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May 2017

Choose your sides, let battle commence!

The Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has called for a black feminist festival in the French capital to be banned, saying it was “prohibited to white people”.

The first edition of the Nyansapo Festival, due to run from 28-30 July at a cultural centre in Paris, bills itself as “an event rooted in black feminism, activism, and on (a) European scale”.

Four-fifths of the festival area will be set aside as a “non-mixed” space for black women, according to its website. Another space will be a “non-mixed” area for black people regardless of gender. Another space would be “open to all”.

The English version of the site does not use the word “non-mixed”, but “reserved”.

So, pig shit ignorant racists reviving apartheid by enforcing racial division? Brave fighters against oppression providing safe spaces?

The foaming lake of Bangalore

Rains have no doubt brought relief to Bengaluru. However there was a flip-side to it at the Varthur lake. The lake has begun foaming once again. Toxic foam was spilling over to the Whitefield Main Road and commuters had a tough time negotiating traffic on Saturday and Sunday. To make matters worse was the unbearable stench emanating from the lake. The residents say that that the situation is so bad that the froth had reached a mall and a hospital.

That environmental Kuznets curve again:

This is a man made lake, built by Ganga kings over thousands of years ago[2] for agriculture and domestic uses but now the lake is receiving 40% of the sewage water from Bangalore for over 50 years

The idiot’s idea of a clever man

Stephen Fry has called for Facebook and other “aggregating news agencies” to be reclassified as publishers in order to stop fake news and online abuse spreading by making social media subject to the same legal responsibilities as traditional news websites.

Outlining his “reformation” for the internet, as part of the Hay literary festival’s programme to mark the quincentenary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517, Fry accused social media platforms of refusing to “take responsibility for those dangerous, defamatory, inflammatory and fake items whose effects will have legal consequences for traditional printed or broadcast media, but which they can escape”.

“One thesis I could immediately nail up to the tent flag is to call for aggregating news agencies like Facebook to be immediately classified as publishers. At the moment, they are evading responsibility for their content as they can claim to be platforms, rather than publishers. Given that they are now a major source of news for 80% of the population, that is clearly an absurd anomaly,” he said.

“If they, and Twitter and like platforms recognised their responsibilities as publishers, it would certainly help them better police their content for unacceptable libels, defamations, threats and other horrors, that a free belief in the value of the press would, as a matter of course, be expected to control.”

If they do that this means that they have to edit what is said.

And all that will happen is that people who want to say things which are edited out will move to another platform.

It’ll just be an endless game of whack a mole.

This is fun

Food stamps: a lifeline for America’s poor that Trump wants to cut
Residents of the Congress Heights section of Washington DC tell of the devastating impact the president’s plan to cut food stamps would have on their families

Yadda, yadda, cuts, teh bastards, chunter.

They then talk to a number of people who get food stamps. None of whom, so far as I can see, would lose any money under the proposals.

Because what is being said is that eligibility should be tightened up to what it was pre-recession. Particularly, able bodied (and single,) people will have to do at least some work (which, from memory, can be as little as 6 hours volunteering a week) to get them.

But here’s The G interviewing disabled people with children about the coming loss of their food stamps, something that isn’t going to happen.

Poor Spudda

He keeps telling us that people don’t migrate over taxes.

To what degree do higher taxes induce valuable and highly skilled individuals to relocate? The fear is that raising taxes will lead to a “brain drain”. Our research shows that the most innovative individual inventors are significantly affected by top tax rates when deciding where to live. Additionally, if the average country decreased its top tax rate, it would attract many more foreign superstar inventors to the country.

Research showing that people migrate in response to tax rates.

So she lost the election then?

Hillary Clinton says she beat Donald Trump in the election
Daily Mail – ‎17 hours ago‎
Clinton, who received almost three million more votes than her reality television host opponent, was denied the presidency because she lost the electoral college count 304 to 227.

Given that it is the Electoral College which, by design, decides the election. Sorta like some other system, it’s a majority in the House of Commons that matters, not of the votes cast.

What an excrescence

The Observer has obtained a series of Conservative party attack ads sent to voters last week in the key marginal constituency of Delyn, north Wales. Activists captured the ads using dummy Facebook accounts after finding that their own ad – encouraging young people to register to vote – were being “drowned out” by the Tory ads.

How dare they!

The Tories are actually competing with their ads.

Isn’t this just utterly appalling?

An army of Facebook workers are tasked with removing terror-related material
MoS investigation reveals that Facebook has hired young Filipinos to do the job
Hundreds of them – some of who have limited English – earn just £1.36 an hour

At which point we’ve got to put that £1.36 an hour into some sort of perspective. GDP per capita in the Philippines is some $3,000 a year. Meaning that someone working full time (2,000 hours a year) will be earning, at £1.36, more than GDP per capita. £1.20 is what is needed to make that.

In British terms that’s like being paid £34,000 a year.

No, absolutely not, this does not buy the same lifestyle, not at all. But relative to local earnings that’s the same.

And that’s not bad, is it?

Jeebus people, stop being idiots

The UK’s full participation in European Union security and intelligence co-operation will be critical to the fight against terrorism after Brexit, leading British security experts have said, as Theresa May announced wide-ranging new plans to counter extremism.

The growing demands for the prime minister to face down anti-EU forces in the Tory party and make membership of bodies such as Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, a top priority, came amid fears that Brexit could leave the UK with inferior access to key European databases and deprive British police forces of vital tools in high-level, pan-European anti-terror probes.

They’re not going to stop cooperating with us about Rasim and Ibrahim just because we no longer want to pay for the French farmers.

This is all most fun

Acacia Mining is preparing to close a loss-making mine after a row over exports with the Tanzanian government escalated.

Shares in the FTSE 250 gold miner plunged nearly 40pc last week after a report by the Tanzanian government accused it of under-representing the amount of gold in the concentrate it exports, potentially depriving the country of millions in royalties.

The government said that Acacia’s gold output was 10 times greater than it claimed – a level that would “make it third-biggest gold miner in the world”, the company said.

We all know the general story from the NGO side. These foreign companies rip off the locals, don’t pay tax etc etc. Try to take much too big a profit margin.

The findings, published with great fanfare on national TV, mean an export ban on gold concentrate imposed at the start of March is likely to continue indefinitely. Acacia is still able to ship out gold bars, which make up 70pc of its output, but estimates that it is losing $1m (£780,000) in revenue every day.

Some observers suggest that Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli, is trying to force Acacia to fund a new gold-smelting industry, but experts say the country’s output is too small for this to be economically viable.

Any why do they demand big margins? Because of fuckwittery like this of course. But I’ll guarantee that if you dig into this you’ll find an NGO or two at the bottom of he claims about not m#paying the due royalties

Hate crimes in Manchester rise to fewer than toll of dead and injured

This evening it emerged that hate crime in Manchester has doubled since the terror attack which killed 22 people on Monday.
Greater Manchester Police bosses said the number of reports had risen from 28 to 56 since Salman Abedi set off a nail bomb at Manchester Arena.
Chief Inspector Ian Hopkins called for the city to stand up against hate and ensure any incidents are quickly reported to the police.
He said: ‘Manchester has come together this week but it is important we continue to stand together here in Greater Manchester against the hate-filled views we have seen from small minorities of the community.
‘We had 28 reports of hate crime on Monday, which is the average, but it rose to 56 reports on Wednesday, although we cannot directly link that to the attack.

22 dead, plus one suicided bomber, and 120 injured.

Hmm

Well, isn’t that just dandy?

The Sage of Ely tells us that:

Labour markedly and appropriately challenge this. In practice the IFS doubt they can deliver but I in turn doubt some of the IFS assumptions: if they think there is a Laffer curve effect in the tax rate range that Labour is proposing then they’re wrong.

Hmm.

An income tax rate of 67, 68% won’t have any Laffer effects? Spudda will no doubt tell us about the Diamond and Saez paper. Then mutter something about 76% and so on. But that’s for a system without allowances. 54% is the peak with allowances – and yes, a residence based taxation system is an allowance in this meaning of the word.

Hmmm.

That’s a lot really, isn’t it?

Intelligence officers have identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in Britain as potential terrorist attackers, it emerged yesterday.

The scale of the challenge facing the police and security services was disclosed by Whitehall sources after criticism that multiple opportunities to stop the Manchester bomber had been missed.

About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a “residual risk”.

Evil or sensible?

Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington allegedly discussed setting up a secret communications channel to cloak contacts between Moscow and Donald Trump’s White House transition team, it was reported on Friday.

Ambassador Sergei Kislyak told his superiors in Moscow that he and Kushner discussed ways to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, the Washington Post said, citing US officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Given the amount of monitoring being done by he US spy services was this evidence of nefarity or just being sensible?

Sigh, that’s not what they’re saying honey

So what if the poor buy avocados – everybody deserves a little luxury
Emma Brockes

How dehumanising it is when rich people tell those further down the economic food chain they shouldn’t have any small pleasures

What people are saying is two fold.

Firstly, it’s just the basic economic problem. Unlimited wants and scarce resources. So, if you want this over here then you cannot also have that over there.

No one is saying that treats shouldn’t be allowed. Only that choices must be made.

The secondary point is not all that many treats if I’ve got to pay for it too.