Well we knew that, dinn we, along with the obligatory new designer virus, the whole lockdown thing again, masks, deathjabs and an economic crash thrown in at the best time of year for it. No point scheduling it for warm summer when there’s still food in the shops.
According to the government's latest "reasonable worst-case scenario," electricity capacity shortfall in the country could total about one-sixth of peak demand, even after emergency coal plants have been utilized, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing individuals familiar with the government's planning.
Under the outlook, along with anticipated below-average temperatures and reduced electricity imports from Norway and France, Britain could be exposed to four days in January when it may need to set off emergency measures to conserve gas.
The report followed a warning last week by the Bank of England that the UK was on course for a lengthy recession as unprecedented energy prices push the country's inflation rate toward 13 percent.
Nature charities joined fire chiefs in calling for a ban on disposable barbecues yesterday, branding them a menace to the environment.
Aren't they just as much of a danger? Given disposable barbecues tend to at least stay put, while lanterns go whereever the wind takes them?
I wonder why you aren't calling for a ban on those? Still, I guess the majority of fires must be being caused b...
Oh!
Around 4 per cent of serious accidental fires are ‘robustly linked’ to barbecue use, Home Office figures show.
To stop 4% of fires, we should inconvenience 100% of customers?
A petition demanding a ban had last night gathered more than 14,500 signatures.
It's probably far exceeded that now, as every Karen and misery-guts and Virtuesignaller in the country flings themselves on the bandwagon as it trundles by...
We all know that the energy bills are heading skywards. Indeed, you would have to be at least a hermit on a religious retreat, to be unaware of the forthcoming Hyper Rise in the price of both Gas and Electric.
But here’s the thing. I’m one of the small band of brothers who get their bills delivered through the letterbox. I have always demanded this small diversion from the relentless march of everything digital. Electricity, Gas, Water, they are all the same, paper bills which cannot be missed in the ‘Inbox’, cannot be deleted by mistake, are there in physical form which simply reminds you that “Sunshine, you gotta’ see to this, pronto!”
So, as I am on a Direct Debit with the Electric & Gas company, I get to see how much is being removed from my bank account every quarter. As you probably know, the Energy Companies compute how much you will be using over the year, divide it by twelve, and thats your Direct Debit.
So this month, the first bill came through, and it was a bit different, because it only showed my electricity bill. About three days later, a second bill came sliding up, and it showed approximately what I expected, which was a small usage of Electricity, a much smaller usage of Gas: leading to a credit surplus left after the payments had ben made to the company: WHICH IS WHAT I WOULD EXPECT.
However, two days after the second bill, a third quarterly bill arrives, and with the aid of ADJUSTMENTS, all the surplus had been wiped out, and I was left, in the opinion of the Energy Company, with just over £1.00 sterling in credit.
So, as I have time to spare these days, I joined the complaints queue, and after waiting just over an hour, I at last spoke to a human being. I explained my dilemma, and asked this bloke, who was actually pretty nice, if he could help me through the mists, and locate my missing money, He called up my bill details, hemmed and harred a bit, call up another screen, and then said that I was dead right, there had been a computer switch-over, some accounts had got confused, and this would be rectified straight away.
Now this is the important bit. He did say that if I hadn’t called up, hadn’t joined the ‘call waiting queue’, hadn’t taken the time to check things out, hadn’t ensured an investigation: the errors would not have been discovered, and I would have been overcharged right up the Khyber Pass.
Check your bills, because everything is computerised, everything is digitised; and if you don’t commence throwing things, even if it is harsh words over a telephone, nothing gets adjusted: because the Computer Never Lies.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) came out with a blistering response to the Monday FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence, reportedly in connection with materials Trump brought with him after leaving office.
"The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves," said DeSantis. "Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic."
Especially as Obama, US enemy n1, is orchestrating it. Obama needs to be airdropped in Kenya … without a chute.
Fine but at the same time, Kari needs to be careful jumping the gun with the ‘Governor’ bit. Remember what happened in Iowa with Michele Bachmann.
...'racist' security tags were placed on cosmetics for black skin but not lighter skin tones in one of its stores.
*sighs* Buckle up, we're going in....
Mother-of-three Natalie Westgate complained to the chain after she spotted the security measures on the makeup, calling it 'racist' and 'absolutely disgusting'.
'I understand you have to security box items but do you think it is ok to only have the dark range security boxed and not the entire range,' she said to Tesco.
'Please ask your race and ethnicity network and Black Voices Advisory Group what they think to security only boxing the dark range then get back to me.'
The utter arrogance in that demand is breathtaking. But sadly only to be expected of someone who doesn't even pause to consider the absurdity of having a 'race and ethnicity network' in the first place...
The supermarket responded first on Twitter and said 'stores may sometimes use security tags on items which have recently been subject to theft and the decision to do so changes from store to store'.
Brave of the corporate Twitter-wrangler to use facts and logic to bat away the annoying Karen. But futile, because there's never just one. They hunt in packs. And the avalanche of manufactured outrage reached the eyes of a manager trained to be obsequious in the face of anything 'racist':
A spokesperson for Tesco apologised and said that it was an example of human error, and they should not have been tagged.
'It’s really important to us that Tesco is a place where everyone feels welcome, and the tags have now been removed,' they told The Sun.
So there you have it, thieves and shoplifters; Tesco wants you to 'feel welcome'. You know where to go now, don't you?
More than a quarter of patients who need appointments avoid making one because they find it too difficult, according to a new survey.
The NHSGP Patient Survey 2022 showed a sharp rise in people struggling to get through to GP practices over the phone. Since last year, the share of respondents saying it was not easy to make contact with anyone jumped by nearly 15 percentage points to roughly 47% in the previous 12 months.
Dr Omon Imohi, a 39-year-old GP in St Helens, said "there's this notion that the GP receptionists are difficult to get through, but they can only offer what's there, they can only give what they've got". She worries about taking toilet breaks while trying to get through 18 face-to-face and remote consultations a day, on top of administrative work like processing prescriptions, blood test results and hospital referrals.
She squeezes in extra appointments for people with urgent needs when she can, but there's a limit how far any GP can stretch. Dr Imohi, who is also vice chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners' (RCGP) Mersey branch, told the ECHO: "[Receptionists] feel the frustration as well, because patients are shouting at them, sometimes patients are insulting them, but it's not within their power."
The pandemic saw GP practices shift to online booking systems and phone consultations, some of them almost overnight. For older, poorer and less technologically savvy patients, this presents a barrier to accessing medical advice as they may lack the knowledge or resources to navigate the process.
I'm thinking any one of us can tell her why it's so. Let's start with the ownership and administration, then the financial incentives for doctors to take certain offers and not others ... oh it just goes on and on and on. Certain demographics herded in, straight onto benefits ... and then the disgraceful covid debacle.
Plus moral compass, the hippocratic and Nuremberg principles. Plus the EBM codswallop which rewards reading a computer screen. Where shall I stop? Medical training now? Priorities?
I confess I didn’t visit the site … more of this cow would not have been conducive to a pleasant brekky … but you get the idea.
More women in office if they are actual women, not deluded, harpy, yes-creatures to the globo push?
Well of course … I nominate our Julia, Kari Lake, Wendy Rogers, MTG, Kristi Noem, Kate Hoey, Ann Widdicombe, Jo Nova … the list goes on.
And the instant any real woman … you know, a competent, sane one, grounded, with high moral compass … is sounded out with a view to a primary or preselection?
Oh no, we can’t be having any competence here, can we, we need an obedient Liz Truss or Theresa May or Princess Nut-Nut or that MP with the ankle bracelet or Diane Abbott or that Thacker cow, or Cressida Dick … they’re the type wanted for office “to advance the cause of wimmin”. Not.
There was one actually … Kemi Badenoch … but of course they did for her by ensuring she was still a bit too young and raw. Give her another twelve years in parliament and they’d not have let her even be nominated.
A judge has told a paedophile that the time has come to stop helping him and start punishing him.
Considerable efforts have been made to try to rehabilitate Barry Hardman, 32, but so far nothing has proved effective as he continued to access sick child abuse images online.
Because 'nothing' is all that they've tried!
Hardman, most recently of Bodmin but formerly of Penzance and St Austell, appeared at Truro Crown Court for sentence having pleaded guilty to breaching a sexual harm prevention order and three charges of making indecent images of children.
Representing Hardman, Robin Smith said that he wants help to address his perversions but was realistic about his situation.
Adding to this, Steve Butterworth from the Probation Service said Hardman was “a man who chaos tends to follow”.
'Chaos' being a pretty good description on the Probation Service, of course...
Judge Linford then went to speak about how the police visited Hardman’s home, leading to the offending coming to light.
“What Mr Butterworth said is worrying. The time has come when efforts made to help you stop and efforts made to punish you start. The breach of the sexual harm prevention order was particularly serious because of your efforts to use the dark web and use software to disguise what you were up to.”
The efforts should have started from the first offence. Why didn't they? These people cannot be 'helped to stop offending'. Why are we wasting taxpayer money on them?
I am not suggesting in any way that female doctors are inferior in quality or professional esteem to their male counterparts, just that they make different choices about working patterns for entirely rational reasons, and that this demographic shift was predictable and indeed predicted. Increasingly, their male colleagues are making the same choices, for reasons I will expand on.
The recently elected President of the Royal College of Physicians writing in the British Medical Journalhas described those of us raising such questions as “ill informed, ill conceived, ill willed, outrageous, and discriminatory”.
It is simply impossible to have a rational discussion in public on this point, so I’m not going to bother trying. I simply observe that in 1987 there were 68,777 doctors on the medical register in England for a population of 47.3 million One doctor for 688 people.
In the whole of the UK in 2022 the figures are 350,000 doctors for 67.44 million – one doctor for 192 people.
The medical workforce demographic no longer meets the demand. This is not due to having an inadequate number of doctors – it is a consequence of how those doctors choose to work and how they have been trained. My cohort of doctors in our mid to late 50s are predominantly male and coming up to retirement – so this problem will get a lot worse, before it gets better. Which leads me to my next point.
Consider professional training. Two decades ago, a trend towards ‘problem based learning’ in medical education arose in direct challenge to the traditional medical school curriculum. A central tenet of PBL was that doctors ‘didn’t need to know’ the really hard science stuff in order to be efficient clinicians.
And now a counter-argument put by Graham Parker and me:
It would be derelict of me not to note that it's certain ladies who have eased my way through the system, from my GP who had an ambulance to me eight minutes after my heart attack, with two men doing the medical bit inside, to the nurse who sorted my med impasse and also got me past other barriers, to the NHS lady on the phone who must have put something on the screen, such that I've been largely left alone ... and so it goes on.
Just seems to me horses for courses, I've no personal complaints, just against the high up admins. Though there's one man there I must eternally thank.
On the other hand, I'm well aware of our Grandpa's story ... not good, not good at all.
