Ann Kempster

I've started on the festive stollen already.

I have many many MANY thoughts about the Capita/Cabinet Office Civil Service Pensions disaster. But Mark summarises them better than I could. Yes Capita were/are bad. But this fundamentally is a failure of Government.

"You cannot communicate culture into existence". 🔥

I wrote a thing about Wales 🫣 adrian-ortega.medium.com/be-bold-is-n...

💔 We just this weekend finished watching Babylon 5 and Walter's deliciously evil portray of Bester. He always looks like he was enjoying playing a baddie instead of a goodie.

I will ignore this analysis until Matthew names which bits of Kent he'd have given to Hitler in 1940.

I mean, it literally does make you an American. In law. That lil thing that ya'll seem to have forgotten about. In his soul, Abdul El-Sayed is more American than any of you lot could ever hope to be.

This. And the protection racket that is the yearly fee to the ICO for precisely nothing in return. God awful service experience as well.

Make it possible to verify your identity as *both* a director and PSC in the same service. Especially if that means doing the hard work to make things simple.

I took a look at the schedule for this whole breast surgery meeting, and out of 94 speaking opportunities, 81 of them (87%) were men. If you remove a single panel on the second day (that had 5 women) and eliminate duplicates, there were 5 women speakers and 61 men speakers (92%). +

More than one in five boys in Year 11 in Wales reported spending their own money on gambling in the previous week, according to a school health survey

Nearly 5 months since we lost Dilys and it breaks my heart anew every single day. I miss her furry little face so much.

"Broadly speaking...crime has more than halved over a period where the immigrant population more than doubled." New crime survey figures should be pumped out on PA systems in every Reform/Restore voting town centre in the UK. Summed up by Fraser Nelson frasernelson.substack.com?utm_source=n...

Cofiwch Dryweryn. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 21.10.65

Voted in the US Midterms in Oregon. I look forward to the day Oregon's 2nd district goes Blue.

NCSC guidance has been updated to same similar: if you can't apply mitigations and patching, take it offline www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/critica...

I think this is the worst vulnerability I've ever seen in terms of impact, and I'm fairly sure this is just the leading edge of what's to come. Letting computers talk to each other was a mistake.

Oh damn it's as bad as expected: If you are running anything on PHP turn it the hell off RIGHT NOW until you can patch it. Yes this means every single Wordpress, Drupal, and Wikimedia install. www.wiz.io/blog/php2she...

"The NCSC is encouraging UK organisations to prepare for immediate updating of systems using PHP. Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated." www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/critica...

Cofiwch!

Just a reminder that your "edge cases" are people's lives. 🙃

sleep problems. Dark mornings. pouring rain. Not a good combo for the noggin.

I can think of one thing right off the top of my head that would improve my health, as an American woman.

Such important research from Round Our Way here. Acting on this will save lives www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...

Just added R*ssell Brand to my block list of words on here. Do not need that shit in my feed. It's full enough of toxic discourse as it is.

This one goes out to my fellow UCD-ers in the Welsh public sector ❤️ medium.com/@niacampbell...

Repeat after me: 1) PIP isn't an out of work benefit. It is a benefit paid to disabled people to pay for the extra costs of living with a disability. 2) Some PIP claimants work. Some PIP claimants will never able to work at all. 3) Impoverishing people doesn't get them closer to employment

The wild thing to me is no cis people are remotely bothered by sharing a ward with a trans person. It's completely an elite manufactured problem. novaramedia.com/2023/10/04/t...

On Question Time last night, I talked about the extractive economic model that has left Wales - and many other nations - impoverished *because they were so rich in resources*. You can see the problem simply by looking at the map: the infrastructure looks like a drainage system.

Yet again find myself watching Love is Blind and really feeling for the women. The pool of men is so incredibly poor Alpha men. Anti vaxxers. Anti abortion. Few can have real conversations. American men in particular are NOT okay.

This is grotesque.

Got all cocky about not having a migraine over the weekend, didn't I? guess what I have now.

Click bait headlines for weather should be banned. Yes, technically the far northwest of Scotland is the UK. But this headline makes it read like the whole of the UK.

Grateful to the prepper community for solving my birdseed/rodent issue. I'm now the owner of a number of food grade metal bins with lockable lids. Chew on that you bastarding little rodents.

The absolute lack of action here from the Gov is appalling. No urgency. No interest.

Completely agree. Heat pumps grants should be evaluated in terms of industrial policy, vocational education, and national security – not short-term distributional politics. A case of "fighting the last war" (Winter Fuel Allowance)?

Oh I see we are back to this weird hot soup weather. Not the weather for eating hot soup as it should be. The weather that feels like you are in a bowl of hot soup. Hot and wet and YUCK.

Sitting down to think about what to cook this weekend. The weather has led me straight to Diana Henry’s Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. Heavenly autumn winter food for the soul.

Having grown up in Wales, I can testify that if you are actually worried about your culture and history being under threat, the thing to do is write poetry and songs, perform plays, tell stories and organise festivals, not just sit around whining.

Excellent thread

This post is a good summary of the BBC article that is currently generating dIsCoUrSe. The "easy read" of the actual report is 26 pages, the full report is 829 pages... www.gov.uk/government/c... ... I don't think I've the time today ;)

7. Here's what makes certain people uneasy: To accept reality of ADHD is to accept the system itself is disabling, which means the structures must change, & that threatens those who benefit most from them. Easier to deny ADHD than to accept structural change