Another glorious day to be alive
To see such headlines as this:
Brussels burns as more than 100,000 protesters clash with police during march against EU
2014
Sunday is the 25th anniversary of the defining moment of my lifetime
11.30 pm, 9 November 1989, Bornholmer Strasse, Berlin:
At 11.30pm on November 9, 1989, Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger was faced with a stand-off. For hours, some 20,000 East German protestors had amassed at Berlin’s border crossing demanding to be let through.
Lt-Col Jäger gave the order to 46 armed guards at his command to open the barrier and stand aside.
It was the moment the Berlin Wall fell.
Or as PJ O’Rouke put it:
“We won… We the people, the free and equal citizens of democracies, we living exemplars of the Rights of Man tore a new asshole in International Communism… The privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual went out and whipped butt.”
Someone out there will have access to the Bernard Levin piece he did on this. Would be good to see that again too.
How glorious it was to be alive that day.
When in Czech do as the Czechs do
I appear to have it on good authority that swearing is just fine:
Speaking to a newspaper Milos Zeman remained unrepentant over his choice of vocabulary during an interview for Czech Radio despite coming under a barrage of attacks from politicians, media and the public.
“I see absolutely no reason to apologise for what I said,” the president told the newspaper Dnes, adding that “only a hypocrite opposes the use of swear words”.
The only problem with using this as an authority for my continued swearing is that Zeman himself is such a cunt and shouldn’t therefore be used as a source of authority.
Let’s increase housing availability by reducing the number of houses built!
St Ives might not quite have grasped this supply and demand thing yet:
Residents in St Ives, the idyllic Cornish resort, have declared war on wealthy outsiders by proposing a ban on second homes.
The seaside town has been described as Kensington-on-Sea because so many rich Londoners flock there each summer.
But now residents are planning to block the building of any new holiday lets or second homes claiming they force local people out of the housing market.
The proposed measure is contained in a draft version of the St Ives Neighbourhood Development Plan which could be voted into local planning regulations next year.
….
Lucy Davis, St Ives neighbourhood plan co-ordinator, said: “There are other places in Cornwall trying for primary residence which have similar problems to us with second homes.“Around 25 per cent of our housing stock in the parish are second homes – that is unsustainable. There’s nothing we can do in planning we have at the moment, it is kind of unprecedented.
“It will only apply to new builds but what it will do is stop the development bonanza that is happening because suddenly it won’t be so profitable.”
Facepalm.
The new builds are aimed at second home owners. Let’s ban any more second home owners. Therefore the new builds won’t happen, will they?
And well done to Plod here
Children as young as four were accidentally sprayed with hot chilli riot spray by police during a school visit.
Officers from Gwent Police visited Gilfach Fargoed primary school, in Bargoed, Caerphilly county, and gave a lesson on equipment used by the force on Wednesday.
But instead of demonstrating a mock PAVA spray, which replaced CS spray, officers discharged a real canister causing panic among the infants.
The spray, used on eight pupils aged four and five, causes the eyes to close and is extremely painful.
Well done I say, well done.
Ritchie on logic
What I want to emphasise is that this opening statement can be read as if complete in itself if cut off like this:
A director of a company must act in the way he considers, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company
The reality is that, in my opinion, all that then follows, including references to the benefit of members, must be seen as qualifications on how this short statement I have just extracted can be clarified to make sure it is effective in practice.
I make the point because what this says is that the corporation is not, of itself, an immoral structure, just as tax is not, as I have already argued in itself capable of such judgement until put into practice. The very clear duty of a director is to run that organisation to the best of their ability. That’s it. Nothing more, or less.
So the question to be asked is whether tax avoidance could ever in that case reflect action taken in good faith likely to promote the best interests of the company. I agree with David Quentin that this can actually be reduced to a question that does not even need involve moral language: it simply needs to be asked whether or not the act of avoiding tax is anti-social in that it imposes cost on others or not, and since it does the question is answered that such practice can never in that case be consistent with acting in good faith.
Fascinating really, isn’t it? That leap from “good faith” to “imposing a cost on others”. If running a company in good faith did in fact mean not imposing a cost upon others then it would be pretty difficult to charge the customers for the products of the firm really. Because while getting them to pay for the goods and services might be a cost they think worth paying it’s most definitely a cost, isn’t it? Meaning that charging for goods and services is something not being done in good faith and is therefore something a company shouldn’t do.
Just fascinating.
Quite the talk of the town this is
Czech President Milos Zeman launched a foul-mouthed tirade against Russian protest group Pussy Riot during a bizarre radio interview.
The 70-year-old leader described the band, who regularly protest against Vladimir Putin as ‘f****d up’ and ‘s****’.
Swearing in both English and Czech, Zeman asked the interviewer: ‘You know what pussy means in English?’ He then translated the word into the Czech for c***, leading to dozens of complaints.
Current thinking is that this all comes from one of two possible causes.
1) His boozing is finally getting to him.
2) Something, anything, to detract from his performance in his actual job.
Richard Brooks on Luxembourg and tax dodging
Someone with a better knowledge of ta law might want to have a look at this report.
Using a couple of Luxembourg companies to do internal financing basically. And that most certainly reduces current tax bills.
This is fun:
Many large private equity investments are also the subject of Luxembourg ATAs. Well known buyout firms such as Blackstone and Carlyle appear in the leaked documents, and Luxembourg investment vehicles are commonplace in such investment firms.
A 2008 joint venture between private equity group Apax Partners and Guardian Media Group, which owns the Guardian, also used a Luxembourg structure after it invested in magazine and events group Emap, now called Top Right.
A spokesman for GMG said: “We partnered with a private equity company which regularly used such structures. A Luxembourg entity was used because Apax already had that structure in place. The fact that the parent company is a Luxembourg company does not give rise to any UK corporation tax savings for GMG.”
And correct me if I’m wrong here. But what all of this does is delay tax bills, not actually reduce them. So the financing company racks up the interest on the loans it’s made to other subsidiaries, Luxembourg doesn’t tax that interest much. Great. But to get it out of the corporate structure it’s still necessary to repatriate it to wherever the domicile of the top company is. At which point it’s taxable at that domicile’s normal corporation tax rate. Or at least that was true until Osborne (for the UK) started to change matters.
That’s correct, isn’t it?
Perhaps not quite what you want in your obituary
In reality Allen was a prime example of that breed of urban revolutionaries satirised by the writer John Sullivan in the character of Wolfie Smith , the self-proclaimed leader of the revolutionary Tooting Popular Front in the BBC sitcom Citizen Smith (1977-80), and his life story was almost as rich in comic detail.
I don’t see how this can work
Judges have been asked to decide whether a mother who drank half a bottle of vodka and eight cans of strong lager a day during pregnancy committed a “crime of violence” against her unborn child.
It’s a standard of English law that a mother may commit a crime of violence against her unborn child any time she likes up to 24 weeks. As long as she can get two doctors to sign off on it, not particularly a great trouble these days. And any damage done by boozing in pregnancy (Foetal Alcohol Syndrome for example) would be done long before 24 weeks.
Can’t see how it can be possible to charge someone with what another law says they’re entirely free to do.
What the fuck business is it of yours, matey?
Petrol companies and supermarkets are to be warned for the first time by the Treasury that they must pass on price cuts to motorists.
Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will write to all of the main fuel suppliers and distributors to demand that they pass on the benefits of falling oil prices to customers “as quickly as possible”.
When did we return to a socialist economy where Ministers decide the price of things?
We have this interesting thing, this *market* that decides these for us.
So fuck off and go back to preparing to lose your job in May.
At some point we’ve just got to hang the bureaucrats
A 90-year-old man could be going to jail for up to 60 days after feeding homeless people and breaking a new law in Fort Lauderdale that bans people from sharing their meals with members of the public.
Arnold Abbott is likely to face a $500 fine and could be sentenced to spending up to two months behind bars after police officers arrested him on Sunday as he was handing out meals to homeless people in a park .
He was arrested and charged along with two ministers from the Sanctuary Church, which prepares hundreds of meals to dish out every week in their kitchen.
Yes, yes, public nuisance, lots of homeless people gather blah, blah, blah.
But how in fuck did we ever end up with a system where a bit of Christian charity becomes illegal? For we do have it on good authority that it is a duty of ours to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless. And that authority doesn’t say that we should pass it off the the State to do it for us. Indeed, in one passage we are told to divide our cloak and ask that we may share the cold as well as the clothing.
Bastards, hang the fucking lot of ’em. JC would be turning in that grave he doesn’t have at the very thought of this shit.
Dr. Tim Lobstein is either an idiot or a lying toad
Dr Lobstein, a World Health Organisation advisor, said the food industry accepted our eating habits needed to change but it would not agree to sell less food.
People in the UK weigh on average around 9kg (20lbs) more now than they did in the 1980s. This means they are eating an extra 215 calories a day – at a cost of 54p each.
No, I’m afraid that that’s not actually true.
We are not, on average, consuming more calories than we did in the 1980s. We are, on average, consuming fewer.
The thing is, we’re also expending fewer calories. And we’re expending fewer calories more than the reduction in calorie consumption. Thus the entirely agreed weight gain.
And this is important. If we shout that obesity is a result of increased food consumption and then try to solve increased food consumption then we shall be wrong. For we will have misdiagnosed the problem in the first place.
This is entirely spearate from whether anyone should be telling us how to live our lives. Even if there is a place for such interventions (no, there ain’t) this bloke is still wrong.
Parklife!
Apparently this is what to say to Russell Brand.
Never having heard the original song myself I wouldn’t know. But glad someone’s got the measure of the supreme tittiness of the pronouncements.
Timmy elsewhere
At the ASI.
Sometimes it’s too little capitalism, not too much, that is the problem.
Sounds like an interesting candidate
Joni Ernst became famous by gazing into a camera and boasting of castrating hogs on the Iowa farm where she grew up.
“So when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork,” she said. The campaign ad Squeal showed images of pigs, then came her punchline. “Washington is full of big spenders. Let’s make ‘em squeal.”
Even Democrats laughed. Late-night comedians spoofed it. Few, initially, took it seriously. This was back in March. Ernst was an obscure, one-term state senator scrambling in a primary against rival Republicans for the right to run for the US senate against a favoured Democrat.
Now, on the eve of Tuesday’s midterm election, Democrats don’t see the joke. Ernst, 44, appears poised to win Iowa’s senate race – and possibly to deliver a senate majority to the GOP.
How excellent this is!
More than two-thirds of the investments made by the private-sector arm of the UK’s aid programme last year were channelled through “notoriously secretive” tax havens, according to a report that calls on European development agencies to be more transparent and accountable in their business dealings.
The study, by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), found that billions of euros intended for projects in developing countries are being routed through some of the world’s most secretive financial centres, allowing businesses to avoid taxes and the attendant regulations.
The effect of this being, of course, that we get more development for our money and less of the cash ends up with the foreign politicians.
What’s not to like about this?
Another ignorant cow on the gender pay gap
Gloria De Piero MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities said: “Women are working an extra three days for free this year because the pay gap is back on the rise.
“Women shouldn’t have to wait another 50 years for equal pay, which is why Labour will be calling a vote in Parliament to get big companies to publish their pay gap.
“If David Cameron’s Government doesn’t act, a Labour Government will.”
Sigh.
As we all bloody well know, it’s illegal to pay people a different amount based on their gender for the same job. Thus, in that pure sense, either there’s no gender pay gap or there’s a number of prosecutions not being brought.
And if we want to start talking about m,en and women in general earning different amounts of money then we’ve got to go look at qualifications, hours in work, years in the workforce, relative death and injury rates of various jobs and all the rest. And when we do that we find that there’s no part of that gap left that can be explained by any form of gender discrimination.
So what the fuck’s she talking about?
The difference based on median hourly earnings for full-time workers increased from 9.5 per cent last year to 10 per cent.
Men and women tend to do different jobs, in different sectors of the economy. They get paid different amounts. And?
Timmy elsewhere
Talking about the Detroit art collection.
Of course it should bloody well be sold. What’s more important? The zip code of the wall a painting hangs on or paying peoples’ pensions and health care?