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Tim Worstall

So now we’ve got a proper enemies list

Angela Merkel and Bono have been awarded gongs in the European Union’s first honours list.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainan president, and Lech Walesa, Poland’s first president after communism, join Mrs Merkel in the highest rank of the new European Order of Merit.

Bono, The Edge and the other U2 band members were also named laureates, albeit at a lower grade than Mrs Merkel, who was recognised for leading Germany’s push away from nuclear towards renewable energy.

That nuclear decision was also one of the worst of recent decades, anywhere, by anyone. Whatever the Europeanness of it.

Where did we put that Tyburn Tree?

Fortunately I’m already on the other side of the world from this shit

The Duchess of Sussex is set to headline a women’s-only weekend retreat in Sydney during her visit to Australia, with tickets starting at A$2,699 (£1,400) per person.

The three-day event from April 17–19, touted as a “girls’ weekend like no other”, will be hosted by Her Best Life podcast at the InterContinental Sydney Coogee Beach, a five-star hotel on the waterfront in the city’s eastern suburbs.

Not that I would have gone anyway, but the thought of sharing even a country with anyone who coughed up for this toss would be too much.

Well, yes, maybe

A cultural shift is also needed – one that can’t happen without young men first taking accountability for their attitudes towards women. They also need compassion – to be told that they do not need to wear the faulty armour of machismo; and that wealth does not define them. Above all, it is rising inequality that blocks their path to a good life – not women.

Except UK inequality is falling. So, erm….

Surprise!

These were the headlines in a FT newsletter this morning:
…
It is the ordering of these headlines that I find interesting. Financial markets come first. Then politics is of concern, with a hierarchy of the USA, Iran, and Britain. Only then is the important issue of this war’s consequences actually highlighted. If millions of people in Iran and other states are left without water, the risk of migration due to real human suffering is high, and awareness of this appears to be very low indeed.

Financial newspaper covers financial markets.

Next week Spud will reveal that The Guardian covers grievance studies.

Difficult one, really

The first is that the politics of care is the most important idea that I am working on at present. Thomas put this very well in our discussion yesterday. He said he did not understand what I was talking about when I began discussing it in the videos, which he saw being recorded, but over time, he now thinks it has become a critical issue for the future of politics. He is persuaded that it is what I should be working upon. As someone also put it on YouTube this morning, this does appear to be important to them as well. They noted that it appears to be neither socialism nor social democracy, and they want me to define precisely what I mean by the politics of care, and they think it is important that I do so. I tend to agree and now think that this is a higher priority than writing disparate blog posts. It is where I will now begin to put most of my effort.

As there is, in fact, no core idea there, how can it be defined? It’s just a streaming consciousness of error to fill up YouTube videos. There’s nowt else actually there.

Fewer

Sigh:

Change needed to system that could potentially allow France to lift trophy with less wins than Ireland

Less winning than, fewer wins than.

Guess what, folks?

It was never a typical school. No uniform. Vegetarian. Origins in eastern mysticism. No “Sir” nor “Miss”, with teachers referred to by their first names.
For bohemian London parents who wanted to send their children off to board, this alternative culture was precisely the appeal of St Christopher’s School ever since its founding more than 100 years ago.
Yet for decades, beneath the alluring sheen of “progressive” education, rampant predators were free to roam its 25-acre campus. It was a “hunting ground” to target children.
Now, after a seven-month investigation by The Telegraph, the disturbing sexual, psychological and physical abuse endured by pupils at the school, in Letchworth, Herts, can finally be revealed.

I’ll spare you the Agatah Christie working it out thing.

It was the staff. Or some perhaps.

How unlike progressives, eh?

Yep, damn good thing too

Let’s spell out what is happening here. A state committing genocide – Israel – has joined forces with an ailing superpower led by an aspiring autocrat. Together they have launched a plainly illegal war, as defined by the UN charter, which prohibits the use of force unless a state faces an actual or imminent attack.

What’s the point of bleating about human rights if we don’t go blow up those who violate them?

Owen’s definition of a Just War here would seem to insist that invading Rwanda to limit the Tutsi slaughter would be unjust. The slaughter of 600k is not an attack on another country now, is it?

Outrage! Outrage!

This seems entirely unremarkable to me:

Every year, the German Bookshop prize, awarded on behalf of the federal government’s commissioner for culture and the media, serves as a financial injection for more than 100 independent, owner-managed bookshops all over Germany. An independent jury selects the winners, based on criteria such as carefully curated literary selection and cultural events. Usually, the public doesn’t take much notice of the prize; its weight on the public purse is barely significant. But for small bookshops operating on narrow margins, the prize money of between €7,000 and €25,000 makes a tangible difference.

This year, for the first time, three bookshops disappeared from the jury’s list, according to an investigation by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The ministry of culture deleted them, due to “information of relevance to the domestic intelligence agency”, it states. What kind of information? Nobody knows, not even Germany’s commissioner for culture himself, since the domestic intelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) is not allowed to divulge it. A quick look at the three bookshops is telling: they are antifascist, they are proud of it and they are institutions in their communities.

If politics feeds money into something then which something gets money fed into it will be determined by politics.

Shrug.

There never will be – cannot be – non-political spending of money by politics. Which means by taxes. So, you attach to the State Teat then the milk you gain will be determined by politics.

Shrug.

It’s one of the grand joys of free markets – no politics.

Err, right.

We can, in fact, now expect more extreme reactions because it is now far from clear that the USA and Israel are going to win the conflicts they have started in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere simultaneously. The economic impacts are already severe, and when people in the USA realise that their energy costs are going to rise significantly, the backlash is going to be extreme, particularly given Trump’s promise not to engage in more overseas conflicts.

So it is not just the risk of major financial meltdown that is now worrying me, although that is very real. What worries me at least as much is the possibility that these extremists, when cornered and when at risk of being shown up as the illegal international facilitators of war crimes, will react even more severely and release yet more mayhem, including through the use of nuclear weapons, a possibility that cannot now be ruled out.

Apparently Trump’s going to drop an A Bomb on The Hague so they cannot indict him.

Sigh

There is one thing that we do know now. This is that the exceptional profits that oil companies made in 2022 will recur. I sincerely hope that somebody has a plan to increase the tax rate on them to deal with this. The case for a windfall tax is going to be overwhelming. We need such a tax, and we need it now. There can be no justification for private sector gain at this moment at cost to the people of the world from enormous economic disruption.

If the price goes up then we’d like people to invest in going and making some more. Taxing away the profits of the price going up reduces that incentive to produce more and so lower the price.

Sigh.

They were doing this then?

The NHS is pausing new referrals for masculinising or feminising hormone treatment for 16 and 17-year-olds after an in-depth review found there was insufficient evidence to support its continued use.

Prescriptions for hormones had been available in England for under-18s with a diagnosis of gender incongruence or dysphoria who met certain criteria.

Thought we were told that no treatments of kiddies did happen? Or is that statement now inoperative?

Somehow kiddies being treated into growing – or losing – the tits they’re too young to take a photo of just doesn’t seem like not treating kiddies. You know?

Twats

The human point of view is presented mostly on an aural level, through the use of voiceover. Laid over Ascension’s unique landscape, conversations with geological experts muse on the relationship between humans and nature. Unfortunately, many of these discussions lean towards the philosophical and speculative, offering little historical and practical insight into the pitfalls of terraforming. None of the interviewees are from the global south, which is also problematic, considering the primarily imperialist impulse behind the desire to reshape and conquer this so-called uncharted territory.

Ascension Island was terra nullius when Europeans discovered it. So what the Global South has to do with it?

Whingeing Wimmins

The performing arts industry in the UK is “inhospitable to parents” and falling far behind other industries in supporting women who have children, according to research.

The report, titled “the Motherhood penalty”, criticises the industry for failing to consider how it might adapt to better accommodate parents, with the result that many, in particular women, drop out.

Its author, Jennifer Tuckett, a playwright, said: “Caring responsibilities were one of the major issues affecting women’s careers in the arts.

“We were shocked to find problems like schedules being sent out the night before and the impact this has on parents, and we would urge both arts organisations and policymakers to look at new models which support both women and men to achieve success in the workplace and at home.”

All plays, musicals, live performances, now to be between 1 pm and 3 pm to allow the mothers among ther performers to do the school pick up. Hey, equality’s the paramount virtue, right?

So, that rugby then, eh?

Didn’t Scotland do well? And Italy…..and I would imagine some of the old English war horses are seeing that pasture, being put out to, coming closer.

I don’t watch the matches these days. Not excited enough to then work out how to use the modern TV and get access.

But, an impression of a change from 20, 30 years back. The biggest change – to me – is that the second and third rank teams now have people who can kick. As that’s worth a considerable number of points – penalties, conversions – this matters hugely. Think back to when we wondered at Bergamasco trying – and the surprise when he managed it. Now that second line of teams all have perfectly competent kickers.

My assumption is that it’s the professional game, possibly most important being the French leagues. 30 years back the fly half (or fullback, whatever) of Italy, or Romania, Georgia, would be playing their club rugby at about our standard of second or even third division. Now they’re in that French first and hugely, wholly, competitive league. Along with kicking coaches and all the rest.

Not a theory I’m wholly wedded to but one I’m willing to put forward. The modern game has allowed many more international teams access to a decent kicker.

Well, yes and no

Ebisawa, the government said, conspired to sell uranium and plutonium to a DEA agent posing as an Iranian “general” in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Asked whether the uranium was enriched above 5% because the Iranian government needed it for nuclear weapons, Ebisawa said: “I think so and hope so.” He later forwarded an email in the name of a mining company offering 50 tons of uranium U3O8 concentrate powder known as “yellowcake” for $6,850,000.

Ebisawa provided photographs of samples, alongside a Geiger counter measuring radiation, and promised the “general’ that the “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” for Iran’s use. Prosecutors said the nuclear material came from an unidentified leader of an “ethnic insurgent group” in Myanmar who had been mining uranium in the country.

Samples of the nuclear materials were obtained and a US lab found they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that “the isotope composition of the plutonium” was weapons-grade.

Conspiring to sell yellowcake is deffo naughty. You’ve got to have a licence to do so – I did at one time, never used it – but it’s also very different from selling bomb material. By definition yellopwcake is not enriched. It’s the first stage of getting from uranium ore to uranium. The enrichment stage requires a $10 billion (circa) plant which is something that varied naughties, other than governments, tend not to have.

Containing thorium is irrelevant. Lots of things contain thorium and it’s useless for bombs anyway. Plutonium, well. My guess – and I think I looked at this some years back, this case – is likely to be a milligramme or two. It is possible – not legally perhaps, but possible – to get it as samples. And anything above that size indicates that it came from reactor recycling, it’s just not a naturally occurring element (well, maybe that natural reactor in West Africa did produce it).

Significant – anything more than a handful of grammes – of plutonium is a vast, vast, red flag. Thorium is a nothing and yellowcake is naughty but pretty trivial. You can still get 20 years for trying to deal it without a licence of course.

In terms of actual danger from what this guy was trying to trade – assuming it wasn’t all just a con anyway – the answer is about zero. Still a crime but, you know.

Until a few years back it was easy enough to buy lbs (not tonnes, but lbs at least) of yellowcake in the US. Second hand and retail. It was used as a glaze on pottery up into the 1970s and a number of US high schools had some lying around at the back of a cupboard. No, really. 50lb sacks and so on.

My read on this – note, mine – is that this is deffo a bad guy and, legally, trying to sell yellowcake, yep that’s a crime. But the ability of this guy to contribute anything to a bomb programme is zero.

So, err, why would they claim that?

Last month, the African Union adopted a motion put forward by Ghana to label slavery and colonialism as crimes against humanity.

Issa mystery, eh?

This month, the motion will be tabled at the United Nations, with demands made for redress.

Oh, that’s why. Ho Hum.