Best Of

I genuinely hope not

I noticed an interesting statistic in the ' Lifeboat' winter edition that in the RNLI 200 year history around 4 million lives have been saved

That is extraordinary and something those associated with it can be very proud of

It's a fascinating organisation. They have their own boat designers incorporating off the shelf kit into the shell of the boat. Good for maintenance purposes. Great away day for engineers/big kids who get to sit in the cabin. I did baulk at the offer to climb through some of the very tight crawl spaces.

You may know one of our son's has qualified as a helm for the Llandudno inshore lifeboat and is on a career path to one of the coxswains of the all weather boat

The dedication is enormous and the training on going both in the classroom, at sea, and in Poole

@IanB2 may be interested on his recent course he navigated the AWB to Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight from Poole

And never forget, they are unpaid

I could not have put it better myself.

"Yesterday, Elish Angiolini published the second part of her inquiry into sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces — another meticulously compiled report destined to vanish into the Governmental void. At 235 pages, it follows last year’s 361-page effort, which was prompted by the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard and whose recommendations ministers enthusiastically welcomed before doing precisely nothing with them.

The inquiry heard that the National Police Chiefs’ Council had produced guidance to help forces tackle these crimes. Yet as of September, over a quarter of police forces still hadn’t bothered to implement it. Angiolini’s own survey found more than three-quarters of young women aged 18–24 had been made to feel unsafe in public because of male behaviour.

But the most damning part of this stage of the inquiry is not what was found — it’s what cannot be found. “No one was confidently able to tell me how many women nationally report being the victim of sexually motivated crimes in public spaces,” Angiolini told the press conference. There are no reliable national figures for rape in public places. None for indecent exposure. None for sexually motivated assaults. This absence of even the most basic data betrays the truth behind the Government’s much-vaunted pledge to halve violence against women and girls in a decade: it cannot reduce what it does not bother to count."

Meanwhile that utter **** Lammy tries to use victims as a justification for abolishing jury trials.

Perhaps it ought not to come as a surprise that a friend of Epstein sees Russia as "devoutly Christian".

Steve Bannon says the US should ally with Russia:

“Russia is a devoutly Christian nation and was our true ally in WWII.”
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1995893766863892742

The end of the sentence left hanging, but pretty obviously “…not Britain”.

Bizarre though when a. The Soviet Union was the ally, not Russia, and b. It was a communist state that outlawed organised religion.

It is not bizarre. It is a collection of the worlds richest billionaires working out how they can share the most power. Religion and politics are tools not objectives.

It's still rank stupidity, even in that context.
The voice of experience:

https://x.com/Billbrowder/status/1995051199259635921
The Wall Street Journal alleges that the real motivation behind Trump’s eagerness to force Ukraine into an ugly surrender is the idea that a lot of people close to him can make a lot of money doing business and deals in Russia.

If this is true, beyond the disgusting morality of this and the huge geopolitical risks that it creates, none of these people salivating over their future riches are going to make a penny, and perhaps do a lot worse.

I was once the largest foreign investor in Russia and I can say with certainty that the Russians aren’t going to let anyone profit in any way. They will talk nice at the outset to attract the investment, but once it’s there, they will steal, defraud, arrest, torture or even kill to make sure that no American makes any money. I’ve seen it so many times it’s almost universal.

So, this shocking initiative is not only terrible policy, it’s spectacularly stupid business.