Tuesday, 4 March 2025
Meanwhile, while our fighting men are away …
Monday, 3 March 2025
No Doubt This Will Be Used As 'One Of The Perils Of WFH'..?
A crooked tax officer who embezzled thousands of pounds from HMRC to pay off her mortgage has been jailed for two years. Joanne Connell took advantage of her position in the bankruptcy team to swipe £193,000 between April and September 2022.
How was someone like this ever in a position where she could manage this?
Connell had worked for HMRC for approximately 15 years in various roles. At the time of the offence, she was an administrative officer in the bankruptcy team. The court heard that Connell created fraudulent credits while working from home using her HMRC laptop.
And it'll be seized on as a reason to stop all WFH, despite the fact that she could have done the same from behind a desk in the office, if their security is that lax that a low grade such as this can bypass any checks on her work, both managerial and system-based.
Connell was off work with ill health in June 2022 after having been admitted to hospital. She subsequently indicated to her managers that she had difficulty understanding and following instructions.
Isn't that a requirement in her job description?
However, an HMRC investigation revealed Connell continued to embezzle money throughout her sick leave. She will now be subject to confiscation action under Proceeds of Crime legislation to recover monies illegally obtained.
I'm only surprised they didn't commend her on her work ethic!
Sunday, 2 March 2025
Norway and sanity
Let’s start with Norway itself:
All right … now to the incident, following Zelensky’s behaviour, where the Norwegian tanker refused to refuel the US warship-sub-whatever … Mike Benz:
Not running the clip, just a shot from it.
Saturday, 1 March 2025
Aftermath of the White House Humiliation
Friday, 28 February 2025
Watch Those Goalposts Move!
Microscopic particles emitted from brake pads can be more toxic than those emitted in diesel vehicle exhaust, a study has found. This research shows that even with a move to electric vehicles, pollution from cars may not be able to be eradicated.Because the real target wasn't diesel cars at all, it was private cars, full stop.
Exposure to pollution generated by cars, vans and lorries has been previously been linked to an increased risk of lung and heart disease. While past attention has mainly concentrated on exhaust emissions, particles are also released into the air from tyre, road and brake pad wear.These emissions are largely unregulated by legislation and the study found that these “non-exhaust” pollution sources are now responsible for the majority of vehicle particulate matter emissions in the UK and parts of Europe, with brake dust the main contributor among them.
Maybe the answer is, when that cyclist passes too close to you, or pedals out from a side road, don't brake?
Go on, do it for the environment! 😂
Thursday, 27 February 2025
Clearing the mind and preparation
“Men and women are not interchangeable.” (Julia M, 1052 a.m., Thu Feb 27th)
“Vive la différence!“ (James Anatole France Higham, before turning commie)
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
The Progressives Fall Out Of Love With Youthful Activism
You would be forgiven for thinking we were back at the Bullingdon Club, in the company of Jonty, Munty, Stiffy, Kipper, Chugger and, to use the polite version, Pig Botherer – only in this case it’s Big Balls and a guy with a history of racist tweeting. This is the sudden, startling emergence into American political life of a type deeply recognisable to Brits: that is, jaunty young men with juvenile nicknames and a firm belief they should be running the world.Well, this is Emma Brockes, after all, the 'Guardian' correspondent who was so dim she really thought Trump had lost the election and it was just the press were keeping it from the American people.
Let’s look at the lineup. The youngest of Musk’s Doge hires, Edward Coristine – online username, Big Balls – is a 19-year-old former intern at Neuralink, Musk’s neurotechnology company, who until recently appeared to be a first-year student at Northeastern University in Boston. Luke Farritor is a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern. Marko Elez, 25, used to work for X and SpaceX, and was revealed by the Wall Street Journal to have authored several since-removed tweets asserting, among other things, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” (Elez briefly resigned before Musk announced he’d reinstate him.) And Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old who boosted a post on X by the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and whose newly launched Substack this week highlighted the perils of skipping freshman English 101 with a post entitled “Why DOGE: Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.”
So, they have the wrong opinions and the wrong sense of humour for Emma, but what about their boss, who surely even she must admit is a success?
Musk, a man with the emotional maturity of a cartoon bank robber, is leading a group of men most of whom have no government or management experience whatsoever, let alone expertise in fields governed by the agencies they have been tasked to reform.
And just perhaps, Emma, that's what's needed right now - someone who isn't steeped in the public sector ethos? Certainly seems so, anyway.
Anyway, we know how this ends. In the largest sense, with the cancellation of programmes mandated democratically in Congress by a bunch of unelected goons in puffer vests. And in the smallest sense, with one of these 22-year-old jerks spilling his Big Gulp cup of Mountain Dew over a keyboard at the Treasury and wiping the social security data of 70 million Americans.
Maybe argue the actual dangers that could exist, rather than the ones in your head.
Tuesday, 25 February 2025
Who’s controlling this global mendacity?
Monday, 24 February 2025
Well, They Would Say That, Wouldn’t They?
Recent press comment about the role of the attorney general, Richard Hermer, referred to in your article (‘Deeply unfair’: how attorney general became lightning rod for criticism of Starmer, 13 February), overlooks the principle that those representing parties in contentious litigation have the right, and indeed the duty, to put forward the case for their clients without fear or favour, so that, as and when appropriate, the court or tribunal can itself independently decide whether such a case is or is not valid. As the great British advocate and judge Norman Birkett once pointed out in a radio talk about the art of advocacy, it is essential that a lawyer’s presentation of the case for a client is not perceived as an expression of the lawyer’s personal opinions.
With decisions as perverse as this one being made by them, that's going to be pretty difficulty to maintain, isn't it?
Not only would this be incorrect as a matter of fact, but it would also undermine our system of justice, under which the case for each side is fully and objectively presented before a decision is made by an impartial and independent tribunal.
Stories like this one aren't really helping are they?
Those who state or imply that, in doing this, the lawyers are advancing their own personal opinions, are doing immense and untold damage, not only to our legal system but to society as a whole. They are undermining the rule of law and opening a path towards a society in which the public no longer trust the legal system or the individuals who participate in it.
So, who is saying this?
Stephen Hockman KC and Sam Townend KC
Former chairs, Bar Council Christina Blacklaws and I Stephanie Boyce Former presidents, Law Society
Ah.
Sunday, 23 February 2025
The problem with climate change “reports”
There are, imho, quite a few problems with this article in TDS:
… and the first is summed up in an old quote from the OUP:
”We believe a scientist because he can substantate his remarks, not because he is elegant and forcible in his enunciation. In fact we distrust him when he seems to be influencing us by his manner.”
-I.A.Richards, Science and Poetry, 1926, in the Oxford Quick Reference Quotations, Ed. Susan Ratcliffe, OUP, 1999.
The problems then continue in the linked article where the author, Chris Morrison, writes:
“Needless to say, there has been no mention of these finding(s) in narrative-driven mainstream media. In fact one Nature pre-publication peer-reviewer commented on the clear danger the paper presented to this important climate scares promoting the Net Zero fantasy. “I see this paper as potentially being used by deniers of climate change impacts,” the reviewer notes. “Consider if possible some rephrasing to put even more emphasis on impact rather than on burned area,” is the suggestion. In other words, concentrate on the emotional impact of individual fires, allowing legacy media, aided by junk computer modelled attribution studies, to concentrate on speculation and fearmongering rather than the facts. Another clear example of what might be termed Ultra Processed News, designed to make the individual consumer sick with worry and induce mass climate psychosis.”
The problem with that piece of prose, aside from being unclear on the goodies and baddies unless Chris defines which are which … is that he himself opened with similar:
“Sensational Findings Published in Nature Blow Politicised Wildfire Climate Scam Out of the Water”
He redeems himself to a point, quoting Anthony Watts, but the Milliband “fanatics” are simply going to trot out their own “scientists” …. hundreds of them … in less fanatical language, projecting “junk” stats as Chris writes and thus the classic adversarial camps scenario is set up, where only one side’s “stats” are used and no mention is made of false meteorological station readings, for example, which were widely reported in soc-med in the past two years.
On a different topic but the methodology by the “Demonrats” v ICE is similar … there’s always straight projection onto the whistleblowing side by the called-out side, as Vox Day mentioned long ago … to the extent that the key Deep State miscreants actually call themselves The Resistance … really? Resistance to what, pray tell? To “far-right, racist disinformation crims” (us), whilst the Deep State apparatchiks occupy the “middle ground” through the MSM, “defending our Democracy”?
An example of this use of the calling-out side’s, the whistleblowing side’s, own vocab store of expressions and projecting it back, was in a Gladstone quote in the OUP book quoted near the top:
”I absorb the vapour and return it as a flood.”
-W.A.Gladstone, on public speaking, in Lord Riddell, Some Things that Matter (1927 Ed.)
The methodology we prefer … but it takes huge wallops of ethics, a lack of fear of what we’ll find, plus a willingness to concede some points but then cite others counter to that … is to see the snippets of data and opinion all laid out on a large table after a brainstorming session by those of all persuasions … with varying theories of interpretation also laid out on said table …
… but I fear that that model is a product of wishful thinking … how long in that room before the headbutting starts between the orators of the two camps? Always two, note, on any given bone of contention, as if it must be, by definition, a zero sum argument, one side “demolishing” the other as Badenough and the Llama-Harmer imagine they do at PMQs, to the headshaking of Reform.