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

@Economic_Hitman @djsumdog @battlepenguin @bookquotebot I thought Technicolour Mars lost gumption when he had to invent immortality to make the plot work.

I love the Climate in the Capital books, even though the climate bit is bollocks, Shaman is very good too.

@Economic_Hitman @bookquotebot @battlepenguin @djsumdog Not his best work, imo. Lovely man, though.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2173896/authorities-turning-blind-eye-sharia

Authorities have been accused of failing vulnerable victims as concerns grow over unofficial religious courts operating in Britain. Fresh Government data reveal fewer than three in every 100 reported “honour-based abuse” cases ended with a conviction last year.

The offences can include forced marriage, female genital mutilation and even murder carried out in the name of family reputation. Critics say the figures point to a wider breakdown in enforcement, warning perpetrators believe they can act with little fear of punishment. Campaigners also raised alarm about the growing use of informal sharia councils to settle disputes inside some communities.

They argue cases are increasingly handled privately rather than reported to authorities, leaving victims outside the protection of the criminal justice system.

This is an interesting take. Makes sense.

https://spectator.com/article/why-the-bbc-is-so-obsessed-with-drag-queens/

As a straight man in media, I used to find it baffling that the most visible on-screen gay type in TV media was the catty, sex-obsessed diva, when few of the gay men I knew in London behaved in this way. That is, until I worked in TV myself, and came to understand how the BBC’s endless quest for diversity quotas shaped its output.

You see, while showing you have met on-air diversity requirements for ‘race’ is easy enough, it’s much harder to convey someone’s sexuality on screen in most contexts. […]

Which is where drag queens come in. A drag queen is the most visible manifestation of LGBTQ you can get. Being instantly noticeable is the whole drag mojo. So putting one on TV – or in a BBC news story – is an immediate sequinned nod to the fact that you are meeting your diversity quotas and telling ‘vital LGBTQ stories.’ Hence why TV has become so obsessed with drag, despite it becoming tedious for audiences. Two drag queens in Eastenders, how exciting, you never hear people actually say.

https://archive.ph/J8t5K

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjd9z0p27k5o

A clinical trial assessing the risks and benefits of puberty-blocking drugs in children who question their gender has been paused after safety concerns were raised by the UK medicines watchdog.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is set to hold talks with King's College London, whose researchers are leading the trial, next week to address concerns, the government said. […]

the MHRA has suggested the minimum age limit of those taking part should be increased to 14, and that there should be more detailed monitoring of bone density and a more rigorous consent process for participants.

@FeartnTired @Gnomeshatecheese Yes. Also faff: “we were trying to sort out who went into which car on the way to the wedding and it was a right palaver”.

https://spectator.com/article/why-the-equality-act-has-to-go/

In particular, it is the [Equality] Act’s Public Sector Equality Duty and ‘positive action’ wheezes which have made it a vehicle for systematic discrimination against less politically favoured groups – whites and men. While the Act outlaws ‘positive discrimination’, where minorities are explicitly hired preferentially, it doesn’t outlaw ‘positive action’, where minority groups get special outreach programmes, which we’re supposed to think is fair and unobjectionable. But as those would-be airmen know, this is really a distinction without a difference. If you’re giving a leg-up to some groups to increase ‘diversity’, you’re not giving them to others. ‘Institutions should be held accountable for treating people fairly rather than hitting artificial demographic targets’, says James Orr, Reform’s new head of policy.

https://archive.ph/45eVC

https://spectator.com/article/why-is-hope-not-hate-out-to-get-me/

So what, you might think. Hope Not Hate is hardly the only left-wing campaign group that masquerades as being above the political fray. But here’s the thing: in 2019-20, it received £141,380 of taxpayers’ money, handed to it by a Conservative government. Hold your horses, says Nick Lowles, the chief exec. That money was given to an organisation called Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust, a separate legal entity to Hope Not Hate Limited. Although you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow, because in 2022 the charity awarded a grant worth more than half a million to its namesake and a similar amount the following year. This prompted the Charity Commission to raise regulatory concerns, forcing the grant–giving arm to change its name to Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and recruit three independent trustees.

I have a dog in this fight. A couple of weeks ago, Hope Not Hate called for my ‘association with Epstein’s circle’ to be ‘scrutinised’ because I sent a couple of emails to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001 and 2002, long before Jeffrey Epstein was accused of being a paedophile. That attempt to smear me was quite bold because it has since emerged that a ‘political organiser’ for Hope Not Hate, a former Labour councillor called Liron Velleman, pleaded guilty to child sexual offences last year. According to the BBC, he sent a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl online a video of his penis and asked to see pictures of her in her underwear.

https://spectator.com/article/why-is-hope-not-hate-out-to-get-me/

@KeepTakingTheSoma @HebrideanHecate Thought the same thing when I heard it used in the news headlines.

https://spectator.com/article/meet-the-jellycat-kidults/

One of the world’s most successful modern toy companies, ‘Build-A-Bear’, allows paying customers to design and make their own teddies. Adult ‘Build-A-Bear’ enthusiasts are a rapidly growing part of their market, but what are the adults doing with their bears, I wondered. Are the bears on the bed? Out and proud in the front room? Online, I found a group of adult Build-A-Bear fans discussing how they’d begin to cope if they couldn’t take their bears to work. The general consensus was that nobody could be expected to ‘regulate their emotions’ without a soft toy. ‘I take my Build-A-Bear Ninja Turtles in with me,’ said a 23-year-old shop assistant. ‘It helps me deal with my anger issues.’ Think of Sebastian Flyte as the patron saint of the 21st century.

How are any of these overgrown toddlers going to grow up enough to have children of their own – to be the comforters not the comforted? The answer increasingly is that they’re not. Men over 65 are now more likely to get married than those under 25, and I only wish that was because the under-25s are having too wild a time to settle down. Where Boomers once had orgies, the kids now have ‘cuddle parties’, where you can go just to be held, in a safe space, by strangers. Held. Seen. What happened to these people?

https://archive.ph/fyY9E

https://spectator.com/article/why-was-jim-ratcliffe-punished-for-speaking-the-truth/

The horror in Nuneaton involved 23-year-old small-boat criminal Ahmad Mulakhil taking a girl into a cul-de-sac last July and carrying out ‘extremely horrific sexual offences’. His conviction this week confirmed what working-class women up and down the country have been saying for more than a year now: that Britain’s porous borders pose a grave threat to women and girls, especially in the poorer parts of the UK where these men from afar tend to be placed, at taxpayers’ expense.

Yet within a poxy 48 hours the debate had shifted from dangerous men to supposedly dangerous words. From the real-world atrocities that spring from government ineptitude to the outrage of a rich bloke criticising that government ineptitude. The opinion-forming set was back in its comfort zone: ignoring the plight of working-class women and instead wagging a collective finger at a blunt billionaire.

Sir Jim’s offence was to say the word ‘colonised’.

https://archive.ph/jKwsT

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/road_sign_hijack_ai/

Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs.

In a new class of attack on AI systems, troublemakers can carry out these environmental indirect prompt injection attacks to hijack decision-making processes.

Potential consequences include self-driving cars proceeding through crosswalks, even if a person was crossing, or tricking drones that are programmed to follow police cars into following a different vehicle entirely.

https://spectator.com/article/the-doctor-will-patronise-you-now/

The prize, for the moment, for the ludicrously infantile goes to the doctor dealing with an elderly but utterly compos mentis friend. He was suffering from an ill–fitting catheter, which was causing a constant and painful intimate irritation. ‘So!’ the doctor began. ‘We’re having a little bit of trouble with our lower tummy, are we?’ ‘I wanted to ask,’ my friend said, ‘is that the bit of the lower tummy that daddies put into mummies when they love them very, very much?’

There has been some interest among students of linguistics for many years about the revoltingly patronising ways in which medical professionals speak to perfectly capable old people; it even has its own technical label, ‘elderspeak’. Related to the babytalk or ‘motherese’ with which adults address tiny children, elderspeak has been found to indulge in excessive use of the first-person plural; to address perfect strangers with inappropriately intimate vocatives such as ‘sweetheart’; to avoid ordinary instructions in the form of the imperative; constantly to use question tags at the end of sentences; a sing-song tone and a raised voice, irrespective of hearing capacity; and to relish a markedly infantilised choice of words. Students of linguistics, since elderspeak was first identified in 1981, generally regard it as a linguistic power play, putting capable people in a position of subordination and removing choice. To an equal, you might say: ‘Stand up now, please.’ Translated into elderspeak, you would say: ‘Let’s see if we can stand up, you lovely man, let’s have a peep at your tootsies, shall we?’

https://archive.ph/GDj3M

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/31/tomatoes-face-axe-labour-nonsensical-junk-food-crackdown/

Tomatoes face being stripped out of pasta sauces and ready meals under Labour’s “nonsensical” junk food crackdown.

Food chiefs have warned that government plans to label thousands of products containing sugar as unhealthy would encourage companies to replace natural ingredients with additives. […]

Kate Halliwell, the chief scientific officer at the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), said companies would be likely to consider reducing the amount of fruit and vegetables from their recipes in order to escape the restrictions.

She said: “Given the majority of the UK population are already struggling to reach their recommended five-a-day and daily fibre intake, we’re concerned that an unintended consequence of this policy could be that it makes it even harder for consumers to achieve this.”

https://archive.ph/5sT6E

https://spectator.com/article/britain-is-becoming-a-surveillance-state-but-no-one-seems-to-care/

Over the past decade, police have increasingly used live facial recognition to identify possible criminals. Since cameras surveilled the crowd at the Notting Hill Carnival in 2016, facial recognition vans have been appearing in various parts of London and other cities, with the first permanent cameras installed in Croydon. Over the past year in England and Wales, police have scanned the faces of over seven million passers-by.

All this has happened amid rumblings of concern and in something of a regulatory vacuum. In a sleight of hand which glosses over the lack of democratic process, the Home Office presents the consultation as the beginnings of a remedy. More candidly, it admits that the purpose of a new legal framework for facial recognition is to ‘give the police sufficient confidence to use it at significantly greater scale’.

Accordingly, the consultation kicks off with a series of questions about which technologies the framework should permit, avoiding any first-principle enquiry about whether live facial recognition should be used at all. In contrast to continental Europe where the EU AI Act restricts the use of live facial recognition for law enforcement, the Home Office assumes the introduction of cameras to every town and city is simply a matter of adopting ‘a valuable tool to modern policing’.

https://archive.ph/EP3E8

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/29/when-will-elite-admit-asylum-truth/

Imagine that you yourself were seeking asylum in a distant land. In such a scenario, wouldn’t you be desperately grateful to the country that granted you sanctuary from whatever horrors you’d fled? And wouldn’t you be equally desperate to avoid doing anything that might put at risk your right to continue living in your safe and peaceful new home?

I very much suspect that you would be. In fact, I bet you wouldn’t even dare drop a sweet wrapper in the street. So why is it, then, that so many men who claim to require asylum in our country go on to commit extremely serious crimes, sometimes mere weeks after their arrival? Could it be that some of these men aren’t quite as vulnerable as they make out, and are instead gleefully exploiting what they believe, not without foundation, to be our elite’s gormless naivety?

https://archive.ph/xmApq

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/01/25/the-assisted-suicide-bill-is-class-warfare-at-its-ugliest/

Currently being debated in the House of Lords, The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which began with such pure intentions, looks more and more like one of the ugliest episodes of class warfare in modern British history. People ‘might well’ apply for an assisted death ‘because there is only a limited amount of money to go around’, the bill’s sponsor in the House of Lords, Lord Falconer, recently told parliament. ‘Your financial position might be an element in what makes you reach a decision’, he explained. When peers suggested amendments to rule out poverty as a motivation, he batted them away: you should not be ‘barred’, he argued, merely because you are ‘influenced by your circumstances – for instance, because you are poor’. As long as you meet the broad medical conditions, poverty is as good a reason as any to seek assistance in ending your life.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/01/26/islamists-have-been-given-a-veto-over-public-life/

It matters not one iota what you think of UKIP. To prevent anyone from holding a ‘Walk with Jesus’ because you fear a ‘local adverse reaction’ is to play a dangerously divisive game. What the Met should have done is police those that they suspect will commit violence (local Islamists), not punish those who, by their own admission, are unlikely to be ‘disorderly’ (UKIP). In doing the opposite, the Met have made themselves the footsoldiers of Islamism and the enemies of freedom.

Who will now deny there is an Islamist veto over much of our public life? Courtesy of the moral cowardice of our institutions, Islamists enjoy staggering power over who is allowed to assemble in public, where, for how long, and for what reasons. The Met’s capitulation to Whitechapel extremists comes hot on the heels of the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal, when West Midlands Police banned Jews from Israel from attending a game at Villa Park because they caught wind of the fact that local elements were planning to arm themselves to attack those Jews. West Midlands Police had earlier banned Birmingham’s 2025 Diwali celebrations, again out of ‘concerns for public safety’.

timing belts should be done around 100,000

Miles? I’m <50k

@djsumdog As long as we’re not talking boom fire doom, that is livable. Ta.