After being kiboshed by PayPal we now have Stripe.
Thank you for all the comments and ramblings over the past 17 years, (back in October 17th!) if you care to throw a few cents into the jar it would be appreciated.
I hope you all enjoyed the US Live Blog. God bless the USA.
For decades we have suffered ministers who get elected to advance their own careers but not to deliver good government, in which they have no belief. Government that’s rotted from the top down is the consequence of that.
OK, yes. Self-serving fools get to help themselves to other peoples’ money. And?
Oh. Man thinks this can be solved by having different self-serving fools rather than reducing their ability to help themselves to other peoples’ money.
No cigar then.
What happened was that became the price someone was willing to pay for it. That’s not the same as value.
It isn’t? There’s some objective method of valuation that doesn’t depened upon hte price someone is willing to pay? One that rests, perhaps, in the Galactic Brain of a solanum?
Perfectly willing to agree that the price someone is willing to pay be different from that Spud is. But other than that….
Ana Tsivilyova, the reported daughter of Putin’s cousin and a deputy defence minister, said that the Kremlin had received tens of thousands of appeals from relatives looking to track missing soldiers.
“The ministry of internal affairs takes [DNA samples] absolutely free of charge at its own expense, and enters into its database for all the relatives who have applied to us. I’ve already said 48,000,” Ms Tsivilyova said in a video at a meeting with lawmakers.
We take DNA. For free! So you can identify the conscript’s rotting corpse! Aren’t we the lovely ones?
Together, SMART and the TGR Group operate in about 30 countries across the globe. The Russian state uses the networks to fund espionage operations, while they also help sanctioned individuals get cash into other countries.
….
The networks operated by collecting funds in one jurisdiction and realising their value without using the global banking system. This often involves swapping cryptocurrency for cash.
Akin to hawala then. When are they going after that system?
Aquitaine, Gascony, Brittany etc returnmto their rightful ruler?
Yes, yes, we know, always believe the woman. But really? Always?
It can now be disclosed that the decision to suspend Tooley from his £229,000-a-year post and begin an investigation was made after allegations were received about an intimate relationship he had with a woman in her twenties in India.
The allegations came from Tooley’s wife Cynthia, 42, from whom he is now estranged. She is believed to have handed over copies of diaries that were written by the woman and given to Tooley.
These allegations stem from before this marriage and even relationship. From before this job even. Anbd yes, the bird was over age, no she’s not complaining about it, no he wasn’t bonking her while he was paying her uni fees.
Cynthia Tooley made multiple allegations against her husband including reporting “a suspicious object” at the vice-chancellor’s official residence in Buckingham.
Always believe the woman, eh?
What if – and this is a pure hypothetical, of course – she’s erm, not being wholly truthful and relevant?
There can, however, be no believer in democratic government who can take any comfort from what happened. Support for democracy is hardly in a good place right now. The USA is tottering on the brink of fascism. Neo-fascist parties are securing significant support across Europe. Romania looks as though it might fall under the control of a far-right president. There is significant political instability in Germany and France, to which the far-right is contributing. The UK is governed with indifference by a government that appears intent on promoting a far-right alternative to itself. This is not a moment when believers in universal suffrage and the right of the individual to be represented within the power hierarchies of the state can be relaxed. I am, most certainly, anything but relaxed.
The S Korean coup failed because democracy. I’d suggest – lightly, gently – that democracy looks in pretty fine fettle.
But note the ongoing lament. Voters seem to be moving in a direrction Spud doesn’t like. Therefore democracy must be in danger because the people are speaking. An odd definition of democracy really….
Tim Worstall is a British economist
As it goes wrong by word 6 of the description perhaps we shouldn’t pay all that much attention.
Journalists at the Guardian and the Observer are holding a 48-hour strike in protest at the proposed sale of the Observer newspaper to Tortoise Media.
The strike, the first at the Guardian in more than 50 years, is due to take place on Wednesday 4 December and Thursday 5 December.
We’ll find out whether the quality of the paper increases tomorrow, shall we?
Porridge adverts outlawed in junk food crackdown
…
The products fall into a category of unhealthy foods developed as part of The Food (Promotion and Placement) Regulations 2021 which are being repurposed for the new legislation.
Both cheeks of the uniarse too….
Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, a national officer with the trade union GMB, said: “Recent history has shown we must retain control over crucial industries like steel. Leaving domestic production to the whims of the open market is sheer folly.
What bit of recent huistory is this? Other than the bit where your union members lose jobs that is?
No wonder this government is already in such a mess. Not only does Rachel Reeves not understand economics, but it is also now clear that she and Keir Starmer clearly do not understand that without good financial controls and having people in charge who really understand the importance of accounting and everything that goes with it, they have no chance of delivering what they want for the people of the UK.
Accounting, accountability, control of financial systems and the good management that flows from those things might be too mundane for Starmer and Reeves to worry their empty heads about, but they ignore them at their peril.
I take that as a bid to be made Cabinet Secretary. Hear the pension’s pretty good there….
A coterie of Hampstead dimtellectuals is insistent that other people are just earning far too much money. To give an example of their political leanings – if Hampstead and dim isn’t enough – they seem to be mostly retired Guardianistas looking for something to do in their cardigan years.
Imagine the character defects that would lead you to spending your golden years shouting at those getting above themselves, eh? For that is what they’re doing.
The groupuscule of the Cardiganistas is the “High Pay Centre”. Which occupies itself by insisting that people who get paid a lot should not get paid a lot. Because, well, they shouldn’t.
The accusations levelled at Soumahoro by Maréchal and her followers have been rebutted by the academic as an “unspeakable aggression”, a “violation” of her intellectual arguments and a distortion of the very meaning of racism. They have also been debunked in some detail by Mediapart: they simply do not hold up to scrutiny. Maréchal accused Soumahoro of being part of a “radical and provocative ideological fringe”, because she “promoted the concept of ‘racial burden’”, and endorsed the “conspiracy theory” of “white privilege”.
Another of the complaints is that in 2016 she took part in a summer camp devoted to decolonialism and that this was allegedly “forbidden to whites”.
Soumahoro has indeed theorised on the “burden of race”. This refers simply to what anyone who is not white has to face daily in societies not built to include them, and in which they constantly face discrimination. White people are privileged in not having to handle systemic racism. The allegedly racist summer camp was intended for people who personally face racism. Obviously this means people of colour.
So the allegations are true then?
Its nominees include transgender biologist Brigitte Baptiste, described in the citation as a “trans woman” who “explores the common patterns between biodiversity and gender identity”.
In biology that would likely be that a gender identity which does not match the sex plumbing is goiing to be an evolutionary dead end perhaps?
Sykes, who appeared in the 2021 series of Celebrity MasterChef, said Wallace had greeted her on set by asking whether models eat, which she said she found “unprofessional” and driven by “ignorance and disrespect with an extra helping of arrogance”. She also claimed he spent time “barking orders” in a way that made her want to leave.
Enough to have anyone disappearing up the Congo, isn’t it?
Kemi Badenoch’s pretence that we can adapt to climate change is wrong because we can’t.
The claim that business makes that we will find some solution to this in some technical sense, but which we don’t know about as yet, is wrong, because we’ve known about this problem for long enough for that technical solution to have been created by now, or it probably doesn’t exist.
There is, just coming over the horizon into economic acceptability, something that will indede largely solve the problem. And it’s going to be Elon Musk that delivers it.
Space based solar power.
Every individual part of it can be done technically. Sure, probably have to build a couple of iterations of each bit to get it exactly right. But it can deffo be done. The problem is cost. Specifically, cost per kg into orbit. Which is the thing that SpaceX is just solving. We really are getting to the point where it will be economic.
At which point, given insolation, we end up not having a problem, at all, with 24/7 electricity. And with Fischer Tropsch and the like not with anything else either.
Now, I don’t expect to see this supplying the world by my likely checkout date. But odds on in the lifetimes of my nephews, and solid 100% nailed on certainty in the expected lifespans of my great nephews.
There really is a technical solution to climate change and it’s going to be so much fun that it’s Musk who is going to deliver it.
Jury trials could be scrapped for thousands of offenders under plans being considered by the Government to reduce record court backlogs.
Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, is under pressure from senior legal figures to introduce a new “intermediary” court comprising a judge and two magistrates to replace the traditional jury.
They would try cases where offenders faced crimes meriting no more than two-year prison sentences such as assault of a police officer while resisting arrest, racially aggravated criminal damage, dangerous driving and possessing a class C drug like cannabis.
More serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter, sexual assaults including rape, assault causing grievous bodily harm, aggravated burglary and arson with intent would still be tried before a jury in the Crown Court.
Supporters claim the new intermediary court – advocated more than two decades ago by Lord Justice Auld in a report commissioned by Sir Tony Blair’s government – would speed up justice without undermining the right of an individual to a fair trial.
Fuck them.
The jury is our protection against them, the State.