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!

The Spectator

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...

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’. https://archive.ph/C02Ph

The real reason Labour refuses to tackle the rape gangs

The ‘grooming’ scandal is the most grotesque example yet of Labour’s abandonment of the working class.

Labourites’ refusal to look this issue in the eye is not just about raw political calculation. No doubt, they would rather Labour councils were not held to account for their complicity and negligence. No doubt, they are gripped by the genuinely racist conviction that tackling the rape gangs too aggressively might ‘alienate’ voters in inner-city, predominantly Muslim areas – as if Pakistani Brits aren’t also appalled by what has been going on in the shadows of their communities. But it goes much deeper than that. Labour is lost to an ideology that is obsessed with looking good and thus incapable of doing good. That thinks protecting the image of multiculturalism is more important than protecting children from rape. That cannot compute victims when they do not conform to their prefab hierarchy of victimhood. That thinks the truth is a dangerous thing, because the plebs can’t handle it. That thinks the working classes are a race-riot-in-waiting. That has jettisoned class politics for identity politics.

Pasta with tuna, spinach and peas.

Frittata.

2 Tier Public Order offenses, and de facto blasphemy laws..Koran vs Union Flag destruction

Apparently destroying a Koran is a public order offense but destroying the Union Flag is not... Two Tier Policing haunts the UK once again.

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.

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.

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….

Why are British police pandering to an Islamic State terrorist?

Cops reissued a mugshot of a female Islamist to cover her face and hair behind a burqa.

Try to take this in. In England, in 2025, police are pandering to the religious whims of an aspiring Islamic State soldier. Like a sad tribute act to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, they replaced a ‘sinful’ image of a female terrorist with a halal one in which her features were hidden beneath black cloth in the fashion of hardcore Islam. We all know Britain’s cops have lost the plot, but doing the pious bidding of an extremist who dreamed of joining the mass murderers of ISIS? That’s a new low.

Oh, I do like making stew! Another pie and four helping of venison and mushroom stew in the freezer.

Massacre of the oak, maple, pine, cypress and hickory trees - all in the name of Miliband's great green energy hoax - the inconvenient truth of where Drax's energy pellets come from | Daily Mail Online

Tom Leonard visits Hertford, North Carolina, to gauge a sense of the destruction caused by Labour

Since it started importing huge quantities of pellets in 2012, Drax has relied on America's South for most of them, not only because it has vast tracts of forest close to coastal ports for easy export but also because these conservative states impose few of the regulations that protect woodland in the UK and the rest of Europe. Logging companies traditionally cut down only the biggest trees as they are most suitable for the building and furniture industries, leaving the smaller ones to keep growing. They also left the ecologically-precious 'wetland hardwood' varieties such as cypress because they were too gnarled to become planks or tables. Now, there's so much demand for wood that will simply be pulped for pellets, everything is worth cutting down. Environmentalists acknowledge that any really high-quality hardwood may still be sent to a sawmill but the rest becomes biomass. Sometimes, they say, an entire clearcut is turned into pellets. […] Everyone I spoke to in North Carolina admitted they were slightly shocked that 'tree-loving' and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry –adopting renewable energy accounting rules that didn't account either for the forests being lost in the US or the carbon emissions from burning the wood. Derb Carter, a senior lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Centre, told me he had repeatedly visited the UK to explain the situation to government officials. ‘There was this assumption that surely the US regulates how forests are managed to protect the public interest,' he said. The Brits were 'surprised', he said, when he explained that in southern states like North Carolina, there was nothing of the sort.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/11/court-gives-gazans-right-settle-uk-palestine-ukraine/ A family of six seeking to flee Gaza have been allowed to join their brother in Britain after an immigration judge ruled that the Home Office’s rejection of their application breached their human rights. The family had made their application through the Ukraine Family Scheme and the decision to accept their case came despite warnings by lawyers for the Home Office that it could open the floodgates to “the admission of all those in conflict zones with family in the UK”. https://archive.ph/fFfi1

The man with the can of spray paint has been to visit. Looks like he got bored after a couple of miles.

Bored of this, now. Is there a word for “drizzle, but it’s frozen”?

Given that these animals have been mutilated and the money has been spent, I would like to know the results of the trials (despite thinking that they should never have taken place).

Representative Nancy Mace

Rep. Nancy Mace Opens Hearing on Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty

(Washington D.C., February 6th, 2025)—Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Chairwoman Nancy Mace (R-S...

For example, the Biden-Harris Administration spent $2.5 million taxpayer dollars to study the fertility of transgender mice. $1.1 million dollars were spent to find out if female rats receiving testosterone therapies to mimic transgender men were more likely to overdose on a party drug commonly used in the LGBTQ community to induce drug-fueled “chemsex.” Federal funds were also used to forcibly transition male monkeys to see if hormone therapy made them more susceptible to HIV.

https://freespeechunion.org/universities-failing-to-promote-diversity-will-face-funding-cuts/ This means that a quarter of all research funding assessments will now be dictated by institutional culture, rather than academic output and impact. In other words, academics may find themselves under heightened pressure to conform to specific ideological frameworks, potentially at the expense of scholarly independence and the open exchange of ideas. […] Notably absent from the new REF criteria is any reference to academic freedom – despite mounting evidence that UK universities are restricting scholars’ ability to research and discuss topics such as the clash between trans rights and women’s sex-based rights.

Driving over the tops just now, I came over the brow of a hill and got an almighty shock at the sight of the huge red moon hanging on the horizon. It’s not up yet here, so have some stars instead, but if you look out in an hour or a bit less you might see Regulus hanging next to it.