484 Responses to Midweek Thread 25 November 2020

  1. StewGreen says:

    CarrieAntoinette’s 1 size fits all policy

    A TalkRadio caller points out that some not working people could isolate for a week or so before Xmas with the family and pretty much be sure they are not bringing Covid
    ..whereas some other person could have just finished a high risk role like cleaning up a migrant hotel or homeless shelter etc.

    And anyone sensible will ignore the 5 day travel rule, cos 3 of the days have no public transport won’t be running anyway.

    One person said normally she’d go down to Cornwall on Christmas Eve and come back on Jan 3rd
    but this year the gov are telling her to come back on the 28th
    ..Why should she ? She’s not putting her Cornwall relatives in much extra danger by staying there a normal.

       16 likes

  2. Scroblene says:

    Haven’t heard much about Manchester Mare, Andi ‘Mid Staffs’ Burnham for a while…

    Perhaps as the noisy, irritating fall guy from last month, his BBC profile doesn’t quite fit in with the continued fall in viewers’ ratings!

    Funny that, I thought he was supposed to be ‘important’, so even the BBC don’t want him badgering them too much!

       14 likes

  3. Concrete sea says:

    A Beeb report today on the killing of Damilola Taylor 20 years ago.The tragic murder of a child, I’m sure most will agree. But, typical of the Beeb, no mention of his killers, who were just a little older at 12 and 13.
    Brothers Danny and Ricky Preddie were members of a gang known as the Young Peckham Boys. You can guess their background. It was not a racially motivated attack.
    Any half decent Plod would have hounded and run these gangs out of town, but then of course there is Stop and Search to consider and the wishes of people like Diane Abbot and Dawn Butler and dancing round their agenda.
    The brothers already long out of jail, having served about 5 years and rehabilitated ? Er well no, actually. Both continue to commit crime and at least one back inside for attempting to run over a Police officer.
    These low lifes should either not have been released or given life licences and then one wrong move and back to jail for a long time.
    Earlier mention here was made of Lee Rigby and on the surface it would seem strange that certain incidents and people seem to be ignored by the Beeb and the like. There have been many other horrendous and tragic killings conveniently forgotten or deliberately passed over.
    On the other hand it’s not strange as we know the reasons why.

       26 likes

    • Van Helsing says:

      Concrete Sea,

      The effects of violent crime on victims and their families is conveniently ignored by far too many politicians, judges and do-gooders. Unless, of course, the victim and their assailant(s) fit a favoured profile.

         14 likes

  4. Fedup2 says:

    Concrete – I wish you wouldn’t mention such things – it just makes me lament the absence of a Death Sentence – but I think I am of the wrong time …

       9 likes

  5. taffman says:

    “R number for UK below 1 for first time since August”
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55105285
    While the bumbling ‘Court Jester’ continues to wreck the UK by trashing its economy. The biggest disaster in the history of Britain ! The worse than useless Labour Party offers no opposition.
    Our only salvation is to look to The Reform Party.

       13 likes

  6. Guest Who says:

    Monday in the Timmeh! Office will be fun.

       14 likes

  7. pugnazious says:

    What would you consider fake news, not just any fake news but fake news designed to undermine a massive democratic vote with the copious use of lies and a torrent of misinformation and black propaganda? If a journalist’s [and I use the term very loosely] main tactic was to furiously churn out claim, after claim, after claim alleging all sorts of crimes, but not having any evidence, just purely hoping she hits the target with at least one of those claims and if not that the mud sticks and her victim is forever smeared with the fake claims, would that count as fake news?

    The BBC has of course, somewhat sinisterly, pronounced that it is the final arbiter of truth, what is and is not fake news. It has its laughable ‘Reality Check’ and the dubiously political ‘More or Less’ programme and its own rapid rebuttal fake news unit. It is endlessly policing the media, mainstream and social, and unstintingly wields the blue pencil as it censors other people’s news if it doesn’t fit the BBC’s own view of what is and isn’t proper news.

    Curious then that when the Guardian’s mad catwoman admits she has no evidence for her claims about Aaron Banks the BBC ignores the story, big though it is, just as they ignored the fact that Cadwalladr had also essentially made up her ‘news’ about Cambridge Analytica….the BBC of course didn’t ignore either story when the claims were being made…in fact the BBC went overboard in promoting her fake news that Brexit had been stolen by Cambridge Analytica when CA had nothing to do with Brexit and the Russians had very marginal attempts to interfere….but the BBC insisted otherwise.

    Today we earn that Cadwalladr has not presented any evidence to back up her claims about Banks and is having to pay huge court costs…this is a big story make no mistake….a mainstream media organisation, and the BBC itself of course, has led a campaign trying to overturn a democratic vote using lies and fake news and the BBC totally ignores this.

    How odd thaat the BBC staff seem not to want to engage…not as if they aren’t interested in all things Cadwalladr….remember when Andrew Neil called her ‘the mad cat woman’…and BBC staff launched a campaign against him?

    ‘Senior female BBC journalists have complained to executives at the corporation about the presenter Andrew Neil, after he failed to apologise for calling an Observer journalist a “mad cat woman”.

    Neil, the host of the late night show This Week and one of the corporation’s most high-profile political interviewers, made the comment about Carole Cadwalladr – whose work helped expose the Cambridge Analytica scandal – as part of a string of tweets posted in the early hours of Tuesday.’

    Curiously silent now when their lying, dishonest and corrupt colleague is shown, twice, to have seriously tried to pervert and subvert British Democracy and of course, in the process, corrupt and defile their own profession. Guess you are known by who your friends are.

    Here’s Douglas Murray from The Spectator…in full as it really is a major story…..just one the BBC seems to have missed somehow….

    ‘A small but significant event has just occurred. This morning the legal case between Arron Banks and the journalist Carole Cadwalladr was due to start. The case came about because of Cadwalladr’s claim that Arron Banks – who was a founder of the Leave.EU campaign (the non-official Leave campaign) – was offered money by the Russians. Cadwalladr has been going around for years making these and other unfounded accusations in every forum and on every platform she can manage. It is not as though her campaign has been obscure. The Observer newspaper has supported her, and as her entirely unsubstantiated claims grew, she was shamefully awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism.

    Although she claimed to see Russian agents everywhere it was finally Banks who decided to sue Cadwalladr. She crowdfunded – posing as the underdog truth-teller against the big rich Russian agent – and then last night (having rinsed her supporters for cash till the last minute) she pulled out of the hearing. As Guido reports here she conceded that she had no evidence and could not go ahead with the case. She is now reportedly forced to pay a first down-payment of £62,000 in costs, with more to come.

    Perhaps it is necessary to say at this point that I have never met either Banks or Cadwalladr and have no special love for either of them. But what has just happened is something that should cause a certain ripple of consequences.

    Firstly, it should be noted that the campaign of defamation which Cadwalladr has engaged in over recent years has been poisonous. I have read many of her unsourced, unsubstantiated claims with amazement that they were ever published. For years she has pumped these claims about Russian agents and Russian money throughout our body politic. In the process she has not only attacked individuals, but every member of the British public who voted for Brexit in 2016.

    Cadwalladr and her financial backers have for years pretended that the British public were misled into voting for Brexit. Instead of listening to the genuine concerns of their fellow citizens they engaged in a smear-campaign against us. They pretended there were not serious reasons to vote the way we did, but only vacuous, stupid people, led down the wrong road by agents of a foreign power. It was an outrageous claim, outrageously encouraged and tolerated by Cadwalladr’s colleagues and peers because she seemed to be confirming their own bigotries and prejudices.

    She and her friends pumped poisonous toxins into post-2016 Britain, from a position of considerable privilege and with some serious financial backing of their own. Now, when Cadwalladr has to stand up just one of her claims in court it turns out – as some of us guessed all along – that she cannot. She never had the evidence to justify her attacks on Banks or the British public.

    A decade ago Cadwalladr’s predecessor Johann Hari was forced to hand back the Orwell Prize for journalism after being found to be dishonest in his reporting. Perhaps this year Cadwalladr could do the decent thing and voluntarily hand back her award as well. Her behaviour has in fact been far more damaging to this country and the journalistic trade than Hari’s ever was. It is one thing if a newspaper wants to continue to publish the unsubstantiated claims of a conspiracy theorist. It is quite another that a distinguished award for journalism should continue to encourage such behaviour. ‘

       32 likes

    • Fedup2 says:

      Judging by the kind of comments she has made since withdrawing her lies – I’m surprised she hasn’t been called before the judge to explain …..
      Aaron Banks should use the knife ..

         14 likes

    • Rob in Cheshire says:

      I remember that Channel 4 News had it in for Aaron Banks too. Michael Crick led the campaign.

      They tried to claim that Banks had financed the Brexit campaign through overseas bank accounts, that he had regularly seen the Russian ambassador, and even that he was running some sort of mercenary army at an African diamond mine.

      All the claims were baseless, and, in my opinion, malicious. I wish he could sue them too. I would love to see Crick, Snow and Guru-Murthy torn to shreds by a decent QC. It would serve them right.

         19 likes

    • taffman says:

      pugnazious
      Vote and support The Reform Party.
      You know it makes sense.

         0 likes

  8. StewGreen says:

       16 likes

  9. StewGreen says:

    RI Xmas lectures are fronted by 3 different green activist scientists this year
    .. And avoid White Men
    All 3 are about Global Warming
    In ‘Planet Earth: A user’s guide’
    @seis_matters @helenczerski & @shine_tara
    are teaming up to tackle climate change through earth, ocean and air #XmasLectures

    #1 The anti-plastics woman
    #2 ‘Planet Earth: A User’s Guide’, + diversifying science.
    climate change – including its history, and the natural and human processes that drive it.
    #3 HelenCzerski who like to label people “deniers”

       6 likes

    • Solomon Grundy says:

      This will be the first set of Christmas Lectures I’ll miss since I can’t remember when.

         10 likes

  10. StewGreen says:

    PUPIL PROBE Asylum-seeker pupil who joined school as 15-year-old but ‘looks 40’ stays in class but ‘not taught with other students’

    A SCHOOL pupil who joined a Coventry school claiming to be a 15-year-old boy as parents feared he ‘looked like a 40-year-old’ is now being taught apart from other pupils.

    A school spokesperson later told The Sun they had been able to verify the student’s age – but couldn’t reveal how.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13313005/coventry-school-adult-asylum-seeker-pupil

       13 likes

  11. taffman says:

    “Topshop owner Arcadia on brink of collapse”
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55099374
    “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
    The idiots running our country take us all for fools. But where are the rest of the Tory MPs?
    They need to know that their jobs will be next.

       4 likes

  12. taffman says:

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk
    From the horse’s mouth.
    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/wholl-save-us-from-nero-johnson/
    How long has he got to go, who will replace him?
    Nigel, your country needs you!

       1 likes

  13. Fedup2 says:

    Taffman – not a bad place to sign off the midweek thread. Thanks

       1 likes