The girls are slacking. (There will be one waiting for me in the garden, but I need six for baking tomorrow so didn’t want to risk it.)

The only human society that has not made marriage in one form or another central to the way it is organised is the Na people, of which there are about 30,000 living in the Yunnan Province of southwest China. They live in sibling-based households, and sexual relations occur in the form of nan-sese, meaning to visit furtively: the men walk to the houses of the women at night, but return in the morning. They are, however, the sole exception in recorded history.

The hilarious collapse of the cult of the keffiyeh

From Greta’s ship to the Global March to Gaza, the white saviours of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set have never looked so silly.

Don’t you just hate it when brown people reject your white saviourism? So rude! Such mannerless ingratitude greeted the Global March to Gaza last week. These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere had planned to trek to Rafah in Gaza to save poor, hungry Palestinians from Evil Israel. But they came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles and roundly told them to fuck off. Wait, you people don’t want to be saved by a plummy white lady from London in a keffyeh? I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but can we please not overlook how unbelievably hilarious it is that the Global March to Gaza has been thwarted by angry Arabs. That this swarm of pompous gits who fantasised that they would shield the Arabs of Gaza from the ‘genocidal lunacy’ of the Jewish State were instead roughed up by the Arabs of Egypt who don’t want their nation used as a stage for moral masturbation by every puffed-up Palestine fetishist of the West. That instead of getting bottles of water to Gaza, these people had bottles of water lobbed at their own heads by pissed-off Egyptians. The mirth of it all might just get me through the rest of this year.

Ahead of our quilt show next month, we’ve had fancy new quilt stands and decided that the old backdrop cloths were looking shabby. Someone bought some flat sheets, and I said I’d put hanging loops on them: how hard could it be? Just fold over the top and do a double line of stitching, then a smaller loop at the bottom (to thread a weight through) and a single line of stitching there. I even already had my walking foot on the machine! God, these sheets are hideous! They’re not square, either in terms of shape or in terms of bias direction, so after unpicking the first line of stitching I had to use way more pins than expected, and then I realised that the edges weren’t straight, so I’ve been resorting to sticking tape on my machine to give me a guide line to sew against.

Pizza night!

The Spectator

Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch the October 7 video?

Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?

Many shrill claims are being made about Israel’s interception. We’ve been ‘kidnapped’, said Greta. They haven’t. They’re fine and they have sandwiches. ‘If anything happens to us, this is a war crime’, cried one of the boat folk as the IDF boarded. This is teenage petulance masquerading as activism. Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude? If these people want to see real war crimes, they could do worse than watch Hamas’s own footage of the racist terror it inflicted on the innocents of Israel. And yet, according to Katz, they turned a ‘blind eye’ to those war crimes. They looked away from the screen. His allegations are being widely reported in Israel and beyond. Self-styled warriors for human rights refusing to watch one of the bloodiest assaults on human rights of the 21st century so far? Implacable anti-racists turning away from the worst act of anti-Jewish racism since the Nazis? If this is true, then it surely speaks to a profound moral blindness among the activist class, where they will sympathise with suffering humans everywhere except in Israel. https://archive.ph/Do0R9

Well, this is annoying. One of the neighbouring dogs has been judged safe, but Dog is always a bit wary of her because she yaps and jumps around rather than just coming to say hello quietly. The little bugger has just bitten him on the bum, which she has form for but has never tried on Dog. I suspect he’ll be even more wary of her in future, if not actively hostile, but I really hope it doesn’t set him back with the other dogs, where he’s been making such progress.

This was an interesting listen.

BBC

BBC Radio 4 - Shadow World

Gripping stories from the shadows - BBC investigations from across the UK

Investigative journalist Annabel Deas explores how “Nick”, a former soldier in the British Army, became a people smuggler working with organised crime gangs from Albania and Vietnam based in the UK. He has twice been to prison for his crimes. In this intimate portrait of a British people smuggler - we hear from the perpetrator directly, to uncover his motivations, methods and the consequences of risking the lives of desperate people. The investigation exposes how the smuggling techniques Nick used are still possible today and details the ease with which smugglers can bring migrants into the UK without being caught. Everyone knows about smugglers who bring migrants in on small boats, but the methods Nick used are rarely heard about. Across the series, he reveals how he illegally smuggled migrants onto cross channel ferries inside cars and lorries, and how he used private marinas to bring migrants into the UK hidden inside a sailboat.

Really bizarre encounter with Next Door, demanding to know why I kept putting my brown (garden and food waste) bin back out after she’d put it in (err, because the council told me to leave it out for recollection and if you’d asked I would have told you this?), which after several repeats got around to “It’s my land” (no, it’s not, I’ve checked your deeds myself; my lawyer says that if it belongs to anyone it’s the Highways Agency, just like (as I didn’t say, she was literally screaming by this point) your front garden), “I could just put a fence up”, etc, and then -- which I suspect is the nub, that I’d painted the fence without asking permission to go on their land (you gave me permission when I moved in, but fair enough, I won’t do that side again: no one but you and your B&B guests can see it). Given I finished painting the fence on the 10th April, and it was that day that they set that fire by my shed and about then that my bin started being moved (I don’t know wtf is going on, the other bins are being emptied fine), she’s presumably been stewing ever since and working herself up to a hissy fit. I went out to my sewing group shortly after, moving my bin back out but (in a spirit of conciliation) leaving it at the other side of my drive rather than in the usual spot between mine at theirs. When I got back, it had been moved back but left open to show it was empty, and a scrawled note stuffed through my door saying that egg shells are not compostable and it hasn’t been emptied because I had put them in it (as they never use their brown bin, I guess they have never checked the rules). She actually opened up my biodegradable food caddy bags, that were disgustingly stinky have been sitting out there through the recent hot weather. Wtaf? (I have no idea where she’s put the stuff that was inside it; they were working in the front garden when I got back so I just came inside. I may go out after dark to check it’s not in my landfill.)

Hmmm.

Just listened to an interview with the founder of this organisation:

Bags of Taste

Bags of Taste UK

Bags of Taste is a comprehensive programme that takes participants from eating unhealthy food, to enjoying better diets and healthier finances.

Apparently if you do cooking classes for people (who don’t cook), only 8% of the recipes ever get made again, but if you do cooking classes and then sell people a bag of portioned out ingredients (£3 for four portions) then 89% of them use the ingredients, so now she has a system where they deliver the ingredients and there’s a WhatsApp group with a mentor who gives advice to the members. Clever idea. Interview:

BBC

BBC Radio 4 - You and Yours, Gap Finders - Bags of Taste Founder Alicia Weston

Gap Finders: Bags of Taste founder Alicia Weston.

Participants receive a bag of food to their door with all the ingredients for seven meals, three recipes and all the materials required for to take part in the two week course which is delivered remotely to their phone. Since launching in 2014 Bags of Taste has taught over 14,000 people and delivered 100,000 meals.

A view of two halves: The wind is coming from the lowlands, and the moisture is condensing out as it shoots up the slope to the highlands.

The Spectator

Keir Starmer is a shallow man

Keir Starmer thinks ‘this is the time now to lower the temperature’ on the gender debate. What a shallow leader the Prime Minister is

And, fine, it’s politics. You take a position for a while, it doesn’t work out, you ditch it and move on, all the while briefing that you’ve been consistent from the start. I get all that. What I don’t get is the prologue. There was a time when Starmer came to believe that men who called themselves women were women. How did he arrive at this conviction? Who did he read? What evidence convinced him? It must have been very persuasive to get a KC to adopt a highly contested interpretation of the law, doubly so when he was leader of a political party and eager to win the next general election. And now he no longer believes that men can become women. It appears that the Supreme Court judgment changed his mind, but that only returns us to the above questions. How did he get the law so wrong? Has he reflected on how these errors came about? Have they prompted any doubts about his wider judgment? https://archive.ph/6fcRQ

Any guesses what would do this to a leek? I’d been leaving it to flower :(

This was an infuriating listen:

BBC

Crossing Continents - Spain - can an algorithm predict murder? - BBC Sounds

How a risk assessment tool is used by police in Spain to predict gender-based violence.

(Also available as a real podcast.) VioGen is an algorithm used by the police – it’s a risk assessment tool. Based on a woman’s answers to a series of questions, it calculates the likelihood she will be attacked again so police resources can be allocated to protect those most in danger. The level of risk could be negligible, low, medium, high or extreme. Lina was recorded as being at ‘medium’ risk of a further attack by the man who was her ex-partner. Three weeks later, she was dead. VioGen’s critics are concerned about the number of women registered on the system who are then murdered by men who are former or current partners. Its champions claim that without VioGen there would be far more violence against women.

Final proof that party I once loved is hopelessly out of touch, writes PROFESSOR JO PHOENIX | Daily Mail Online

I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right - and frankly w...

I was once a member of the Labour Party – but not any more. I left in 2021, the day that David Lammy dismissed women’s rights campaigners like me as ‘dinosaurs... hoarding their rights’. For good measure, he claimed that men can grow a cervix. I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right – and frankly what the vast majority of the public feels is right – that I could no longer support it. The Supreme Court ruling should have been a wake-up call for Labour but the party has shown itself to be hopelessly out of touch once again. The silence from the PM on such a socially transformative ruling is tin-eared enough. But now the likes of Home Office Minister Dame Angela Eagle are plotting to thwart the judgment in a cowardly WhatsApp group of Labour MPs.

What happened to all those female penises, Keir?

The Supreme Court ruling might just have broken the spell of trans mania.

The trans takeover of Labour speaks to how susceptible the technocrats are to mania. These supposedly smart people have trained themselves out of common sense. They belong to an overeducated caste that defers blindly to expertise. That is naturally suspicious of what ordinary people believe to be true. That thinks the counterintuitive idea, the one that is hard to understand and even harder to explain, must be superior. They will happily believe that 2 + 2 = 5, men can become women, and insanely expensive windmills will bring down energy costs, if someone with letters after their name says so. It also speaks to how visionless our rulers have become. Bizarre ideas have so deranged governments across the West precisely because they stand for so little. They have no ideology, no vision for society, and so they latch on to transgenderism or critical race theory or climate alarmism to lend some meaning, some semblance of purpose, to what is otherwise power for its own sake.

Number four of six.

The Spectator

Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism

Blue Origin's space rocket flight must surely go down as the most self-indulgent and pointless trip into space. Ever.

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. https://archive.ph/Qc98T 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!