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Woo Watch

And now we have the true reason for the obesity crisis

A new study from scientists at Sydney University has found that placing volunteers in temperatures of less than 59F (15C) for around 10-15 minutes caused hormonal changes equivalent to an hour of moderate exercise.

Excellent. Given that the average UK home would have been below 15 oC a generation or two ago (outside that one room with the coal fire in it) and given that the average UK home is now above that temperature throughout we now have our cause of the obesity crisis.

So we can tell all those people bleating about sugar and fast food to bugger off, can’t we?

Hmmm

But, the bottom line is can we – and should we – be making laws against cancer? In my opinion, given the clear upwards trajectory of cancer worldwide, it is the hallmark of an informed and caring society that we do.

It’s my opinion that a liberal and free society would tell prodnoses like this to fuck off.

So where’s the evidence?

Hundreds of thousands of children are traveling in smoke-filled cars every week.
In England alone, more than 430,000 children aged 11 to 15 are exposed to second hand smoke in cars each week, according to estimates by the British Lung Foundation.
185,000 children of the same age are exposed to smoke while in the family car on “most days”, if not every day.
“Given these data only cover children aged between 11 and 15, it is possible that the total number of children affected on a weekly basis could be in excess of half a million.”

Lots of up to and possibly as many as and estimates in there. So it might all be a load of blown smoke anyway.
But I ask the readership this.
IF the medical evidence is correct …..

If that evidence is indeed correct then the question is: well, where are all the sick children?

If passive smoking is a bad idea then, if 500,000 children are exposed to it on a weekly basis, then we should have some evidence of the bodies piling up. If we don’t then one of two things must be true: either that the exposure isn’t happening or the exposure doesn’t cause the bodies to pile up.

So where are the sick kiddies?

Since when was feeding the starving connected with the Jooos?

Morons:

It is precisely because of this that Oxfam, founded in Oxford in 1942 as Famine Relief, turned to the actor Scarlett Johansson in 2007 to become its global ambassador. She travelled to Oxfam projects, something that provided photo opportunities for herself (as a caring artist) and for Oxfam (to shine a light on the important work that the charity does).

In January, Johansson was appointed the brand ambassador for SodaStream, an Israeli company that produces machines to carbonate beverages. SodaStream’s factory is located in the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, near Jerusalem.

Therefore, because Johansson works with the Jooos she cannot work with Oxfam.

Bugger this feeding the starving thing and embrace the anti-semitism of the British left instead.

Cunts.

Seumas on Stepan Bandera

He rally doesn’t like people who didn’t like Stalin, does he?

The party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torchlit march earlier this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews.

Hmm.

During his political career, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) split into two factions: the OUN-M and the OUN-B. Stepan Bandera was responsible for the proclamation of an Independent Ukrainian State in Lviv on June 30, 1941, eight days after the start of Germany’s aggression.

The OUN intended to take advantage of the retreat of Soviet forces from Ukraine. Some members thought that they had found a new powerful ally in Nazi Germany to aid them in their struggle against the Soviet Union. However, just days after the proclamation and the Nazi invasion of Lviv, the leadership of the newly formed government was arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany, and on July 6, 1941[1] for his refusal to rescind the declaration, Bandera was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis and not released until September 1944. Also, within two years of the declaration, the Nazis had imprisoned or killed 80% of OUN-B leadership.[2][3][4] Soviet authorities authorised the KGB to assassinate as it happened in Munich, West Germany, on 15 October 1959.

Not that I’m saying Bandera was sweetness and light but……

Owen Jones and the 9 Point Agenda For Hope

They’ve let the teenage trot out of his cage again. Would that they had someone who could grow whiskers opining on how to run the country:

1) A statutory living wage, with immediate effect, for large businesses and the public sector, and phased in for small and medium businesses over a five-year Parliament. This would save billions spent on social security each year by reducing subsidies to low-paying bosses, as well as stimulating the economy, creating jobs because of higher demand, stopping pay being undercut by cheap labour, and tackling the scandal of most of Britain’s poor being in work. An honest days’ pay for an honest days’ work would finally be enshrined in law.

Let us assume that what he means is the Living Wage calculated by the campaign for a living wage. The problem with this is that the current minimum wage would indeed be that living wage if only the government didn’t steal so damn much of it in tax and national insurance.

No, really, I’ve been doing these calculations ever since the living wage campaign first started. And the only difference between the two suggested numbers is the depredations into the incomes of the working poor made by the demands of the State.

So much so that I have suggested that the income tax and national insurance allowances (and yes, including employers’ national insurance) should be linked, by law, to the full time full year minimum wage. Change one and you’ve got to change the other. And the post tax net income of people on today’s minimum wage would be, in such a system, the post tax net income of people being paid the living wage under the current tax system.

For the fact is that we do not have wage poverty in the UK today. The State is taxing the poor so highly that what we actually have is tax poverty.

2) Resolve the housing crisis by regulating private rents and lifting the cap on councils to let them build hundreds of thousands of houses and in doing so, create jobs, bring in rent revenues, stimulate the economy and reduce taxpayers’ subsidies to landlords.

The general view of rent controls among economists is that they are the best method of destroying the housing stock of an urban area short of aerial bombing. The biggest part of the cost of building housing in the south of England these days (which is where the housing shortage actually is) is the scarcity value of the chitty allowing you to build the housing. So, this is easy to solve. Issue more chitties, problem over.

Without that side effect of damn near bombing the hell out of urban areas.

3) A 50 per cent tax on all earnings above £100,000 – or the top 2 per cent of earners – to fund an emergency jobs and training programme for young unemployed people, including the creation of a national scheme to insulate homes and businesses across Britain, dragging millions of out of fuel poverty, reducing fuel bills, and helping to save the environment. All such jobs will be paid the living wage, supported with paid apprenticeships rather than unpaid “workfare” schemes.

We already have 50% tax on higher earners. Employers’ national insurance is, as Ritchie would tell us, entirely bourne by the employee. Add the current 45 p rate to employers’ NI and we’re already over 50%.

Also, we’ve already got an insulation scheme4 running. And the reason it’s not working all that well is that large parts of the UK housing stock cannot in fact be insulated. Simply don’t have cavity walls into which you can put the stuff.

4) An all-out campaign to recoup the £25bn worth of tax avoided by the wealthiest each year, clamping down on all possible loopholes with a General Anti-Tax Avoidance Bill, as well as booting out the accountancy firms from the Treasury who help draw up tax laws, then advise their clients on how to get around them.

That’s a Ritchie estimate of course and therefore clearly wrong. Much of what Ritchie does count as “avoidance” is stuff that HMRC and EU law describes as entirely legal structures being used as they are supposed to be being used. There just isn’t the money to be collected here.

5) Publicly run, accountable local banks. Transform the bailed-out banks into regional public investment banks, with elected taxpayers’ representatives sitting on boards to ensure they are accountable. Give the banks a specific mandate to help small businesses and encourage the green industries of the future in each region.

Well done, you’ve just recreated the Spanish caja system. You know, the one that went entirely and totally bust and dragged the entire country down with it? Precisely and exactly because “elected representatives” doled out the cash to their muckers.

6) An industrial strategy to create the “green jobs” and renewable energy industries of the future. It would be focused on regions that have been damaged by deindustrialisation, creating secure, skilled, dignified jobs, and reducing unemployment and social security spending, based on an active state that intervenes in the economy, learning from the experiences of countries such as Germany.

Germany….the most expensive and fatuous green energy scheme ever, anywhere? The one that has coal use (and brown coal at that) rising?

And don’t you know that jobs are a cost, not a benefit, of a scheme?

7) Publicly owned rail and energy, democratically run by consumers and workers. As each rail franchise expires, bring them back into the public sector, with elected representatives of passengers and workers to sit on the new management boards, ending our fragmented, inefficient, expensive railway system. Build a publicly owned energy network by swapping shares in privately run companies for bonds, and again put elected consumers’ representatives on the boards. Democratic public ownership instead of privatisation could be a model for public services like the NHS, too.

What an excellent model for insider capture. The only people who will run for such boards and positions are the insiders who will benefit most from being able to manipulate the system.

8) A new charter of workers’ rights fit for the 21st century. End all zero-hour contracts, with new provisions for flexible working to help workers. Allow all unions access to workplaces so they can organise, levelling the playing field and giving them a chance to improve wages and living standards. Increase turnout and improve democratic legitimacy in union ballots by allowing workplace-based balloting and online voting.

More unionisation. Well, I suppose he has to say that given that he’s subsidised by one or more unions.

9) A universal childcare system that would pay for itself as parents who are unable to work are able to do so, and which would take on the inequalities between richer and poorer children that begin from day one.

We already have one of those, don’t we? Usually known as “parents”.

To be honest I’ve no beef at all with anyone proposing whatever they like as alternatives to the current system. I’ve been known to make a few suggestions myself.

But it would be nice if the people doing such proposing were to take note of the accumulated wisdom of the past few centuries. You know, have a look at what has been tried and failed before?

Guardian readers respond to news of Cuban economic reform

Cuba for me is a bright flame in a dark world. I am fully aware that it is no utopia and that there are many shortages and imperfections but they have learnt many interesting lessons during the special period after the USSR collapse and so are building from a self sufficient standpoint.
When one looks at the madness of the US and the EU where freeloader bankers run and ruin the economy, where corrupt central banks print more debt onto future generations and where all rationality and sustainability has left the room…Cuba is a beacon in front of all of this. I think the most humiliating lesson they have thought the world(And more importantly the US) is that you can provide free and excellent healthcare despite being bullied by exterior forces. Cuba is particularly interesting in the case of Greece with a similarly(but with no embargo!!!) crippled economy, they could really learn alot from Cuba who is also blighted by a heavy civil service.

I’ve long wondered about that health care myself. Even to the point that it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that a communist dictatorship had been fiddling the figures. But even if not it’s an interesting justification isn’t it?

No democracy, gross poverty but free health care. I’m just wondering why this beats democracy, great wealth by historical standards and not free health care?

Or they could decide for themselves just a thought…………….. what kind of government they want ………………………………………… Elections in Cuba involve nomination of municipal candidates by voters in nomination assemblies, nomination of provincial and national candidates by candidacy commissions, voting by secret ballot, and recall elections

Since Cuba became a one-party republic and the Communist party became the official political party to which candidates are elected , they seem to have feared well. Free and fair elections interesting concept and a good idea any examples of that working out

Interesting, no? People still supporting stalinist “democracy”?

Err, yes?

Heavy Americans who drink diet beverages rather than those sweetened with sugar appear to eat more, according to a study released on Thursday that raised questions about the role lower-calorie drinks play in helping people lose weight.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed data from a U.S. survey of 24,000 people over a period of 10 years. People who were overweight or obese generally consumed the same amount of calories a day no matter what they drank, but those who chose diet drinks got more of those calories from food.


If you
are overweight* then you are consuming more calories: thus if you get fewer of those calories from soda pops then you will be gaining more from other sources which are not soda pops.

This seems reasonably obvious really.

Ouch! Polly tries economics again

Labour’s pitch on immigration is counter-intuitive: enforce decent pay and conditions and fewer migrants will come. Once British people with families could afford to take those jobs, employers would lose any incentive to recruit cheap workers abroad. Stop bad employers undercutting decent pay with imported near-slave labour. As a message it may not quite work politically as it doesn’t satisfy the gut fears of the Ukip-inclined, but it has the advantage of taking real action against a real problem. Labour’s new determination to enforce minimum pay inspections and spread gangmaster legislation to construction and hospitality is more than welcome: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown adamantly refused both, appeasing employers with lax regulation.

Employers are to blame for importing so many of the unskilled, instead of hiring at home. The best favour tougher rules on pay and conditions to drive out cowboys who undercut good companies. A living wage imposed, for example, on all big supermarkets would work if they all had to pay the same. Almost all low-paid work is essential: a living wage would stop cheapskate employers scrounging off tax credits and importing what too often looks like serf-labour.

Sigh.

No, seriously, what is she on about? The way to stop immigrants taking all our jobs is to raise wages?

So, why do they come here? Because the pay is better. So, if we make the pay even better will more come or fewer?

And as to “all low-paid work is essential”. Has she never heard of replacing labour with capital? You know, like those self service checkouts? ATMs?

Our real problem is that some of the people who attempt to run the country believe this sort of tosh.

300,000 people more than 1 km from a free cash machine

I’m not sure I get the outrage about this:

About 300,000 people in low-income areas don’t live within 1km of a free cashpoint. This has been highlighted as a scandal for the consumer banking industry that makes “Wonga look like Santa Claus”, according to Frank Field, Labour MP and government adviser on poverty.

Umm, aren’t we all fat lardy bastards who should be walking more these days? And what is 1 km anyway? 10 minutes walk? Yes, actually, it is about that. A brisk walk is 4 mph so yes, 1 km is about 10 minutes.

Looks so horrible, doesn’t it? People might have to walk more than 10 minutes to get to a cash machine?

But it should be noted that this is merely part of a pattern; it even has a name, The Poor Pay More, and has been an observable sociological pattern since 1967, when it was systematised by sociologist David Caplovitz. You can see it in the £2 courgettes from those same convenience stores,

Err, if you’re buying somewhere on the grounds of convenience rather than price then yes, you will get stung on the price. It’s rather there in the name of the shop really.

in the astonishing fact that the poorest decile pays the most tax (“you’re talking about marginal tax rates”, people always say soothingly, at this point; as though that would be ok, to have people who earn the least paying the greatest penalty for working. But anyway, that’s incorrect: the boost to VAT, coupled with the senseless reduction in council tax credit, has left the poorest spending an eye-popping 47% of their income back to the government, a proportion which is only echoed in the top decile who, of course, have a surfeit of options to get round it).

Err, no, it’s average tax rates you want there. And I’m afraid, Zoe, that you’ve made a big boo boo there. You’re including a tax credit: which means we are looking at both taxes and benefits. And the actual tax rat on the poor, including both of those, is negative. Because they get most of their income from benefits, you see?

Oh yes, this’ll work nicely

Financialisation ought to be reversed. Yet such an entrenched system will never be reversed by regulation alone. Its reversal also requires the creation of public banking that would operate with a new spirit of public service. It also needs effective controls to be applied to private banking as well as to international flows of capital. Not least, it requires new methods of meeting the financial requirements of households, as well as of small and medium enterprises. There is an urgent need for communal and associational ways to provide housing, education, health and other basic goods and services for working people, breaking the hold of finance on everyday life.

Ultimately, financialisation will not be reversed without an ambitious programme to re-establish the superiority of the social over the private, and the collective over the individual in contemporary society. Reversing financialisation is about reining in the rampant capitalism of our day.

Have they forgotten 1989 already? When we all finally saw, in gory detail, what the superiority of the social over the private led to?

A Guardian question we can answer

Could rationing hold the key to today’s food crises?

No, fuck off.

Contrast that with food banks today: obviously the situation is slightly different, since the scarcity is not of food but of money, and it has been wilfully created by the government by unjust benefit sanctions and maladministration. Nevertheless, people are hungry, and rather than answer that with a call to act collectively, to sacrifice collectively, we are asked to maybe give a tin of kidney beans as we pass through Tesco,

And what the fuck’s wrong with voluntary collective action rather than State enforced collective action?

These people are mad aren’t they?

The New York City Council has voted to add electronic cigarettes to the city’s strict smoking ban.

What?

City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, who sponsored the bill, said at a press conference on Thursday that the public use of e-cigarettes threatens to undermine enforcement of anti-smoking laws because their appearance is similar to traditional cigarettes and could “re-normalize smoking in public places.”

Next up NYC will ban the drinking of apple juice in public because it looks like white wine.

We should probably try pre-war actually

Sir Michael Lyons, the former chairman of the BBC who is overseeing in Salford one of the largest urban developments in Europe, is by temperament a practical man. He promises he is not interested in “building castles in the air”, but constructing a realistic blueprint for more than 200,000 houses a year being built in England by 2020.

Appointed by Ed Miliband to prepare a plan for Labour to implement in power, he starts by stressing the need for the country collectively to grasp the scale of the problem.

He told the Guardian: “We do need some of the enthusiasm we had in the years immediately after the second world war where we saw it as a duty of government to encourage housebuilding on a much bigger scale.

For the years immediately after WWII were when we had rationing of building materials. Plus the planning acts that restricted the availability of plots. Immediately post war in fact we had piss all house building.

What we’d really like of course is the pre-war attitudes. Where people could build what they wanted, what they thought the market wanted perhaps, pretty much where they wanted to. And, amazingly, lots and lots of houses did in fact get built.

Funny that really, markets working better than bureaucrats.

On those wages at McDonalds

This is a slightly excessive ambition for a fast food job isn’t it?

2. There’s been a lot of talk lately about people wanting work/life balance. Does your job provide that?

It’s very tough. I get paid $9.15 an hour. I have to depend on the father of my children for a lot, always asking him for money. It would be nice to be able to support my kids on my own. That’s why I decided to work. I applied to McDonald’s and they called me right away. I was hired right on the spot.

Seriously? Someone expecting that part time work in McD’s is going to support 5 people?

Jeebus

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown.

The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery.

Nowt to say but Jeebus.

War on Want really are cretins aren’t they?

In 2007, Alliance Boots left the FTSE 100 by becoming a
privately held firm in Europe’s largest ever leveraged
buyout (LBO). The transaction was led by US private
equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. and the
company’s Executive Chairman Stefano Pessina, a
billionaire resident of Monaco. The LBO was financed
largely with £9 billion in borrowings, more than 12 times
the company’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax,
depreciation & amortisation).
By taking on this level of debt, private equity-backed
firms like Alliance Boots have the potential to erode the
tax base in the country where they locate their
borrowings. Profits are, in effect, shifted abroad.

While Alliance Boots operates in 25 countries, largely
through its wholesaling business, its more profitable
retail business is mostly in the UK. Because all or almost
all of the LBO debt was located in the UK, Alliance Boots
has been able to deduct its finance costs from taxable
income in its most profitable market. During the
six-year period since the buyout, we calculate that the
company was able to reduce its UK taxable income by an
estimated £4.2 billion compared to what it would have
paid had it not carried any debt, resulting in a tax bill
reduced by an estimated £1.12 to £1.28 billion in taxes.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the tax bill has been reduced by one red penny. It could actually have increased.

It is true that profits are taxed at the company level. Interest paid is taxed at the level of the recipient. That the company is no longer paying tax on profits means, here, that the recipients of the interest are paying tax on that. There is thus no, I repeat absolutely none, evidence that the total tax bill has gone down.

Aravindan Balakrishnan

So, the Maoist who was allegedly holding those three slaves.

Statements of the National Executive Committee, CPE (ML)

First Published: The Marxist-Leninist, (Internal Discussion journal of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist)) Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1974

Statement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) – August 1st, 1974

At an extraordinary plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) held on July 17th, the Central Committee decided unanimously to endorse the decision taken by the National Executive Committee of the Party on July 10th to suspend Aravindan Balakrishnan from all posts and from membership of the Party. The Central Committee also took appropriate disciplinary action on members of Aravindan Balakrishnan’s small clique.

Aravindan Balakrishnan and his clique were suspended from the Party because of their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities and because of their spreading social fascist slanders against the Party and the proletarian movement.

The Central Committee regretted that, after 7 years of struggle to unite together in order to strengthen the proletarian revolutionary movement, and especially its proletarian headquarters, Aravindan Balakrishnan had unilaterally and without consultation attempted to destroy all the established unity instead of trying to strengthen it, had set himself up against the proletarian Party and violated all discipline, and had launched an entirely unprovoked and thoroughly unprincipled external attack on the Party.

The Central Committee noted that after several months of internal ideological struggle and disagreement on certain important questions, Aravindan Balakrishnan, suddenly attempted to abort the struggle to clarify differences and forge unity in the Party on the basis of principle and arrogantly and individualistically began to withdraw from his responsibilities to the Party and put himself above discipline, then after several weeks he launched his cowardly attack on the Party as ’fascist’. Through this Aravindan Balakrishnan has done serious harm to the proletariat and the Party.

The Central Committee resolutely opposed Aravindan Balakrishnan’s line of seeking disunity and using ideological differences to divide. This method is not the method of genuine revolutionaries but is used by individualists who refuse to subject themselves to the collective, and refuse to accept the discipline of the Party as the necessary conscious and voluntary discipline in order to serve the proletariat. Not only did Aravindan Balakrishnan seek disunity, but he also tried to conspire to build a clique of people around ’his line’ and establish his centre whilst still claiming to be in the Party, continuously saying one thing to the Party comrades and preaching and practising another to younger comrades and comrades under his ’discipline’.

It is just a classic. Worth reading in full. And reminds me of nothing other than Lenin’s Tomb and the SWP nonsense about factions etc etc.

And I expect various left leaning newspapers to become rather quiet about this story very soon indeed.

Oh, even better, The Guardian is reporting that he might have been one of the inspirations for Citizen Smith…..

Seriously, do we have to put up with this shit?

Why walking within 30ft of a lit cigarette puts you at risk of dangerous passive smoking

Walking any closer to smokers means inhaling 100 times recommended limit
Campaigners say indoor smoking ban has shifted passive smoking outdoors

Being within 30 feet of a smoker outdoors puts you 100 times over what fucking limit?

The researchers said people should stay at least 29ft 6in from a smoking source, adding: ‘No safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke exists and breathing even small amounts can be harmful to human health.’

That’s quite an achievement, making even Stanton Glanz look reasonable and sensible.