Remarkable.

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Matthew Syed is a Times journalist. Two days ago his article on the Washington DC collision Trump’s scapegoating threatens the entire basis of aviation safety (£) was published, excoriating The Donald’s comments on DEI initiatives at the FAA, and casting serious doubt on the possibility that those initiatives could have been responsible for the collision.

People who don’t read The Times tend to assume it’s a right-leaning paper. They couldn’t be more wrong. The best description I’ve ever heard of it is that it’s “achingly liberal”, as are many (most?) of its readers, and the comments sections reliably reflect that. The paper has employed for many years the odious feminist (I repeat myself) Caitlin Moran – affectionately nicknamed “Moron” by colleagues, I’ve been told – as a twice-weekly columnist. She and her partner have two daughters. In her book How to be a Woman she revealed that she became pregnant during a holiday in Cyprus, not having used any contraception. She had an abortion and revealed the child she’d killed was male.

Comments on the article were almost all supportive and predictably anti-Trump for voicing his opinion that DEI initiatives were probably the cause of the accident. I pitched in with some comments of my own, supporting Trump’s opinion, and for my troubles got some flak and a little support.

I understand that journalists frequently read the comments on their pieces, one that comes to mind is Julie Burchill when she writes for The Spectator, using a pseudonym but everyone knows it’s her. But few journalists do this, so I was surprised that Matthew Syed had replied to a commenter, and I replied to his comment (below). I’ve had no response from him, what are the chances?

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We’re linking daily to selected video / audio files from our YouTube channel. Today’s file is here (video, 38:21).

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Our thanks to Nigel for this. Check out the still image at the top of the piece. It was taken during a statement by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, behind him are five “persons of colour” and a white woman. Check out the short video (0:54) which Newsweek have posted so as to only show Jeffries. Extracts from the article:

Lobach, a 28-year-old Army aviation officer from Durham, North Carolina, was assigned to the 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. She had served since 2019.

She had no deployments, [J4MB emphasis] the Army said, but had received several commendations, including the Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal and Army Service Ribbon…

“Rebecca earned her place in that aircraft,” said Lieutenant Samantha Brown, also a friend of Lobach.

“She was outstanding, and she deserved to be there.”

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Nigel on top form (video, 25:12).

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Interesting. Elizabeth Hobson has left some comments, and William in his reply to her references a Hope Not Hate report, State of Hate 2020: Far Right Terror Goes Global. On pp.102/3 the report references Elizabeth, Philip Davies MP (sadly no longer an MP, having lost his seat at the last general election) and myself.

In the same vein as William’s article, last week Prof. Matt Goodwin wrote a Substack piece which we’ve already linked to, We’re all “extremists” now.

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A piece on the BBC, the headline Teenage skaters, a young pilot and a professor – the victims of DC plane crash. It’s an unusually long piece, and you need to get to very near the end to read this:

“Rebecca Lobach, an aviation officer from Durham, North Carolina, was also on board the helicopter.”

She was more than “on board”. She is known to have been piloting the helicopter at the time of the collision which claimed 67 lives – not that you’d learn this from the BBC, obviously.

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We’re linking daily to selected video / audio files from our YouTube channel. Today’s file is here (video, 52:49).

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Earlier today we published a piece titled AUSTRALIA: England suffer innings defeat to lose Women’s Ashes 16-0. We were pleased to receive the following comments from generouslydaze96ff7faf83 – honestly, the names some parents give their kids!

“I went to one of the One Day Internationals at Bellerive Oval in Hobart along with about 2,000 other souls. It was entertaining for all the right and wrong reasons, including a brilliant juggled catch on the boundary and a farcical moment where two fielders, either of whom could have easily caught the ball, decided to let the other one go for the catch. In the end both of them stood and watched passively for what seemed like eternity as the ball landed on the ground between them. The oddest thing was that everyone, including their team mates and the crowd, acted like it was something perfectly natural that happens all the time. I’ve never seen anything like it in men’s cricket, at any level. A real ‘WTF’ moment for the ages.

England threatened to be competitive on a few occasions, but none of those occasions lasted more than a minute. The key difference between the two sides was that the Australians looked like they might have practiced batting, bowling and fielding at some stage before the game, which was obviously quite unsporting. However, England had impeccable manners and looked just as nice as Australia in their uniforms, which I think is what secretly matters in women’s cricket. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how stylish you look playing the game.”

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Oh dear. How sad. Never mind. An extract:

England captain Heather Knight to ABC Radio: “We’ll be judged on the scoreline.

“We haven’t played our best cricket and we’ve got some brilliant players. [J4MB translation: “We played our best cricket, but because almost all our players are crap, we lost 16-0.”] We haven’t been able to compete for long enough.

“When they had the advantage, they really hammered it down and I think we can learn from that as players and see how we can come back from this.”

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