Julian Assange freed

The Wikileaks statement:

And the US State Department?

So is he a journo, a crim or both? That's where we are at the mo ... much thinking to do on't.

They Should Serve As A Reminder That You've Got The Wrong Priorities...

An NHS trust has marked Pride month with rainbow-coloured zebra crossings at one of its hospitals.

North West Anglia Foundation NHS Trust (NWAFT) said it wanted to help shape culture and policies for an inclusive environment.

A piity it doesn't want to ensure its building are safe and in good repair instead.  

In recognition of Peterborough Pride, two pedestrian crossings - one outside the car park and one opposite the main entrance - at Peterborough City Hospital have been given a rainbow makeover.

The initiative was funded by the North West Anglia Hospitals’ charity and similar pride initiatives are in the pipeline for the trust's other hospital sites including Stamford and Hinchingbrooke.

If you've donated money or run a fundraiser for this charity, congratulations! You've been taken for a right mug, haven't you?  

Jo Bennis, Chief Nurse at NWAFT, said: “As the executive link with our LGBTQIA+ staff network, I’m really proud that we continue to support our colleagues, patients and local community – not only during Pride, but always.

“We hope these rainbow crossings represent celebration, raise awareness, and serve as a reminder to our colleagues and visitors that we are an inclusive trust.”

That's not what they are representing, is it? 

The trust said the staff network also regularly delivered lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ colleagues to the executive board and was innovative in its approach to new working ways for staff.

I wonder just what that means... 

Now to this Nige and Reform thing …

Reservations about Nigel?  For sure, all documented over some years. Richard Tice? Too smooth and politician-like for mine. John Redwood? I like him. Hunt?  Corrupt, like Gove. Starmer, Corbyn, Rayner? You’d have to be kidding.

And that’s where we are just now. Some are looking at giving the Uniparty a “kick in the backside”, some are looking for change more fundamental but my prime concern is Isabel’s here:

Referring not to pollies and other public figures falling down on the job but to us ordinary men and women, in agreement on general direction.

This next is a reposting of a tweet I just ran:

Radicalism and English coffeehouses

'Radical' in its original form meant:

but over time, it significantly changed its primary, of many meanings:

Notice that one is the American Meriam Webster and the other is Oxford ... there's a lot of Founding Fathers/ Constitution/Declaration of Independence in the first ... while the second is almost a guidebook for Alinsky communist rip out and destroy, root and crop, baby with bathwater, mindlessly, start over, under the control of a self-appointed politburo of "sages".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centuries

In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission. Travellers introduced coffee as a beverage to England during the mid-17th century; previously it had been consumed mainly for its supposed medicinal properties. Coffeehouses also served tea and hot chocolate as well as a light meal.

The historian Brian Cowan describes English coffeehouses as "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and discuss matters of mutual concern." The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which it was possible to engage in more serious conversation than in an alehouse. Coffeehouses also played an important role in the development of financial markets and newspapers.

Topics discussed included politics and political scandals, daily gossip, fashion, current events, and debates surrounding philosophy and the natural sciences. Historians often associate English coffeehouses, during the 17th and 18th centuries, with the intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment: they were an alternate sphere, supplementary to the university. Political groups frequently used coffeehouses as meeting places.

The whole notion of why the royalists allowed such back to the roots discussion by the ordinary man was that he wasn't a worker, he was a town guildsman or academic or thinker and coffeehouse rules demanded civility and "enlightened" discussion other than on proscribed topics:

The topic of "sacred things" was barred from coffeehouses, and rules existed against speaking poorly of the state as well as religious scriptures.

The barring of "sacred" discussion, far from protecting the faith, actually encouraged participants to discuss anything other than that or other than anything threatening the state ... within a narrow, bowdlerised range of topics and views, discussion was fierce and heated ... the thinking giants of the time were there.

Out of it all came a godless take on the world, where monarchs were also not part of it ... in other words, the Royal Society natural science only, secular view on all things, just as the universities wanted the ordinary middle-classer to limit it to.

Coffeehouses died away in the late C18th because there was a new international game now ... French Revolution and the instalment of The Voice of Reason on the altar of Notre Dame and so today's bloodbaths began.  How many did Lenin slaughter? Stalin? Hitler?  CRT in schools after the Frankfurt School ... look at the state of parenting and rainbow Wokery school teaching today.

Once you tear down a society's natural protections, despite the abuses by those above ... then it's a Build Back Better Brave New World, all rules of engagement dashed to the ground ... marauding mobs now control the streets.  And the indtigators in their high castles and corridors are as safe as cadtles ... so they think.

So What..?

The comedian Katherine Ryan has lamented the lack of...

Oh, god! Free HRT treatment? Audiences forced at gunpoint to laugh at her jokes?  

...female late-night chatshow hosts in the UK in an interview for Grace Dent’s Comfort Eating podcast.

Oh, Well, so what? Personally I'm not a fan of chat shows, so whether they are hosted by a man, a woman or an orangutan, I couldn't care less.  

Ryan, a standup comedian who has appeared in UK panel shows and sitcoms, including The Duchess on Netflix, said men appear to be handed late-night shows while women tended to feature more in daytime TV.

So, has it never happened? Reader, it has. And it didn't work:  

Charlotte Church had a late-night talk show for two years from 2006 to 2008 on Channel 4, while Davina McCall’s attempt in 2006 on the BBC lasted just eight episodes and was branded a “flop”. The Mrs Merton Show, with the late comedian Caroline Aherne performing as the eponymous host, was popular in the 1990s but was a radical take on the format.

Maybe that's why women aren't getting the gigs, Katherine?  

It’s the wider implications of course

As Paul wrote:

There’s a double culpability here, as well as the obvious one of the lowlifes being paid to do it by someone powerful enough to also stand down Plod … it was a clear message that someone powerful runs things … and it ain’t us … it has zero respect for heritage, cultural history … and it’s not just the Woke left loons, the bratty kids badly brought up … it’s not even the deathcult or perma-victim, feckless blacks …

Rather, it’s someone higher up the food chain in a suit or in suits, with oodles of dosh and part of the ancient perma chip on the shoulder set … in a sense, it’s religious fanaticism of an unholy sort. Anything it touches, pays, blackmails … is ruined.

Yes, desecration is bad … yes, Plod working solely for Them, not us, is bad … but it’s also the inability of ordinary people to see who the target should be beyond Blair and Obama … that’s the sticking point.

As a General Election rapidly approaches.

The Villain Of The Piece Isn’t Who You Think….

Hundreds of homeless families were permanently forced out of London by councils last year after many were given 24-hour ultimatums to either accept a private tenancy far away from the capital or be kicked out of temporary accommodation and left on the streets. The campaign group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL) found that 319 households in 2023 accepted offers of a private tenancy outside London. They were often given 24 hours by council officials to accept homes out of the capital or risk making themselves “intentionally homeless” by refusing an offer.

Booo! Wicked Tories demanding value for money for the taxpayer! 

Well, no, actually... 

Five councils in the capital, which are all Labour-run, accounted for 74% of all out-of-London private discharges. Waltham Forest sent the most families outside London, relocating 67 out of 130 households outside the capital.Enfield was identified as the council sending families the furthest from their jobs, schools and support networks.

What a turn up for the books!  

One mother the Guardian spoke to in Enfield was given 24 hours to accept an offer of a private tenancy in Hartlepool in December, which she said she felt “forced and pressured” into accepting. The home the family were sent to was doors away from where a man was murdered last October.

And does no-one ever get murdered in Enfield?  

Waterloo and the Finest Hour

Today was Waterloo:

... plus Churchill's "Finest Hour" speech.

The time consumed in this punditry

 (0234)

Coming back to that old exam expression "show your working" or show how you came to the conclusion you did, let me do that right now ... show you what's involved in putting up a post ... here was one item among many:

Draino is a major pundit monitored by the Donald and people, so if he noted this guy FreeStateWill, maybe I should too.  Let me click the Show-more:

... and you'll see there's but one more line.  My usual is then to skim down comments, which I did, until Unherd. This site is becoming slick and problematic, run now by someone trying to "promote" it professionally. Every red flag was showing, inc. saying "click here to read more" ... click bait.

Which took me to a substack, which asked me to subscribe "for free", which is a huge red flag ... we're getting dragged into BS we don't need and because I knew by this point I'd be doing this post item at 0234,  I did click, to be greeted by a single, centre-column screed by some guy putting his view. It was nothing special, the first few paras.

Backclick and keep scrolling down through comments:

Uh huh. I vaguely know what this Juneteenth is ... some stoopid Woke left thing.  Continue:

Genuine question from supposedly "one of us" there. Continue:

That was about it. 0253 a.m. and I'm not a slow delver as a rule. See opening time again ... 0234 ... 19 minutes from read to write.  One topic. Given that I average about 23 items a day, some multiples, I can, I think, reasonably say that "processing" each item is maybe 5 mins for myself ... times say 50 items ... you start to get the idea ... about 250 minutes, just in the exploring, before the screenshooting and compiling starts. Expand 20 of those, maybe for tomorrow as well and that's 300 minutes more. 

Point of writing all this? Just to give an idea why many items I'd skim through but leave it at the Show-more line ... it conveys the main idea. But, say you, why not put in the url? Well it doesn't work that way ... it leads to an X account, not to a plain text article ... and I must so do because all the main players are on X, esp. in the US and UK. You want more? The @symbol is the opening of the moniker, sufficient to find the "conversation", if on X.

All right ... 0306 now, which gives you an idea of the time involved for a post, about to go up at OoL and N.O., hoping Julia will mention it on X later in the day ... as I shall with hers.

(0319)

Just proofing now ... am going to explore that 9-0 abortion pill ruling.

(0324)

I'll puruse that one over at N.O., not at OoL.

(0340)

People Were Happy Granting Them An Inch....

...but now they've seen how they want to take a mile, they've changed their minds.

Public support for transgender people's ability to change the sex on their birth certificates has drastically fallen in recent years, a major survey reveals. Just 24 per cent of people now agree that trans people should be allowed to change their sex 'if they want' – compared to support levels of 58 per cent in 2016. The results have emerged as part of the British Social Attitudes report, carried out annually by the National Centre for Social Research.

Predictably, the trans activists are pointing at 'the media' as the culprit, because they've apparently been convincing the easygoing British public that there's a danger from trans people. Which is somehow not true. 

We are asked to assume that it's not the case that demanded medical overreach and stifling of mainstream opinion have harderned attitudes, that people would otherwise be totally fine with the use of a once-respected police force as a silencing agent for our free speech, even to the point of wasting time on non-crime. 

Researchers also looked at public opinion on trans rights – and came to similar conclusions. Asked whether they thought trans rights had gone too far, 47 per cent of the public thought they had.

I worry about the other forty-three percent, frankly!  

The researchers said: 'It could be argued that this apparent shift in attitudes may be restricted to the specific issue of gender self-identification.

'Alternatively, perhaps the intensity of debate [has] influenced attitudes towards people who are transgender more broadly, with the result that views towards society's protection of their rights may have shifted in a more illiberal direction.'

It's not society's protection of their rights that concerns people, it's their demands that everyone else's rights should be trampled on to give them what they can never have.