This trip into space is anything but a boost for feminism or whatever these pampered celebrities choose to focus on. Yes, women can go into space with no limitations – as long as they are rich, famous or happen to be on close terms with a billionaire in this particular case. A Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, became the first woman in orbit in 1963 – these self-declared explorers are no Tereshkova. Space travel is supposedly about furthering scientific knowledge and bringing benefits to humanity. This shameless and tawdry publicity stunt does not qualify on either count.
Plus, I very much doubt that they were making a meaningful contribution to the flight or science, so they are not astronauts. Did they even have a pilot of board, or was it controlled from the ground?
After seeing so many people bemoaning the decline in quality on nine star broccoli seed since its heyday, I wasn’t really expecting much so I’m really very impressed. The heads are small (which is fine, I’m treating them like sprouting broccoli or kale flowers), but there are far more than nine of them even after I’ve taken two harvests!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-the-young-rich-flee-to/
If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to a dangerous frontier.
My money is still on the Pilgrim-types to lead the way, at least in the early waves. But I did wonder, while sitting in its airport last week, if interplanetary human civilisation might one day end up looking something like Dubai.
Dubai operates rather like a space colony. It depends on desalinated sea water and imports almost all of its food. Temperatures can approach 50˚C in the summer, with no rain to speak of, and construction workers frequently die of heat exhaustion. This is an environment exquisitely hostile to human life, hence the air-conditioned sand on Dubai’s most luxurious beaches. For the wealthy, life is lived indoors for many months, under artificial lighting.
Nevertheless, out of the desert has sprung a prosperous, hi-tech, cosmopolitan society that bright young chancers want to be a part of. British chancers, above all. The population of Dubai has grown from 20,000 to more than three million in just 75 years, and British citizens represent the largest western community by some distance. There are estimated to be as many as a quarter of a million Brits living in Dubai, plus a similar number in neighbouring Abu Dhabi, and their numbers will keep growing. Tens of thousands of British people are moving to the Gulf every year, and there has been a 50 per cent year-on-year rise in UK searches for ‘move to Dubai’ and ‘jobs in Dubai’.
A lot of them in third world countries are prostitutes. Prostitutes, male or female, have high levels of assault. That’s where those sort of stats come from, particularly Brazil.
Eg, this map from a pro-trans org of murder rates. Note that even in the worst countries the rates are lower than the rates for women (eg, 2023 this site has <100 TIM murders, Amnesty lists 1463 femicides.)
Might need repotting? It’s only got a small amount of compost in there.
Pasta with tuna, spinach and peas.
I have some yacon tubers, but I have a nasty feeling I didn’t overwinter them properly: they look rather sad and shrivelled.
I’m trying agretti and oca this year, which should be interesting.
Frittata.
https://cjstrachan.substack.com/p/2-tier-public-order-offenses-and
So if the Koran burning was a public order offense which could incite a reaction then what was the desecration of our national flags in a political protest? Why wasn’t that a Public Order offense? It offended millions and it creates a very real risk of violent reaction or reaction in kind.
This is the heart of the problem. You either have Freedom of Speech or you don’t. You either have Blasphemy Laws or you don’t. What’s happening here is that senior plod at GMP are subjectively deciding, off their own back, what is acceptable and what is not. […]
There’s clearly double standards in the application of public order offenses here and this matters because Labour are using the public order offense to deny that they have brought in a blasphemy law by the back door. By denying that the Koran burnings are enforcement of blasphemy laws Reynolds etc. have just once again highlighted the two tier justice system in the application of public order offenses.
Oh, right. Not a clue, then. Some sort of migratory bird? (Although I can’t think of one beginning with b off the top of my head.)
Way too early for butterflies.
From Feb we play 'first to spot three Bs', I just won BEE 🫶 can you guess the other two? Clue, not BADGER 😆
https://video.nostr.build/079449bec7b5a7c01fc97b7c75f1fafccd8e4d07cf0a616474f21f2289568e59.mp4
Bluebell?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-70-missing-people-found-34682991
At least 70 bodies have been found beheaded in a church with most having been held hostage.
The horrific discovery was made in an abandoned village in the DR Congo this Friday. The victims, reported to be hostages of the ADF rebels, were found in a Protestant church in Kasanga, where people had left after repeated attacks. […]
The ADF - Allied Defence Forces - are affiliated to ISIS and they are seen as the most deadly armed group in the region. […]
The dead in the church massacre are understood to be among the dozens of people who have been reported missing since last Wednesday in the village. Horrific details from local media have revealed that they were decapitated using machetes.
I’m jealous! Our Seedy Saturday is just seeds in a cold polytunnel, and mostly not remotely interesting ones. I didn’t even bother to go this year, because it was icy out and I knew I’d end up putting a few quid in the tin and then desperately looking for anything I’d be likely to grow but hadn’t already got.
You can make candles from beeswax, which is expensive, or tallow, which is made of cows and thus bad for the environment, but I’m going to make a wild guess and say that your bog standard cheap candle is ultimately made out of some kind of hydrocarbon.
So, in our glorious net zero future, when the power grid has a little oopsie we’ll be huddled around a little blob of oil for light and heat….
This case raises so many troubling questions about 21st-century Britain. It reminds us there are people in our midst so consumed by hatred for the UK, and the West more broadly, that they dream of joining our implacable foes in the Christophobic, misogynistic, savagely intolerant army of IS. And it confirms that our institutions of state are now so far down the well of self-hating moral relativism that they’re willing to appease the feelings of a woman found guilty of terror offences. A woman who wanted to submit to the Islamist tyranny. A woman who even fantasised about sacrificing her own kids in the name of Islamo-fascism. In what kind of messed-up country do the nutty sensitivities of a woman like that trump the hard-won right of ordinary citizens to see the face of a person convicted of terror?