threegee

Yup, the latest bout of alarmism from the IPCC surely illustrates that their case is crumbling. Even a courageous one of their number defecting (and putting his job at risk) on the grounds that the alarmism isn't at all warranted. There's no doubt a section of society that actually wills MMGW to be true. It suits their sense of "justice" and how things should be. It's religion for the irreligious. It ticks all the boxes in a belief-set that sees the present course of society and human development as misdirected. It's the same bunch of people who have got overworked about other issues in the past - nuclear disarmament - hole in the ozone layer - nuclear power - "globalisation" etc. They are essentially Stalinist in their misplaced concerns; anyone who disagrees must be a "class-enemy" and eliminated (sacked). Anything which points to the fact that they may be wrong must be suppressed. Quite a few of them in the Beeb I think. The present bunch buy heavily into Gaia theory - up to a point - but when its author says nuclear power is the only sane way to go they don't want to listen any further. That's because there's an irreconcilable conflict with another irrational thread. A lot of these extremely vocal and irrational people are in the green movement. Which is a shame, because it detracts from some of the more useful messages from that direction. Every religion has its admirable good intentions, together with followers who do great harm under the moral cloak so provided.

Curiouser and curiouser! Rather a lot of red faces if this report is true! http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/mh370-hijacked-afghanistan-russian-intelligence-3407468

Well, I'm going to disagree here. It has been pretty much a waste of space for many years now, indeed unsafe! We can't preserve absolutely everything, and some things have to go to make way for the new. And.. it wasn't actually a church hall for a lot of the time I was around there. That's a use it assumed because there was little else to do with it. Let's preserve the things that are worth preserving, and don't let the bad decisions of the past - I'm referring to the council driven carnage of the place in the '60's - make us overreact when things have seen out their utility. Many things have gone which should have been preserved, but this certainly isn't one of them! So... nice to have known you Infants School / latter day Church Hall, but Bedlington needs a touch of "The Doctor". It needs to regenerate if it is to survive as other than a dormitory for other places. Places that have had a fairer deal! Presently, we need to grab whatever reasonable quality development we can attract. Excessive clinging to the past is a sure sign of decline. We owe it to the future, our children, and indeed our forefathers, to move on! I do hope I haven't stifled the debate here; are there actually any rational reasons why the development shouldn't go ahead?

The server for this website was recently patched... and all related company ones. Rotating passwords is always a good idea, but few people ever bother. You should focus on the sites where you use https: (the lock thing on your browser), and where cash is involved. The sheer scale of this is actually a bit reassuring, because criminals have so many potential targets the chances of an individual being victimised are small. And, if you are a Mac user, you've had no https: security for ages anyway (see my bit in the Computing forum), and only thought you had. It always pays to be paranoid though. So if you even have to think is this really necessary - just do it anyway!

http://www.bedlington.co.uk/community/classifieds/item/102-samsung-galaxy-star-gt-s5280-smartphone/ -- I can do torms!

Well... would you believe it, the ONS has underestimated the number of immigrants over 2001-11 from "new EU countries" by a mere 350,000? How was this possible? Seems they only bothered to count the ones coming in to Gatwick or Heathrow and couldn't be arsed to find out how many they were waving through other airports. If they can't even COUNT the legal immigrants who present themselves under their very noses accurately how can they even start to estimate the illegals?! http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-26972597 Yes, Mr Clegg, you fool no one! The 27% of the audience who bought your crap should be told the facts, and not the pack of lies you peddle! You cherry pick from the official statistics, and even they are often based on partial, incomplete, and politically slanted information. Meanwhile Italy is inundated with boat people and simply can't cope. 4000 have been rescued over just the past few days. They will be given papers and released because there's nothing else the Italian state can do. Germany won't help a bit - not even money to protect borders - because they are well shielded and rely on cheap labour for their industry. Eu - big on Europe and very small on Union! Time to get out, and kill the nonsense and political junketing off for good! Eight billion pounds a year we can spend on fixing our own problems, and get rid of the economic drag that only benefits Germany. Job at risk? Yes, only those at the trough though!

I know one shouldn't prejudge these things but his performance in court really is worth one of his namesakes. At very very best he's a dangerous idiot; at worst he's as guilty as sin, and today's performance compounds it! Can you get away with murder in the RSA if you are famous enough? Well we all know that you can in the USofA, and from my short while there I'd say that you probably could have - if you were white! Today, I think maybe not.

This report from the Aussies is a lot more believable than the Chinese leads: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10748957/Malaysia-Airlines-MH370-authorities-very-close-to-finding-missing-plane.html The duration of the sounds and the likely gear being used lend it a lot more weight. Chances are now better than evens that the batteries will last long enough despite the low temperatures, but it will be a close run thing. Even so if this is not a false positive it will still have vastly narrowed the area of search, so that full recovery should be a matter of weeks and months, rather than years like the Air France plane. That deep the search effective search radius is shrunk even further. So, despite the excellent work a fair element of luck in this Aussie detection I think. Let's hope that luck holds!

Born: Joe Yule Jr., in Brooklyn, New York, 23 September 1920 Read more: http://www.filmreference.com/Actors-and-Actresses-Ro-Sc/Rooney-Mickey.html#ixzz2yClqtt7N Seems like he wrote the book Life's Too Short - in 1991! Another George Burns episode: if you want to see 100 years then don't write a book alluding to lifespan!

Not April 1st then? Someone should alert The Moos Quiz about this crime!

Somehow I think Milipede and Cameron are going to come up with any excuse to avoid any form of public debate with UKIP. Clegg did a tad better in the first debate as then he played it straight. Tonight he was quite transparently adopting carefully rehearsed tactics which didn't look at all genuine to anyone, let alone to the undecided. The result was he parted company with a lot of people who just might have bought his basic pro-EU message. In fact there were times he looked like an overgrown schoolboy who'd been caught out in a lie. The "Sitting Bull" thing fell completely flat. Whoever at LD central who came up with that juvenile stunt should be shown the door! Fit for the House of Commons maybe, but the British public were far more bemused at the behaviour of their Deputy PM than amused. Anyone who didn't know would surely have guessed that Farage was the deputy PM, and Clegg was the rank outsider. His days as LD leader must now be numbered! It's interesting that a full third of all declared LD voters polled thought Farage won. So, just when Clegg had calculated that he had nothing to lose - he did, and badly!

Quick, someone start a Facebeuk campaign to bring it to Bedders! A winning move, if ever I heard one.

I think any male with a hairdo like the younger guy on the extreme right would have been an object of extreme derision in 1958! I remember being mocked for having a rather nice, and quite modest, floral tie, not more than spitting distance form there right around that time! The location looks outside The (Old) Vicarage and the year must be in the 1960's. The lady to Harold's right would appear to be his wife Mary, who amazingly still seems to be going strong, having recently celebrated her 98th birthday. So... why doesn't someone ask her? Anyway on the quite sound basis that Labour leaders only came to Bedlington when an election was looming, and certainly not after they got elected, it's likely 1964, 1963, 1962, etc... in decreasing order of probability.

If this is true then there was no in-flight emergency, and the cause is entirely human intervention: http://www.nst.com.my/nation/general/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-pilot-i-established-contact-with-plane-1.503464#ixzz2xAMFgdac It's also curious that in the final transmission to Malaysian Area Radar the frequency of Ho Chi Minh wasn't read back. This had been done religiously on each earlier hand-off. It's almost as if there was already no intention to change to it, even more than ten minutes before this pilot says he established contact.

Fixed!

Yes! And, they were at Front Street East before that, and of course 40c Front Street West since the early 1970's.

Which a guy on the Beeb says is just the right size for an ISO Container! I hope he's right because it would still hold out some hope for the relatives. No one is going to survive in those temperatures and that swell.

Well someone may not have "flown" it, but someone was around to enter the coordinates, and that must have been someone who knew what they were doing - those coordinates are precise regional aviation waypoints. Which rules out the loss being due to sudden decompression. i.e. why didn't they key in a workable altitude too if there was a general oxygen shortage? They didn't have time before they passed out too? OK, so how come they apparently did this at least *twice*?! This map was "leaked" from the investigators. The chiefs avoided all direct questions about the waypoint flying, and did the usual politicos try to change the subject. The explanation has to be a freak combination of factors, because no single explanation adds-up.

The old ones are always the best!

So what took so long? Apparently it's one in every 30 £1 coins now! Sounds like these are a boon for blind people too, who struggled to tell the £1 from a 2p.

If you accept the sudden decompression theory then why did the aircraft fly on to a designated waypoint by itself? Accepted logic is that this would require eight or nine accurate keystrokes on the autopilot. On top of this you are required to believe that the aircraft carried on on a straight course for full seven hours without anyone up there or down here noticing, and then somehow ended up in some "Bermuda Triangle" area lost to all surveillance. All the navigation/airframe electronics work, but all the autonomous communications ones don't! Both pilots don't get to their oxygen masks in time? If the pilots did have time to enter navigation coordinates they'd enter them straight back to departure point or a nearer airfield, not to a navigation point in the middle of the ocean. The odds add up to making the sudden decompression theory unlikely, and there's not much left to consider except a carefully crafted plan. If it was a decompression and/or fire then there are some serious design flaws and unforeseen interactions in the 777's systems, and it's imperative that the truth be known at the earliest possible moment.

Anyone following the disappearance closely may find this rather interesting: http://keithledgerwood.tumblr.com/post/79838944823/did-malaysian-airlines-370-disappear-using-sia68-sq68 It's the only theory I have heard that makes any sense. That's if you believe that the military in this area are even half competent. Some really good planning capped off with a bit of luck that another 777 was in more or less exactly the right place at the right time. Maybe this couldn't have been pulled-off before ADS-B? Doesn't explain who and why of course, but if it's even half the truth we are sure going to find out!

Sad news, but he'd been seriously ill for quite some time. He visited Bedlington many times in his long career, and will likely be seen in several pictures in the Gallery. Although many of his views were totally wrong-headed he was a great asset to - the Tory Party; a fact no more readily appreciated than by his Labour Party colleagues! Though - like a stopped clock - he was spot-on once in a while. An idealist, a true socialist, and an eccentric. No one ever doubted that he believed what he was saying though, and that's where the present lot part company with Tony's generation. Often wrong, but still very worthy of respect, you are a sad loss Tony!

And... hardly a month later (4 March 1974) the appallingly incompetent Edward Heath (the second worst Prime Minister in UK history) was booted out, and pipe-smoking Harold was back. Like many other thoroughly bad things that were foisted on us undemocratically (the EU included) Ted the Incompetent was right behind The Local Government Act 1972. Mind you it was also backed by Labour, though like many things they really didn't know if they were for or against it, or indeed what day of the week Tuesday was! The irony of all this was that Heath was the first leader the Tories ever elected "democratically". Sort of suggesting that a bunch of time-served old codgers in a smoke-filled room was a vastly better system of choosing a national leader than electing the ex-public school twit who (at the time) had offended the least number of Tory Party members!