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I for one welcome our new feminist overlords

Spaces in a new car park in the Black Forest town of Triberg now come with male and female symbols. The spaces for women are wider and well lit, while those for men are close to concrete pillars and can only be reversed into.

Explaining the policy, Mayor Gallus Strobel said it was a natural decision because men are better at parking than women.

Feminism as it should be done, eh?

Caroline Spelman is a cretin

Now the Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, has disclosed she is in talks with the insurance industry about a scheme which could add 10 per cent to an average family’s bill.

She is proposing a levy, which could be in place within months, that would apply to all home insurance policies in an attempt to raise enough money to cover damage in the aftermath of severe flooding, which can reach billions of pounds in insurance claims.

Why do we have to have cretins running the country?

Ministers are concerned that some insurance firms are able to “cherry pick” customers in low-risk areas and refuse to offer cover to home owners in flood-prone neighbourhoods.

Yes, that\’s the fucking point.

We\’d rather like people not to live on flood plains. Because, you know, their existence is evidence that that\’s where it floods sometimes. Not being able to insure your house against floods if you live on a flood plain is what is known, in technical language, as a \”fucking clue\” that perhaps you shouldn\’t be living there.

Surely to God at least one person in government knows someone at Lloyds of London?

On Eva Rausing

Harry Mount says that it\’s all about lots of money leading to boredom and thus drugs.

I say tosh.

That someone has been ingesting industrial quantities of drugs for decades and then dies in middle age shows quite how non-dangerous drugs are.

On the price of milk

Some people are getting very confused here I think. Try this from The Guardian:

How much is a fair price for a pint of milk? The answer is: whatever price allows everyone in the supply chain – farmer, dairy, supermarket – to turn an honest profit.

What?

Seriously, The G is arguing that a fair price includes a fair profit margin? Doesn\’t that completely destroy everything they say about banks, oil companies and multi-nationals?

For example, a \”fair profit margin\” would obviously mean a profit over and above the cost of capital. Something the British banks haven\’t achieved in years: meaning that this argument leads to one insisting that bank profits should be higher than they are.

As to what is actually driving the milk price. We\’re in a rigged market because of the EU. That\’s one cause.

But far more importantly, we\’ve the standard interaction of supply and demand. Dairy farming is becoming more efficient: as farming has been doing since the Neolithic. That rising food production is what has enabled civilisation to develop. More milk is being produced from less land with fewer cows. It really is not a surprise that prices paid to producers are falling in real terms.

The effect of this is to bankrupt some producers and force them out of production. Which is, harsh though it may sound, exactly what needs to happen. Production is becoming more efficient thus we need fewer producers.

*Shrug*. That\’s just the way it is folks.

Comparing health care systems

Of course it\’s not just people not being patched up and sent on their way efficiently. It\’s an entire culture of bureaucracy. I\’ve no doubt bits of the NHS are world-class. But the shop-window walk-in & A&E is grotesquely inefficient, and that\’s all I\’ve seen first hand. And I can compare it against the similar systems in France, Germany, Canada and Norway, all of whom manage to achieve Triage without demanding everyone who isn\’t dying always waits 4 hours.

Forward to the Middle Ages!

Hippie romanticism:

Despite the best efforts of Ceausescu to throw them off the land and the draw of new markets and employment opportunities since, around 30% of Romania\’s 19 million population continues to live off their subsistence and semi-subsistence farms. However, both Romanian government and policy makers in Brussels refuse to acknowledge that these are the people who prop up the Romanian economy, keep the culture alive and the environment diverse.

30% of the sodding population are still medieval peasants. And this is good, something that must be maintained.

The thing that always gets forgotten here is that incomes can only be within the boundary of labour productivity. Thus the income of a peasant must and can only be some fraction of the productivity of the peasant lifestyle. Ie, pretty much fuck all.

Which is to say that the problem with peasant style farming is that people have to live as peasants.

Isn\’t this a known effect?

Researchers in Canada have found that for every million doses of the H1N1 pandemic vaccine that were administered in 2009/10 there were two extra cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome which can be fatal in extreme cases.

Somewhere lurking at the back of my mind is the idea that this is a known possible side effect of many vaccines?

Timmy elsewhere

At the ASI.

Which brings us to my modest proposal. The income tax allowance, the national insurance thresholds and the national minimum wage should all the same amount. We should pass a law that says that they must, always, be the same amount. If the minimum wage is £6.08 an hour (and the normal working week 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year) then one starts to pay income tax and NI at £12,646.40 in annual income and not a penny before. If we want to raise the NMW to £7 an hour then that\’s fine: but no one then pays tax before £14,560. If some fool Chancellor of the future (and we can bet on having at least one of those) decides that he wants income tax to start at £5,000 then the NMW must, at the same time, fall to £2.40 an hour.

If there is indeed a moral case that there is some minimum permissible price for an hour of someone\’s time then there is exactly that same moral case against our rulers helping themselves to some of that pittance. This system would make clear and apparent that moral argument. By enshrining it in law we remove any possible wriggle room for the future.

We also encapsulate into law the most obvious and simplest truth about poverty. If you want to increase the incomes of the poor then just stop taxing them so bloody much.

 

The Murphmeister\’s blithering stupidity

That is glaringly obviously right and the need is so universal there is no room for a market either: as I again argue in the Courageous State, when there is universal need markets are simply a mechanism for capturing the revenues of the state for private gain.

Food is a universal need. Thus markets in food are simply capturing the revenues of the state for private gain.

It\’s just Ritchie reveling in his ignorance, isn\’t it? Even a moment\’s thought shows that his statement is untrue, is simply another opportunity for him to express his prejudices.

The actual point about elderly care (which is what he is talking about) is that the need is not universal. That\’s what causes the problem. Some of us will pop off after a 5 minute illness and need no elderly care at all. Others of us will require decades of care.

It is this uncertainty (risk might be a better word) which leads to the necessity of insurance and there\’s a very good argument that, as with pensions, the State should be involved in the provision of that insurance. Not the provision, note, but in the insurance, the financing.

So he\’s doubly wrong which even for Murph is pretty good going. Universal need does not mean that markets are contra-indicated. And the problem with elderly care is precisely that not all need it. That\’s why it needs and insurance based financing mechanism.

Damn those enclosures!

And then he sees it fall apart. Between 1809 and 1820, acts of enclosure granted the local landowners permission to fence the fields, the heaths and woods, excluding the people who had worked and played in them. Almost everything Clare loved was torn away. The ancient trees were felled, the scrub and furze were cleared, the rivers were canalised, the marshes drained, the natural curves of the land straightened and squared. Farming became more profitable, but many of the people of Helpston – especially those who depended on the commons for their survival – were deprived of their living. The places in which the people held their ceremonies and celebrated the passing of the seasons were fenced off. The community, like the land, was parcelled up, rationalised, atomised.

How terrible, eh?

As Jonathan Bate records in his magnificent biography, there were several possible causes of the \”madness\” that had Clare removed to an asylum in 1837: bipolar disorder, a blow to the head, malaria (then a common complaint on the edge of the fens).

Tens, hundreds of thousands not dying of malaria.

What bastards they must have been to allow the enclosures.

I\’d say so, yes.

Experiencing my own abortion and photographing the result was a sobering experience.

For of course you did not experience your own abortion. You experienced the abortion of your child.

Who is not, of course, around to tell us what it was like.

My mother had an illegal abortion some 30 or so years ago……Soon after, I took a friend to a clinic for an abortion……A year later, I was facing the same procedure.

It\’s pretty tough getting this contraception thing through to you, isn\’t it?

Dear God, can\’t Polly get anything right?

Only the state can provide the care we need in old age

It\’s an inconvenient truth for George Osborne but the numbers don\’t lie: privately we can\’t afford to look after ourselves

This is simply nonsense.

The State has no magic money tree: whatever is spent on providing care in old age has to come from us, the population. We can afford it simply because there is no alternative to use being the people who afford it: we\’re the only people possible to pay for it.

Where the State does come in is that they are the only people capable of providing us with the insurance. That risk spreading across the population of some of us being healthy up to the three minutes in which we croak and others dribbling into their Alzheimer\’s for 15 years.

The State can indeed be the enabler, the insurer, but there\’s precisely fuck all reason why the State needs to be the provider.