Notices by Flick ?? (flick@spinster.xyz)

@sun @amerika Wasn’t the Amiga the Mac of the era in terms of pro/TV graphics?

@amerika @sun No, I’m thinking major blockbusters rendered in it. B5, maybe? Or a ST:TNG? That era.

@jae @amerika @sun Some of the demo disks were frankly amazing.

@amerika @sun I would kinda like that. Loved my 500.

@amerika @sun A 386 was such a wtf downgrade, even if it did have Doom.

@amerika @sun They were. I went from a vic-20 to one and it was just such a game-changer.

@lain Proton’s £100, if I’m reading it right, and fastmail’s £54 (not worth the hassle of moving it). But thanks!

Talk to me about email hosting, please.

My mum’s is with Gandi, and I thought “fair enough” when they started charging £36 a year a couple of years ago, but they pissed me off when they suddenly bumped it up to £66 last year with no warning.

One mailbox, several addresses on the same domain going into it. Not a heavy user.

Who should I be looking at?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/rudakubanas-school-knew-he-was-trouble/

Following that meeting, Hodson wrote the email in which she warned staff about Rudakubana’. She remarked on his ‘sinister undertone’, that ‘there was never any sense of remorse or accountability for his actions’. It is worth repeating that Hodson is a highly-experienced professional, with many years of experience supporting children with very complex needs. So when she said ‘I’ve never come across a pupil like [Axel Rudakubana]’, we must take her seriously.

Unfortunately other professionals had different ideas. Hodson prepared an education plan for Rudakubana in which she described him as ‘sinister’ and ‘cold and calculating’. An unnamed mental health worker challenged this, accusing Hodson of racially profiling ‘a black boy with a knife’. The headteacher told the inquiry that the accusations ‘shut her up’ and ‘closed her down professionally’. Hodson agreed to remove those remarks from the plan, despite what she described as a ‘visceral sense of dread’ that Rudakubana was ‘building up to something’ and that she feared the boy would bring a knife to Acorns.

This is the sinister power of equality doctrine. Even highly experienced professionals feel cowed, doubt their own professional judgment and soften their language. To be thought ‘racist’ can end a career.

https://archive.ph/6HwyX

Read the whole thing, she has experience from both sides of the fence.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-parents-gaming-special-educational-needs/

While I’m grinding through the traffic, taxpayers are footing bills that could fund whole classrooms. Councils and schools spent a record £2.26 billion on special educational needs and disabilities – ‘Send’ – transport last year. That’s more than double the 2015 figure, fuelled largely by a surge in spending on taxis. Cab firms have cottoned on to the money-making venture. In Hampshire, they charge £86 per pupil per day on average; in North Yorkshire, £78. Camden Council paid more than £900 a day for transport for one pupil. Operators sign multi-year contracts that guarantee tidy profits, but they’re not the villains – they’re simply capitalising on the state’s failure. The real scandal is the failure itself, and how some families take advantage of it.

https://archive.ph/tRW6Z

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-grooming-gang-inquiry-headed-for-a-whitewash/

Keir Starmer did not want to hold an inquiry into grooming gangs. He did everything that he could to ignore the rape and torture of children which has scarred towns across England. Louise Casey’s audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse was almost certainly commissioned to get him out of a tough spot and get calls for an inquiry out of the papers.

It was only after Labour were left with absolutely no choice in the matter, damned by the scale of abuse documented in Casey’s report, that an inquiry was finally commissioned.

It should therefore be no surprise that before the inquiry has even begun, it is being undermined. Four months after Starmer bowed to pressure, the Home Office have confessed that a chair of the inquiry still hasn’t been appointed. The scope of the inquiry is yet to be determined and the first area to be reviewed remains undecided. Survivors have been left wondering if the government is preparing to let them down, again.

https://archive.ph/bf6ok

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/10/asylum-seekers-pay-taliban-to-write-fake-death-threats/

A Telegraph investigation can reveal how corrupt officials in Afghanistan produce government letters threatening to kill asylum seekers. The letters are then used as evidence in asylum applications.

To demonstrate how easily such documents can be obtained, an undercover Telegraph reporter paid Taliban officials £40 to produce three fake letters from different regional offices on official headed paper, signed by local administrators. […]

The official offered two versions: a standard letter for £40 and a “premium” version — complete with an official stamp and a “100 per cent approval rate” — for £200.

https://archive.ph/vYSKN

@Economic_Hitman What was the final result? (Polls don’t federate well.)

What to quote…?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/digital-ids-are-a-nightmare-of-tony-blairs-making/

Is Tony Blair pulling the strings of Keir Starmer’s government from beyond the political grave? Only two days ago the Tony Blair Institute released a report calling for digital ID cards. Now Starmer is expected to announce that the UK public will indeed have digital IDs forced upon them. […]

Whilst Blair has long campaigned for ID cards, there is a more recent source of funding for the Tony Blair Institute which is rather interesting. Among the listed donors for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is the Larry Ellison Foundation, Ellison being the founder, Chief Technology Officer and Chairman of technology group Oracle – exactly the sort of company that might be needed to assist with a compulsory ID card system that would require the development and maintenance of a comprehensive dataset of all UK citizens and residents. That may have immense commercial value – and no one can assume that our information will never at any point be sold to private interests. That is, after all, exactly what already happens with the electoral roll, at least the public-facing side of it.

ID cards will also create immense opportunities for fraudsters. Former software engineer Andrew Orlowski revealed this week that a senior civil servant had leaked him details of internal Whitehall documents which express fears of how vulnerable a national ID card system will be to identity theft. If hackers can get into systems run by Marks & Spencer and Jaguar Land Rover, they can get into a national ID card system as well. And once they are in, there will be a wealth of information required to steal anyone’s identity, all in one place.

https://archive.ph/bf0kn

@VivianHsiao hope you’re ok! That storm sounds terrifying.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/who-were-the-real-bigots-in-epping/

We need a reckoning with these events in Epping. Not only with the problem of migrant hotels but also with the frothing animus that greeted the women there when they dared to speak up. It confirms that women of working-class origin are absolutely unwelcome in the ‘MeToo’ movement. That rallying cry is for professional women only, the ladies of the bourgeoisie, not women in pink tracksuits who never went to university. You women should stay home and pipe down.

More starkly, the left’s sexist rage in Epping speaks to the classism of what passes for radical politics these days. The minute someone from the other side of the tracks expresses a political view, the graduate left wonders: ‘Is this fascism?’. The irony of Epping is that the true bigots were not the women raising concerns about sexual violence but the haughty outsiders telling them to shut up. Under the cover of being ‘pro-refugee’, these people give voice to an anti-masses hysteria of the like we’ve not seen since Victorian times.

It is essential we do not forget what happened in Epping. Women raised concerns about the sexual assault of a child and they were called Nazi scum for doing so. Dwell on that, and do something about it.

https://archive.ph/KQa8z

@HebrideanHecate If it was a religious wedding, it wasn’t legally a wedding so has he actually committed a crime? It’ll be interesting to see the outcome.

@sim @dcc @kirby @p AIUI, the girl had been sent some CSAM that the sender had since deleted, and the police were wanting her phone to get evidence so that they could go after the sender.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-investigation-child-viewing-social-media-post-b2830835.html

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-is-the-outrage-over-the-aid-trucks-hijacked-in-gaza/

Unicef has confirmed it in black and white: armed men in Gaza hijacked aid trucks at gunpoint, stealing ready-to-use therapeutic food meant for thousands of severely malnourished infants. According to the UN, at least 2,700 children have been deprived of life-saving nutrition as a result. And yet, the world barely blinked. […]

This latest incident is not a deviation. On Saturday, reports confirmed by Cogat, Israel’s military coordination body for the territories, described another deliberate sabotage of aid efforts: Hamas terrorists are said to have fired at UN teams working to open a new humanitarian corridor in southern Gaza. Armed men seized UN vehicles and reportedly used them to blockade roads meant to carry food and medicine. It is all part of a deliberate strategy to obstruct aid distribution in order to engineer a crisis and externalise blame.

If Israel were truly trying to starve Gaza, why would it coordinate with the UN to open new routes for food and shelter supplies? Why would it allow in therapeutic nutrition and medical equipment that is then stolen or intercepted en route by Palestinian terrorists?

https://archive.ph/APPrD

In an open letter in 2020 more than 1,200 academics argued that mass-protesting George Floyd’s death during lockdown was safe, while visiting a dying relative in hospital was not. This helped torpedo the reputation of science. A prominent left-leaning scientist told me recently: ‘The pandemic has destroyed my trust in scientific experts.’

Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.