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July 2019

What’s the point of voting Tory then?

Fracking should be banned, the UK must take global leadership on the climate emergency and a royal commission should decide how to build homes in an environmentally sustainable manner, an influential group of Conservative MPs has said.

The Conservative Environment Network (CEN) set out a manifesto on Tuesday that they said must govern the UK’s policies to prevent climate catastrophe and allow for greener economic growth.

If you get the same idiocy from them as everyone else?

Not a liberal, this one

Forget the rebrand – Kim Kardashian West should ditch her shapewear range entirely
Shapewear or ‘Solutionwear’ is a necessity – if you don’t want your butt, boobs, gut or thighs to move or breathe at all. Let’s get rid of it altogether

Hmm – you can’t do that isn’t how most liberal initiatives start now, is it?

Shapewear helps us to keep up with all this – it is a necessity if you don’t want your butt, boobs, gut or thighs to move or breathe at all. The marketing for, and prevalence of, these products says your flesh shouldn’t move if you can help it. Because who needs to be able to move freely?

Well, us. In 2019, people want to move forward. We are fed aspirations of feminist futures, equality and acceptance in life and at work almost everywhere. A kinder world for women is made a more realistic prospect in magazines, papers, TV and film every day – we can see it happening. Too slowly, but at least we are getting there. And we want to get there as quickly as we can, with no restrictions – especially not physical ones.

Replace all the “we” there with “I” and there’s nothing wrong at all. And if it was followed by “I desire” and “you do what you like” then it would be impeccably liberal. But that conflation of the I into we and then the implicit addition of you must not means it’s entirely illiberal. Getting on for fascist actually.

Oh, and, usefully, we’ve a potential proof of the writer’s contention. If the stuff doesn’t sell then she might be right. If it does then she ain’t….for it would appear that some sufficiency of we does want all this

Give me money for my new project and I will save the world

Using a few more electric cars, cutting air miles by a small amount a year and recycling the office waste is not the change we need now. Nothing less than a fundamental change to the whole business model of society is required. Tackling global heating has to be at the heart of that, and much of what UK business does increases the risk of catastrophe, rather than prevents it.

In that case a change in the purpose of all companies, imposed by law so that adaptation to the constraints of the climate crisis is their number one objective rather than profit, matched by the introduction of sustainable cost accounting so that we can appraise who is likely to be able to succeed at that process of adaptation and who will not, and aware capital appropriately as a consequence, is what is essential now if the economy, the country, we and the planet are all to have any chance of survival.

Ritchie’s current funding runs out in September. Expect – if you can even believe this is possible – a certain increasing shrillness in the call for new funding for the new project as the date approaches.

This is great

The cowardly state is the exact opposite of the Courageous State that I described in my 2011 book with that title. What happens in the cowardly state is that a neoliberal politician, obsessed by centralised macroeconomic control of the economy and a desire to shrink the state at all costs so long as it has limited impact upon their own political fortunes, will close, privatise, outsource and simply abandon public services where anyone but they can be blamed for this happening with an indifference as to the consequence that is profoundly sociopathic.

I would argue that this is exactly what has happened to local government since 2010. The impact of austerity has been offloaded by central government onto local authorities. Sixty per cent of central government funding for local services has been lost over that period.

So, those obsessed by centralised macroeconomic control decentralise economic control over local services and funding.

This is bad.

Ho hum, that expansion of the universities was a bad idea, wasn’t it?

This is not a situation that is easy to reverse, for all sorts of reasons. Good people are not attracted to be councillors when the rewards are low and the prospect of failure, for which you may well feel a personal responsibility even if that is inappropriate, is high.

Councillors used to be unpaid. Now they’re paid. The quality has gone up, has it?

Whilst funding, borrowing and the governance of local government have all to be reimagined to make sure that they are fit for purpose,

How about local people pay the local taxes they wish to have in order to pay for the local services they desire?

Small world

Rodham tested that friendship on Prescott’s behalf in 1997, when he arranged a White House meeting for Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, to help to smooth the way for a plan to introduce “smart” credit and debit cards to Russia. “I just called the Russia desk at the White House, as anybody in this country can do,” said Rodham, although it is possible that being the first lady’s brother helped to get the call put through to the right person. Luzhkov’s name rang alarm bells in the Clinton entourage. He had been accused of having links to Russian mobsters and had been involved in a dispute with an American businessman who was subsequently found murdered in Moscow.

Murdered is the wrong word there. Assassinated.

Knew the bloke, vaguely. But he and his assassin (not the shooter, the guy who paid at least by all sensible accounts) were customers.

There was a joint venture which owned a hotel and there was an argument over who really, really owned it. The Russian courts said the local, the arbitration one in Stockholm the American. A terminal solution was found….. not particularly Luzhkov involved, even as he would clearly and obviously known the shooter and probably done business in other realms with him.

Which has been worrying about ‘leccie companies going bust

There is always moaning about the functioning of a market economy. The latest fuss comes from Which?, concerning the operation of the energy market. The complaint is that companies arrive, charge unsustainably low prices, go bust and customers — 283,000 households this year — get transferred to companies that charge more. That last being what keeps the lights on, as they don’t go bust.

This isn’t a problem, nor something to be regulated away. Which? seems not to realise that suppliers going bankrupt isn’t an error of the system, it’s the designed function of a market economy.

Sadly, the editor changed my use of “mither” to moaning in that first sentence.

Pity, I like the world mither…..

Not a lot

How the climate crisis will change your plate in 2050

Really, between not very much and none.

In her new book, Amanda Little explores what it will take to continue feeding 7.5 billion people in the world

Grow exactly the same crops but perhaps 100, or 200, miles further north or south of their current locations.

Next problem please……

A light amusement

Leonard Cohen with Marianne Ihlen:

Trivial

Triviality I know but it’s the bloke riding sidesaddle, the women astride (??). Given external genitalia arrangements this might even be sensible…..

Genes don’t matter, eh?

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Gauff now lives in Delray Beach, Florida. Her father, Corey, played basketball at Georgia State University and her mother, Candi, ran track at Florida State University. Her natural athleticism is obvious but her mental strength and her character are equally impressive, helping her to handle the pressure of being considered “the next big thing”.

That is, of course, about a tennis player.

The Guardian’s happy to say that genetic endowment matters.

Yet if the same thing were said about brains they’d be horrified. Even though we do have really compelling evidence that IQ is heavily gene influenced when it comes to smarts we’re all that tabula rasa, aren’t we?

Odd how fashion influences science, isn’t it?