

      1. My Navy friends find it useful. It allows them to keep in touch with friends/loved ones who are posted around the world. Better than Royal Mail.

        1. I get daily pictures of the residents doing interesting things at Mother’s care home. Sometimes, even Mother features!

    2. Meta are the parent company, same as Google is owned by Umbrella.

      It’s a tax vehicle. As for adverts – does anyone NOT use an ad blocker and DNS level blocking these days?

    4. No. Facebook has been owned by Meta for years – it’s still Zuckerberg, just his overall company, also for Instagram, etc.

  62. 385726+ up ticks,

    Bulgarians pocket £50m from taxpayer in Britain’s biggest benefits fraud
    Five Bulgarian nationals plead guilty to falsely claiming Universal Credit over five years and storing wads of cash in ‘fraud factories’

    Seemingly they will be given stiff sentences, fodder for fools, in reality they will be in open nicks able to travel within a 500 mile radius daily, and will be employed as tutors in the finer arts of scamming for up & coming WEF / NWO political gang members.

    1. Scamming 50 million off the tax payer is nothing, says Gummer, as he pockets another million in kick backs for forcing the taxpayer to fund windmill subsidy.

      1. 385726+ up ticks,

        Afternoon SE
        I do realise, but they will not want to be hemmed in, their needs will be catered for as we have witnessed in other criminal issues ,
        think F N M, felons needs matter.

    1. And you’ll find a steadfast refusal to dredge the river. Why? Because that’d mean changing our water policy. Why’s that? Because the environment agency refuses, stubbornly, to deviate from the failed EU water policy so our entire water policy is designed for Spain.

      1. Add to that all the house building. Building on flood plains and meadows. Not clearing ditches. Chopping down woods and forests for solar farms.

      2. Sorry, Wibblers, but that’s cobblers. The idea that dredging the Tyne would have prevented it bursting its banks is nonsense. There’s been two to three inches of rain across parts of the north-east in the last week.

        There is certainly a case to say that proper maintenance of some watercourses, natural and man-made, in specific locations would have prevented or reduced localised flooding (e.g. Somerset Levels 2014, Tadcaster Bridge 2015, Fishlake (Doncaster) and Wainfleet 2019). Local knowledge has been lost over the last 30-40 years and responsibility handed upwards from drainage boards to councils and quangos.

        Simply shouting “Dredge the rivers!” isn’t the answer to flooding.

  64. My estranged sister messaged me on facebook and asked me how i am. So i told her…Mental
    health good. Everything else falling to bits. PAD, Cervical Hernia,
    Diverticular, Gynaecomastia, Hypogonadism, Antiphospholipid syndrome,
    Secondary Polycythaemia, Hypertension, Cramps in feet.
    Other than that i’m
    ticketyboo. How are you?

    And people wonder why i drink so much.

    1. The cramps I can help with – stretch more. The muscles that power your feet are in your legs, so do floor exercises to stretch your abductors, hamstrings and quads.

      1. Thanks. The clot in my leg affects the blood supply to my foot. They are not going to operate. I said how do i cope with the pain. He said to walk through it. Wanker.

        1. I’ve found that Magnesium Tablrts are effective i stalling night cramps in my legs.

          2. May I make a suggestion for night cramps in legs and please don’t laugh – it works! Buy a small, horse-shoe shaped magnet of the kind that seamstresses use to pick up spilt pins, about 2″ long. Put it in your bed, open end facing the headboard, about 12″ from the bottom roughly where your feet go, underneath the underblanket.
            My late husband suffered from night-cramps which, after he lost a leg and couldn’t jump out of bed, got to be a pretty serious problem indeed and nothing helped. Then a friend told us about this and as I had a magnet of the kind described it went straight into the bed. It worked from night one. I have since recommended it to four more people with exactly the same result and now need one myself!
            Give it a go, all it costs is a couple of quid for the magnet which will also come in handy if you spill pins 😆

          4. I’d never heard of it before or since and no amount of research has unearthed it anywhere else, but I do have a theory. Remember in science classes using magnets to pull a pile of iron filings into a neat straight line? This was to illustrate that they were made up of atoms, each with a positive and a negative charge, that positive will reject positive and ditto for negative and the magnet pulls them all the right way round so that negative meets positive, meets negative etc. Our bodies run on electrical impulses too, so maybe some of the atoms in our muscles for some reason start facing the wrong way round and the magnet pulls them round the right way? It’s as good a theory as I can come up with anyway :D!
            The last person I told about it was very recent and had suffered from night cramps almost all his adult life. He actually got quite cross with me insinuating that he didn’t believe me because if it worked why didn’t more people know about it, which made me very cross. I happened to have a spare one and gave it to him saying if it works, keep it, if it doesn’t give it back, but don’t effing argue with me when I am trying to help by recommending something that while it may not help, is costing you nothing and will most definitely do you no harm!! I saw him a few days later he rather shame-facedly told me that it had worked – the first night, just like it did with my husband, and the other three people I told about it!

          10. I prefer to shop locally. There is a craft shop in one of the local towns; I just need to make the effort to get there.

          11. They should have one there. I noticed on Amazon that they seem to be sold now as educational material for children.

        2. Gentle swimming (aqua therapy), and you might take a look at hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Available in Portsmouth area.

      2. I’m trying wearing socks in bed – recommended by an eminent neurologist. It actually seems to help although evaluation is a bit tricky because I find my susceptibility to cramp goes in cycles – sometimes as much as 3 weeks without cramp but then a week or more of leaping out of bed in agony (especially if it’s in my hamstrings or – worse- the muscle that makes my big toe point upwards).

        1. Do you find you are more prone to cramps after eating salty food? I know I suffer if I eat crisps or salted pistachio nuts.

          1. I’d say the reverse but that’s probably because I’d expect salt to help rather than make it worse.

        1. Our younger son used the expression “Reach out”.
          If he’d been 40 years younger, I’d have sent him to bed without any supper.

          1. Whenever I hear that expression I want to reach out and clip the transgressor round the ear…..😆

        2. I have two brothers like that! After years of persecution I have finally put my foot down, keep relations cordial (Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas etc) but in the interests of my own sanity and peace of mind, otherwise ignore. Now they want to see me but I don’t want to see them because I know the same thing will happen all over again as it always has. Apparently I can’t “move forward” 🤣

          2. Indeed, in every way, since one of them is in South Africa and the other in New Zealand 😁

          5. In some situations, those expecting others to ‘move forward’ are almost admitting guilt and avoiding owning up to their errors, but expect their victims to forget their past behaviour.

          6. Exactly this, but the problem lies in the fact that if the victim does decide to put it behind them and move on, the guilty all too often interpret that as “proving” that they did nothing wrong. Not owning up to your errors is not at all the same thing as “almost admitting guilt”. The only way to deal with people like that is to move right on and out of reach!

        3. Sounds like she would love going on all expenses paid courses to pick up grating phrases. Very irritating.

          1. ‘Step up’ was another one. Obviously she had been watching too much American telly.

          3. just us easy going people suddenly turning into stranglers…though i do think that is the intent.

  65. Just been out to a builders merchants. Drove through a part of the local town I haven’t been to for some time. I’ve spotted where the slammer colony has taken root and from where it wil grow outwards. Planning application for a Mosque is just a matter of time so the townsfolk are going to need Gavin Boby on speed dial.

  66. So sad…

    A Lebanese man accused of funnelling “tens of millions” of dollars from Iran to Hamas has been found shot dead in the mountains near Beirut, a security source told AFP. The body of Mohammad Sarur, who was under US sanctions, was found riddled with bullets on Tuesday in a villa in the town of Beit Mery, just outside the Lebanese capital. Mr Sarur had been shot five times and was in possession of an undisclosed sum of money that the killers did not touch, the source, who was not named, said.

    Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) later reported that the body of a 57-year-old Lebanese man, identified by initials that correspond to Mr Sarur’s, had been found in the area near Beit Mery. Mr Sarur was placed under sanctions by the US in 2019 for acting as a middle-man, channelling funds from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards through Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in order to carry out terrorist attacks from the Gaza Strip.

          1. Like a colleague of mine used to say way back, “we need 101% effort. 100% isn’t good enough.”

      2. It also depends on what is meant by “mother tongue” – people can be born in this country and still claim muslimese as their mother tongue… /sarc

      3. I’ve just been to an internal audit conference and i reckon only 10% of us in the room were native Brits.

  68. NHS mail.
    Just received a letter from my consultant effectively telling me that things are ticking along quite nicely. Steady as she goes and all that.
    Just as well. The letter has taken a month to travel a couple of miles across Colchester.

    1. I couldn’t open the link our surgery sent by text, but I finally found the letter on their Facebook page. Basically said “We know our service is a bit crap these days, but we can’t afford any more doctors….. so take your minor problems elsewhere – eg – chiropody clinics or NHS 111. ” Still they have got three new nurses.

  69. A report from my local newspaper’s website.

    Reform UK Stevenage’s candidate dropped for alleged offensive posts

    9th April

    By Christopher Day

    Amodio Amato has been dropped by the Reform UK party as their parliamentary candidate for Stevenage.

    A Mail on Sunday investigation found a series of offensive remarks on a social media account reportedly belonging to Mr Amato.

    They included a declaration that London was an “Islamic State”, and that there would be “a Muslim army run by Sadiq Khan”.

    Other posts said that Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf is “most certainly a Hamas terrorist supporter”, and spread the conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is “a transvestite”.

    The investigation also found offensive comments by two other Reform parliamentary candidates, with at least 12 of the party’s candidates now dropped or suspended.

    Mr Amato’s removal from the party came too late to stop his name being on the ballot paper for Woodfield ward at the upcoming Stevenage Borough Council elections on May 2.

    A Reform spokesperson told the Mail on Sunday on April 6: “Amodio Amato and Pete Addis have been removed from their candidature with immediate effect, for comments that clearly breach any basic idea of decency.”

    On the same evening, Mr Amato posted on his Facebook page that he “no longer work[s] for ReformUK, we have parted our ways.

    “I wish them luck. At some point a new candidate will be available for Stevenage.

    “It is a misunderstanding that cannot be resolved.

    “I still believe in their core principles, I have spoken loudly about them on this page.”

    Richard Tice, Reform’s leader, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that his party made “the fastest decisions when someone does or says or writes something completely inappropriate”.

    He continued: “One of the reasons we put our candidates list out so early ahead of many of the other parties is so we’re open to the scrutiny of various organisations and the media and in a sense that’s a good thing. They’re helping us with the vetting process.”

    Based on current polling, Electoral Calculus predict that at the next general election Reform UK will gain 12.3 per cent of the vote in Stevenage, behind only Labour and the Conservatives.

    The party’s website says that a new parliamentary candidate for Stevenage will be selected in the “near future”.

    https://www.thecomet.net/news/24241522.reform-uk-stevenages-candidate-dropped-alleged-offensive-posts/

    It’s looking ever more likely that I will be spoiling my ballot paper come the General Election. It’s all very well saying that news media helps the party filter out unsuitable candidates, but vetting an applicant’s facebook and other widely used social media accounts ought to be within the realm of the party’s own procedures, not something left to mainstream news media.

    1. My ballot paper in Hammersmith usually has a good selection of independent candidates but voting for them has the same impact as a spoiled paper. It soothes my conscience but that’s all. What to do when the establishment is so corrupt?

          1. Only the insane have strength enough to prosper, only those who prosper judge what is sane.

        2. We had a rhino party that emulated the loony party.
          A couple of elections ago their candidates were leading in several ridings ahead of the official party candidates, so they nominated several more candidates to spread the vote.

          Their policy platform included such gems as moving the Rocky mountains so that each province had their fair share of hills.

      2. One of the local independents wanted to do even more ‘to combat climate change’. Another wanted more LTNs. One was sort of sensible and suggest a car park be built to get traffic off roads – but only for certain types of vehicle, and the roads to be double yellowed.

    2. From what I can make out what he said and suggested was probably correct, including his own observations and those of many others. His valid points are why people would want to vote Reform.
      A bit of panic set in and over reaction.

    3. My son, who had intended to vote Reform, lives in Sussex and received the following from the local party:

      “You have no doubt heard of several candidates being deselected due to views which have no place in the Reform Party. Sadly, our candidate for Lewes was one of them.
      The Reform Party prides itself on professionalism, and we do not need candidate’s whose views falls short of what is expected of them. Due to these deselections the Reform Party will be re-vetting candidates.
      We all know that the media and certain groups are making it their mission to find any reason to stain the Reform Party’s good reputation and so we must be more robust in our approach.”

      He wrote back asking what the views were that merited de-selection, but got the following mealy mouthed reply:

      “It was more of an internal matter which escalated during a Zoom call which I would say was unprofessional which led to his demise.”

      As I have said before, I might still vote Reform, but I do not trust them at all, especially with Tice in charge. Controlled opposition in my view, and far too establishment to do what is required.

      1. Sorry to say it but nothing will change. If Reform were to win every single seat in the commons they’d still be stymied by the real opposition – the state machine itself.

        For example, stopping the invasion of this country means repealing numerous acts of parliament. The civil service would ensure everything possible was done to stop that, mobilising the media, globalist organisations, quangos and courts to tie up any change whatsoever. It would be a campaign of exhaustion dragged out for the 4 years of government while citizen expectations are ignored and we’d be back to square 1 as folk grow disenchanted.

        Most people simply do not understand how government works. They assume the PM says ‘stop the boats’ and the boats magically stop. In reality there are countless impediments. This is why I am so disgusted with the Tories. They’ve had 14 years to make changes and yet have preferred bickering, infighting, arguing, semantics, ego and sheer waste to get in the way of doing what the public want.

        Increasingly I think a dictatorship that is unaffected by elections would be the only route to smashing the state machine. Without the civil service to say ‘Oh, there’s an election coming, do you really want to change anything….’ it would simply be instructed and when it refused that could be dealt with.

        I volunteer my services. Watching lines of civil servants walking out of their offices with security behind them carrying a box of belongings appeals to me.

        1. A dictator in control of all government systems. Use the same tactics presently employed against dissenters.

      2. “… we do not need candidate’s whose views falls short of what is expected of them”. Two errors in one sentence would be enough to stop me voting for them! If they can’t proof read (and understand grammar) what’s the chance of their being able to cope with complex matters of government?

      1. They are going the same way as the ChinoTinos. Rolling over to the tune of Al Beeb.

      2. Disgustingly though, that organisation has bought power – with our money. The fascist Left are everywhere in big government. That’s the main reason why it must be defunded. Being awash with cash it hands out ever more to vicious,, bitter little Lefties who love abusing power to get their own way, creating a vicious cycle.

      3. They’re a lever to get rid of the Conservatives. After that, if they betray us, we can betray them likewise.

    5. They included a declaration that London was an “Islamic State”, and that there would be “a Muslim army run by Sadiq Khan”.
      What’s offensive about that? – it’s true

    6. Reform learnt the lesson of the things that wrecked UKIP – too many obsessives who simply cannot be disciplined or understand that the establishment will be all over Reform looking for any statement they can characterise as ‘extremist’.
      If you want to shoot your mouth off go to Hyde Park Corner or do it anonymously online, if you want to win the battle against the increasingly totalitarian politico-media complex you have have to become a disciplined army aimed at one thing – winning power.
      My UKIP branch was full of nutters and fruitcakes – one saddo who’d insist on lecturing everyone for 30 minutes every meeting why the Act taking the UK into the EEC was unconstitutional and two others who used to rant on with anti Christian diatribes at every opportunity. All three should have chucked out as disruptive cranks but never were.

    7. It comes to something when telling the truth is considered “comments that … breach any basic idea of decency”.

  70. 90% isn’t likely given that the muslim community only account for about 10% of the population. But, the likelihood is they’re concentrated in specific cities and it is cities where the majority fraud is carried out.

    1. And various African and Indian tongues. Between them, they constitute a far larger proportion of the workforce.

    2. And various African and Indian tongues. Between them, they constitute a far larger proportion of the workforce.

  71. Pharmacies have been granted permission to take on more of the routine tasks hitherto carried out at GP surgeries.

    1. Sadly, that did not apply when younger son and I nipped round to the nearest pharmacy at 8.0 p.m.ish on Saturday.
      The pharmacist was only dispensing prescriptions from a hatchway.
      Sonny Boy II stuck it out for another 24 hours, and then took his chest infection to the Emergency Treatment Unit. He only (!) had to wait 4.5 hours to get a prescription – not actual antibiotics, though. He now has the pills – some 48 hours after he first needed them.

      1. If somebody presents with a chest infection, and is examined to diagnose said infection, why on earth don’t they prescribe antibiotics? The reluctance to prescribe antibiotics when they really are needed, just leads to worsening symptoms and harder-to-treat infections, many of which then needs stronger antibiotics and even hospital admission.

        1. Tell us about it.
          Extra difficult when your son is a middle aged man and there’s a limit to what you can do without him looking like Ronnie Corbett in “Sorry”.

    2. A couple of weeks ago, In a local pharmacy collecting my medication, I came up behind a young chap who had hurt his finger. When we were much younger we just got on with life. Pharmacists have enough work to carry out.

  72. Scotland and Canada, and also remember the online harm bill forced through here.

    Why? Why are three separate nations all implementing the same absurd nonsense in just about the same way? Also note that nations which prevent such things – America, Germany, France haven’t pushed through this sort of drivel.

    This nonsense must be repealed as a matter of urgency. Government is staffed by vicious morons who must be exposed and held accountable, and cranks and wasters (Lefties) not given carte blanche to punish the innocent they dislike to force their own demented, evil attitudes by silencing dissent.

      2. He doesn’t have a soul, he is an empty headed actor without any moral compass to guide him.

  75. Cameron, what a guy. Bit Pic N Mix with with the countries he decides to support. He supports borders; then he doesn’t; then he does… Strangely, when PM of his own country…he didn’t.

    1. That’s because David Cameron is doing everything Soros wants just as he did when he was PM.

      1. And are you telling us that Sunak brought Cameron back because Soros told him to?

        2. Yes, absolutely. Soros, and more recently his friend Gates, are hands on Davos operatives pretty much running everything of importance via puppets in Downing Street, parliament and the civil service. The corruption which goes with this is off the charts.

  76. Europe can rely on American corporate power to start another war if this one doesn’t finish us off.

  77. ‘Could compulsory military service soon be reintroduced in Germany?’ (Spectator Coffee House)
    Just the beginning of course. Plans for a European army will later be resurfaced and eventually conscription throughout the EU.

  78. Afternoon All

    “The picture I had looked at with trusting eyes for all my life,not any more”

    Neil Oliver good bit on seed oils (Grizz will be pleased)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYGX5tUGU1g

    Rest

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/22459b2bde132b3681508980d42b472a97cd0b48ec3c894c60f55f4b1284ad3f.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8c4e2fede64005eeb7b525094550f4ecc2e2dcbabc4f1dde8d1cdb5f7c4d1c77.jpg

    https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=568,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/160/572/776/original/4f0ee2ed9b3c0f67.png

    https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=568,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/160/573/793/original/82f3cac660e92dc9.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9e1e69f3c89c34ee5f865057134b7d6c289422bdfb94e635a983813b6871bc85.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e6cb711e0d00001d33738aac93a4116c1eca151a87dae5a61d6e8fc73e195ba7.gif

    1. Indeed Grizz is very happy, Rik.

      Neil is repeating here what I have been warning — about the WEF and its media cronies — for years.

    1. Which will now be going round my head till i manage to get it out of my head!

    2. Humza Yousaf is almost certainly linked to Soros, whose money is behind the Climate Change Act 2008 and Legal Net Zero 2019. Nicola Sturgeon received Soros’ emissaries in Edinburgh and her policies were identical to Soros’ policies.

      Just by coincidence (not), Lord Adair Turner was the first chairman of the Climate Change Committee and appointed by Soros’ operative, Gordon Brown. It was revealed by the DT in 2014 that Turner was “in an alliance” with Soros and Turner was given a Soros job.

      In 2016, Lord Adair Turner was appointed chairman of the Energy Transitions Commission by Soros’ operative, David Cameron, and is moving the country to Net Zero just as Soros wants.

      So as you can see, the Net Zero puzzle is pretty well complete.

      1. Sounds like the conclusion of one of many ‘conspiracy theories’. Being correct right from the first word.
        I hope that the people of Scotland come together and get rid of all these dreadful people who are damaging our long established cultures and socialstructures. Maybe the beginning of the end.

        1. Quite. I wonder if Lord Adair Turner’s “alliance” with Soros goes back to when he was Director of the CBI and chairman of the FSA? Likely always a Soros mole secretly doing what Soros wanted.

          One clue is that Turner has long been very enthusiastic about QE and “helicopter money” and so is Soros. Probably because as Soros planned the fiscal expansion 2009 thanks to his puppets Obama and Brown and thereby engaged in massive insider trading before it went public, Soros ended up with most of it which is why he later said he’d had a “good recession”!

        2. One can only hope. But I’m not sure how much the people of Scotland, or England or Wales, are capable of justifying hope. Only time will tell.

    1. I guess that the 13 billion Trudeau gave to VW for a battery plant will be another poor investment then.

      1. They have in recent years developed a straight six engine. That might come in very useful soon…

        1. I’m not a driver, so a “straight six engine” means not a lot to me. A friend (petrol head) went up to their ‘works’ for a tour a few weeks ago.

          1. Never mind, the type of engine isn’t important. What is important is that they have a new petrol/diesel engine that’s capable of meeting current emissions legislation, and which can be fitted into cars that might otherwise have been electric. In other words, they won’t be entirely screwed if the whole EV thing doesn’t go where they thought it would!

    1. That’s really terrible for the camels. Not equipped at all for this sort of thing. They will inevitably die. You may think me sentimental but it pains me to see the suffering of animals.

      2. Why on earth would we think you sentimental because you don’t like to see animals suffer?

        1. Because some people believe that animals don’t suffer as people do. Obviously I don’t believe that. I think in the sort of circumstances the camels are in, they feel terror.

    4. You might be surprised that camels are not just ships of the desert; they have a surprising aptitude for swimming and the ability to survive in dry and coastal ecosystems. Scientists suggest that camels have a peculiar physiological makeup and can withstand extended periods of dehydration without any adverse effects.18 Dec 2022

      Swimming with camels in Ras Al Khaimah

  87. After the lovely start, the “hazy overcast” intensified and by the time I got to South Manchester it was raining!
    Not a bad run though, 3½h including pick up time and shopping at Buxton Morrison’s.

  88. When Dolly goes for grooming it costs me £40. I didn’t want to send Harry to the same place because Katrina cuts it too short and i want him to keep his bib.
    I asked Rachel the breeder who she would recommend and she said ‘Me’. She won’t accept any money either. So i took a big box of chocolates for her four daughters.
    I also asked her about breeding from Harry. She said she would find an appropriate bitch.
    No stud fees but i am going to have one of the puppies from the litter.
    Soon to be a three doggie house.
    The dogs have only been gone 5 minutes and it feels really strange. No welcoming party when i got back !

          5. My brain spent a millisecond there flabbergasted that the Democratic Republic of Congo produced wines at all, before clicking around to Romanée-Conti… 🤣🤣

          7. The Kinshasa Noir goes down well.

            (Just got back from an early couple at the pub so you beat me by a long way to the DRC.)

          8. I used to say “money is made round to go round”. MOH always countered, “money is made flat to stack”!

        3. Mad Harry, daughters Cockerpoo hair cut costs £55! And that is here in Central Scotland, not Edinburgh or Gleneagles! Waiting list is weeks!
          Edit : dreadful English!

          3. It costs us £45 for a Yorkiepoo haircut. The groomer is an international dog judge. He knows his stuff but his business is a bit of a conveyor belt, short back and sides sort of thing. The dogs like him. £55 is very expensive for way oop north though. I bought a set of clippers during lockdown but never quite dared, so I use them on poppiesdad’s diminishing locks instead!

          4. Haha! Much the same as our lovely daughter! Harry doesn’t like her doing it (even on the ironing board!) so the clippers she bought during Convid get used on Grandpa!

          1. I can imagine a woolly mammoth poses a challenge for a cut, wash and blow dry for the stylists so they deserve a big tip. 🙂

    2. I get it Phiz. I lost my little Border Terrier last August at the age of 15. I missed her so much. No paws behind me demand cheese when I opened the fridge. No warm little body on my bed at night.
      It could not go on. So in February I took delivery of an 8 week old Stffordshire Bull Terrier pup; which is quite delightful – if hard work. One does forget that puppies are hard work. She brings much joy to our lives – and is a great fan our friend Citreon.

    3. They are very more-ish, Phizzee. I would love another pup, a companion for Rico, but poppiesdad has firmly put his foot down. Rico has been something in the nature of a baptism of fire this time – he is a high energy dog with seemingly a strong prey drive – my ankles, feet and furry boot slippers, very determined and he suffers from anxiety separation. He is very nimble and fast on his feet, through the door in an instant. He requires a longer walk than Poppie did, we are out for at least an hour in the morning, shorter walk in the evening. Actually, weSo another pup is out of the question as we are ‘getting on’ and, as Nagsman below says, puppies are hard work, it’s like having a toddler running amok in the house. Shoes, socks, hats bags and scarves have also to be stored at a much higher level otherwise eagle-eyes spots them before immediately (and if possible will climb to get them).

      1. You have taken my words out of my mouth PM.

        Pip is hard work now that Jack is no longer alive , he has developed a different personality , and is over eager when he meets a she dog , and is rather growly when he meets another entire dog .

        He is so energetic , and even though he is a fit nearly 11 year old . He still grabs socks and hankies , and will grab our spectacles and any paperwork left lying around .

        When we have walkie time , he is off like a bullet , he was trained to the whistle , when he was younger , and was so obedient .. no longer !!!

        I did think a companion , another oldie would be nice for him, he is a cuddle monster .. I don’t think so, and as you say , we are all a lot older now .

        Pip is exhausting and wakes us up at the crack of dawn .. !

        1. Fortunately Poppie was, and Rico is now, a sleepyhead and Poppie quite happily would snooze until turned 9.00 am and Rico is now starting to stir at 8.45 am.

          It’s not just our stuff that he takes that is lying around, it’s clothes on the clothes line outside he will tug at if they are within reach, and on the dryer clothes rack inside the house. I have to have eyes in the back of my head. Poppie was such a calm girl, she made me feel calm inside my head as well.

          I wonder if Jack kept Pip in order in a way you didn’t realise, and he is now going through a stage he should have gone through years ago, but couldn’t, because of Jack’s authority? I have often thought we all have to go through these life stages, sometimes we can’t ‘do’ the terrible twos for example until we are twenty two or even older when circumstances allow! I remember someone saying to me that their second daughter blossomed when the elder girl went off to university.

        2. Kadi has settled nicely into being an only dog. I am quite surprised, because I thought he might suffer from separation anxiety.

  89. It would be monstrous to decriminalise abortion. I speak from experience
    If there is to be any change to the law at all, it should be to reduce the 24 week legal cut-off at which abortion is routinely allowed

    ISABEL OAKESHOTT : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/09/it-would-be-monstrous-to-decriminalise-abortion-i-speak-fro/

    A brave thing for this woman, who is Richard Tice’s girlfriend, to have written.

    My worry is that the likes of Harpy Creasy, Harpy Cooper, Harpy Rayner and Harpy Reeves and their fellow travellers will be clamouring for post-natal abortion when they are in government.

  90. Me too. My first though was oh those poor camels. The people have some agency to help themselves. The animals have none.

  93. If you meet him, do ask how long he’s been in an “alliance with Soros” as stated in the DT. I think it goes way back to the CBI in the 1990s.

    Also, please ask him who else is, or has been, a Soros mole. I think it’s every PM since 1990 plus many more!

  94. ‘Police Scotland is subservient and fearful It’s embarrassing If people feel offended they now think it’s a police matter We look inept It’s inconceivable 8,000 people felt they were victims of a hate crime before April 1 We’re policing the impossible’

    Scottish officers speak out after the ‘clumsily constructed’ new hate crime law inundated them with thousands of reports in the first week.

    “Embarrassed.” That’s the word that keeps coming up. After a turbulent inaugural week for Scotland’s hate crime legislation there are certainly louder, more emotional adjectives flying around, but in the messages that have been passing between serving and former police officers across Scotland, the common theme is one of simple embarrassment. In the past few days, whenever Calum Steele, the former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, has heard from a colleague (and there have been many), the main feeling has been, as he describes it, a “metaphorical holding of heads”.

    There is a sense, he says, among rank-and-file officers that policing “seems to have lost its compass”. “People are genuinely embarrassed. They feel that the service, and by extension [they] as individual police officers, will catch some of the public brunt.”

    The law itself is “clumsily constructed”, he says, but more than that, it’s the way the legislation has been communicated that has left so many serving officers reeling. “The fact that the service which, just a few short weeks ago was telling Scotland at large that it wasn’t going to be investigating what you could put in inverted commas as ‘real crime’ because of budget pressures and demands, and then on the flip side of that coin says everybody with hurt feelings that believes they’ve been a victim of hate based on their own perception should report it, and they’ll investigate it, and more importantly record it based on that perception.”

    On Easter weekend, in the final hours before the legislation came into force on April 1, officers scrambled to complete the two-hour training video that laid out how to operate within the new law. That online course “would have taken place while calls were coming in”, explains David Threadgold, the chairman of the Scottish Police Federation. “The buy-in from those officers and the ability to understand what is quite complex law just would not have been there.”

    The feedback he has received since – a somewhat neutral term for the long list of frustrations that have landed in his email inbox since April 1 – is revealing. Many said that, even after completing the training, they remained uncertain about what the changes really meant. They were also left lacking any real confidence that, in practice, they would be able to grapple with “the nuance of incitement of hatred”.

    One experienced officer shared his fears that he would struggle to understand the difference between an insult and a true offence. “I am 53 and I’ve been a police officer for almost half of that time,” he wrote. “I’ve performed several roles that have required sound and well-rationalised decision-making which has been tested over the years.

    “I would struggle to explain the difference between a high-level insult, which I think is allowed and is lawful, and low-level abuse, which is criminal.”

    Another officer cited the “lack of reference to the Human Rights Act” in the training. Another pointed out that the legislation risks making the police “look inept” and could “result in a loss of public confidence”.

    “The [Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act] is 100 per cent open to exploitation,” they said. “Police Scotland is so subservient and fearful of upsetting people in its image that I have no doubt we will be taking complaints from people with little or no pushback.”

    On the ground, the law is already adding pressure to a stretched workforce. “At this precise moment in time, the people it’s impacting the most are those that are wading through the 6,000-odd complaints that have been received in the past week or so,” says Steele, who now serves as general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations.

    In fact it’s closer to 8,000, says Threadgold, who finds it “inconceivable” that 8,000 people truly felt they were victims of a hate crime before April 1. “I have been contacted by people today who have told me the only reason they have recorded a crime is to make a protest point against this Government.”

    Officers already find themselves “policing the impossible”, says Steele – particularly “in the larger cities where active demonstrations take place”. “It’s going to impact any police officer who is policing any event where there are opposing factions at play. That’s a difficult situation to be in. They would often be better off not being there and just letting them get among themselves and see who’s going to sort it out.”

    He fears “the expectation of the public, who now will be chanting ‘hate crime’ at them, expecting people with opposing views to be arrested”. Meanwhile, he says, many officers feel the new law will see them dealing with cases that constitute a personal dispute rather than genuine criminality. “There are too many people who feel that to be offended is a police matter,” he says.

    The added bureaucracy isn’t exactly a sweetener for officers, many of whom have already been brought back in for overtime shifts to cope with the deluge of complaints that have landed in the past week. Will it all affect police recruitment figures? Brendan O’Brien, a former officer who now runs police recruitment company the Bluelight Consultancy, says that it isn’t a police officer’s job to decide if they are morally for or against a particular piece of legislation. “There’s a bottom line with police officers – they know they’re going to be serving His Majesty the King impartially and without fear or favour. I’ve been involved in policing since 1985 and I’ve seen all sorts of legislation come and go. You get on with it and do your job because you’ve sworn an oath of office.”

    This is by no means the first time that policing has strayed into an area outside its remit, he says. “The police have been the service of last resort for the last decade or so. Now they’re having to be all things to all people. Like with mental health – police increasingly find themselves dealing with those issues when they’re not always qualified to do so.”

    For O’Brien, it’s just par for the course in modern policing. And SNP ministers are already planning to extend the laws to give more protection to transgender people, by making it easier to prosecute those who engage in “conversion practices”.

    Steele points out recruitment levels are already fragile. Numbers have “fallen off a cliff ”. There were once 5,000 applications a year in Scotland. “In my time that reduced to less than half that.”

    “The value and regard with which people hold policing as a career is not the same as it once used to be,” says Steele. Could this be the final straw for some officers? He suspects it would take more than the hate crime law to push them, but it isn’t impossible. “If people are inclined towards the door in any event then it is hypothetically possible that this could be the one nudge that they need to push them over the precipice.”

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/248934ecc44089fc12465761dc0da2a07238dd30148dd278c7d357b00f06ba96.png

    Lefty Jock Wimp: “Officer, my feelings have been offended; I need to report a ‘hate crime’.”
    PC McGrizz: “Man up, you pathetic fucking milksop, and grow a pair!”

      1. Your call is important to us. To get you through to the right department, press 1 for gays & lesbians & others, 2 for blacks, 3 for Jews, 4 for Muslims, 5 for Trans, 6 for lefties, 7 for druggies, 8 for disabled, 9 for police officers. Please hold for all of the above.

        Have I missed any out?

        2. Muslims should have been first. Allah Islamists Slammers will be highly offended at the hate that put them 4th.

    2. The best thing folks up there can do is to keep making spurious complaints and completely gum up the system. If it’s broken, they can’t do anything to innocent people.

      1. The trouble is that, in the interim, they won’t be able to do much against criminals either….

        1. Not a trouble when you consider that they stopped actually doing real policing years ago. So it’s no great loss, really!

      2. The trouble is that, in the interim, they won’t be able to do much against criminals either….

    1. Unfortunately I don’t get bullace here, Korky, but on a good year we get plenty of damsons.

      I have some damson jellied jam from 2022 that has a flavour bordering on the sublime.

      1. Plums do make wonderful jams/jellies. When we moved here back in 1984 there was a mature greengage tree in the garden and it produced an abundant crop in 1985 that was turned into the best homemade jam I’ve ever tasted – my dear late wife was the ‘jammer’ at that time – I took over after her death. Sadly, the 1987 hurricane caused unseen damage to the roots and a gale in January 1989 finished the job by blowing the tree over. One good crop was all we had but it was memorable.

        1. We have an old greengage tree that never produced anything much until about three years ago – I didn’t make jam but froze them for use in tarts and puddings. We had a good crop the following year too, but then nothing last year. We had a plum tree as well that did well until it blew down in 2012.

      2. Plums do make wonderful jams/jellies. When we moved here back in 1984 there was a mature greengage tree in the garden and it produced an abundant crop in 1985 that was turned into the best homemade jam I’ve ever tasted – my dear late wife was the ‘jammer’ at that time – I took over after her death. Sadly, the 1987 hurricane caused unseen damage to the roots and a gale in January 1989 finished the job by blowing the tree over. One good crop was all we had but it was memorable.

      3. Damson jam has a superb flavour. I’ve never seen it on sale commercially, so I’ve only ever made it myself.

  96. In words

    ‘The next caller Louise, is in the Rhondda Valley and you’re through to the Prime Minister, go ahead Louise.’ ‘Good morning Prime Minister.’ ‘Hi Rhonda…’

    Rishi Sunak on LBC this morning mixing up names and places as he takes calls from listeners.

    https://youtu.be/L0dikX80Ed8

    1. Rishi Sunak “Help me Rhondda” (sic, Beachboys). Sunak will certainly prove to have beached the “Tories”.

      2. The area of Gobleki Tepe and all the unexcavated others, close to truly ancient cities like Edessa and Harran, and adjacent to Armenia, the location of Eden and the origins of the Sumerians according to their own beliefs.

    1. Or, as I read yesterday, the public are far more likely to roll up their sleeves for an injection if they call it a nice, friendly, familar ‘vaccine’ rather than an mrna injection.

  104. Ah, yes Eden. Just one documented talking snake. Now we’ve got thousands of the bu@@ers!

      2. I have another one which looks like four different cans of paint have been poured all over it. When i went to pick up Garlands from her hotel the guy that answered the door was covered in paint overalls (painting the dining room) and i said Snap !

    2. Carol has just put four of my Liberty Tana Lawn shirts on eBay. Collar size either 16 or 17 from distant memory. They were fashionable in the seventies.

    3. A girlfriend of mine made me a floral shirt in similar shades when I was a student. Sadly, a subsequent girlfriend destroyed it in a fit of zealous rage.

      1. As you are aware i have high standards where taste is concerned. I want the ones with the sunflowers. Do you have a link please?

  106. Just in from three hours in the garden. Grey skies and now a bit of drizzle. Maddening thing. I have had for years an old kitchen knife which was transformed into an invaluable garden tool. I had it on Friday. Gone. Lost for ever. Makes me spit….

    Signing off, anyway, as there is a lecture from the British School at Rome in ten minutes.

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain

  108. Just in case that slammer in Edinburgh thinks he is disenfranchised, here are a few to rebalance his prejudices:

    Policeman’s uniforms – Black
    The original police van for transporting prisoners – Black (Maria)
    New Zealand Rugby Team – All Black
    Colour of coal – Black
    The Sky at Night – Black
    The Prime Minister’s car – Black
    Gates to Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament – Black
    A Scottish Regiment (sadly no more) – Black (Watch)
    Hijabs – Black
    A Nottler’s sense of humour – Black
    A pudding – Black
    A type of bread – Black
    A type of treacle – Black
    The ISIS flag – Black

    There must be many more.

  109. A soupy Birdie Three!

    Wordle 1,026 3/6
    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    🟩⬜🟨🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Soupy indeed. Four here.

      Wordle 1,026 4/6

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

  112. Having a baby at 41 was ‘really selfish’, says BBC Breakfast presenter
    Rachel Burden made the ‘terribly arrogant assumption’ she would have a straightforward pregnancy, but her fourth child was premature
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/10/having-a-baby-at-41-was-selfish-says-bbc-rachel-burden/

    I am 77 rising 78 years old. My father was 48 and my mother was 42 when I was born. I was 47 when my first son was born and 49 when my second son was born. Their mother was 31 and 33 respectively.

    My wife, myself and our children are in good physical and mental health as my mother and father were until they died respectively at the age of 97 and 86.

  113. The prospect of ‘Mega North Sea Drilling ‘could well affect voting in Aberdeenshire?

    A negative affect on SNP in particular, perhaps.

  114. Predictably, the BBC is taking a stance on the Cass report. It appears to see shortcomings in ‘gender services’ as a failure to recognise the scale of the ‘problem’, a lack of sympathetic individuals and organisations capable of dealing with what it regards as a widespread phenomenon. If anyone has spoken of the need to question ‘transgenderism’ [sic] and to discourage children and teenagers from allowing themselves to be subject to treatment that they will regret for the rest of their lives, I haven’t heard it.

    Thankfully, none of the interviewees I’ve listened to has used the word ‘heteronormative’.

  116. Ross Clark
    Sadiq Khan’s Ulez has spectacularly backfired
    10 April 2024, 12:29pm

    What was that about Sadiq Khan’s expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) supposedly helping to reduce our dependence on cars and clean up the air? As well as the stick of charges of non-compliant vehicles, Khan has rolled out a very large carrot: £121 million of funds to help motorists ‘transition to greener alternatives’. That includes £49 million worth of scrappage grants for cars, at £2,000 a time, and £72 million worth of scrappage payments for vans and minibuses. According to City Hall in a press release last October, the whole package has resulted in 80,000 fewer motorists driving around London.

    So London’s streets are presumably now much less congested than they were before Ulez was brought in? Er, not quite. According to the sat nav maker TomTom, congestion last year was actually worse than it was before Ulez and the pandemic. In 2023, motorists spent an average of 45 per cent of their journey time stuck in jams, up from 37 per cent in 2019. If there really are fewer motorists using cars around London – and on past records it is not unreasonable to be sceptical of data presented by the mayor’s office – there have clearly been other changes which have impacted on journey times, for example from low traffic neighbourhoods.

    Transport for London’s own statistics refute the idea that there has been a shift towards greener forms of transport since Ulez was introduced. While road traffic has recovered to within 5 per cent of the level it was prior to the pandemic, bus and tube usage is still 20 per cent lower than it was. Obviously, Ulez isn’t the only factor at play there. The pandemic led to a collapse in public transport use, as we were told to stay at home and avoid it, and helped cause a permanent shift in work patterns. Rush hours are a lot quieter now, especially on Fridays, when Khan recently lifted peak travel restrictions to try to encourage people back to tubes and buses.

    But the fact that road traffic levels have recovered faster than public transport use suggests that changes in work patterns have hampered a shift to ‘greener travel’. When people do leave their homes, whether for work, leisure or shopping, it seems they are more inclined to do so by car. Indeed, the kind of jobs which cannot be done from home – such as nursing, caring or building trades – tend also to be the ones which are hard to do by public transport.

    Sadiq Khan promised cleaner air and less traffic. The first might well have been achieved – although air pollution levels have been falling sharply for the past 70 years, and the more polluting, older vehicles would have steadily been removed from the roads, Ulez or no Ulez. But it is a lot more difficult for the Mayor to claim that he has cut traffic – on the contrary, in some ways it appears now to be worse.

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

    1. The speed limit is 33% lower than previously. And most people don’t even manage to get to 20, but trickle along at 14-17 because people have been done for “speeding” at 23 and Plod likes to hide behind trees with his special gun. So no wonder traffic is a mess.

    2. The article is based on a fallacy. It was never about emissions. It was always about money.

  118. Gotcha!

    Three sons of the leader of Hamas have been killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, relatives and official Hamas media said. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons Hazem, Ameer and Mohammed were killed with family members in the strike near al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City.

    Ismail Haniyeh, who now lives in exile in Qatar, is originally from al-Shati. The deaths were confirmed by Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV station as well as Haniyeh family members on social media.

    1. Sadly those family members allegedly included three of his grandchildren. Wiki mentions that Mr Haniyeh sired 13 children. Some of his relations reside peacefully in Israel as Israeli citizens.

    3. So how many thousand innocent Palestinians did the Hamas publicity team claim in this unwarranted attack on a defenceless neighbourhood?

  120. Such a happy crew – already scratching one another” eyes out.

    Labour has become embroiled in another trans row after Wes Streeting welcomed the Cass review into NHS gender services and pledged to implement it in full.

    The shadow health secretary said the report raised “some serious concerns that are pretty scandalous”.

    But Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP placed under investigation by the party last year for campaigning against gender ideology, pointed out that women who had exposed the scandal had been “blanked, sidelined and dismissed” by male leaders simply for speaking up.

    And feminist Julie Bindel demanded an apology from Mr Streeting for failing to support her gender-critical views when he was president of the National Union of Students.

    In reply to Ms Bindel’s accusation, Mr Streeting replied: “From memory (16 years on, so correct me if I’m wrong!) I replied to confirm that you weren’t on NUS’ no platform policy and as this was in relation to a motion passed by the autonomous women’s campaign I was not empowered to overturn it (not least as a male president!).”

    Mr Streeting’s comments angered the Labour Left. The Corbynite group Momentum tweeted: “The Cass review ignored dozens of scientific studies, coming to a harmful conclusion of limiting access to gender-affirming care for trans youth.

    “Anti-trans campaigners have celebrated it. So it’s highly disappointing that Labour’s leadership is welcoming it unreservedly.”

    1. Those spineless liebour politicians (and others from every party) are only now speaking out because a) there’s an election looming and b) because they see which way the wind is blowing in the majority of public opinion.

    2. The more time they spend fighting each other, the less they spend fighting us.

    3. Notice the usual euphemisms trotted out by the mad-Left. Covering up the reality of what’s happening across the West.

      There’s a schism in the Left like on the Right. On the Conservative side we have Liberals and actual Conservatives. That’s business as usual in comparison to the Left. Labour have mad-Leftists with one foot in material reality, as angry and resentful as they are, then there’s the angry “reality is an oppressive construct” Clownworld people.

      As I understand Mr Streeting is gay, perhaps he has twigged on that Gender-woo ideology attempts to Trans the gay away.

    4. Notice the usual euphemisms trotted out by the mad-Left. Covering up the reality of what’s happening across the West.

      There’s a schism in the Left like on the Right. On the Conservative side we have Liberals and actual Conservatives. That’s business as usual in comparison to the Left. Labour have mad-Leftists with one foot in material reality, as angry and resentful as they are, then there’s the angry “reality is an oppressive construct” Clownworld people.

      As I understand Mr Streeting is gay, perhaps he has twigged on that Gender-woo ideology attempts to Trans the gay away.

    5. My son used to play sport with a lad who didn’t tun up for the season after his A’levels. It transpired that he had gone abroad for transition surgery . Many, many years later, on a whim, I googled the name of this person and found that they were a major force in founding Momentum. This might help explain the party line of the Corbynistas.

      1. Cue my inner pedant.

        “ Many, many years later, on a whim, I googled the name of this person and found that they were he was a major force in founding Momentum.”

        Edit. I can’t find strikethough. “They” is not a “they”. “They” is a “he”.

  121. He and the other Hamas leaders live in luxury while sending their deluded followers and their children to kill and die for them. About time some of it got personal for them.

    1. Precisely. The leader of Hamas resides in Quatar. They and his ilk live in luxury whilst their devoted followers give their lives to contest the western attacks.

    1. I expect that the British taxpayer will be on the hook to help fill the hole, gotta be world leaders doncha know..

  123. (I tried to post this under a post about Gregory Peck only to discover that the post had been removed. I cannot understand it – the post was completely inoffensive and showed a picture of Gregory Peck with Audrey Hepburn]

    Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in his best role playing the sort of father we would have liked to have had and to have been ourselves.

    [I adored my father and could not have wanted a better one!]

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/24dcb43d3f6ea82e9c9efdbf82ed67daa8c7ce305bf0b818b195d9ce19613cc3.png

    1. Your were very lucky, Rastus. Mine died when I was 21.He was 53 and I have felt the loss all my adult life.

        1. I’m sorry, N.
          Do you remember him at all?
          I really miss my Great-Aunt Hilda, who had Leicester Council grovelling before her – despite being the size and stature of a small concrete bollard.

          3. Hilda was the best of Bristish womanhood. Two of her would have vanquished the Nazis. The good Lord made her small to stop her taking over the world…

        2. I’m sorry, N.
          Do you remember him at all?
          I really miss my Great-Aunt Hilda, who had Leicester Council grovelling before her – despite being the size and stature of a small concrete bollard.

      3. There’s a lot, as an adult, to learn from a Father. And a Mother.
        Mine died in 1997, when I was 36, but I hardly knew him as he worked in Nigeria and I went to school in the Uk. Very little contact. Trying to remedy that with my two lads, but it’s difficult.

      4. Dad, like my dog, is going downhill fast. He will be 85 at then end of the month, two days after my birthday. He and mum are coming down to stay for a few days. I cherish every moment (but they still both drive me mad).

        I am squandering my children’s inheritance on afternoon tea at the Richmond Park Hotel. It’s not got the vies of the river that the Petersham has, and which my dad enjoys, but they do refill the sandwiches, cake and tea as much as you want. Not that my folks have a huge appetite. But it’s going to be a nice afternoon out.

    3. Gregory Peck was a very kind man. Mary Badham, the little girl who played Atticus’ daughter Scout, was from the West Coast of the USA fair away from the movie’s shooting location. When he realised that Mary Badham would spend her weekends in a hotel with only a chaperone for company, he approached her mother and – with her mother’s permission – he suggested that Mary spend her weekends with his wife and himself at their nearby home. As a result, Mary and Greg remained life-long friends.

    4. It’s only a couple of years ago that I re-read Harper Lee’s unsurpassable To Kill A Mockingbird. Time is now ripe to see the film again.

      1. it was just lovely when my children were doing this for exams (GCSEs), which gave an excuse to reread and savour. Of course, in our Brave new World this is no longer possible.

      2. It’s every bit as good as the book, Grizzly. (On re-reading your post I see that you have already seen/read both.)

    3. Just think how much better off we would have been had we really had Brexit instead of BRINO.

  125. Good grief, Biden might be doing the right thing; must be a first.

    Biden says he’s ‘considering’ ENDING the prosecution of Julian Assange after Australia urged U.S. to drop WikiLeaks founder’s case
    President Joe Bidens aid Wednesday that he’s ‘considering’ ending the prosecution of Julian Assange
    In February Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the request and said he wanted Assange to be returned to his native Australia
    Biden was asked about Assange while entertaining another Quad leader, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, for a White House state visit

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13293795/biden-julian-assange-australia-drop-wikileaks-case.html

    1. Can we have back the millions we’ve spent on policing the embassy whilst he’s been there? He’s not even British or wanted here yet he’s somehow cost us a small fortune.

      1. If “we” had got hold of him at that time I suspect he’d have been deported to the USA.
        The policing wasn’t to protect him, it was to catch him.
        The Yanks have tried all sorts of tricks to get hold of him and there is no chance he would have had a fair trial.

        1. I know. Perhaps we can ask the Yanks for the money. It’s their fault he scarpered to the embassy in the first place.

          1. When they chucked him out of the embassy he was taken to jail – Belmarsh I think. He’s a political prisoner.

          3. He was apparently next door neighbour to the even more dangerous criminal known as Tommy Robinson (real name blah blah) and was subjected to similar cruel and unusual punishment. They were even tapping on the pipes, for crying out loud.

            Of course, no “Human Rights lawyer” will represent either decent man (prisoner of conscience) on or off the public purse – and even if they did, there would be no justice for such men. They are to be expunged to further the new world order.

          4. That can’t possibly be true, because we have Human Rights enforced by the ECHR. I know, because every rapist and his dog is allowed to stay here if they have a cat, because they have a “right” to a family life.

          8. From several accusations. It just annoys me more than anything that he’s cost us so much money and isn’t even British.

          10. I know. I really didn’t expect an Aussie to cost us so much, though! Usually they just take our Ashes urn rather than our coinage.

    2. I’ve just read this.
      My first impression is that word is out that Assange is not going to be extradited. Hence the US diplomatically withdrawing its petition would be somewhat face saving for the Americans. Only my theory, I really don’t know.

      1. I wonder if there is something in a treaty between the UK and US that stops the UK from doing the obvious thing and sticking him on a non-stop flight to Perth.

  127. For some bizarre reason the sound of anything posted on this site is permanently muted for me out of the blue. Can anyone give me advice on how to retrieve it? (Have checked all the usual things)

    1. Some browsers have a setting to mute videos by default. Which browser do you use?

        1. Sorry if you’ve already tried this, but go to settings > Privacy & Security > scroll down to Permissions, and click on Autoplay settings. ‘Under Default for all websites’, does it say block audio, or block audio and video? And are any sites listed below that as individual settings?

          2. Did that and found nothing but then noticed a little word saying “mute” on the nottl web address, clicked it and Bingo! Thank you so much!

          7. Technology, eh? Carrier pigeons were so much simpler! Glad you’ve resolved it.

  128. The very fact that there is any discussion on whether the mutilation of vulnerable children is justified says all you need to know about the evil that is extant in the world.

    2. They abort unborn babies by the million, why would they care about mutilating a few thousand children?

        1. Evening AAL. Everything okay in your world?
          I really miss Sue Ward from the Speccie even though she’s pro Vlad. Have you seen her?

          1. I miss her too but thought she did come here at first? Haven’t seen her on the Speccie for a while either but I don’t look at the comments as much as I did.

          2. I don’t PJ. Perhaps she did and drifted away There was some hostility from some NoTTLers at first.

          3. Yes, I remember it, there was. They woke up one morning and found their site flooded with newbies!

          5. And a good evening to you sir. I’ve not seen Sue over at The Spectator, although I am not frequenting it as much since they dropped the banter bomb. I will be looking out for her over there. I popped in earlier for a Jake Wallis Simons article. I thought of you as a result of a new BTL poster who took a very anti-Israeli position, very belligerent. Oh for a JD comeback moment, or a PetaJ or a Sue Ward!

          6. I’m afraid the Speccie is following the Cameron line on most things now, ie steadily more progressive, anti Israel, and shortly to be pro China.

          8. Yes the anti-semitism is getting out of hand. Some even more nasty trolls, too. I don’t know whether I will bother to renew

          10. I have seen her on my soon to be terminated forays on the Spectator. Still posting good sense.

          12. Today I took advantage of £3 for 3 months offer when you start the cancellation process. I was able to select “comments section changes” on the reasons why I wanted to cancel scroll down menu. They have that ticking clock to sort themselves out BTL.

    3. They abort unborn babies by the million, why would they care about mutilating a few thousand children?

      1. Yes. It is. As is a lot of the other stuff that is being quietly ushered in under cover of, eg, Covid and Net Zero.

        1. But Mengele did his little experiments on those humans who did not count as human before they were killed. This happened too.

  130. I see it is a tank…….a different one I think – at first I thought it was a hospital bed, then I saw the gun.

    2. A hospital bed with a gun?
      Hmmm, I think you could be onto something there….

    3. Wow! Addiewell!! Tough area to walk around looking like that!! He is seriously demented!

        1. So we’ve been saying for years and years. meanwhile they march on with no humour at all, just grim determination.

          3. That bunch don’t do humour. To have humour requires a degree of cleverness – they don’t have that. They cannot think for themselves.

          4. My analysis too, Sue. I don’t understand why they are coming here in such droves.

  133. I do remember him……he was good looking too. I’d post a photo but I haven’t overcome the problem on this laptop with posting photos.

          2. All those years of listening to our ailments, looking down throats, saying aarrrgh, sticking their finger up bottoms, takes it’s toll

    2. Our eight years’ old son (at that time) would have happily said he wanted to be a girl because he simply loved girls’ trainer shoes – the bright greens, blues and pinks on white. He loved anything colourful. Of course they want to get these children before puberty kicks in so that in the boys’ case their features remain soft and girlish, and in both cases before their hormones that come with puberty tell them who they really are. It is all truly appalling, in fact I can think of no words strong enough to describe what govt has allowed for the sake of a political ideology.

      1. Not just ideology, pm. Paedophilia/pederasty plays its part and has infiltrated all our institutions as surely as has Marxist/Fascism.

        1. Indeed. It is about the destruction of the family and all that goes with that. We have allowed it to get to this stage. How much more, how much degradation, are we (as a people) still going to allow?

      1. Sounded like a bunch of semi-literate neo-Nazis to me – still, whatever floats yer boat……

          1. Apparently their follow-up hit is ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’ – catchy little tune!…..

          2. I do see your point – but this is more of a protest (a cri de coeur) than an affirmation of supremacy. I know it sounds like a football crowd and is musically unsophisticated but is is from the heart and it does chime

      2. It’s a rehash of a traditional folk song, but sung by/on behalf of Proud Boys a group that would generally be labelled far right.

      3. They’re called The Mannerbund. It seems the song has become a nationalist anthem across America and Europe.

  139. It’s time to come clean.
    Was chatting to Second Son over a couple of pints, about parts of my past, and the hurt that comes up over friends that self-delete was part of the conversation. This is difficult to talk about any way, so I wrote the text below as email to him to start the explanation as to why his 63-year-old Dad couldn’t speak any more.
    Hope it helps explain.

    I mentioned this in the pub tonight, briefly. It relates to my friend Elaine, an English lady living in Siracusa back in the 1990s, and who was the secretary on the site when I was out there. She was originally from Liverpool, married to a man in Augusta in Sicily who we all reckoned was Mafia. In 1998, just after moving to Norway, I read a news article that said that she’d killed herself with pills, in her car, leaving two small boys. How can you do that?

    She was my friend.

    When this happens, it’s difficult to get past it. There are so many questions – like “What if I’d been a better friend and supported her more?” Who knows?
    Still, a reason to think on, It’s almost impossible for me to listen to this, or talk about it, without tearing up. The learning point for me is to take care of my friends and family, wherever they are, so it doesn’t happen again. It hurts too much.

    I associate this music with her, so it’s difficult to listen to and remain calm. https://youtu.be/7O049oi2Dxw?si=xZqoQUJvE7X1AFdz

    Another piece of music I find difficult to listen to without extreme emotion is the one below – it was played in the pub tonight. It was always on the radio back in 1990, when I was living in Aberdeen and driving in my old red Polo over the Cairngorms to the construction site near Inverness on a Monday, and Mother was still in Sussex. My big emotion was that I missed Mother so; I’ve never been much good at being alone, and for her to be 650 miles away… that was hard. Really hard. She is the person from which all the wonderful things in my life have come from – including the both of you, Patrick and Alexander, o being separated is/was hard.
    https://youtu.be/0-EF60neguk?si=ZCcTzujOGQ7bFuq1

    Take care of your friends and loved ones.

    1. Dont beat yourself up – we all face these considerations.

      You’re clearly a good man, as I’m sure your sons will tell you if you ask them!

      1. Thank you for your kind words.
        It’s life; I wrote the mail to my lads, as it’s easier to type than snivel, ‘cos it still breaks me up.
        It’s time I said these things to wife and offspring… just hard to do.

        1. We did this last night, man!

          Let’s both make a pledge to tell our loved ones exactly how much we love them (I’m as bad as you, remember).

          I’ll report back and I’ll be chasing you…………………….

          Deal?

    2. I have a similar experience, which I won’t expand upon.
      At the time you will not have realised, and when it happened it was too late.
      You’ll never get over it, but try to place it to the back of your memories.
      The memory will still be triggered, but recall the good times, not the event.

    3. I’m going to stick my neck out here…I think your wife and boys will be amazed and delighted. I know I would!

        1. I’m sure they do. Sometimes hearing or reading words you long to hear, matters.

      2. Problem is, I can’t say it to them without becoming a blubbering mass of marshmallow.. And I’m a Yorkshireman, from Ilkley Moor!

    4. There is more than one way of looking at our past experiences Obs.
      At a funeral of one of my best old mates about 4 years ago. I met his eldest son for the first time. Pitting image. He’s was in his early 40s. He said to me ” do you realise if it hadn’t been for you none of us would be here today”.
      When I was 21 seven mates flew out to Benidorm for a holiday. As we lay on the beach one day John my mate from college, said. “This is the life, let’s go to Australia”. Too far I replied. “What about Canada”? he said. No too cold, what about South Africa? “Yep that’ll do”.
      Just over 12 months later we arrived by ship in Cape Town.
      I stayed two years he stayed over 30.
      Married twice and had 5 children altogether. This son i met was his first born.
      We had lost contact, but he came back around 10 years ago.
      But as I said sadly passed away, too soon.
      I’ve got another one like that, but for another day.

    5. Do not beat yourself up, Paul. There is nothing you could have done which would have changed things. Going on a survivor guilt trip doesn’t help anyone.

  140. I had to go to Canary Wharf today on a conference. I was going up the escalator from the Underground and there was a gaggle of about 8 twenty-year old muslim women in their (admittedly colourful, not black) garb, standing all over the escalator. So I said, excuse me, and made them move over and they were not happy. They uttered some words in Arabic that I know are disrespectful about white non-muslims. They think i didn’t know.

    On the train on the way home I had to stand. The man next to me, an Arab, was reading a website with Palestinian flags all over it and the one headline I read was: where are your Jews now?

    This is what we are up against. Yet we have “hate crime” laws which mean we can’t say hurty words about our “diverse” friends.

      1. I know a few Arabic insults:

        Imshi = go away in short jerking motions, and

        Nick Allah ( the ultimate insult) = Fcuk Allah.

        1. Thanks for those Sir J – I’ll remember them! Although I’m sure I was at school with a Nick Allah (or something like it…)

    2. Perhaps a few well chosen words in Arabic, telling them they are slaves and whores to their men might puncture their hubris.

    3. Lots of women in headscarves in town this afternoon, all very colourful.
      Not in the pub, thouigh. I was there, farting somethin awful… and I mean, really rancid. Wonder if this was related?

    4. All entirely the point. I think gabbling in foreign should be banned. It’s rude.

      My french is atrocious, my German and Italian even worse, but I made the effort to speak to those natives in their own language. Yes, most said ‘please stop, it hurts’ but they respected my trying.

      1. Oh come on PJ, only a little tiny bit, shurely?? Mongoose, box of frogs, March hare etc etc…..

  149. Totally understand, I’m just the same. It’s easy to say I love you to family but am too prone to tearing up as you put it.

  150. Better to carry a few printed reminders to hand out, of exactly who they are and where they belong in society.

  151. The international Left-wing elites are well on their way to crushing democracy

    The ECHR’s net zero judgment shows why the UK must now leave the court without delay

    ALLISTER HEATH • 10 April 2024 • 7:39pm

    Democracy is dying, and we are running out of time to save it. The theft of power and influence from ordinary citizens, and its transfer to unelected, unaccountable lawyers and technocrats is accelerating.

    The populist backlash, when it comes, will be devastating, but in the meantime the Left-wing elites are doubling down, using every possible justification to expand their empires.

    In an incendiary judicial coup this week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) greatly expanded its own remit while downgrading democracy another notch. In a ruling that would almost be funny if it weren’t so serious, its Grand Chamber ruled that countries that don’t reduce carbon emissions fast enough are violating their citizens’ right to private and family life.

    This risible decision is bad news for anybody who questions the rush to compulsory electric cars, or heat pumps, or smart meters, or higher taxes on carbon: your views are no longer welcome, and will no longer matter. The judgment was meted out against Switzerland, but will set a precedent to all signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights, including Britain. The heroic Swiss had voted down a set of net zero measures in a referendum: the ECHR has effectively blown up Europe’s most democratic constitution, in a stark warning to the growing band of net zero dissenters in Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

    This isn’t only about the courts telling the politicians to implement their own laws and their own “carbon budgets”, as in a conventional judicial review: this ruling goes much further, stating that the only way a state can stay on the right side of human rights law is by rushing to decarbonise.

    The problem is obvious: if a rise in temperature violates our right to a private and family life, what doesn’t? Where will the ECHR power grab end?

    The game here is clear. By making everything about “human rights” that cannot be questioned, then the democratic sphere, where we can debate and disagree and vote for different approaches, is drastically curtailed, and the influence of Left-wing lawyers massively increased.

    What about NHS waiting lists: are they not a violation of our human rights? Shouldn’t the ECHR order the Tories to spend even more on healthcare? Will somebody test this soon? What about the limited supply of housing, which is pushing up prices? Isn’t that a much more obvious rights violation, as it makes it harder to have a family? Should the Court step in here too? And what about too little spending on the military: wouldn’t family life be disrupted in the event of war?

    We could also do with more economic growth, higher wages, motherhood and apple pie. Where does the madness end? It is time for Britain to leave the ECHR before it is too late.

    I spent hours wading through the judgment, Verein Klima Seniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland, and found it hard to discern anything in it that could qualify as actual legal reasoning, as opposed to verbiage from a “court” that has given up on any pretence of self-restraint.

    It simply decrees that the meaning of Article 8 of the Convention must now encompass “a right for individuals to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life”.

    The Convention’s original authors never had anything like that in mind, and surely never dreamt that their post-Second World War document would be traduced and distorted in such a way.

    Today’s ultra-activist judges are treating the Convention as a “living document”, reinterpreting its meaning as they see fit. The only legally rigorous section in the ruling was the partly dissenting view by Tim Eicke, the sole British judge, who perhaps realises this latest preposterous overreach will one day be remembered as the moment the UK was finally tipped over the edge on the question of withdrawal.

    One line in the judgment reveals the deeply authoritarian impulse underlying the decision: in a classic case of Orwellian doublespeak, it reverses the meaning of “democracy” to justify disregarding what the public actually wants. “Democracy cannot be reduced to the will of the majority of the electorate and elected representatives, in disregard of the requirements of the rule of law”, we are told.

    This might be interpreted simply as meaning that an angry mob has no right to impose its will without going through proper constitutional procedures. Even in the UK, which has no formal separation of powers and in which Parliament can change any law in any way it likes, our independent courts have long adjudicated on the legality of government actions. If they are deemed unlawful, the government must then follow the law, or else get Parliament to change the law.

    Yet this isn’t what the ECHR has in mind, and it conflates the “rule of law” with “rule by lawyers”. It believes democracy should be radically constrained, that the people aren’t wise enough to take decisions, that there are objectively good and correct positions and bad and evil ones.

    If you trust the voters, you can get Brexit – horror of horrors – or the Swiss rejecting net zero, which is clearly intolerable. Democracy is the political equivalent of pocket money: it should only hold sway over unimportant matters. The real decisions should be taken by objective judges.

    Democracy’s pathology is that it can descend into a tyranny of the majority, and an oppression of the minority. But again this isn’t really what the ECHR is worried about. Its allies want to keep moving us from a minimalist interpretation of the rights that should constrain majoritarian rule – the sorts of negative liberties in the US Bill of Rights – to a Left-wing, maximalist one, where we all have a right to every possible good thing, from cheap housing to two holidays a year to no climate change, and where only the details are left to the politicians and the technocrats.

    They also believe that consulting the electorate doesn’t work because it doesn’t account for the very young or the as yet unborn, and so the answer is to impose a rights culture which neuters genuine politics. Who guards the guardians? Who runs Britain? It’s time to take back control from these anti-democratic, maniacal elitists.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/10/international-left-wing-elites-crushing-democracy/

    1. Human Rights never stopped lockdowns, suspension of freedom of association, speech or right to work, even forcible ‘vaccination’. Funny that.

        2. The ECHR seems to take the line that the science is so settled on climate catastrophism that Greta T’s ‘truth’ has become ‘the truth’ beyond all reasonable doubt. I daresay they would take a similar line on future pandemic lockdowns. This is, of course, an opinion from a bunch of people with law degrees but no scientific training, who have found it very easy to ignore the dissenting scientists because their work is marginalised by the various tools at the disposal of the Blob – see what happened with the Great Barrington Declaration.

          1. The way the GBD was treated was, in my view, one of the biggest scandals of the scamdemic, given who the authors were. Anyway, they’ve been proved right!

    2. Hang on. If you can take a government to court over climate change, why can’t we take them to court for making us cold and forcing shortages, high taxes? Devaluing the currency causing inflation?

      Or is it only forcing ‘climate change’ the ECHR is bothered with? Switzerland has a recourse – it’s called democracy. We, in the UK do not. We’re lumbered with whatever the vermin infesting Westminster and whitehall foist on us.

      1. Do what the Scots do (ref hate crimes) and swamp the ECHR with an avalanche of perceived human rights ‘violations’ so they cannot function.

    3. It seems to me there are too many grubby fingers in the Net Zero PIE for the current bunch of Westminster attendees to want to do anything about leaving the ECHR. Consequently the implementation of Net Zero will henceforth be a requirement for everyone in the UK and instructions on what you must do to achieve it will be issued to everyone in a little Red Book……..or face ruinous fines…

    1. Sounds like a smokescreen from the Royal Mail and Post Office to disguise the fact that the system is crap.

    2. Cheap imports from China – another great international success for Dave (and Gideot).

      1. And expensive ones – they make the windmills the government pours 500 tons of concrete in the sea bed for.

        Oh, that was it. The toady programme waffled on about a set of islands off England and how they were growing huge biodiversity after massive pollution. The moron BBC er then said ‘oh, and wind turbines?’ and I thought [expletive] me. They’re really suggesting pouring hundreds of tons of concrete into the sea bed is a _good_ thing?

          1. I’m all for CO2 – it is vital for plant growth hence the ultimate solar powered energy catalyst. Any less than we now have (the c.0.4% in the atmosphere) would risk the survival of plant life. More, and the deserts might become green.

            But I am not in favour of ditching reliable, cheap and efficient energy production for these abominations, which are all about grifters getting rich on subsidies whilst impoverishing the rest of us, destroying food production, uglyfying and polluting the environment and destoying local wildlife, all courtesy of child slave labour in distant benighted countries.

      2. It started long before those two numpties got their feet under the table. Back in the early 90s I had a colleague who waxed lyrical about how cheaply he could buy Chinese manufactured toys for his grandson. I pointed out very bad aspects of buying cheap tat made either by prisoners or by people on subsistence wages with bosses able to undersell western manufacture because of the lack of workers rights or basic health and safety. My warnings went unheeded and I remember the dear old Grauniad praising the way our home market was being flooded with cheap tat that enabled the poor to buy new clothes as often as the rich. It’s curious how they didn’t seem to care about the environment in those days, let alone about the way ‘the poor’ were having their jobs exported.

  153. Diarmaid MacCulloch on BBC4 on what promises to be an interesting programme on Thomas Cromwell.

    1. He wrote a biography of Cranmer (which I own but haven’t yet got around to reading). I believe that’s very good.

  154. Ah. The Far Right. But we’re all far right now, aren’t we? I thought the Proud Boys were Yankee patriots?

    1. I accept that I’m far right now, even though 20 years ago I was centre and I haven’t moved, as far as I’m aware.

      Apart from racism, where I have been shifted well into the racist sphere by groups such as BLM and people such as Lammy and the BBC

      1. I’ve been a seriously soppy Leftie all my life (on the rare occasions i’ve been at all interested in politics), and haven’t changed, but now I find myself a far-right whotsit

        2. I have always belonged to the flog ’em but not hang ’em brigade. Life to mean life.

      2. If you were centre 20y ago, then 40y ago you’d have been a bloody Militant supporter!

      1. Sorry I don’t do Jumping Jack’s and I tried a step class once but never again. Bumping into your own step is one thing but I managed to trip over someone elses step.

      1. My grandpa did. I have only recently seen the point. But that is just lovely. The lead trumpet (if that’s what it is) is sublime.

        1. My limited talent allows me to play Youtube videos, no more, so I can only listen and marvel at the skill…

  157. I’ve been watching the digging for Britain programme on a regular basis. In more recent progs they have been carrying out excavations on development sites in London and Birmingham.
    The exhumed bodies outlined the horrific lifestyles some of them had. It makes me quite annoyed when I keep hearing about people moaning and claiming to have been vuctims of slavery.

  158. That’s me for today, we had the elder grandchildren (4&8) visiting today, good fun but testing. ☺️
    Good night all. 😴

  160. Yes. I did post here in the early days and then a few years ago. I’ve always liked Geoff a lot as a fellow conservative Anglican.

  162. I’m now off to bed too, chums. Good Night to you all, sleep well, and I hope to see you all tomorrow.

  164. They’ve been very welcoming and kind, haven’t they? And one can certainly understand the prickly ones

    4. I cannot find the source of the words attributed to Choudary. I suspect they are a fabrication.

      1. Whereas I both very much doubt that these words “are a fabrication” and believe him to have said far worse. He is an Islamic hate-preacher and terrorist who has somehow managed to be financed and protected ad infinitum, at huge tax-payer expense, within this country, which he hates with a murderous venom.

        A repulsive creature who would stop at nothing to impose his barbaric creed upon us all by force or any other means.

  167. Why can’t America move on from civil war?

    Both Democrats and Republicans see the legitimate wielding of power as a form of tyranny

    PHIL TINLINE • 10 April 2024 • 6:20pm

    Not so long ago, the notion of civil war erupting in America might have seemed a fairly niche political nightmare. In 2017, Omar El Akkad’s book American War imagined a civil conflict over fossil fuels, but it was a speculative fiction, set in 2074. Yet by 2022, another novelist, Stephen Marche, was publishing The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future – and this was speculative non-fiction, about today.

    Now comes a new movie, Civil War, in which the British writer-director Alex Garland conjures a vision of secessionist ‘Western Forces’ and the ‘Florida Alliance’ advancing on Washington. This is a rebellion against a dictatorship: the president is in his unconstitutional third term, has abolished the FBI and has ordered airstrikes against civilians.

    Garland’s movie is in a long tradition: the spectre of a second civil war has periodically haunted America ever since the first one. In 1908, Jack London’s wildly influential novel The Iron Heel imagined socialists winning elections across the US, only to be crushed by a right-wing oligarchy. Chicago becomes a premonition of Stalingrad. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis imagined rebel army units trying to oust a dictatorial president. And in 1974, Philip K Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policemen Said had civil war ending in a police state.

    These are left-liberal nightmares – with some grounding in history. Think of the National Guard smashing into black neigbourhoods in Detroit with tanks in 1967, the pitched battles between trade unionists and corporate private armies in the 1890s, or the actual civil war in the 1860s against the authoritarian, slave-owning Confederacy. Likewise, Civil War echoes today’s right-wing calls for a third Trump term and for gutting the FBI.

    The trouble is, not all Americans see things this way. Imagining civil war has long been an imaginative project on the right too. In the 1970s, a neo-Nazi called William Pierce wrote a horrific propaganda novel called The Turner Diaries, which used images of rebellion and civil war to try, all too successfully, to foment political violence. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was obsessed with Pierce’s book.

    McVeigh was initially linked to the militia movement, which nursed a detailed scenario for civil war. This was triggered by what they saw as the state-orchestrated massacre of religious cultists outside Waco in 1993. Rumours insisted that martial law would soon be imposed by the national guard and recruits from street gangs, herding patriots into camps. Militias tooled up and steeled themselves to resist.

    Meanwhile, the talk-radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh talked about abortion as the ‘new civil war’ in his 1992 book The Way Things Ought to Be; McVeigh read this too. Around this time, the pioneer of the idea that ‘cultural Marxism’ was deliberately eroding western culture, William Lind, began writing his novel Victoria (2014), in which the US collapses, and the ‘Northern Confederation’ goes to war with the woke forces of darkness.

    Trump’s rhetoric has revived the imagery of right-wing resistance to left-wing authoritarianism. Last March, he assured his supporters: “I am your warrior… I am your retribution”, and declared 2024 “the final battle.” It just so happened that he was speaking near Waco.

    In Civil War, the president is straightforwardly a dictator. But in the actual Civil War, it wasn’t quite that simple. President Lincoln’s assassin denounced him as a tyrant – yet Lincoln had just liberated enslaved Americans. Garland’s movie is well worth a watch, but it might be worth watching a second time – and imagining that the president is only a tyrant in the sense that Fox News has called Joe Biden an “authoritarian” and a “wannabe dictator”. If civil war ever does erupt in America, it may be because, however different the justifications, each side sees tyranny in the other.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/04/10/civil-war-film-donald-trump-joe-biden-dictatorship/

    BTL:
    James Palmer
    Sorry, this is an extremely lightweight analysis of a major issue which goes to the very heart of democracy, who holds power and the reach of unelected government organizations acting beyond their remit.

    Orange Man bad and Biden creepy doesn’t cut it.

    Larry Rhoads
    There was a study done years ago, asking liberals what they thought conservatives wanted and why. The same was asked of conservatives about liberals. The conservatives accurately stated liberal goals and the thinking behind them. The liberals misidentified half of conservative goals and guessed wrongly about the ideas behind even those they got right.

    It is because conservatives are given a steady diet of liberal thought in MSM, movies, books, and in education that they got most of it correct.
    The liberals had to make up things because they had never listened to a conservative.

    Earlier today, someone mentioned V for Vendetta. Here’s part of Wiki’s description of that film: “…Britain is ruled by…a fascist and totalitarian regime led by High Chancellor Adam Sutler, which controls the populace through propaganda, and imprisons or executes those deemed undesirable, including immigrants, homosexuals, and people of alternative religions.”

    In fiction and film, ‘totalitarian’ regimes are almost always of ‘The Right’ yet the great majority of the most successful – and longest lasting –tyrannies in human history were Marxist. Larry Rhoads is making this point in a different way.

    1. We toured several southern plantations last month, the guides were still living the War of Northern Aggression and calling out the Yankees for unsporting behaviour.

      There seemed to be a complete breakdown in communication between democrat and republican with no common ground with no respectful dialog between the two sides. Borde security, health care, abortion rights, whatever just split into us vs. the wrong ones!

      Me? I cannot say, I’m Canadian, and I have bigger issues with Trudeau!

      1. How I do loath the term “abortion rights”. Along with the term “reproductive health care” it’s most popular euphemism.

    2. “...controls the populace through propaganda, and imprisons or executes
      those deemed undesirable, including immigrants, homosexuals, and people
      of alternative religions      .”

      Except that here, now, it seems to be the mirror image – the diametric opposite. Anyone who isn’t immigrant, homosexual, or of alternative religion is demonised whilst those listed rule – along with ever more bizarre deviancies.

  168. Evening, all. Very late on parade today because I’ve been out all day and when I got back I had a long telephone call to deal with. Europe should not poke the Russian bear.

    1. I don’t know that many people have been attacked or killed as a result of poking bears. I do know of some people that have still been attacked or killed by bears, though. So not poking them is not a sufficient defence.

      3. The Russian Bear is definitely not to be under estimated.

        The Americans in the form of Donald Trump just sent ‘Lord Cameron’ packing and apparently Mike Johnson in the US Congress has done the same by simply refusing to gift him an audience.

        Our government ministers are the laughing stock.

    1. The morning after the night before, SJ. Perhaps the night before involved that bottle of whisky Phizee gave him? 🙂

      1. He’s not that daft to consume it all at once – even spread over the the wee dark hours

  175. I know how to solve the problem – I shall go and make another cuppa. By the time I return there will probably be 25 posts on Thursday’s page for me to read. Lol.

  177. Well, I did make myself a cuppa, but that didn’t work. I am now getting really concerned about Geoff’s health.

  181. The international Left-wing elites are well on their way to crushing democracy. 11 April 2024.

    Democracy is dying, and we are running out of time to save it. The theft of power and influence from ordinary citizens, and its transfer to unelected, unaccountable lawyers and technocrats is accelerating.

    The populist backlash, when it comes, will be devastating, but in the meantime the Left-wing elites are doubling down, using every possible justification to expand their empires.

    Wrong tense. It’s pretty much dead. Mass immigration, which no one has ever voted for, is the premier policy of the political elites of the west. This to undermine the Social and Political Cohesion of the People and neutralise their ability to resist. The EU is a non-democratic Globalist Front. The UK has passed a series of laws banning Free Speech which our ancestors would have thought inconceivable. Even the United States has sunk into a Globalist lackey. Tyranny rules supreme in the West.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/10/international-left-wing-elites-crushing-democracy/

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