It’s amazing that these people were even allowed to vote, let alone vote on something as important as EU membership. A selection of comments from people with serious mental problems on the BBC Have Your Say pages:
Elizabeth Kirkby
There is absolutely no need to wait any longer before triggering Article 50, nor any excuse for doing so. The sooner the process is started, the better. I do not see any need for complicated negotiations either. I just hope the “remainers” do not use delaying tactics or throw a spanner in the works out of spite.
Davey Tusker
I don’t know what these remainers are bleating about. They lost the vote – surely they should try and help their country rather than just throwing their hands in the air and calling everyone who voted out stupid. Maybe they could leave the country and go somewhere else where people appreciate cowardice.
Kevin
Stop stalling, dithering and pussy-footing around.
Get a move-on with the Brexit.
Peter Charles
Complete & utter waste of money. The EU should sort out the numerous bankrupt nations its Euro has created & start to fund its own defence rather than relying on the USA, Canada & UK. Europe is in massive decline & wants to prop itself up with this figment that, as a continent as one it matters. The EU is finished, Europe is irrelevant and the English speaking nations will take the world forward.
Alfresco
I’m not normally a religious man but i THANK GOD that we have taken our country back and rejected the right-wing Germanic dictatorship of the EU.
We are FREE again, Free to celebrate only BRITISH culture and to once again RULE THE WORLD
This next one is special – inasmuch as the author clearly seems to have special needs:
AuntieLeft
YES!!
The sooner we get out of this EU madhouse the better
Did not see the report in the FT about the UK getting part of the 42,000 bottles of wine and 1,000 bottles of spirits on Brexit deal on the BBC
Junker must be devastated
All with OUR money and it wont be Aldi wine that is for sure
The Eurocrats really do extract the urine from us plebs
OUT – ASAP
Leave the madhouse to the insane
And this one’s not far behind:
Project Fear Phase 2 – Project Tantrum
Wasn’t it by January 3 months ago? What’s all this stalling for, the people have voted so stop playing games and trigger it already Sharia May, it’s going to take 2 years after that, tons of time to plan and negotiate, so stop giving the anti-democratic EU marxists a chance to form a coup against it and for the EU, who we are still paying vast cash to, to take a fat turd on the UK in the meantime.
Now try and work out what this prat is going on about:
Jon
Let’s hope we can drop these EU employment laws which are killing business – no more softy lefty nonsense – lets man up and get people doing a hard weeks work. The French don’t work anymore and they can’t raise the taxes as the rich have moved to London
This one doesn’t seem to be aware that zero-hours contracts are actually illegal in many European states. It’s the UK – which hasn’t banned them – which is at fault all by itself:
edinthesouth
@1414 so why does your beloved EU not ban ‘zero hour contracts’ across the 28 EU States? does not suit their neoliberal agenda to destroy working classes and replace with “immigrants”?
There are hundreds more. I just repeat again: why on earth were these people allowed to vote?
None of them is capable of understanding the complexities of removing the last third of the 20th century from UK Law and finances, and think it can be done just like that. Most of them are operating purely on the flag-waving level. Several are clearly wrong on key issues, and yet cast their votes based on that. And others are simply a few olives short of a pizza.
It’s funny, because I’ve recently started using hand car washes and they’re bloody brilliant. I can get a high-quality wash and shine, plus a vacuuming of the interior, for the same price I was paying for a top Tiger Wash in the drive-thru at my local garage (which never cleaned the alloys properly, frequently didn’t blow off all the loose water, and was often not working anyway because some prat had driven into the machinery before it had risen out of the way). But what struck me was the turnover they must be pulling in.
Last time I was there, in the space of about 30 minutes they cleaned and vacuumed six cars, and more were queuing as I drove off. A simple wash and dry costs £5 and a vac on top takes it to £10. So I saw them turnover at least £150-£200 in an hour. At a rough estimate, they might be pulling in somewhere in the region of £1,000 a day, and perhaps £7,000 a week – maybe even more than that. They operate out of disused petrol stations, so rental costs must be quite low. Obviously they have to buy in materials, but I’ve looked some of them up and the most expensive item is around £1.25 per litre (they probably pay much less), and each litre would be enough to clean dozens of cars. There’s usually 6-8 blokes all working like mad, but I reckon that each could be grossing the equivalent of nearly £1,000 a week.
That would equate to over £20 an hour.
Having said that, it must be absolutely back-breaking work, and the materials are powerful surfactants, so with little in the way of safety equipment (maybe a pair of latex gloves) the long-term effects on the health of those guys must be questionable.
The Tesco operation is a franchise operated by Waves Car Wash, and they apparently have 180 Tesco sites. The franchisee at Congleton is the culprit – not Waves. However, the same BBC story notes that a Northwich car wash (not operated by Waves) was found on the same day to be employing three asylum seekers.
Actually, she hasn’t really said anything we didn’t already suspect. But even so, one piece of advice I would give her before she gets too wound up in her ego is that she remembers that the slightly-less-than 52% who voted to leave the EU were not all Tory voters in the first place, and once the inevitable downturn in the economy kicks in, even less of them will be. In effect, Brexit will cost her her job – just as it did David Cameron before her.
Cameron f–ked up the country by allowing the Referendum in the first place. May is simply f—king up the still-twitching corpse he left behind.
Theresa May still has time to see sense and stop Brexit, but I don’t think she will because she is simply playing a political game which she believes is to her own advantage. She is incapable of seeing that it is not to anyone else’s advantage beyond being seen to comply with some ridiculous definition of the word “democracy”.
I still live in hope that someone else will come up with a way of preventing Brexit happening. If it goes ahead, I can say with absolute certainty that it has effectively screwed up the rest of my life. I can also be quite sure that it has damaged or screwed up the lives of this generation’s children, and probably those of at least another two or three generations beyond that. And that assumes that the world remains as it is today, and that some insane despot doesn’t appear on the horizon.
Leaving the EU is the WRONG DECISION. Holding a referendum was the WRONG DECISION. Everyone with even the smallest amount of intelligence – including Theresa May, who was against Brexit – knows it.
At close of play on Friday, GBP stood at $1.297 – that’s 12.6% below what it was before the Referendum. It is only about 0.5% higher than its lowest post-Referendum price, and 3.5% below the highest it has been post-Referendum.
Just regarding that last post about Rosetta, and one of the images I have shown again here:
If you get the full sized image here, in the black sky to the middle left there is a small white dot that might be a star, a data glitch, or just an aberration on the optics. But look what happens when you blow it up:
It’s a disk shape with several lobes around it. Here’s what happens when you adjust the contrast:
Is that strange or what? I’d have never spotted it if I hadn’t seen the comments under that photo.
No one else seems to have picked up on a possible UFO in this latest Rosetta image.
There’s bound to be a logical explanation. On the list of possible logical explanations, it being a real out-of-this-world UFO comes in somewhere at around the gazillionth position.
Mind you, it doesn’t half look like that photo in Independence Day when they first detect the aliens approaching.
Actually, it is definitely some sort of exposure artefact. Every time a star appears in any Rosetta image you see some sort of streaking and those lobe-like structures. In another image from the final descent you can see multiple stars and they all show the same features.
The Rosetta probe went into orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014, after a 10-year journey which saw it travel more than 4 billion miles as it swung around Mars and Earth (three times) to pick up speed. Finally, a critical deceleration phase as it neared 67P slowed it from almost 800 metres per second to a more sedate 8 metres per second, after which orbit was established.
This in itself was an incredible feat, but there was more to come. In November 2014 Rosetta discharged a small lander, known as Philae, which landed on the comet’s surface. I suppose success is a relative term, since Philae’s system for attaching itself to the comet was – with hindsight – possibly a little too much the stuff of science fiction. The theory was based on the assumption that comets are merely big balls of ice with dirt mixed in, and Philae was equipped with explosive harpoons which were supposed to be fired into the surface on contact and hold it there while it used threaded feet to screw itself down. I don’t think anyone is 100% certain, but it was believed that the harpoons didn’t fire, and consequently Philae bounced back into space and landed again – this time in a location which was believed to be dark and shielded so that an erratic signal was received and the solar panels were unable to keep it powered up. Nevertheless, it did send back some photographic data before going silent for more than a year.
It was believed that if Philae were to suddenly be exposed to sunlight again it would wake up, and that this might happen as the comet went around the Sun and the rotational axes shifted. This didn’t happen as planned, though a very brief signal indicating full functionality was detected before the Rosetta-Philae link was shutdown to conserve power in mid-2015. It wasn’t quite the end, because only a month or so ago Rosetta incredibly produced a picture (composite, above) which clearly showed Philae pretty much upside down and wedged under a rocky cliff.
In the end, Philae didn’t actually achieve much – if you don’t count actually touching down very nearly safely on something travelling at 34,000 miles an hour around 300 million miles away as an achievement in itself! It nearly worked – nearly, but not quite. It didn’t drill and analyse samples as was originally intended. And personally, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that comets are not the big snowballs they’ve always been reckoned to be and are somewhat harder – such that when Philae’s harpoons fired, instead of penetrating as the theory said they should, they bounced off and the thrust pushed Philae back into space before the weak gravity pulled it back down and dumped it in a crevice (I’m just surmising, OK?) I mean, does this look like a “dirty snowball”?
As Comet 67P passed around the Sun in 2015 and began to move away into space it was always known that it would eventually be too far away for Rosetta to remain powered and operational. They could have hibernated it until 67P came back again in about 7 years’ time, but the chances of Rosetta successfully coming out of hibernation were slim (it was not designed to withstand such conditions and the risk was great). The decision was made to land Rosetta on 67P instead – more or less a low-speed crash landing.
Well, that happened today, and the image above was captured just 20 metres above 67P (that’s just slightly less than the distance you need to be able to read a car number plate from for your driving test). Apparently, the comet is so far away now that the data transfer rate is only about the same as it was on the Internet when we used to rely on dial-up modems. The width of the surface shown in the image is about 2.5m – two or three adult paces.
I was on a lesson over the weekend, and driving through the city centre and on to London Road we were repeatedly obstructed by a cyclist who was weaving through traffic and riding in the middle of lanes to prevent anyone getting by. Amusingly, he had a GoPro on the front of his helmet – which I assume must have been attached with a couple of 6-inch nails straight through his brain.
I pointed out to my pupil, as this twat weaved his way through traffic and rode straight through red traffic lights at the junction between Lower Parliament Street and Pennyfoot Street, that this was the precise location where a woman cyclist was killed not that long ago. Then, at the roundabout, he skipped on to the pavement to avoid stopping, and we again had to deal with him blocking the left lane he’d re-joined as we approached Hooters.
He wasn’t unusual. He was typical.
Coincidentally, the case against the lorry driver who ran over that woman has just come to its conclusion. He has been found guilty of “causing her death by careless driving”. The BBC Local newsfeed has a few more details – most notably:
Jurors were told it is not illegal for a cyclist to come up the inside of a lorry, but the Highway Code recommends not to do so.
Actually, the Highway Code says various things aimed at cyclists. I can’t find anything like that, but there are plenty of much better ones.
Rule 72
On the left. When approaching a junction on the left, watch out for vehicles turning in front of you, out of or into the side road. Just before you turn, check for undertaking cyclists or motorcyclists. Do not ride on the inside of vehicles signalling or slowing down to turn left.
Rule 73
Pay particular attention to long vehicles which need a lot of room to manoeuvre at corners. Be aware that drivers may not see you. They may have to move over to the right before turning left. Wait until they have completed the manoeuvre because the rear wheels come very close to the kerb while turning. Do not be tempted to ride in the space between them and the kerb.
I don’t think it has been proven one way or the other whether Adam Haywood was signalling. He has never claimed that he was – saying that he cannot remember, but that he normally would have. That Post report somehow has reached the conclusion that he wasn’t, and I believe this is based on the premise that Louise Wright – an all-knowing and completely flawless cyclist – wouldn’t have been there if he – a totally flawed and guilty before proven motorist – had been signalling, so since she was there, he couldn’t have been.
The big problem here is that the Highway Code is full of MUSTs and DO NOTs for motorists (the capitals mean there is a Law that applies). ALL the cyclist rules – with a few notable exceptions – are completely free from hindrance of Laws, meaning cyclists can technically get away with anything. Absolutely no cyclist is anywhere near flawless, and even the exceptions are ignored.
Rule 64
You MUST NOT cycle on a pavement.
I don’t think I need to say again that 95% of cyclists ride on the pavement when it suits them. And 100% of the police force does sod all about it. Then there is:
Rule 60
At night your cycle MUST have white front and red rear lights lit. It MUST also be fitted with a red rear reflector (and amber pedal reflectors, if manufactured after 1/10/85). White front reflectors and spoke reflectors will also help you to be seen. Flashing lights are permitted but it is recommended that cyclists who are riding in areas without street lighting use a steady front lamp.
Not many cyclists have lights fitted, or even reflectors.
Rule 71
You MUST NOT cross the stop line when the traffic lights are red. Some junctions have an advanced stop line to enable you to wait and position yourself ahead of other traffic
The majority think nothing of skipping lights when it suits them, and many haven’t got a clue about cycle forward areas and assume they can do that at any junction.
Rule 66
You should
never ride more than two abreast, and ride in single file on narrow or busy roads and when riding round bends
not ride close behind another vehicle
It’s common to see the Spandex boys slipstreaming cars and buses. Riding two abreast on country lanes and busy roads is standard behaviour. Earlier this summer there was an organised cycle event around Ruddington and the south of Nottingham, and there were parents riding three or four abreast as they ushered there bloody kids on tiny little toy bikes along the A60. It was extremely dangerous, since the roads had not been closed, and you had to overtake wide.
Considering all of the above, the Pennyfoot Street junction does not have a cycle forward area. The junction is one of the busiest in Nottingham and the accident happened during the rush hour. Any cyclist pushing forward – and especially alongside a lorry – under those conditions would need their head examining. And yet they still do it.
When I’m out on lessons, my blood sometimes runs cold when I suddenly realise that a cyclist has crept up on our left side. It’s bad enough that it almost catches me out – but what about the pupil, who might only be on their second or third session? Even a newly qualified driver may not have suitably developed skills to spot every retard on two wheels who does things like this – and it doesn’t help anyone if they all find out the hard way. Neither the dead or seriously injured cyclist, nor the severely traumatised driver (who will undeservedly get 100% of the blame and 0% sympathy).
It seems that the Law is very eager to blame Adam Haywood for Louise Wright’s death. It is prepared to make all kinds of assumptions without the necessary proof in order to do so. But if you were being completely objective about it, it would be equally simple to make some similar assumptions about Louise Wright putting herself in such a dangerous situation to begin with.
The Highway Code urgently needs some DO NOTs and MUSTs adding to the cycling rules. Unfortunately, before that can happen, the UK needs to start getting real about cycling and road use. The government needs to stop trying to encourage people to ride on the roads, and instead get them on to the very expensive and underused cycle lanes and cycle routes.
Adam Haywood has been found guilty of “careless driving” because such a crime exists. There is no Law about careless cycling, and on that basis Mr Haywood might be considered to have been hard done by over something that was, at best, more like 50:50.
Jurors were told it is not illegal for a cyclist to come up the inside of a lorry, but the Highway Code recommends not to do so.
It also adds:
Jurors were told there is nothing in law to say that a driver must indicate, but the Highway Code says they should.
Only the first nebulous statement was used in determining Adam Haywood’s guilt. The second one was not used at any time to suggest that Louise Wright was equally to blame if such vague reasoning is to be allowed in courts of law. I’m sorry, but this is just f—ing ridiculous.
The BBC’s Local News feed includes a post:
Cyclist death should ‘remind motorists about awareness’
Speaking after the sentencing, Det Con Connie Xavier from the Serious Collision Investigation Unit, said: “It should remind all motorists for the need for absolute awareness.”
“If we allow that awareness to lapse, even for one moment, it can result, as with this case, in a loss of life.”
This is why the police have lost the plot. Where is the vital mention that cyclists should also develop “awareness” and not behave like anarchic prats?
Somewhere in my posts about the disastrous decision to leave the EU I mentioned that it wouldn’t be long before some prat started going on about bringing back Imperial units of measure. Well, although I said it over 3 months ago, here’s confirmation that I was right.
The leading jackass for the movement, Warwick Cairns, claims:
…imperial measurements are not only easily understandable but inherently popular.
“There is something about feet and inches that feel part of our identity and culture,” he says. “They make sense on a human scale, they make sense on a cultural scale. It is part of us.”
Complete bullshit. Imperial measurements are only “easier” for people who are not likely to need to worry about using them for many more years – because they won’t be around. The main protagonists in all this are old fossils who hate Johnny Foreigners, and who were brought up using the Imperial system. They represent the past, not the future. The woman in the picture below is the archetypal anti-metric idiot (apologies for the stereotyping, but some people make it just too easy).
I can assure you that, having been in the first generation involved when the switch to metric was made, doing maths using an antiquated multi-base system – and one where the bases were variously 4, 8, 12, 14, 16, 20, etc. – was no fun at all. Doing maths in base 10 was much easier, and it meant that instead of pissing about with over-complicated fundamentals, you could start learning serious stuff.
Why have a system where there are 12 inches to a foot, and three feet to a yard, and where the basic unit of the inch was split into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, and so? You had thous, inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs, miles, leagues, fathoms, cables, nautical miles, links, and rods.
Having a metre consisting of 100 centimetres makes much more sense. And splitting each centimetre into tenths (1 millimetre), hundredths, thousandths, and so on makes calculations using the metric units inherently easier. And it extends naturally to volume and area.
It was the same with pounds (weight). The basic pound, or lb, consisted of 16 ounces (oz). But there were 14lbs to a stone (st). Then you had the hundredweight (cwt) – which is 112lbs or 8st in the UK, but 100lb in the US (so the names “short hundredweight” and “long hundredweight” have to be employed). The US doesn’t use stones. But the different cwt weights then mean that there are both long- and short-tons, since a ton in the UK is 2240lb, but in the US it’s 2000lb. And right down the bottom end you had grains and drachms. A grain was 1/7000th of a lb, a drachm was 1/256th lb, an ounce (oz) was 1/16th lb, there were 14lbs to a st, 28lbs to a quarter, 112lbs in a cwt, and then the ton.
For liquids, you have even greater differences between the UK and US measures. A UK pint is 34.7 cubic inches, but a US pint is 28.9 cubic inches. Therefore, a US gallon is 231.2 cubic inches, whereas the UK gallon is 277.4 cubic inches. Then you had gills, quarts, and pecks. And minims, scruples, and drachms, Let’s not even go into dry measures, with bushels.
Historically, many countries have used some or all of these units, but even in the UK the actual definition has changed several times. Indeed, many American definitions are older historical ones that would have applied in the UK at one time or another. It seems that just about every king we ever had filled up his favourite barrel and then decreed that it was the standard unit for something or other. Even when it was just about to be scrapped, the Imperial system had the Imperial pound, the a Avoirdupois pound, and the Troy pound. There were some others used by merchants, too.
Several Imperial measurements had various kinks and corrections that had to be applied somewhere (e.g. the fathom, which was regarded as being 6 feet, when it was in fact 1/1000 of a nautical mile – so actually 6.08 feet).
The Imperial system was – and still is – a God-awful mess and it’s place is on the scrapheap of history. It was nothing like the panacea being suggested by these out of date idiots.
Well done to Arsenal, who walloped Nottingham Forest 4-0 last night in the “League Cup” – in spite of certain Forest supporters convincing themselves Forest would run up a cricket score and get Arsene Wenger sacked.
In the words of the inimitable Fry in Futurama – the Bicyclops Built for Two episode:
The answer is when it is Trent University – which is more of a glorified sixth form that takes people from around the country instead of just locally. I say this after seeing this story in the week. It laughingly refers to the people ultimately responsible for killing a hedgehog as “researchers”.
In case any Trent University “researchers” are reading this, it is probably worth reminding them what a hedgehog normally looks like.
However, this is what one looks like after Trent University “researchers” have got to it.
The dirty silver thing is a radio transmitter, and the various coloured tags are shrink- or heat-wrapped to the hedgehog’s spines. You have to wonder what sort of retard would attach THAT many tags to a single animal. Well, actually you don’t have to wonder too much when you think of sixth-formers pretending they’re scientists.
Wildlife experts have commented that the coloured tags are far too long and would most likely interfere with the animal’s normal behaviour. They could easily have become entangled. Apparently, the radio transmitter was twisted around the animal when it was found by someone in their garden. Experts have pointed out that such a bulky device would have prevented the animal from crawling under low hedges, gates, and fences, and would thus have put it at risk from predators.
The vet who treated the hedgehog removed TWENTY SIX tags.
The hedgehog was:
…dehydrated, underweight, had mange, severe colitis, broken toes on one foot and [sic] intestinal fluke, and died despite attempts to treat him.
This is the part where you need to make your mind up for yourselves. Do you think that a hedgehog festooned with 26 tags, all of them at least six times longer than its spines, and a radio transmitter the size of a matchbox bearing – if you look at the picture – an antenna which appears to be approximately the same length as the animal itself, is going to be adversely affected?
Or do these two quotes convince you otherwise?
Hugh Warwick from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, which part-funded the study, said: “Over 30 years of work there is no evidence that our research interferes with the well-being of hedgehogs at all.
“The heat-shrink plastic tags that are now the standard marking technique do not require plastic to be melted onto the spines and cause the hedgehog no trouble at all. It is not far off humans getting hair-extensions.”
Nottingham Trent University said: “The animal is completely unhindered and able to go about its activities – such as feeding and breeding – in the usual way.
“Research is crucial to furthering our understanding of the threats hedgehogs face and to develop appropriate responses to those.”
Hugh Warwick is clearly one of those pseudo-scientists who likes to anthropomorphise things. However, I think it is safe to say that what was done to this hedgehog had f__k all to do with human hair extensions (which, incidentally, cause MAJOR problems for humans if done incorrectly).
And Trent University – who are clearly too embarrassed to identify the cretin of a “researcher” responsible – have managed one of those brilliant paradoxes. They say they want to further their understanding of “threats to hedgehogs”. Obviously by becoming one.
