Tidying the Shed

I've been tidying the shed this morning. It's really a brick extension to the garage which looks as if it was originally used as a small workshop. We call it the shed and use it for shed-type storage such as garden tools, lawn mower, strimmer, paint tins, general tools, electric drills, wellies, bits of wood and so on.

Anyhow I've been finding out how many useless and/or hopelessly corroded bits and bobs accumulate in sheds. I knew of course, but tidying the shed always seems to hammer home the relationship between sheds and stuff which might have been useful one day but never is.

I'll resume operations after a well deserved cup of tea.

Defence readiness bill isn't ready

Defence readiness bill won’t be ready for another year

A bill to put Britain’s industries on a war footing has reportedly been delayed by a year.

The Defence Readiness Bill, which would require key industries to prepare their workforce in the event of a conflict, was set to be laid before Parliament in this year’s King’s Speech.

The legislation, which was recommended by the Strategic Defence Review, would also have included provisions to make energy networks and railways a military priority.

Lord Coaker, the defence minister, said last year the bill would be introduced at the beginning of 2026.

A chap is bound to wonder if Mad Ed Miliband is involved in "provisions to make energy networks and railways a military priority." 

Oh well, there is no need to worry about things like that, the paperwork isn't ready yet.

 

The European Commission and fact-checking experts

Mercosur, climate and immigration: the hoaxes targeting rural Europe

The European Commission and fact-checking experts have identified a growing wave of disinformation targeting rural areas and the agri-food sector across the continent, with campaigns exploiting the controversy surrounding the EU-Mercosur trade deal, climate skepticism and anti-immigration sentiment.

Sources from the Iberian Digital Media Observatory (Iberifier) and the European Commission's services confirmed to EFE the existence of coordinated campaigns aimed at rural populations. Russia is cited as one of the identified sources, though not the only one, and the motivations remain difficult to pinpoint.

The European Commission and fact-checking experts eh? Can't they do better than telling us it was the Russians what done it? 

Damaging the way you think

Damning study reveals how ChatGPT is damaging the way you think

Scientists are sounding the alarm on a tool used by millions worldwide after finding it sends people into a 'delusion spiral' of destructive thinking.

A pair of studies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford revealed that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google's Gemini regularly provide overly agreeable answers, doing more harm than good.

Specifically, when people asked questions or described situations in which their beliefs or actions were incorrect, harmful, deceptive or unethical, the AI replies were still 49 percent more likely to agree with the user and encourage their delusions as being the correct viewpoint compared to responses from other people.


So what's new here? We've been aware of the echo chamber effect forever, so have the media, celebrities and politicians. The political effects can be disastrous, we know that too, leading to all kinds of mischief endorsed by high level echo chambers and their delusion spirals of destructive thinking.

Our destruction of course, not theirs.

 

A shining example of net zero policy.

Hydrogen boiler scheme handed £25m taxpayer cash uses tech that 'is not proven'

The two-year H100 pilot in Methil, Fife, by SGN, was previously hailed by John Swinney as a “shining example” of net zero policy.

A hydrogen boiler scheme handed £25million of taxpayers’ cash has been branded an unviable “policy misstep” after UK ministers admitted the technology is unproven. The two-year H100 pilot in Methil, Fife, by SGN, previously hailed by John Swinney as a “shining example” of net zero policy, has seen 300 homes switch to hydrogen for cooking and heating...

Prof Baxter claimed he was asked to leave when he tried to raise his concerns at a meeting of the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster in 2022. He added: “Hydrogen for home heating was a misstep that should never have progressed beyond early exploration."

Follow the money. Such a useful phrase.

A Peculiar Ritual

Emmanuel Igwe has an interesting Critic piece on the gap between the Starmer/Blob narrative on UK-EU trade and ONS data. 


Brexit was not an act of economic self-harm

Whatever you have heard, UK-EU trade is doing just fine

Some circles of the British commentariat have perfected a peculiar ritual: that of prodding through good economic news, only to declare such news as bad. A major target for such investigation is Britain’s post-Brexit data. The latest data released by the Office for National Statistics quietly refutes the established narrative that “Brexit did deep damage to our economy”, as our Prime Minister said on 1st April. I promise you, it was not an April Fool’s joke.

When measured in real terms, after Brexit total exports rose by more than 23 percent, from £735 billion in 2015 to £905 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, the fact that Britain’s trade has grown faster than GDP in the same period is an even sharper rebuttal of assertion by erstwhile Remainers that Brexit was an act of economic self-harm. These numbers are empirically robust, unarguable, and yet noticeably avoided in mainstream political discourse.

The whole piece is well worth reading as yet another indicator that Starmer/Bob has yet to get over their hatred of Brexit and those who voted for it.

Despite the growing prevalence of non-EU trade for Britain, our current Labour government continues to insist on the importance of “dynamic alignment” with various EU standards and regimes — that is, mirroring EU regulations onto British statute books whenever the EU changes them. Under dynamic alignment, Britain’s regulatory scope would be defined in offices it cannot enter and decided by parliamentarians not elected by the British people.

Canada Bids for the Rabbit Hole Record