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April 2014

What Joy! We can invest in Ritchie!

You can now become part of the Fair Tax story.

We are asking anyone who shares our vision to become part of it by becoming an investor member. Our society will be democratically owned and run by you the members and shareholders, for the benefit of the community.

The Fair Tax Mark is registered as an Industrial and Provident Society (IPS) and as such can offer shares in the business.

In order to further the business, and indeed its campaigning aims, we are now seeking to raise capital through the issue of shares with an interest rate of 5%.

The capital raised through this share issue will provide sufficient working capital to the IPS in its start-up phase. Specifically, this will pay for the marketing and promotion of the Mark and the development of additional criteria so that we can assess a broad range of organisations.

This is an exciting opportunity to invest in a genuinely ground-breaking project which has no precedent anywhere in the world. We are looking to use the power of accreditation to encourage responsible behaviour in a completely new area, one which has important consequences for the way our future societies develop.

And now for the snigger:

We are currently investigating the practicality of arranging Enterprise Investment Scheme tax relief for investments in our shares.

When other people use the standard provisions of the law to reduce their tax bill this is tax abuse. When Ritchie does it….

Umm, why Zoe?

It pleases the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) to compare rent costs to CPI inflation, but the salient comparison is with wages, which have been stagnant or falling for over five years.

We do normally compare inflation with inflation you know.

Absence of tax is not a subsidy

Madeleine Moon MP said ending the “high level of subsidy” enjoyed at military bars would help to curb drinking.

She said she got the “fright of my life” when she was charged only £1 for a treple gin and tonic while visiting forces in the Falkland Islands two years ago.

Stupid cow. Why should a military base not in the UK pay UK rent, rates or booze taxes? Gin’s a £ a sodding bottle once you get rid of those things.

A military culture of heavy drinking can see service personnel “drinking to the point of oblivion” a defence minister has admitted as she faced calls to scrap subsidised drink in military bars.

Anna Soubry told an MPs committee the Government should do more to rein in a boozing culture within the Armed Forces.

She also faced calls to end cut price alcohol on military bases after one MP complained she had once been charged only £1 for a treble gin and tonic while visiting troops on the Falkland Islands.

There is no bloody subsidy:

Cheap drink is available to officers and senior NCOs in mess bars, though it is sold at a profit and not subsidised, while military bars on or near bases are most often operated by commercial outfits.

See?

And to get to the basics, if you’re trusting someone to be willing to go kill and or die for you you’ve got to trust them to be able to work out their own drinking patterns.

There’s the ignorant and then there’s the positively stupid

I took Andrew Bolt to court – because free speech should never mean the right to savagely hurt others

There is free speech, and then there is the responsibility we all share as decent human beings not to savagely hurt others or incite hatred within the community

Err, yes, free speech does indeed mean that you can use the words cunt, nigger, abo, slag, shite, even, if we are to be outrageously offensive, Australian, as mere insults or even as fully meant descriptions of another. Whatever they happen to think about it too.

It’s also true that good manners, social mores, the respect of your peers and many other things place limits on which might be used in what circumstances. But free speech really does mean that there should be no laws to prevent you from using those words.

We might, perhaps, make one restriction, where their use would be so inflammatory as to be likely to incite violence or cause a breach of the peace. But it is incite violence, not hatred, a breach of the peace not savagely hurt others.

Another way of putting this would be that being a “decent human being” is a matter of manners, being a peaceful one is a matter for the law.

And I do think Ms. Cole might have been helped a little by the subeditors at The Guardian:

And yes, on the flipside, other people will have their right to be viscously bigoted removed,

Viscously, thickly, bigoted is rather good there but I’m sure that’s not what she meant.

Watch what Paul Mason does here

Piketty’s argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father’s bank/ministry/TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally.

If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, “dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labour by a wide margin”, says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.

We start with an “if”. If r > g, then……..

By the end of the second paragraph it’s become “automatically”.

Tsk.

Don’t be such sodding twats

Rugby World Cup 2015 organisers are mulling over the idea of segregating fans at the tournament next year. No more mix’n’mingle, no more rubbing shoulders with the opposition, no more jibes and taunts and banter.

Jeebus, it’s one of the joys of the damn game that you all see it on equal terms, with the supporters of the game itself, not just the supporters of your tribe.

We do it for fun nowadays

Mo Farah would have had some tough competition from ancient farmers living 7,300 years ago.
Scientists claim if they were to cross paths, our ancestors would have been capable of outrunning some of the world’s most talented athletes.

Yeah. Isn’t it lovely how far we’ve come, we sprint and run these days for fun not to avoid becoming lunch.

A minor boo boo at Bloomberg

One the information page about Sean Fitzpatrick:

Quote

“This coaching team clearly identified problem areas after last season– the scrum, lineout, restarts, the aerial game that we were pretty average at– and they have worked hard on these areas.”

– Sean Fitzpatrick on Aug 01, 2010

Just a small note, the Sean Fitzpatrick who ran Anglo Irish Bank into the ground is not the same Sean Fitzpatrick who played rugby for New Zealand and now comments upon the game.

What jolly japes, eh?

Ukip is on course to win the highest share of the vote in next month’s European elections, senior political figures warned on Sunday, in a result that would be viewed as a collapse of trust in the political establishment.

Entirely correct of course. A very large number of people have lost trust in the political establishment. And given that I’ve met quite a few of them I can understand why too. Alarmingly incompetent most of them.

Well, yes

Farage may be a public school-educated banker, but he does a much better impression of an ordinary person than the leaders of the other parties.”

The others seem to have difficulty in making the impression that they’re human, let alone ordinary.

Well, that kills that idea then

Peal said the link between poverty and poor educational performance had become a “truism” in the left-leaning educational establishment, but it was disproved by international figures.

For example Japan, Canada and Poland all fare worse for child poverty than Britain in Unicef data.

But they rank higher than this country in a key measure of educational achievement, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the report said.

And social inequality is more extreme in China and South Korea, but both beat Britain in the PISA data, it added.


Turns out
that it’s just crap teaching in crap schools that’s the problem.

Tee hee

LibDems told to expect to lose all MEPs in Euro elections ‘bloodbath’
Senior Liberal Democrats have privately been warned that the party could be left with no MEPs after next month’s European Parliament elections, The Daily Telegraph can disclose

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

Last election I remember debating a Lib Dem (admittedly, she wasn’t high on their list, nor was I on our) at the National Farmers’ Union. She muttered something about immigration and said “well, if that changes then we’ll still have Schengen”. Silly bat actually thought we were in Schengen instead of outside it.

Anyone with access to the Sunday Times?

Apparently I’m mentioned in their piece on Thomas Piketty today. And while my ego is large it’s not large enough to pay to read what is said about me. So, would anyone who has access to the Sunday Times like to post whatever it is they’ve said in the comments section?

Thanks v. much for those comments. And blimey, isn’t it an odd selection of people to quote on the subject?

Blimey, this is a bit desperate isn’t it?

One of Britain’s top doctors has warned that children’s health is being damaged because academies and free schools are allowed to opt out of serving healthy lunches to their pupils.

Two million children at such schools are now at risk of exposure to unhealthy foods as a result of the coalition government’s divisive and “irresponsible” policy, which is undermining the fight against childhood obesity, Professor Terence Stephenson told the Observer.

Stephenson, chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) – the professional body for the UK’s 250,000 working doctors – launched a sharply worded attack on government inaction over Britons’ dangerously expanding waistlines. He also accused academies and free schools – which need not comply with the same nutrient-based standards for pupils’ lunches as grant-maintained schools – of setting young people a bad example.

“It’s damaging children’s health,” he said. “Allowing children in academies and free schools to be exposed to unhealthy choices, unhealthy foods and unhealthy diets when there’s still huge concern in this country about obesity in children is definitely a backward step. Too many schools have been allowed to withdraw from this excellent, evidence-based system,” said Stephenson, a leading paediatrician.

Seriously?

Once people have tasted power they really don’t like giving it up, do they?

Is there nothing so trivial

That some idiot won’t try to ban it?

“We need to look at why doorknobs are not suitable for disabled people,” Alan Norton, chief executive of Assist UK, an organisation that provides products and equipment to people with disablities, told The Independent.

“When you look at people with arthritis or those who have little movement of their hands, a lever is easier as you push down on it. However, automatic doors would be the better solution. I agree that we should ban doorknobs in the UK.”

Ban doorknobs? As opposed to, I dunno, setting up an organisation to aid those with arthritis or little movement of their hands to retrofit their homes. We could call it, say, Assist UK and appoint someone called Alan Norton to run it. I’m sure, in this infinite universe of universes, that there’s one where that does happen.

As I’m sure that there’s this one, where a certain Alan Norton obviously isn’t getting laid enough. Such pent up sexual frustration is the only explanation I can think of to explain the idea of banning sodding doorknobs. What next? Banning doorbells because they’re no use to the deaf?