Skip to content

OK, so we know Tim Lang is wrong

Whatever the reasons, the result is an “unprecedented rise in foodborne illness”.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, said it was no surprise and there would be more cases “until the British public wakes up and says it is not acceptable”. He added they should ask: “Why should I play Russian roulette with food?”

He put the increase in cases down to a “weakening of state attention and regulatory focus on food hygiene and safety”. He added that the situation had been “worsened by Brexit and local authority cuts, and a fragmentation of the system of food safety governance”.

Given that we know he’s werong, always, that cannot be the explanation. Instead, what about the idea that by taking the preservative chemicals out of everything and instead eating naturally – with the bugs still in – everyone’s getting food poisoning?

Well, he was

Duchess of York called Turkish banker accused of theft ‘kind and supportive’ after £1.4m payment
Prince Andrew’s ex-wife praised Selman Turk in letter after receiving funds from the financier accused of stealing £40m from heiress

He was kind and supportive £1.4 million times as well.

This is, umm, weird

Sachets of sauce and small bottles of shampoo will be banned from European restaurants and hotels after a deal was struck to ban single-use plastics in the EU.

Belgium, negotiating on behalf of EU member states, reached provisional agreement with the European Parliament on the law to cut packaging waste late on Monday.

Because I’m reasonably certain that they passed another law, a decade back, which insisted – on food safety grounds – that little refillable bottles of oil and so on were not to be allowed in restaurants and sachets had to be used.

I’d need to make sure that was true before making much of a fuss about it but that is the recollection….

Seems faily based

The Duchess of Sussex “creates so much drama” that does not exist and then uses it to “rewrite history”, Gary Goldsmith has suggested.

The Princess of Wales’s uncle criticised Meghan as he chatted with his fellow Celebrity Big Brother housemates on the ITV1 show.

The 58-year-old businessman reserved some of his wrath for Prince Harry, saying: “I mean, you can’t throw your family under the bus in such a dramatic style, then write books about it and expect to be invited round for Christmas.”

By contrast, Mr Goldsmith hailed both his niece and Prince William as “the saviour of the Royal family”.

In fact, difficult to argue with much of that.

Snigger

Avictory for the right in the Portuguese general election this week could reverse the social advances of the past few years and herald a return to the “moral, theoretical and political bankruptcy” that followed the 2008 financial crisis, the leader of the small Left Bloc party has said.

Speaking to the Guardian as Portugal prepared to go to the polls on Sunday in a snap election triggered by the collapse in November of António Costa’s socialist government, Mariana Mortágua said rightwing and far-right parties did not have viable solutions to the country’s housing, healthcare and wage crises.

Yeah, quite. Far better to stay with the left so that Prime Ministers can receive birbes from lithium mines in peace…..

Calling fireplace enthusiasts

So, this new to us house. Got a vast fireplace – 5ft wide mebbe, 2.5 high. Nearly the size to stick a boy in to turn the spit (which it doesn’t have, either boy or spit).

Cool – tho’ obviously that’s going to consume the firewood summat rotten.

So, stick a grate (and a fireguard) in there and we’re golden, right? I have been informed that it draws very well, which is good.

However, it has two steel plates in it. Or maybe iron, but not cast iron. One on the floor, one on the back wall. Clearly, the intention is that this gets hot from the fire, then radiates heat out.

OK, so who knows about these sorts of things?

#For example, instead of a grate that keeps the fire off the steel plate, should we instead look for something more like a barrier to horizontal movement if it? So that the fire does rest on the steel, but we also make sure that we can have a small and ntense fore through concentration? Anyone with detailed knowledge here?

One of the recent weirdnesses

I tend not to comment much on the Israel/Palestine thing. It’s been going on since before I was born, will be doing so long after I’m daisy fodder and I can’t see that anything I say will make much difference.

However, one of the little weirdnesses I#ve seen recently is indignant shoutoing from the left about Hamas and rape. Sure, fighters killed lots of people. And kids. And teens. But not rape, oh no, not that at all.

Because – well summat. Dunno what, but summat. Even to the point of insisting that as there are no first person claims of rape before or after being murdered then the claims cannot be taken seriously.

Hmm:

Hamas attackers raped women’s corpses, a UN report has found, citing “clear and convincing” evidence to support multiple accounts of sexual violence.

That’s where the switch gets flipped, isn’t it. The UN is ther fount of all that is holy about international cooperation etcetc – until right now when they’re lying lackies of the Zionists, right?

Toughie really, isn’t it?

Jeremy Corbyn has threatened to take legal action against Nigel Farage over a “highly defamatory statement”.

The former Labour leader, who now sits as an independent MP, said he could not let “disgusting and malicious lies go unchallenged”.

A statement from Mr Corbyn’s team alleged that the former Brexit Party leader had “accused Jeremy Corbyn of subscribing to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”.

Really, what could you say that might make Jezza look anti-semitic?

Oh. Yes. Very good

Super-rich families and wealthy investors will be asked for help by the Church of England to build a £1 billion reparations fund to atone for the “great evil” of the slave trade.

A £100 million pot announced by the church last year is “insufficient” to address the “enduring harms from enslavement” that persist today, an independent report has found, calling for a tenfold increase.

The church made the commitment after finding that a significant chunk of its £10.3 billion wealth could be traced back to profits from slavery, largely through a fund given to the church by Queen Anne in 1704 that invested heavily in the slave trade.

Sure. We made money from the slave trade. We’ve still got it. But you should pay the reparations.

What friggin’ cuts?

For years, the Tories said austerity was over. But look around: it’s getting worse, and there’s more to come
John Harris

This week’s budget is certain to bring more cuts. Westminster is missing the stark fact that people simply cannot take any more

Tax take is at 70 year high, public spending up in cash, in inflation adjusted and in GDP terms.

What sodding austerity?

This is just Jevons again

Jevons’ Paradox:

There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it.

You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work.

Jevons is a maybe, it depends, not an is.

The depends is the elasticity of demand with respect to price. Now if George were even capable of understanding that we’d all be happier. But given that we, we initiates, know what it is we can now see how to square that circle. You charge farmers more for their irrigation water. Thereby changing that price movement to which they are reacting.

Job done.

George just never does get economics, does he?

30 year veteran journalist gets surprised

All this weirdness, Swisher says, was there, whether consciously or not, to smooth over the fact that the new tech industry was not the big-hearted humanitarian project its founders often talked about, but something much more straightforward: the latest iteration of rapacious capitalism.

How’s that for long term insight, eh?

I have, very vaguely, come across Swisher in my own working life. Not impressed is one way to put it.

Does she think he ever feels any fear about the huge responsibilities that ought to come with what he has built? She answers emphatically. “Yes. I think every now and then you see that he knows he’s in over his head.” She mentions an interview she did with Zuckerberg in 2018, for her Recode Decode Podcast, in which he expressed the somewhat startling opinion not only that Facebook (since folded into the giant company that Zuckerberg named Meta) should host content put up by Holocaust deniers, but that such people were “not intentionally getting it wrong”.

“He was so out of his depth, and you could see that he kind of knew it,” she says. “But he kind of walked into it: like: ‘I can handle this.’ I’m like: ‘You cannot handle hundreds of years of antisemitism – I’m telling you that you can’t. You need some real experience.’ And that was my issue: someone who was so ill-prepared was making decisions that affected all kinds of people and unleashed an enormous amount of toxic waste.”

Man doesn’t share my opinion. Man Bad.

Now to be really unkind. Swisher was married to a senior, long term and early Google engineer. Those stock options were going to be worth something. So, what was the divorce settlement? It still work as joint property in a lesbian marriage?

Blokes, eh?

When City executive Selena* logged on for a Teams call with five senior male colleagues in spring 2021, she was gobsmacked.

She had spent weeks warning bosses that the London-based investment firm risked falling foul of European regulations. She had gathered data and presented supporting evidence, but was repeatedly brushed off. “Nobody wanted to listen,” she said.

So her jaw dropped that afternoon when a male colleague raised the issue and immediately gained support from the same boss who had ignored her. “I had to stop the meeting,” she recalls. “I said: ‘Why does it take a white, middle-aged man to deliver the exact same message that I’ve been delivering over the last few weeks?’”

When her comments were dismissed, and described as “over the top”, it was the final straw. “The realisation was: it doesn’t matter how hard I work, how talented, how committed I am. They will never ever recognise me,” she said.

Selena – now in her mid-40s – later resigned, bringing her decades-long career to a temporary halt, and leaving another City executive’s behaviour unchecked.

Her story was among those shared by more than 40 women from the financial services industry during a closed-door session of the House of Commons’ Treasury committee’s Sexism in the City inquiry, the report and recommendations of which are due to be released this week.

Prompted in part by the sexual harassment allegations against hedge fund boss Crispin Odey,

“They won’t listen to me” and “sexual harrassment” are different things, no?

Nice to see it out in the open then

Richard Allen, from the Retailers Against Market Abuse Alliance, said: “It’s almost as if the Government has lost sight of what customs duties are for.

“They’re there to protect our economy. There has to come a point where we think about the country and the economy, and all the money from those sales goes straight to China.”

That is, customs duties are there to protect the profits of the local and domestic capitalists at the expense of consumers.

Because that’s what customs duties do. Make foreign made stuff more expensive, thereby protecting the profit margins, and fortunes, of the domestic capitalists.

At which point, obviously, fuck them and unilateral free trade it is.

Yeah?

In the worst hot spots covering areas of up to 6,000 people more than 150 cases have gone unsolved in the past three years, prompting warnings by victims’ campaigners and policing experts that burglary has been effectively decriminalised in parts of the UK.

Much more fun monitoring Twitter back at the station, right?

The point about burglary is that in a “neighbourhood” area like that a bit of actual street policing, a local copper, would know who the scrotes are. Sure, catching them takes a bit of effort. But knowing who they’re gonna be is always a good start.

Impressive

What Sunak and his far-right allies want to create with their pernicious rhetoric of unity, to which Labour subscribes, is a feeling of inclusion for some in a group from which others are most definitely excluded.

Unity’s Bad, M’Kay?

But perhaps most of all there is the realisation that the need for a new, unifying, narrative within politics is very high.

Unity’s Good, M’Kay?

After that there is my belief that any such narrative has to simultaneously accept the imperative of collective co-existence and the innate requirement that this be fair whilst at the same time recognising that the differences between us have to be accepted and even celebrated because they are what make us unique so that we can stand out in a world where our obvious need for company and mutuality is ever-present.

A wise person once summarised this as loving our neighbours as ourselves, but I am going further than that.

Aren’t we the lucky ones to be treated to the Fifth Gospel?

Don’t be so bloody stupid, of course not

A former Conservative MP under investigation by the police over a rape allegation returned to Parliament last week to vote for a ban on transgender conversion therapy, The Telegraph can reveal.

Crispin Blunt’s decision to return to vote in the Commons for the first time since October is likely to reignite a fierce debate about whether MPs accused of sexual offences should be banned from the parliamentary estate.

Is he considered such a danger to the public that he’s on remand? No?

Therefore he is merely that, someone accused and not, in any way, guilty of anything. So, of course he cannot be banned from either the estate or voting.

Jeez, this isn’t difficult.

If people have alternatives then…..

….it’s not possible to impose the monopoly vision upon them, is it?

The focus of most tax authorities was on the scale of the tax losses that they might generate, but in terms of their political economic impact, their consequence was much bigger. John Christensen and I suggested, right from the beginning of the time that we worked together in 2003, that the real function of tax havens was to act as the launchpad for an assault on democracy.

The underlying logic of this claim has always been quite straightforward. Those who hate representative government subscribe to the simple logic that if only they can starve democracies of the revenue that they require to fulfil their mandates then they can undermine the whole social contract that is the foundation of the democratic promise created by the universal electoral suffrage that has only really been commonplace from the 1930s onwards. Tax havens are a way to deny them that revenue.

That you call the monopoly vision democracy doesn’t change that it is a monopoly vision. Which is why choices must be denied, of course.

Well, it sorta depends

The claim by a former government minister earlier this week that parts of London and Birmingham with large Muslim populations are “no-go areas” has highlighted the enduring myth that there are UK neighbourhoods and towns unsafe for white people.

Paul Scully, the MP for Sutton and Cheam in Greater London, later retracted his suggestion that Tower Hamlets and Sparkhill were unsafe for non-Muslims to enter, made during a BBC interview about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the Conservative party. But he also defended invoking the Islamophobic trope on the grounds that people told him they perceived there to be a threat.

Whole Northern towns seemed to be unsafew if you were white, female and teen.

How ‘no-go zone’ myth spread from fringes to mainstream UK politics
Notion of Muslim-controlled areas unsafe for white people has been promoted by rightwingers since the early 2000s

Nick Griffin made the claim live on TV, on Question Time. How everyone shrieked at him that it wasn’t true!

And, of course, it was true.