Saturday 30th & Sunday 31st May 2026

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Quick update on Reform's local election success

[Frog222]

22° delightful !

Migrants outperforming natives ?

Here's one for Rupert Nigel Rob Kier, and Andy and his mate Shabana --

[Frog222]

So much fucking corruption !

Interesting that Harborne's 'fortune' must be quite recent, stablecoins have been around how long ?

[Frog222]

Hey, which country are we buying today ?

This is all to say that when you step back and look at Nigel Farage’s £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, even when you compare it to illegal donations, you can see clearly how unusual it is. There has never been anything like it in British politics, and people are right therefore to be more than usually concerned about where it came from, why it was given, and how it was spent.

But step back further still, and Farage’s gift looks as quaint as a 1960s Bond villain. All the parties’ spending in the last British general election added together came to barely one-hundred-thousandth of the total for America’s presidential and congressional races that year. Fairshake, which is just one lobbyist for crypto in the US, has $165 million to spend on this year’s midterms, enough on its own to more than double the cost of a UK-wide contest.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that some US billionaires might be looking across the Atlantic right now and wondering why they should bother chucking so much money at SuperPACs when they could, for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas, buy a whole G7 country. And, let’s face it, that money wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems.

Oliver Bullough , free read mail from Byline Times .

[Frog222]

For the next HeatWave

The one thing that kept coming up again and again was window film to help block out the sun’s rays effectively.

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/boi ... ck-4437677

[Frog222]

On toxic AIPAC money , the pushback has started , a short one !

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I've already looked into the cheap infra red blocking film for windows (which does work) but the problem is it can destroy double glazing by creating a huge temperature difference between the two panes, which can result in (at best) the seal being broken as the air between them expands or (at worst) one of the panes shattering. It's really only safe for single pane windows which the article above should have made clear. (I got all this from a Reddit glazier forum). I don't think my new landlord would be very chuffed if the first thing I did was cause the windows to explode.

There are other alternatives for double glazing but they're a lot more expensive and mostly involve tinting.

Besides I'm beginning to enjoy lounging around in tropical temperatures in my pants...currently 23.7°. I might try drinking wine out of a coconut shell with a straw.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Remember I said I'd met Mothin Ali and had a chat with him? He said if I ever needed anything I should get in touch so...

There's a guy who's been washing cars directly across the road from me in the disabled parking spaces of a church. He's been doing this using a trailer that contains a large water tank and a generator which powers his hoses (so basically a massive power washer). The generator makes a hell of a racket and he was there every day for weeks from morning until night. The neighbours had already put in noise complaints to the council and got nowhere then on Monday night I finally snapped at 10.30 at night while he was still at it and emailed Mothin Ali about it while pissed and a wee bit stoned.

Guess what? After a brief appearance on Tuesday morning the guy's not been back since. This could be a coincidence because I didn't get a response to my email from Mr Ali, but upon re-reading it it's clear that I'm intoxicated and quite possibly deranged so it's little wonder he would think twice about furthering the correspondence even if he had solved the problem.

[refitman]

Besides I'm beginning to enjoy lounging around in tropical temperatures in my pants...currently 23.7°. I might try drinking wine out of a coconut shell with a straw.

Don't forget the paper umbrella!

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Don't forget the paper umbrella!

Indeed, and this reminds me of something I was thinking about the other day. I watch a lot of Japanese stuff and when it's hot there you see loads of people quite sensibly sporting umbrellas to shield them from the sun. Not fancy parasols just ordinary umbrellas. Try that here and you'd be stared at as if you were a lunatic, and even if it were to catch on you'd have Reform types ranting about how woke and un-British it was and how looking like a cooked lobster was patriotic.

I'm a factor 50 plus hat kinda guy and was sneered at in a pub a few years ago during a discussion about how those of us who are less hirsute about the head must protect ourselves from the sun. It was a father and son double act who scoffed at my measures of protection, quite rudely I must say, but they ran the pub and I was with my Dad who knows them so I bit my tongue. Hilariously my Dad told me a couple of years later that they'd both developed skin cancer. Which I know sounds kinda mean but the father was an embezzler and fraudster who'd been in and out of prison and bought the pub in cash and his son turned out to be a heroin dealer. The pub's now closed due to them both currently being detained at his majesty's pleasure.

[Frog222]

I've already looked into the cheap infra red blocking film for windows (which does work) but the problem is it can destroy double glazing by creating a huge temperature difference between the two panes, which can result in (at best) the seal being broken as the air between them expands or (at worst) one of the panes shattering. It's really only safe for single pane windows which the article above should have made clear. (I got all this from a Reddit glazier forum). I don't think my new landlord would be very chuffed if the first thing I did was cause the windows to explode.
There are other alternatives for double glazing but they're a lot more expensive and mostly involve tinting.

Besides I'm beginning to enjoy lounging around in tropical temperatures in my pants...currently 23.7°. I might try drinking wine out of a coconut shell with a straw.

It's now ... nice and warm indoors ... 23/24° while 15 outside !

[Frog222]

I haven't been to the UK for many years but was impressed by the amount of single-glazing still existing !

[Frog222]

Clive Lewis pointed out exactly this on the recent PoliticsJoe youtube--

Most local authorities now outsource their highways maintenance to large infrastructure firms. Oxfordshire, for example, where Alexander hit her lunar crater, has agreed an £840m, eight-year contract with M Group, the infrastructure giant that maintains 30,000 miles of British roads and has annual revenues of £2.5bn. M Group, in turn, is owned by the private equity giant CVC Capital Partners, which in 2025 reported profits of €873m (£760m).

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with such deals, they have rarely resulted in better roads. In 2019, Birmingham council ended a 25-year PFI contract with Amey early after accusing the contractor of ignoring road defects to maximise profits. Last year, the BBC reported that Cambridgeshire council was unhappy with M Group, which it pays £51m a year, because of the “ridiculous” quality of its repairs. (M Group says it inspected the potholes and “only one needed further work, which was done at no additional cost to our client”.

I'd say there IS something wrong with profits going offshore for substandard work ?

BTW an excellent Long Read on Citizen Action against the faceless ones !

‘One day I thought, that’s enough’: the people fighting back against pothole-riddled roads
The dire state of roads has provoked pothole vigilantes and become a political flashpoint from Manchester to Manhattan. How did we get here?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/ ... dled-roads

[refitman]

And the difference between Labour and the Tories is...?

[Frog222]

Silly article , never gets into the smallest detail on its magic Seven-Letter-Word, the one beginning with WEL !
https://archive.ph/7UpTf

Nice day, enjoying a house refurbished(almost) by the kids and my new cleaning-man organised like most of it by First Daughter, down to first-ever occasional meal on wheels , hopefully tomorrow !

I managed to synchronise my Decathlon watch with its Coros app on my NEW smartphone , the old one broke as my health was accelerating downwards which complicated a great deal , down to lost phone numbers ....

so I retrieved the recent heart/lung lack-of-fitness records showing first ever HR of 150 . I told the A&E about it.... and eventually got treated for a very well hidden chest infection .

OUF !