Notices by Flick ?? (flick@spinster.xyz), page 2

@djsumdog I’m not interested enough to be mechanically minded, and I trust my (not a dealership) garage a huge amount.

Thanks, though! Do you think it’s “do not drive” or “get it booked in”? If it does snap, what happens?

@djsumdog Surely the garage would have spotted that? Passed the MoT <6mths ago!

Ok, place your bets now: what a wrong with my car?

About half the time, when I start it up in the morning I get a squealing kind of noise. It does it even if I stop moving, gets louder as I speed up, then stops after about a hundred yards. Putting the handbrake on and off, or stamping on the brakes, makes no difference. There’s a funny smell afterwards, sort of burnt (reminds me a bit of one time I smelled burnt out clutch).

It’s done it intermittently ever since I’ve had it, since when the garage have stripped down the brakes and the gear box but it’s getting worse/more frequent, and the smell has me worried.

Shitty recording, but you can just about hear it as an high-pitched whine over the engine. Sounds worse when you’re in the car.

@carolen Oh god, that is so hilariously po faced and missing the point.

“What we’re seeing is the monetisation of hate,” said Matteo Bergamini, the founder and CEO of Shout Out UK, a political and media literacy training company that created the original game.

https://spectator.com/article/the-poisonous-truth-about-british-universities/

For all that people like to think that woke is over, or that the trans madness is dying down in the wake of the Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie’s victory, it’s still the case that a quarter of British academics say they fear they could be physically attacked for addressing subjects such as trans ideology. Research is being skewed, students are being misled, staff are self-censoring and scared.

And look at Professor Gordon: they’re right to be scared. It’s not like university management has anyone’s back. Quite the opposite. In the countryside where I grew up, gamekeepers would sometimes hang the corpses of foxes and crows along the top of a barbed-wire fence as a warning to other predators: don’t mess with the boss. A ‘game-keeper’s gibbet’, it was called. ‘Management’s gibbet’, we could call the line of academics strung up like Professor Gordon, twisting in the wind. Beware oh students, this is what awaits you in just a short while in the world of work: Karen-like line managers; HR women with that haunted turncoat look. Think: who here is really on your side?

‘The complaint system has been kicked into the long grass,’ a source told the Daily Telegraph. Well, it’s getting pretty crowded in Phillipson’s long grass. Also slowly decaying in the weeds is the guidance so many desperate teachers, doctors and academics have been waiting for, which will finally make it clear to businesses and all public bodies that as a result of last year’s excellent Supreme Court ruling, sex under the Equality Act means biological sex. Once the guidance is published, schools, hospitals and universities will be able to go about their normal business teaching pupils actual reality about biological sex and keeping men in dresses from barging into the single-sex places designed to keep women safe. Management will no longer feel free to use such tactics to out their enemies. Once the guidance is published…

https://archive.ph/CQ7AW

@Kang_Kong3 @CozyLife @DevouredByTheDead @Eiswald @Robert_Edwardly And/or exposed to graphic porn and went “eww no, if that’s what women have to do / actually enjoy then I am obviously not one”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/08/free-speech-union-hacked-by-trans-activists/

Trans activists have hacked into the website of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and published a list of its donors online.

A direct action group calling itself Bash Back said it had breached the FSU’s online security and was revealing the names of all those who had donated more than £50 over the past two years.

Hours after the list of names appeared online, the FSU obtained an emergency injunction from the High Court, forcing the group to remove the donor details.

https://archive.ph/lxwLs

1954:

Yikes.

@HebrideanHecate I heard the army thing on the radio: surely anyone in the affected areas would have been ready for it?

Looking at the forecast and fearing that it might be right when it says six hours of rain falling on frozen ground followed by six hours of snow on top….

Not just Stonewall!

https://order-order.com/2026/01/06/trans-mad-charities-suffer-huge-losses-in-2025/

Mermaids incurred losses of £285,496 with final reserves of minus £33,056, down from £226,224 last year. The charity reports reduced activity and that it has undergone “a full restructure to reduce costs.” Shedding jobs…

Stonewall is in an equally bad position. Its income fell from £6.9 million last year to £4.7 million. Higher spending of £5.6 million have produced a deficit of £906,000. Their cash reserves are down to £92,000 from £1 million…

The organisations are also supported by piecemeal grants from taxpayer-funded sources in their activities. At a university talk late last year trans campaigner Jolyon Maugham said the two charities were “essentially killed” by the Charity Commission after having to fight legal cases. The same strategy Jolyon is using unsuccessfully against the Institute of Economic Affairs…

It was actually Maugham’s Good Law Project which crowdfunded and supported Mermaids in its massively unsuccessful litigation against fellow charity the LGBA to have its status revoked. That’s what kicked off the downward spiral…

@Economic_Hitman Probably not.

https://spectator.com/article/france-is-becoming-used-to-gratuitous-violence/

We’ve heard this all before. In France, certainly, but also in Britain. Random attacks in public places are explained as tragic eruptions of mental illness. The attacker’s background is minimised. Immigration status is treated as incidental. Prior convictions are mentioned late, if at all. The violence is presented as inexplicable, and therefore unavoidable.

Attacks like this now follow a familiar script. They dominate the news cycle briefly, sometimes for a day, and then fade. Often, they barely register as major headlines at all. Random violence has become part of the background noise of public life.

The fact that this attacker had no legal right to be in France, had already committed serious crimes, had been in custody and released, and was never removed from the country barely featured in much of the mainstream coverage. It was acknowledged by only a handful of the press.

https://archive.ph/WDkrQ

@NoDoxGregBrady @vitalis @Economic_Hitman Huh: I did my rotator cuff rehab with one of those elastic bands, but I can see light weights as well.

(Over a decade ago, and there are still two or three Pilates exercises I can’t do without pain the next day. It’s a bastard of an injury.)

@Economic_Hitman @vitalis Rehab.

@djsumdog Recipe is a bit of a reach! I just chopped and sautéed them. I think I put a splash of shio koji and some pepper in.

@HebrideanHecate I almost technically had a white Christmas: there were some sleety flurries about 11pm last night.

@HebrideanHecate Christmas miracle! Bloody cold, though.

Another hundred yard dog walk…. He did make it all the way up to see the DTs yesterday, so I suppose he’s allowed to be tired.

I really hope he keeps being able to make the trip, they love to see him.