Word of the Day...

pshaw

interjection

 

used to express irritation, disapproval, contempt, or disbelief

Disbelief certainly!

HT Wicked Leeks @ Riverford...

Salt - not really worth its weight in gold...

Salt has never, ever been 'worth its weight in gold': that's a
modern myth. You are absolutely correct that extracting salt is
economically trivial, given the infrastructure to do it on a
quasi-industrial scale: it isn't a private individual's backyard hobby,
but it is entirely trivial for polities on the scale of a town or
larger. Salt is also very easy to trade, since it's portable and it
doesn't spoil.

Where did the quote about History Repeating come from?

"Variations on the repeating-history theme appear alongside debates about attribution.

Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said, 
“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, 
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to  repeat it,”

while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote,
 “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat  it.”

Lessons from the past may not always ward off doom, but they can provide insights into the present and even the future."

 

History Repeating | College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences | Virginia Tech

...while the ills of our privatised water industry have many authors – from
Margaret Thatcher, who put it into private hands in 1989, to the
rapacious venture capitalists, who have stripped its assets and loaded
it with debt, to the company chiefs, who have been responsible for the despoilation of our rivers,
and to successive governments, who have been complicit in weakening
regulation – Sir James Bevan, one-time head of the Environment Agency,
is, in many eyes, seen as emblematic of the failures in oversight of
privatised water companies, the personification of a system that has
failed us all.

But it’s best to begin this shocking tale here.

There are 195 countries
in the world. Some are big, some small. Some are highly developed,
others not so much. Some are rich. Some poor.

Now for the extraordinary
fact.

Guess how many of those countries have put its water industry
fully into private hands.

Cadbury was an icon of British industry and philanthropy; the fact it
made damn tasty chocolate was just a bonus. The Cadbury family built
the brand on socialist principles in the 19th century, using the vast
wealth their product generated to build hospitals, establish saving
banks for the working classes, and provide vital resources for the
blind. This was a time when the mega rich used their wealth to build
libraries and public parks, ....

John Cadbury was a Quaker, a teetotaller, and an early
environmentalist. He campaigned for better child labour laws, for animal
rights, and against the slum conditions the poor of Victorian Britain
suffered under. He believed in improving the lives of his workforce and
when his two sons took over the family business in 1861, they set about
achieving their father’s dream of building a model town for their
factory workers: Bournville, now a major suburb of Birmingham.

...

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.

“Keir Starmer may be resigning the office
of Prime Minister but his legacy of total
complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza
will follow him forever.

From political cover for war crimes and
the authoritarian suppression of peaceful
protest in Britain, to the countless
surveillance operations and arms exports
to Israel, despite clear evidence of the
mass murder of Palestinians, he has
aided and abetted one of the greatest
crimes in history."

"― Ned Boulting via King Lear; June 28, 2026 "

“We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves." Anyway. Stage 19 of the Giro tomorrow, so there's always that.

"― Ned Boulting via King Lear; June 28, 2026 "