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There's likely an agreement with the WI: you don't infiltrate us and we won't infiltrate you! Oh, hang on, it's called the Soroptomists. My mum was once approached to join, but gracefully declined on the grounds that she didn't feel comfortable being a member of any secret society who would have someone like her as a member. [sorry Groucho - and Mum!]

The Beeb is buying content not giving money away; they reserve the giving away for their own I think. If it delivers for their customers then no I wouldn't agree. They could of course ask the viewers what they think and act on the response - we have the technology - but of course that might set a terribly dangerous precedent. I'm not one of people who think that digging up cricket pitches in the early hours did anything but harden the attitudes of those in South Africa. I met a few Boers on their own turf; they were not unreasonable people, and had some views that were hard to counter. They could, and eventually were, talked into the 20th Century. The Peter Hains of this world did nothing to help in this, and probably did a lot to hinder. Boycotts don't work, they polarise! On the NUJ thing, you are probably right. All they seem to be able to do these days is reschedule a few repeats now and then. Technology and much more proactive middle management are easily able to neutralise much of their mischief, and the free market has done for their monopoly. Another uncredited win for Mrs T? So I'd be wrong singling out the leftie elements for special mention when the real villain is many decades of inbreeding at higher levels.

Tax breaks aren't a public subsidy, they're just a little less of your own money (mis)appropriated by the state. [Labour Party writers of such politics of envy sound bites as "tax breaks for millionaires" please note.] A tiny fraction of one percent of our citizenship gives us 26% of our state spending. They don't actually have to, as unlike the rest they have a wide choice as to where to pay their taxes, but that's straying from the point - again. It all depends if you think "our betters" should be allowed to social engineer, and I think things have gone way too far in telling Joe Public how he should act and think. I object to my tax money being spent on social engineering that weakens our society overall, and allows a small clique of drones (the political classes) feel better about themselves; that leads them to believe that they've done good without unintentionally doing even more bad - more often the reality. Please! The lefties at the Beeb (NUJ) don't need any more encouragement to colour their output. Though now that we have a Tory party that appears to have fully bought in to all things politically correct I'm no longer sure what that colour is. Logically it would be a muddy grey - highly appropriate for all the Polly Toynebee types who would remove all colour from our lives, and all the natural variation that so enriches it.

What no Android version?! A much bigger audience for Android than iOS these days - and the difference grows every month. http://phandroid.com...e-market-share/ Could get you a job at the detached-from-reality Beeb though!

Bee politicians meddling in people's lives again! What a private club wants to do is up to its members. If people don't like it then don't join, start your own if need be! End. Politicians have no answers to the issues they get elected on by promising action, so justify their existence by meddling in matters they have no mandate to interfere in. Who gave Cameron the right to mess with traditional marriage? No mandate, virtually no debate, and cross-party stitch up with all the budding "social engineers" and the leagues of their "gay" buddies in parliament. A pox on the lot of them, and I will never vote for Cameron, or indeed any of the "major parties", ever again. Democracy is something they only give lip service to. They pretend they are concerned at the lack of respect they get and dwindling public support. But actually it's only when a major wake-up call is looming (like UKIP and the EU) that they start paying attention to public opinion. Unless there's organised opposition to what they are up to the country is being run by cross-party political stitch ups by three parties, that in truth have so little between them these days that you could randomly redistribute the rosettes and it would make no practical difference to anything. The Tories have completely sold out to lefty social engineering, and Labour to market capitalism and now to rolling back the welfare state. Indeed if you think doing something about the unaffordable welfare state is priority you'd be better off voting Labour, as they'd get away with the needed reforms without quite so much fuss. And, the Lib Dems will agree to practically anything to get cushy jobs for their boys too. Principals have now gone completely out of the window; the game now is say anything, do anything, just get power! When you get it follow your own hidden agenda, and ignore what the people who put you in power think.

Oops! My apology to Mr Alsop for spelling his name wrong!

Both those photos are amazing foxy. The second one shows the place I only ever knew as Allsop's the Barber as Foggan's shop. One of those really obvious things that never register when you are too close to the action! My fashion expert says the crowd scene is turn of century. Lots and lots of possibilities there, as we were big on community in those days. A coronation perhaps? Let's take a totally wild guess at Saturday, 9 August 1902. We so easily forget the import of infant mortality in those days. Large families to provide assurance, and spread the grief around!

To Americans?! Why do they all look/act like John Cleese?

We aren't talking about Mr Henderson the dentist who bought the "Patton" house further up? They lived above the present Post Office before moving over the road and up a bit. Daughter is Patricia - and a very nice lady she is; I remember her mum, a very smart lady. Straker is a very old Bedlington name. I have some sort of recollection that some Strakers may have lived in the Baptist Yard before it was demolished (early 1960's or maybe late 1950's?), That's was around about the location of the present telephone exchange. Or maybe it was Foggan's Yard - entrance where Lloyds TSB is - or even both? I think they edit themselves out these days. Especially true when it's so easy these days to find "long losts", even on the other side of the globe. Only the truly geriatric have any excuse, and the real dodderers seem to get be getting ever older.

US Government Agency demands magician write a detailed "disaster plan" for his (previously unlicensed) rabbit and he and his wife then get training to implement the rabbit disaster plan. The plan must protect said rabbit from disasters "such as a tornado, fire, flood etc" and ensure its care afterwards. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/1/agriculture-department-tells-magician-write-disast/ Brought to you by the Obarmy Administration?

When I was in Amsterdam many moons ago I was disgusted to find that the Anne Frankhus had been heavily colonised by commie propaganda pedallers. Didn't go in for that very reason. Hope they were booted out long before now. Anyway that looks an exceptionally well-heeled district for pre-war - supporting the oft-floated theory that there aren't too many poor Jews.

= The Baptists. Ah, the truth always comes out in the end - but only on the Internet! Is there a Marley in amongst your names?

To sum up: It's the Sun stupid! What many real scientists have been saying for years. Really interesting how the Beeb instantly shuts down any argument that conflicts with the present politico's delusions. They even admit to this bias - justified on the grounds that they don't need to cover anything that conflicts with "established scientific fact". This makes about as much sense as their admitted bias towards Apple products, justified on the grounds that "[The iOS app caters to] a demographic that was more likely, both in percentage terms and absolute numbers, to use BBC on-demand services." In other words while we have to admit that there are many times more Android users out there than Apple, those Apple users are our type of people! An intrinsically self-fulfilling prophecy when you ignore 80%+ of the potential users. Ignoring inconvenient ideas, and inconvenient scientific data, seems to be the new way to self advancement. You can only marvel at Al Gore's bare-faced cheek by accusing others of this. http://www.takepart....t-truth-hangout Note that he starts off by turning a wholly scientific issue into an entirely moral issue by making several false comparisons with social issues; proceeds from the false premise that the garbage he promotes is established science, and when asked how this can be taken out of politics further politicises the whole thing. Listen to this sickening bit of pure propaganda in front of a carefully selected and swooning audience, but only if you have the best part of an hour to waste. Don't expect any pertinent questions, because there aren't any! "This is not that complicated"! Actually it's a lot more complicated than you are prepared to acknowledge Mr Gore, or suits your sound-bite method of putting your illogical political arguments. That's the really Inconvenient Truth.

The best thing the EU could do is break the M$ monopoly that forces you to pay for Windoze on a new machine. i.e. the manufacturer should be required to offer the same hardware without Windoze at a lower price. That price reduction should represent a large proportion of the retail price of the software - the price M$ charge you and me - and not some cooked-up deal to make the discount appear hardly worth having. Then operating systems could compete on a level playing field. Anyway, if you are lumbered with W8 then you absolutely *need* http://www.stardock....roducts/start8/ (or similar product) to preserve your sanity. Best five bucks you will spend this year, and you get to try it free for a month anyway.

"Clean coal" has nothing to do with reducing "greenhouse gasses" Adam. If you burn X Kg of carbon, you get Y calories of heat, and generate Z m3 of CO2 - the numbers are the numbers, and there's no getting away from them. CO2 is the "greenhouse gas". Whatever you burn, if you want to reduce CO2 you have to extract it expensively, and with near exactly the same process as for any other organic fuel. Only nuclear is clean. As for the economics of coal just at the moment... well... just turn your radio on. Back to those "riches" everyone is so concerned about. Actually, having looked at this for a while, and very practised at losing large chunks of money on dusty holes in Bongo-Bongoland, I really don't think that there are any riches! Yep, I think a great deal of the shale gas/oil thing is a way of parting unwary investors from their money. Take a glance here: http://energypolicyf...-not-in-shales/ There's a lot more of that - all very technical, but what it boils down to is that no one is making any wonga. Or rather no one who doesn't sell out rather sharpish after the first gas starts flowing is making any. To quote that article "It is a failed business model of epic proportion." The economics of the oil business depend an awful lot on back of envelope calculations (dressed up to look authoritative) - projected reserves are often alarming wide of the mark. Energy extraction from shale seems to be taking this guesswork to a whole new level. It's looking increasing like a lot of shale projects are simply incredibly long tubes in the ground to stuff ten pound notes into!

Some good advice above, and Symptoms is right about the Apple myth too. Only on an Apple product can the mere act of plugging it into a charger result in the device being seriously compromised. Chrome OS is probably the safest platform these days, but that's likely because for most people they accept big brother Google's free offers and defaults. It's not entirely without its bloopers though. For someone completely wet behind the ears a Chromebook is easily the safest bet, and way way cheaper than anything Apple. Google do the thinking for you, supply your software for free, and keep everything up-to-date. Most sensibly configured PCs are hardened these days and it's necessary to resort to trickery to compromise them. Hover your mouse cursor over and links so that the actual URL appears (sometimes in the status bar) if there are subtle differences from a URL shown in the text that's VERY suspicious. The main vulnerability these days is malicious Java scripting on sites you are lured to. Make sure your Java engine is fully up to date. Any e-mail attachment you don't expect and are in any way unsure of the source of probably carries a payload, and should never ever be opened. Windows users would probably be best advised to remove any Microsoft e-mail clients and use Thunderbird - though you probably will need some assistance at setting this up properly to filter spam and flag likely malicious stuff. I was surprised quite recently though to discover that most people these days don't even know what an e-mail client is, and assume webmail is proper email! If you are viewing HTML emails make sure that the display of LINKED graphics is turned off. It's the default these days on any decent e-mail client but Microsoft were very laggy in implementing this on Outlook/Outlook Express. There's not a direct threat here, but it makes it possible for scamsters to detect if you've received and displayed their mail. If you need to take one thing away from here it's to NEVER publish your e-mail address on a website anywhere so it is publicly readable, and be very picky who you give it to. People still do this all the time! This is both idiotic and completely unnecessary.

Our Town would be a far better one if there'd been a lot more "confrontation or argumentative" in the past. Some of the socialist BS that paralysed things, and encouraged state dependency, might have been exposed. As it is the doers still leave to do somewhere else - no coincidence that a lot of the input here comes from overseas! This week the Labour Party under "Red ED" parted company with universal welfare spending, at long last recognising that it is totally unaffordable, terminally disincentivising, and out of step with how 21st Century (Thatcherite) Britain actually thinks. Will many local people realise this? Probably not until the welfare check gets slashed, or "their" next Labour government cuts back more drastically than any Tory/LibDem government would ever dare to. And what about the few truly great people who didn't leave? People who changed the world, and in any other town would be hailed as heroes (not the least to promote tourism and profit from it)? They didn't buy into the socialist myth (and its blame game), so have been mostly written out of history!

It was 2:39 am!

Here's some press video just shot at Computex (no sound). Many of the devices shown are using the new Haswell architecture CPUs, and the power savings are obvious from the reduced form factors. With the 14nm die shrink next year "real" computers can only continue to get even lighter and more powerful. Notice too the odd Intel powered phone - ARM is going to be sidelined over the next decade. We'll see a lot of this stuff in the shops before year-end. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHqdBbiYH3Q

http://news.yahoo.co...-112248378.html This is not good for the UK at all! Good for a selected few in Germany, perhaps. Yet another reason to add to the already long list of reasons to leave the EU. Is there a complimentary list of reasons to stay in? Some would claim so; but such lists don't stand close examination, so they are very timid in producing them.

Like many others they learned to play the system. They get invited on Newsnight and are paid a fat fee for sailing as close to the wind as they dare. This is done in the name of getting a balanced view and free speech. Invite a BNP or EDL spokesperson onto the same prog and all the leftie journos at the Beeb would stage another of their regular walkouts - and there'd be a left-wing protest mob screaming outside! Totally agree! All enterprise has to be rewarded fairly, and to discriminate like that would reinforce ghettoisation. It's difficult to justify movement restrictions in a free society, but I think, in the interests of proper integration, immigrants should be told which areas they can and can not settle in for say the first five years based on the number of immigrants already in those areas. So probationary citizenship before full citizenship is granted. Violate the probation conditions and you qualify for a ticket for the first plane out, no endless court hearings or appeals. Could we do this under EU law? Most likely not! And, we need that temporary (half-a-generation) complete hold in order to sort out the current situation.

Came from a theatrical family. His cousin was Jon (Dr Who, Worzel Gummidge etc. etc.). Best remembered to '60s radio listeners for his Seamus Android character (a thinly disguised send-up of Eamonn Andrews) in Round The Horne. R.I.P.

Slightly different tune from "We haven't sought nor do we need government support." - this week? "This decision is part of our commercial strategy to play to the traditional strengths of the bank,” said Mr Sutherland. Ah yes, good commercial strategy for a bank not to make loans, very traditional and showing strength too. Still, a new crisis CEO has to say something reassuring, pity it couldn't be more honest like: We screwed up big-time with a huge error of judgement, but things aren't bad enough to threaten our continued existence. And, with the support of our loyal customers, I'm confident we are going to weather this sticky patch in our history. Generally BS says as BS does!

Which Muslin country is this where it's legal to "sleep with 12 year old girls"? In a significant number of Muslim countries sex is illegal unless you are married, and most have more or less the same age of consent as we do! Spain wasn't a Muslim country the last time I was there, and standards in the Mediterranean countries are markedly different to the UK. For instance although the age of consent in Italy is 14, Silvio Berlusconi is being prosecuted for having paid-for sex with an under 18 year-old (he denies this, and she's just told a court she lied about the payment and a fair bit else) - his alleged crime is regarded as a very serious matter. If this is being offered as an excuse for this behaviour then it doesn't wash! By any rational standards Enoch was right. Our 'betters' opened the floodgates to immigration and the consequences are as predicted. Whether this was a deliberate ploy by Labour's champaign socialists to garner votes, or just utter incompetence is the only matter still at issue (I lean to the belief that it was a bit of both). Enoch was a history scholar, and was very aware that in the entire history of mankind an attempted "multicultural society" had never produced other than a bloody result. For any society to function properly everyone must subscribe to the same set of common values. Only in an enlightened society does this set of common values transcend race and religion. But, when you have a significant section of society who won't even accept the law of the land, and seek to subvert or ignore it, then that's where tolerance should firmly end. The problem is seldom the first generation of immigrants - they are grateful that they've been accepted and are able and willing to adapt to their new host culture - it's when subsequent generations become radicalised, well beyond the time horizon (and active political careers) of our "social engineers", that the problems surface. There is plenty in Islam that extremists can latch onto to to justify what we are experiencing, and it's up to followers of this religion to sort this out - it should be their problem not ours! Saying that it's just a small minority really isn't good enough. The entire Muslim community needs to get its act together, not just in condemning this behaviour, but thoroughly isolating the radicals that preach hate, and if necessary, set up their own religious hierarchy which doesn't take its interpretation of the Koran from evil men in foreign lands. For our part we need to put a hold on all further economic migrants for say twenty years, or until it's generally agreed we've properly integrated and de-ghettoised the communities we already have. Pulling out of (or seriously changing our relationship with) the EU has to be part of such a cure, else we are in for another dose of Social Engineering Sickness. The symptoms of SES also include, draconian restrictions on civil liberties, curtailment of traditional free speech, extremist reactionary groups, and loony lefties advocating that the cure is more exposure to the problem!