Clarkey

right! thats the last profile picture edit.
In heaven, everything is fine.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

South Africa is the only country that built nuclear weapons and then deliberately destroyed them before a new demographic majority took power.

By 1989, they had 6 assembled warheads and a working intermediate range missile that also launched satellites, all developed alone under total embargo.

>1990: de Klerk ordered the arsenal dismantled
>1991: every gram of enriched uranium was melted down
1994: the missile program was cancelled

It was all finished before the ANC inherited the state.

France and the UK will sooner or later have to face similar difficult decisions.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1958 the Chinese state worked out that sparrows were eating the grain, and organised six hundred million people to kill every one of them.

It did not take bullets. Villages, schools and factory units turned out with pots, pans, drums and gongs and made continuous noise so that no bird could land anywhere. Nests were pulled down, eggs smashed, chicks killed. The sparrows flew until their hearts gave out and dropped into the streets, where children collected them and the totals were reported upward as achievements. The toll ran into the hundreds of millions.

The arithmetic was sound as far as it went. A sparrow eats grain. Fewer sparrows, more grain, more people fed. Nobody in the room was wrong about what the bird took.

They were wrong about what it did.

Sparrows eat insects, in enormous quantity, and most of all in the breeding season when the chicks need protein. Take them out of a farmed landscape and the locusts and grain borers they had been holding down are handed the whole country. Which is what happened. Crop losses to insects rose sharply, and by 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng had made the case well enough that Mao ordered sparrows struck from the list and replaced with bed bugs.

Far too late, and never the whole cause. The famine of 1959 to 1961 was principally a policy famine, driven by collectivisation, grain requisition and the diversion of farm labour to backyard steel furnaces, and the dead are counted in tens of millions.

But the sparrow campaign is the purest thing in the episode, because it is the reasoning stripped to bone. A committee looked at a living system, isolated the one animal it could measure as a cost, and calculated the gain from removing it without ever asking what that animal was holding up.

Now look at what is being proposed for grassland.

The ruminant is measured the same way, on one ledger line, the methane it emits and the land it stands on. What is left off the ledger is everything it does. The grazing that keeps grassland grassland instead of scrub. The dung that feeds the beetles that feed the birds. The hoof that breaks the surface so seed can take. The mouth that removes the standing dead matter which otherwise cures into wildfire fuel. The manure that returns phosphorus and nitrogen to the soil so nobody has to mine it and ship it in.

Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved over tens of millions of years. Remove the animal and you do not get the same field minus some methane. You get a different system, and it will not be the one on the spreadsheet.

The men who ordered the sparrows killed were not stupid, and they were not cruel. They had a number, and the number was correct, and they were praised for acting on it decisively. It took two years for the second half of the equation to arrive, and by then nobody could put the birds back.

We are eighteen months into the herd reduction schemes.

The grass has not sent its invoice yet.

[Clarkey @CodgerClarkey]

@europemaxxed Bourne got his german girlfriend killed conveniently forgetting about his gal back home. what a shagger!!!

[Clarkey @CodgerClarkey]

@robertwlk “I wiggle when I piddle, ’Cos my middle is a riddle” . . . poetry ❤️

[Robert Wilkinson @robertwlk]

I was at a football match last night. After the 90 minutes were up they played
"Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" & "Reasons To Be Cheerful" over the tannoy, even before the ref had blown his whistle.

Turns out it was Ian Dury time added on at the end.

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

Communism will work this time ✌️

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

The absurdity is breathtaking.

Foreign motorists can fail a UK driving test and still legally keep driving on their overseas licence during the 12-month grace period, while the DVLA admits it does not even keep a register of how many are doing this.

So the public gets lectures about “road safety”, but the system cannot even tell us how many untested drivers are out there.

That is not a policy. That is negligence.

[Clarkey @CodgerClarkey]

@AndyatAuto @afneil what ever you say bud. Enjoy that hour before you have to rely on gas, again

[Clarkey @CodgerClarkey]

@elonmusk Meritocracy? who would have thought it, in this day and age

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

There is a hint of delicious irony to all this.

China currently manufactures 80% of the world’s solar panels, 75–80% of all batteries, 60–65% of wind turbine parts and 55% of global crude steel.

This staggering modern-day success story represents the largest, quietest transfer of industrial might and power in human history.

China's manufacturing grunt is more than the next 15 countries combined—larger than the US, EU and Japan together. To power this industrial onslaught, China commissions around six state-of-the-art coal plants a month (50–80 GW a year).

It operates over 1,200 coal plants totaling 1,271 GW—more than half the world’s total capacity. Its coal mining fleet is four times larger than second-place India.

As a result, China’s share of global manufacturing grew from 6% to 30% since 2000. Meanwhile, America’s plunged like a lead balloon from 25% to around 12%, and Europe’s collapsed from 25% to around 14%.

How? China uses abundant, reliable coal power, refuses to bind itself to net-zero, and has leadership that treats factories and steel mills as critical assets—unlike the West.

In geopolitical terms, this should be a lightning rod across the decaying West. But the job on the West is just about done, and the Western green transition is now almost entirely dependent on hardware manufactured by China.

This rise to dizzy heights was only made possible by using the same demonised dense fossil fuel energy that has already sent the Western world spiralling into a brackish, foul-tasting, latter-day mediaeval backwater.

It should be the biggest, loudest, and most outrageous news story in the Western world—but it hardly rates a mention.

[Clarkey @CodgerClarkey]

@ThaiBill2 sounds like a tip saw being fiddle bowed!

[Henry Bolton OBE 🇬🇧 @_HenryBolton]

This has to be stopped.

[Lucy Graham @montrosegraham]

@BackBrexitBen A CCP forward operating base in Bangladeshi Tower Hamlets.

Nothing to see here.

[Lee Nallalingham @LNallalingham]

🚨 HMRC has failed its audit for the 24th year in a row.

That’s according to the National Audit Office’s latest report into the department’s finances.

Auditors were unable to give HMRC a clean audit because they found material levels of fraud and error in benefit expenditure.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The department responsible for collecting our taxes has failed its audit for 24 consecutive years because of fraud and error.

Meanwhile, this Labour Government has already increased taxes by £70 billion.

And Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly considering another £38 billion of tax rises.

How about before taking another penny from taxpayers…

…HMRC stops the fraud and error and manages to pass an audit for the first time in 24 years?

[Pro America Politics @proamericapol]

In 1998, Serena and Venus Williams said they could beat any man ranked outside the top 200 in the men's division.

So, little known and 203rd ranked men's player Karsten Braasch took them up on the challenge.

Braasch after a night of drinking and smoking with zero practice, destroyed Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2 in straight sets.

The Williams sisters are the greatest female athletes of all time. And they barely made Braasch break a sweat.

It wasn't because Braasch was very good. He wasn't.

But, as a male, he possesses biological advantages even the best female athletes can't compete against.

That's the very reason we established women's sports to begin with.

To even the playing field.

That shouldn't be controversial. And you shouldn't need a biology degree to understand it.

[Michael Knowles @Express_Knowles]

Full story on a huge crisis erupting in Britain's asylum system: https://t.co/rPRh416xj9

[Michael Knowles @Express_Knowles]

Robert Bates, from the @migrationCtrl told this newspaper: “It is an insult to the British public, who deserve a government that deports foreign crooks rather than housing them at our expense.

“These people have shown that they are a threat to our society and do not deserve the right to live amongst us. The asylum system is clearly broken beyond repair if it enables a grave injustice such as this to occur.”

Shadow Home Secretary @CPhilpOfficial said: “It is shameful that Shabana Mahmood is putting up over a thousand foreign criminals in expensive hotels and flats at taxpayers’ expense.

“Many will go on to commit yet more crimes."

Reform's @ZiaYusufUK said: "It’s outrageous that so many foreign criminals are living in taxpayer funded accommodation. These people have no right to even step foot in our country, let alone have the red carpet rolled out for them."

[Michael Knowles @Express_Knowles]

Exclusive: One of the biggest investigations I've worked on...

More than 1,500 convicted foreign criminals are living in taxpayer-funded asylum accommodation because they have not been deported.

Labour is battling a growing removals backlog, with almost 20,000 foreign crooks living across Britain.

And an 11-month probe by this newspaper can reveal around 1,509 offenders have been given free homes found for them.

Critics said our findings “reveal that the Home Office is paying for illegal migrant criminals to be scattered in communities”.

The Home Office insisted that the decision to release a foreign criminal into the community is “never taken lightly”, before adding “suitable accommodation is sourced prior to their release to manage them effectively”.

This collaborates evidence given to MPs by asylum accommodation provider Serco, who revealed a “lack of returns agreements with certain countries means their nationals will never be deported”.

They added: “These individuals are therefore transferred to asylum accommodation on an indefinite basis.”

[Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ClimateWarrior7]

My team of Sherpas have now successfully placed my piano on top of K2.

Only 23 of them died in the end, proving the naysayers completely wrong.

Still having some difficulties with the covered sedan they're going to use to take me up there.

The noise of the compressor fan that ensures a breathable atmosphere is very loud.

I'm working on resolving these issues.

Please contribute to my GofundMe, because none of this is cheap, and when I finally play "Candle in the Wind" on top of K2, with lyrics adapted to highlight the climate emergency, it will all be worthwhile.

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

Lol this was in Private Eye so I'm now giving it its widest readership. Remember, folks, Ian Hislop gets £400,000 a year from the BBC for ignoring uncomfortable issues. I guess Private Eye staff just do it for free