- “Trick or treat” – Part one of a multi-part essay about the novelist and columnists Lionel Shriver by Robin Ashenden. Highly recommended.
- “Next pandemic is coming and it could kill millions more than Covid” – Kate Bingham, the vaccine tsarina, says we need to be better prepared for the next pandemic in an alarmist piece for the Mail.
- “What Lockdown Did to Africa” – Only debt forgiveness can bring the continent out of its lingering economic crisis, argues Toby Green in Persuasian.
- “More details on the very strange efforts of the German Health Ministry to hide internal details of the Covid response from a parliamentary investigative committee” – Eugyppius on the latest shenanigans of Germany’s Covidians.
- “The ‘urgent climate crisis’ is just a political fabrication” – Dr Alex Starling argues that the so-called climate crisis isn’t real.
- “Net Zero excess ruined landlords – the Tories will not be easily forgiven” – Rishi rowing back on some of our Net Zero commitments won’t undo the pain they’ve already caused, argues Ben Wilkinson in the Telegraph.
- “China climate envoy says phasing out fossil fuels ‘unrealistic’” – The complete phasing-out of fossil fuels is not realistic, says China’s top climate official, according to Reuters. Why are we bothering, then?
- “Weather kills fewer people than 30 years ago, new data show” – No, extreme weather isn’t killing more people than it was 20 years ago, reports the Telegraph. Winter deaths reached 15.6 per 100,000 in the 1990s and is now down to 6.8.
- “Rishi Sunak’s green policy shift is the beginning of the end for net zero” – It isn’t just in the U.K. that politicians are abandoning Net Zero. The policy is also unravelling across the world, says Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
- “Value of used electric cars drops by a fifth” – Dealers have warned that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are sitting on forecourts for “months on end while they haemorrhage value”, with some at risk of selling at a loss, reports the Mail.
- “NHS nurse sent messages saying ‘I’m going to kill bed five’” – Two nurses are on trial for alleged misconduct on the stroke unit at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, reports the Mail.
- “Police drop investigation into woman arrested for praying silently” – Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is no longer being investigated by the police for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, according to the Mail.
- “University ranked 814th globally ordered to drop ‘world-leading’ from advert” – Embarrassment for Ulster University as it’s forced to remove posters describing it as a “world leading university”, reports the Telegraph.
- “Barclays to close U.K. accounts of all British expats” – Barclays has told overseas customers to transfer funds to a global account – but they must maintain a £100k balance or pay £40 a month, reports the Telegraph.
- “Russell Brand breaks silence after being accused of rape” – Russell Brand has released another video, denying any of his relationships were non-consensual, says the Mail.
- “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman” – Ramesh Thakur hails the bravery and leadership shown by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, who has spoken in favour of voting ‘No’ in the forthcoming Australian referendum.
- “A Picture is worth a Thousand Words” – The Naked Emperor is understandably alarmed by a new chart showing how much more left-wing the British public has become in the last 15 years.
- “Schools should not support child wanting to change gender, NHS guides” – In a rare outbreak of common sense, the NHS says schools should not allow children to socially transition their gender without their parents’ consent, says the Mail.
- “Schools must provide changing rooms for pupils based on sex at birth” – Schools will no longer automatically be breaking the law if they refuse to refer to children by their chosen name or gender, Britain’s equalities watchdog has announced, according to the Times.
- “Marianna Spring: the BBC’s misinformation merchant” – Tom Slater, the Editor of Spiked, exposes the falsehoods of the BBC’s fact-checker-in-chief.
“Marianna Spring: the BBC’s misinformation merchant”
— spiked (@spikedonline) September 20, 2023
Tom Slater exposes the falsehoods of the BBC’s fact-checker-in-chief.
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“The sun has got his hat on
Hip, hip, hip hooray
The sun has got his hat on
And he’s coming out today!”
Blimey, even the sun is “woke” now, along with Father Christmas and the rest…
There is no doubt in my view that proper studies of insect populations need to be undertaken. I too remember the days gone by when any journey outside the town would result in a windscreen and front bonnet covered in splattered insects, but no more. The question is why?
Unfortunately, if this subject can be tacked on to another “crisis” some dishonest member(s) of ‘The Science’ will surely do so.
The subject is however more than worthy of in-depth study.
Have you ever considered that the angle of a car windscreen has changed and is now far more streamlined and thus insects are likely to pass over rather than splatter
The number plate’s not, and indeed there are several insects splatted on mine, I just checked.
Yes I have. Bird populations do seem to fluctuate wildly though. Done properly a study in to insect populations would be of far more value to humanity than the millions currently wasted on nonsensical and pointless climate change studies.
Found it remarkable yesterday how many insects invaded our house – never seen so many varied types; our little garden was thick with them and I was chasing butterflies around the house to try to remove them! This doesn’t tell us anything about wider patterns of course but the way the heat had seemingly brought millions of extra critters to life was quite something!
‘… proper studies of insect populations need to be undertaken.’
Why?
Bee populations are under pressure. So, possibly insect populations are too. What are the causes? What would be wrong with on-going studies into insect populations? As somebody has rightly pointed out insects form the basis of the food chain.
Until Billy starts screwing around of course.
I think swallows are low in number this year but around me loads of swifts, probably more than I ever remember. Martins probably a little lower on house martins but loads of sand martins around on the local river.
I cannot be convinced that the numbers of these birds have any relationship to insect armageddon – more likely varying environmental factors in their massive migrations.
There was a story a few years back about cuckoo numbers being down in England, but less so in Wales for some reason. I seem to remember a link with Malta was suggested and what they do to birds there.
(Speaking of Malta, I also seem to remember a story about Malta having “only” two different rubbish bins, and daily bin collections. Why are we so bad on this in the UK?).
Here in Thailand we have nightly rubbish collections. I have a recycler who comes and picks up all bottles(plastic and glass) cardboard paper and cans. These are provided by the local council and i do NOT pay for these services.
This is another interesting subject. Welsh and Scottish cuckoos are thought to take a different migratory path in the autumn compared with the English cuckoos. The English travel more SW through Spain and the Welsh and Scottish travel more SE through Italy. Feeding conditions here are much better as 95% of the tracked cuckoos safely reach their winter quarters. This is reflected in the better fate of their breeding populations; Welsh cuckoos have declined much less than in England and Scottish populations have remained stable.
The life cycle of the cuckoo is amazing!
Or events along their migration routes.
Insect Armageddon may have many causes, but discount Climate Change. Almost continuous geoengineering and its close relation the ever increasing level of radio frequency pollution should be near the top of any list.
radio frequency pollution
Can you elaborate?
If we’re facing insect Armageddon, it’s going to bugger-up their plan to make us all give up meat and instead eat insects.
I wonder what they’ll come up with next? Eat dirt?
Worms.
Cue singing…
‘Nobody likes me,
Everybody hates me.
I think I’ll eat some worms.
long thin slimy ones,
Short fat hairy ones.
See how they wiggle & squirm.
Bite their heads off,
Slurp the juice out, throw the skins away.
I don’t know how I could live without my worms three times a day!’
LOL! My first laugh of the day thank you!
My pleasure! Don’t think they teach it in the Brownies any more!!!
It might be on the verge of a comeback though if Billy hears about it.
There has definitely been a huge drop in the number of birds and insects in our garden here in Suffolk. The bee population has dropped dramatically as has the number of butterflies and so has the small birds – it has been quite a dramatic change. However the number of wood pigeons seem to have increased unfortunately.
Since a pair of peregrines took residence of the church spire, our pigeon population has been a tad smaller.
We have a few beekeepers in the village so we don’t want for honeybees but I’ve noticed fewer moths this year & reduced bat activity of an evening.
Lose the food at the bottom of the pyramid & the predator species suffer. Not until the predator species or the prey with PR are affected that we stupidly take note.
I bought a bug home, a luxury pad for insects which is on the house wall facing south, but as yet no one has taken up tenancy!
One of the many terrible harms of climate fraud is that genuine environmental and conservation causes have been sidelined or rubbished by association, as this article correctly highlights. I spent my childhood and younger years as an ardent conservationist, now I look at organisations like WWF and Greenpeace as the enemy. Even recycling, something I once felt quite strongly about, is tainted by association.
Insects undoubtedly need our concern and protection given their sensitivity to the toxins we routinely pump into the ecosystem. How ironic then that we take environmental lessons from one Bill Gates with his links to Monsanto. We’re living in a ghoulish inversion of reality.
No surprise but this matches my position in its entirety.
WRT recycling, from being very keen my position now is anything in any bin. I can of course kid myself that if I deliberately mix my rubbish I am virtuously providing somebody with work in a sorting plant.
Naiively I fantasise that our rubbish is sorted and recycled.
I don’t really believe any of it gets recycled, that if it is, it’s probably more energy intensive and that really, it’s all just an exercise in promoting communitarianism to break pleb individualism!
Yep.
I really liked this article – very well thought out and balanced. I think one thing to bear in mind is that bird populations vary as some are displaced by others. My personal impression was that Magpies were a rarity when I was a child in the 60s and (having just checked) this is confirmed by the RSPB. Starling populations, on the other hand, have declined significantly. I do think it is important to understand the reasons for these changes, but they may not, per se, be a sign of ecological catastrophe.
Tens – or is it hundreds – of thousands of wind turbines and acres of solar panels, both renowned for daily mass slaughter of avians and insects – could that have anything to do with it – particularly since climate change lunacy and these blots on the landscape are a pandemic of the Northern Hemisphere?
Plus: large areas of land now used for growing crops for biofuels, and large areas no longer farmed. Birds and insects adapted to previous conditions may have been affected.
And where is it writ except among creationalists, that all species must remain the same exactly as their creator intended?
So natural variability and evolution? Too difficult for biologists, naturalists? And of course anathema to ‘conservationists’ for whom NOTHING can be allowed to change.
“proper studies of insect populations need to be undertaken.’
Why?”
Have you not answered your own question?
Very odd.