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A new type of politics, eh?

Green party ministers in Germany have been accused of lying about safety issues at the country’s nuclear power plants to ensure they were shut down, even as the war in Ukraine threatened European energy supplies.

A German media outlet has accused Green ministers in the country’s coalition government of covering up key technical reports that suggested keeping the nuclear plants open would have lessened the country’s energy squeeze in 2022.

The magazine Cicero claimed that Patrick Graichen and Stefan Tidow, junior Green ministers at the economy and environment ministries respectively, re-wrote the documents to falsely suggest that retaining the power stations was “not tenable” on technical or security grounds.

Green turn out to be the same lying toads as every other politician.

This will be fun

Donald Trump’s aides have drawn up secret plans to oust the chairman of the Federal Reserve and allow the president to set interest rates, according to reports.

Allies are said to have drawn up a range of proposals for the way monetary policy could be run in a second Trump administration, including rolling back the independence of the central bank, which has been critical to the functioning of the economy and financial system in recent decades.

Supporters of the Republican candidate have compiled a 10-page document with a new vision for the running of the central bank and monetary policy, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Potato has been demanding that central banks should lose their independence. Interest rates should be set by politics he says. No doubt he’ll find some reason why this is wrong though.

Mischaracterised, eh?

When Asna Tabassum, a hijab-wearing Muslim, was announced as the valedictorian for the University of Southern California class of 2024, my initial reaction was the thought of my south Asian mother saying, “What are you doing? Why aren’t you valedictorian?” But what followed was pride.

Then the university announced last week that it would no longer allow Tabassum to speak at commencement. After pro-Israel groups mischaracterized Tabassum’s pro-Palestinian views as “antisemitic”, the USC administration claimed that security concerns made her speech untenable.

Just a thought

So Trump’s being prosecuted for paying off a bimbo.

OK, fair enough, I assume there’s some law he’s possibly broken to do that.

So, was the same law broken by whoever dealt with Clinton’s bimbo eruptions?

And what about JFK?

It’s not unusual that an American President puts is about. And that there are salacious stories about such and that those might – might, obviously – lead to deals or possibly even, well, cash.

So, what’s different this time around?

It’s such a lovely moral view

Creating the capacity to pursue claims that impose poverty when the object of this benefit was to relieve it is indicative of a mindset that has lost touch with reality.

Of course, if there is fraud, chase it, but I very much doubt that many of these claims involve fraud. They refer to simple human error. In that case, there should be forgiveness in most cases, coupled (perhaps) with repayment, at most, of a part of the sum overpaid, representing a fair tax rate (ten per cent?) on the excess earnings not declared.

But so long as this persecution continues, we are living in a country governed by a political party that shows it just does not care.

Folk who cheat the system by claiming money direct are to be let off with a mild slap on the wrist.

The same bloke insists that those who obey the law, wholly and entirely – he calls it “agressive tax avoidance” – must be pursued to the ends of the Earth for more money.

How extreme is this?

The risk of stating plainly what Idaho argued at the US supreme court on Wednesday morning is that it is so sadistic and extreme that people might not believe you. Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Prohibiting all abortions at any stage of gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the Idaho law allows doctors to perform abortions in cases where the life – but not “merely” the health – of the pregnant woman is at risk.

We can only kill this one person if by not doing so we kill this other person.

A singular version of the trolley problem.

And?

Yes, yes, I know that absolutely everything about this is wrong

But a way for me to think about this:

The vaccine is an individualised neoantigen therapy. It is designed to trigger the immune system so it can fight back against a patient’s specific type of cancer and tumour.

Known as mRNA-4157 (V940), the vaccine targets tumour neoantigens, which are expressed by tumours in a particular patient. These are markers on the tumour that can potentially be recognised by the immune system.

The jab carries coding for up to 34 neoantigens and activates an anti-tumour immune response based on the unique mutations in a patient’s cancer.

To personalise it, a sample of tumour is removed during the patient’s surgery, followed by DNA sequencing and the use of artificial intelligence. The result is a custom-built anti-cancer jab that is specific to the patient’s tumour.

There’s a story doing the rounds about what happened to a covid patient. Flus and the like can kill through a “cytokine storm”. When the immune system goes absolutely wild trying to kill off whatever and it kills the whole body.

However, occasionally – occasionally! – such a storm doesn;t kill the patient. And this happened to that one covid patient – his terminal cancer got killed off by the storm and he didn’t. The storm was, that is, just enough to kill everything that wasn’t exactly him but not enough to kill him.

So, me being me, I’ve been just assuming that a decent treatment for all sorts of things would be an induced cytokine storm (not that I actually know what one is in any detail) that did that 99% but not the last 1%.

And it’s possible to think of this new vaccine – possible, obviously, because that’s the way I am thinking of it, rightly or wrongly – as being a smaller version of just that. Get the immune system to go wild on the cancer. Sorta, go Israeli on Gaza rather than go British on Dresden as in the true storm.

It’s not right but suits me as a mental model.

The problem with such not right metnal models is that this then leads one on to further speculation. What about inducing more vicious but not fatally vicious such storms? How far could you take this over-excite the immune system?

So, Wienstein found not guilty

The disgraced movie mogul’s appeal was dismissed in 2022. But on Thursday, New York’s highest court agreed with Weinstein’s claims that he was judged “on untested allegations of prior bad acts” in a way that portrayed him “in a highly prejudicial light”.

Writing the court’s majority opinion, Judge Jenny Rivera said Judge Burke had acted “erroneously” in allowing the testimony of accusers who were not complainants in the case, calling it “an abuse of judicial discretion”.

“The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial,” the court said.

Essentially, varied women were allowed to say he did bad things to me. But they weren’t the women how was charged with doing bad things to. So, it was all a load of bad character witnesses. Which ain’t fair.

Ho Hum.

So Rwanda works then

As with the Australians stiling people on Nauru. It’s not the number deported that matters – it’s the number not around to deport as a result of the threat that is.

The threat of being deported to Rwanda is causing an influx of migrants from the UK into Ireland, the country’s deputy prime minister has complained.

Micheál Martin said that the policy was already “impacting on Ireland” as people were “fearful” of staying in the UK.

So, Rwanda works.

“Maybe that’s the impact it was designed to have,”

Yep.

Of couirse, it can still be evil, sensible, whatever, but if it’s even diverting claims then it’s working.

Read the important bit

Ryanair will be forced to scrap a planned expansion of UK flights unless it is allowed to hire foreign air stewards, chief executive Michael O’Leary has said.

Mr O’Leary warned that British workers no longer want to work as cabin crew, and attacked “insane” post-Brexit rules that stop the company from deploying foreign workers at its 13 bases in the country.

He said that it threatens the Irish carrier’s plans to station 20 more aircraft at British airports by the end of the decade, an increase that will create as many as 1,000 jobs.

Mr O’Leary said: “The UK needs entry-level labour and young kids are no longer willing to do those jobs because there’s full employment. People don’t want to be cabin crew anymore. If they don’t, fine, let’s bring in Spanish or Italian or central European citizens.”

Simply raising wages to attract new hires is not an option, with Ryanair crew already paid between £30,000 and £50,000 a year, he said.

Mr O’Leary also suggested he would be happy to carry deportees on flights to Rwanda under Sunak’s plans to crack down on illegal immigration.

Back, scratch, mine, yours…..

Well, yes Aditya

How about the capital as modern-day Sodom? Polling shows Londoners are far more likely than other Britons to frown upon same-sex relationships and sex before marriage.

Largely because a large proportion of Londoners are not what would be, traditionally, described as traditional Britons.

These people are mad

Ministers of Germany, Brazil, South Africa and Spain: why we need a global tax on billionaires
Svenja Schulze, Fernando Haddad, Enoch Godongwana, Carlos Cuerpo and María Jesús Montero
Finance chiefs say higher taxes for the super-rich are key to battling global inequality and climate crisis

Billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers

Hmm.

By directing two-thirds of total expenditure on social services and wage support, as well as by calibrating tax policy administration, South Africa continues to target a progressive tax and fiscal agenda that confronts the country’s legacy of income and wealth inequality.

Ah, yes, they are mad. They’re trying to use the bastard thieves of the ANC as the example of where this new tax revenue should go.

Quite, insanely, crazy.

Could just be the weather of course

More than 1,000 higher rate taxpayers fled Scotland to the rest of the UK after Nicola Sturgeon’s government introduced two more income tax bands, a Treasury analysis has estimated.

A paper by UK government economists found the changes introduced in 2018-19 led to 1,030 higher earners moving south, costing Scotland £61 million in tax receipts that year.

“Fled” might also be a bit strong. Decided, on balance, to move?

Rather than the claims being made here it would be fun to know the full and overall numbers. Did the tax rises lead to an increase in income collected? If so, what was the difference between hte amount and that forecast? All that stuff.

Sadly so

There is now a striking correlation between levels of education and holding stupid, destructive ideas, between being highly credentialled and falling for every fashionable conspiracy theory, every tribalistic affliction, every online fad.

That long march through the institutions…..

So, who are the wealthy who must be taxed?

Over and above the usual answer of those who have £5 more than the person being asked of course.

One is that you can save a lot. Your proportion of voluntary savings goes up as a part of your earnings. You put more into your pension, you put more into your ISA, you put more into whatever else it is that you want to store value in for your future. That is one measure of well-being.

The other one is that you can actually afford to make choices about what you do in life. In other words, you can afford to not work. You can retire early. Or you can afford to work less, or you can actually choose to do what you wish rather than what you have to, to put food on the table, pay the bills and everything else. Now, that’s a pretty critical distinction, but it’s really important because that point does arrive in some people’s lives.

It is a point where we can recognize that people have real wealth because wealth represents choice and the opportunity to take it, and that opportunity to decide where you save more or where you work less is critical. This is a point where you cross over from being ordinarily well-off to being wealthy.

The wealthy are any bourgeois on the verge of being independent.

Can’t have that of course – Tutto nello Stato and all that. So, tax them back into dependency.

Banks really don’t just create free money

Y’all y’all will recall the Great Potato declaring that banks simply do not need deposits. They only take them as a favour to customers.

Profits at Lloyds Banking Group fell by more than a quarter in the first three months of the year after Britain’s biggest domestic lender was hit by tougher competition for deposits and mortgages.
….
Its net interest margin, which is the difference between the interest it pays on deposits and charges on loans, fell to 2.95 per cent from 3.22 per cent a year ago, which it blamed on “headwinds due to deposit churn and asset margin compression, particularly in the mortgage book as it refinances in a lower margin environment”.

Net interest margins are a key measure of banks’ profitability and had surged since late 2021 as the Bank of England lifted interest rates to combat inflation. This is because commercial lenders were slower to raise the rates they paid to savers than they had been for their borrowers, boosting their margins and profits but prompting criticism from politicians and regulators that depositors were being treated unfairly.

If banks don;t need deposits then why are they competing for them on price?

Well, yep?

‘How sick do they have to get?’ Doctors brace for US supreme court hearing on emergency abortions

The piece opens standard American journalism school style. Personal story from a participant.

Personally I absolutely hate this style but that’s what they’re taught, that’s what wins prizes.

Still, the background, sure. We’re back in this battleground of competing rights. That of the child/baby/foetus/blastocyst to not be killed and that of the mother to not be mother/not die herself. As we’ve got laws – and always have had too – about where those two sets of rights switch from the babbie must be born to switch on that vacuum cleaner then we’ve got to have legal judgements about where that switch is.

Pretty much everyone – even The Pope – will agree that treating the ectopic pregnancy to save the mother’s life, even if that does mean the death of the embryo (note the very precise formulation the Catholic Church uses there, treat and if as a byproduct is OK, directly not) is moral if regrettable.

Defining “emergency” as “the bird’s feeling a bit peaky” would lead us to where we are in Britain today, effectively on demand even as that’s not, at all, what the law says.

So, yes, there are going to mneed to be lgeal rulings.

One of those little Russian details

A Russian deputy defence minister has been detained on suspicion of bribe-taking, the country’s top law enforcement agency has said, a rare move amid the offensive in Ukraine.

The investigative committee reported Timur Ivanov’s detention on Tuesday without offering any details of the accusations against him, saying only that he is suspected of taking an especially large bribe….

“Especially large” is the crime. Which does tell us something about bribery in the Russian system.

Back when the first question in business there was “Who do we bribe?” The second was “How much do we bribe them?” It was only when we got to third in the list that we got the “For what? What are we trying to do here?”

Bribery really was first and second.

No, really, really. The route to success was to look around and work out who you knew, who you had access to, what bribing them would give you access to. Only then did you decide what line of business you were going to go into.

So, here’s a question

Almost a million children will be receiving health benefits by the end of the decade amid a surge in reported autism and ADHD cases among boys, official forecasts show.

The number of under-18s receiving Disability Living Allowance (DLA) is expected to hit 948,000 in 2028-29, according to figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – double pre-pandemic levels and equal to around one in 14 children.

Is something that’s 1 in 14 a disability that must be paid/compensated for or is 1 in 14 just part of life’s rich variability so get on with it?

Sure, sure, as benefits for ADHD become available more are diagnoseed and all that. But we still do have this question. Losing the genetic lottery badly enough to have an IQ of 60 and no moral sense at all leaves nothing but politics – so probably wise that we do pay disability. But how common does it have to be for it to be normal?