I stupidly had mozzarella (which I can’t get lactose-free) two days in a row, so with hindsight it’s not surprising that my digestive system complained, but it was a bloody week ago now and I am getting a bit sick of it.

https://freespeechunion.org/police-advised-councillors-to-suppress-asylum-status-in-child-rape-case-sources-allege/ Local officials have raised concerns about a lack of transparency after it emerged that Warwickshire Police advised councillors not to disclose the immigration status of two men remanded in custody over the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, citing fears of inflaming community tensions. The guidance, reportedly issued to avoid inflaming community tensions, has prompted renewed warnings about the impact on democratic accountability when the full range of consequences of immigration policy are obscured from public view. […] In recent months, other asylum seekers in taxpayer-funded accommodation have been charged with serious sexual offences across the country. In some cases, local politicians have accused councils and police of a “cover-up”, claiming incidents were kept quiet, as in Nuneaton, to avoid potential unrest. This pattern of institutional nervousness around immigration and multiculturalism, particularly when sexual violence is perpetrated by members of ethnic or religious minorities, has been documented since at least the 2000s.

The Spectator

Jess Phillips: ‘I’m being controlled by aggression and violence’

Jess Phillips spoke to Iain Dale at the Edinburgh Fringe festival about Gaza, voter intimidation and her return to Labour’s front bench.

[Jess Phillips] says that her opponent, ‘the independent [muslim] candidate,’ brought in external canvassers. ‘From London,’ she believes. ‘We couldn’t advertise where we were going. They were haranguing voters. There were fireworks thrown, tyres slashed and constituents threatened at polling stations. And I have to say they were almost exclusively men.’ She told her sons, aged 16 and 20, to keep away from the count. ‘I thought, I’m being controlled by aggression and violence.’ She won by 693 votes but her opponent asked for a recount. The returning officer refused. ‘She was incredibly professional,’ says Phillips. ‘And absolutely tiny. About five-foot nothing. And she was encircled by men, shouting at her. It made me fucking furious.’ After the count, Phillips exchanged a handshake with each of her defeated opponents. ‘The independent candidate refused to shake my hand. Petty little idiot.’ Jonathan Ashworth had a similar experience in Leicester South where he narrowly lost to the independent, Shockat Adam. Phillips now regrets her decision not to publicise her opponent’s tactics for fear of tarnishing the image of her constituency. ‘Lots of journalists came and I kept them away. I didn’t want the people who live there to look bad.’ https://archive.ph/iJ8vf

The Spectator

Why Generation Woke loves romantasy

When the willowy human Feyre meets the faerie Tamlin in A Court of Thorns and Roses (known as ACOTAR by fans), he is a ‘snarling gigantic beast w...

What is most bizarre is that, despite violent and sometimes coercive sex being the main selling point for many of these books, each comes with a list of trigger warnings (which consequently remove any mystery). They alert readers to ‘kidnapping/imprisonment’, ‘ableism/ableist language’, ‘body shaming’ and ‘forced betrothal’, among a litany of other politically incorrect sins. There is a profound cognitive dissonance at play here. Romantasy is for the generation who came of age during the excesses of fourth-wave feminism, trigger warnings and social justice. […] And yet almost all the books involved coercion and compelled sex. Does the popularity of romantasy betray something missing from Gen Z’s sanitised lives? The generation no longer having sex are devouring books which portray it in its basest form. The most hotly anticipated romantasy book of the year, Alchemised, is a direct reworking of a Harry Potter fan fiction written online. In it, Hermione Granger is sent as an enslaved surrogate to Draco Malfoy. Give me Emily Brontë any day over this. https://archive.ph/zfHoz

Record number of over-60s are referred to anti-terrorism scheme amid overall explosion in 'extreme right wing' views | Daily Mail Online

Home Office figures show 127 adults in their 60s or beyond were put on Prevent

Record numbers of over-60s are being referred to the Government's troubled anti-terrorism scheme, the Daily Mail can reveal today. […] Even the 1955 epic war film The Dam Busters and The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare were flagged as possible red flags of extremism by Prevent's Research Information and Communications Unit. […] While 'extreme right wing' referrals have been stable since records began in 2016, the reports for over 60s in all categories has more than doubled - rising from 59 in 2016, to 127 in 2023. Over the same period, the overall number of referrals under the Islamist umbrella has plunged by 75 per cent, from 3,706 to 913 - or 13 per cent of the total.

Two recent interesting episodes of The Food Chain.

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, A place at the table: fostering and adoption

— about how to approach food with foster children, including a very interesting segment about food hoarding, aka what to do when you find a stash of tinned food under the child’s bed: don’t scold, instead put up a new shelf in the child’s room for the tins and then, when they’re all neatly arranged, say “Now, is there anything else you would like to add to your shelf just in case?”

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Eating well with dementia

— about how to approach food with dementia patients, particularly how to get them to eat independently rather than spooning food into them like they are brainless voids. The latter had an interesting anecdote about a man who loved mashed potato but stopped eating it for no obvious reason. Someone thought “Hmm. Mash is white. The plates are white…” and got him a blue plate, whereupon he started happily eating the mash that had suddenly reappeared in his meals and was soon putting weight back on.

I normally go walking in bog standard cotton/poly socks, never have any issues with them but I don’t normally walk very long distances. Did some research and the jury definitely says to wear two layers. I’m not at all keen on those thick wooly hiking socks, so I looked into mad high tech ones and bought a couple of pairs of double layer ones that are only slightly thicker than my usual ones. Tried them out walking the dog today, and I had a slight sore spot on the pad (weirdly) of my heel after about forty minutes. I just took them off to have a look and there’s no damage or redness, but I do have a bit of a callus there, so maybe that’s the problem? I’ll crack on with them and see.

No, Sydney Sweeney is not a genocidal goose-stepper

Woke TikTokers have mistaken her American Eagle jeans ad for Nazi propaganda.

Way back in the mists of time, before TikTok, before Bluesky, before pussy hats and the #Resistance, there used to be this thing whereby large companies would hire beautiful young women with bodies you could bounce pennies off and for large sums of money, said women would prance about showing off whatever products the company was selling – plus their own natural assets. […] The funniest thing about this non-story is that, by eighties and nineties standards, Sweeney is not a traffic-stopper. She’s obviously lovely in her own way, but compared with the glamazons who sold us stuff back in my youth, she’s practically homely. She’s a normal looking young woman with a fantastic rack and a very expensive make-up artist. And yet she’s provoking thinly veiled jealous rage all over the internet. That is how far the culture has shifted in just a few years.

The Spectator

The Online Safety Act is plumbing new depths of stupidity

As anyone who has endured a pointless argument on the internet probably knows, there’s a decidedly useful rule for such situations. It’s called...

The result? Not a safer internet, but a smaller, duller, more paranoid one. A place where freedom shrinks, innovation flees, and everything begins to sound eerily and deadeningly pre-approved, like Russian poetry under Stalin. It is already noticeable that the OSA is not being used to shut down Pornhub or xHamster for adolescents, but to silence discussion – or even basic news – about those topics most awkward for the world’s worst government: Pakistani rape gangs, illegal immigration, protests about asylum hotels, and all that dreadful jazz that soundtracks Britain’s decline. What’s more, the OSA threatens to destroy Britain’s AI industry – one of the few areas where we might actually be exploiting our post-Brexit freedoms. […] For example, next year the OSA will allow Ofcom to require companies to hand over any information about their algorithms as well as internal documents, data and software source code as part of its ‘regulatory functions’. https://archive.ph/uZO58

Access Restricted

An elite team of police officers is to monitor social media for anti-migrant sentiment amid fears of summer riots. Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest. […] Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “Two-tier Keir can’t police the streets, so he’s trying to police opinions instead. They’re setting up a central team to monitor what you post, what you share, what you think, because deep down they know the public don’t buy what they’re selling. “Labour have stopped pretending to fix Britain and started trying to mute it. This is a Prime Minister who’s happy to turn Britain into a surveillance state, but won’t deport foreign criminals, won’t patrol high streets, won’t fund frontline policing. “Labour are scared of the public, Labour don’t trust the public, Labour don’t even know the public.” https://archive.ph/lgkq1

Guido Fawkes

Nearly a Third of Young Labour Voters Consider Leaving UK Under Starmer

One in four young Britons are considering leaving the country. A new Adam Smith Insights poll of more than 1,300 people aged 18-30 shows 28% have t...

One in four young Britons are considering leaving the country. A new Adam Smith Insights poll of more than 1,300 people aged 18-30 shows 28% have thought about or are planning to emigrate. Among young Labour voters, 29% say they are either seriously considering (20%) or actively planning (9%) to leave. […] “Our research demonstrates the fear amongst young people that Britain is a sinking ship. GenZ are not the anxious generation – they are the scared generation. Scared that the country they love is being driven into the sea by decades of bad policy, terrible economic performance, and embarrassing leaders.”

the Guardian

Russia’s Aeroflot cancels flights after pro-Ukraine hackers claim cyber-attack

More than 50 flights axed and 10 delayed as Silent Crow hacking group apparently claims responsibility

The Russian airline Aeroflot was forced to cancel dozens of flights on Monday after a pro-Ukraine hacking group with a track record of claiming responsibility for hacking targets in Russia said it had carried out a cyber-attack. Aeroflot did not provide further details about the cause of the problem or how long it would take to resolve, but departure boards at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport turned red as flights were cancelled at a time when many Russians take their holidays.

The Spectator

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

The Trump Golf Course at Turnberry in Scotland looks like a middle-ranking complex for assisted living. It is all plastic double glazing, unfashion...

As soon as the Prime Minister and his wife arrived, Mr Trump turned his attention to Mrs Starmer, over whom he practically slobbered. ‘She’s a respected person over all the United States’, the President said, in one of his trademark mad reveries. This conjured the image of the Prime Minister’s wife being afforded that same respect across the United States. All Hollywood is a-chatter with tales of Sir Keir’s Missus. New York cab drivers affix a miniature of Lady Starmer on the wing mirrors. Drifters across the great truck routes of Appalachia tell tales of her beneath the stars. On the remaining reservations of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota when they rise to beard the new dawn, they do so by saluting Victoria, the Lady Starmer. https://archive.ph/uxAWy

I weeded the drive half an hour or so ago, and foolishly didn’t bother to go back and get my big leather anti-nettle gloves rather than my normal gardening ones. I’m not sure what’s caused this to suddenly come up, but I’ve had a thorough scrub and an antihistamine….

TikTok cashes in as gangs post videos of dangerous crossings | Daily Mail Online

Traffickers launching migrants across the Channel on small boats were promoting the crossings on TikTok - and being paid by the tech giant.

Traffickers launching migrants across the Channel on small boats were promoting the crossings on TikTok – and being paid by the tech giant. […] Migrants subscribed to live video calls with the smuggler. One account had 3,550 followers and another 22,300, so traffickers could be earning thousands of pounds. The subscription service is a widely used feature for TikTok which makes clear on its website that after app store fees, ‘TikTok splits the revenue up to 50/50 with you’.The Mail on Sunday contacted two subscription service users who promoted a new life in Britain on their profile.

https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-online-safety-act-comes-into-force/ And already, there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out. One example came on 25 July, the day the [Online Safety] Act came into force, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age.” […] What appears to be emerging isn’t just a two-tier internet, but something subtler and more insidious: a default-off model of speech and expression, where access to lawful content is no longer presumed but withheld until certain hurdles are cleared. On platforms like X, the door is currently closed before users even approach it. Elsewhere, full access depends on navigating a system of checks and classifications. Either way, the longstanding assumption that legal speech should be visible by default is being quietly dismantled.

Nearly gave me a heart attack: it appears that the lingonberries are ripe!

Access Restricted

Police have admitted escorting pro-migrant protesters to an asylum hotel at the centre of days of volatile demonstrations. Essex Police initially denied that it had brought activists from the group Stand up to Racism to the Bell Hotel amid claims by anti-migrant protesters that the arrival of counter-demonstrators sparked the violence on July 17. However, the force backtracked after being shown footage of the protesters being escorted by officers from a nearby station to the hotel. On Wednesday, Essex Police will hold a press conference, at which is expected to explain its policing of the demonstrations. https://archive.ph/cNt8o

After a rodent hiatus, when they seemed to have learnt that the traps were only dangerous at night, I decided to move them to a manhole cover in the duck-free part of the garden. I’ve been baiting them for a few days, and set them last night. Nothing first thing, but I’ve just gone to put the washing out and needed to empty both!