The Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, whose platinum solo album The Other Side of the Mirror Hine produced in 1989, said: “It seemed that we had made a spiritual agreement to do a magic album in a fabulous Dutch castle, at the top of the mountain. Whenever Rupert walked in, the room was on fire. There was a connection between us that everyone around us instantly picked up on.”
Holland’s slightly short of castles on mountains…..
The BBC defended its decision, saying the inclusion of the racial slur was made with the approval of the victim and his family, who wanted to show the severity of the attack. It said the decision to broadcast the word followed discussions involving “senior editorial figures” and was preceded by a warning to viewers.
The use of the word prompted more than 18,000 complaints to the BBC.
On Saturday, the Radio 1Xtra presenter Sideman quit his job, saying he could not work with the BBC allowing “the N-word being said on national television by a white person”.
Using the N word, sure, impolite at very best. Not what we would encourage from our national broadcaster. In explanation – no, not mitigation – it was said in a news report, to show what the attacker was shouting as he attacked. With the active support of the victim to the word being used in said description.
Maybe the right decision, maybe not.
But this idea that there is this word that a white person may not use while a black person may – that being the implication of what is being said there – is flat out racism. At which point you can fuck off matey.
The government move has provoked fury from British farmers, who say it is “offshoring legitimate environmental concerns” by forcing them to compete with sugarcane grown to lower environmental standards than the UK’s.
The UK’s standards for growing sugar cane don’t exist. given that, you know, we don’t grow any.
$925,000
308 WORSTALL ALLEY
Newtown, PA 18940
It must be me, right? Given how rare Worstall is as a name.
This not actually being so, it’s v rare in the UK – three of us now I believe. But over in the US there are hundreds. Mostly in PA and over into OH. Leading to me once getting an email from a kid in OH somewhere asking if I was the Dr. Worstall he’d taken Driver’s Ed from…..
Carlo De Benedetti, the former owner of La Repubblica, one of Italy’s biggest daily newspapers, is no stranger to a challenge. Now, at the age of 85, the tycoon is about to embark on what might be his biggest one to date – launching a newspaper in the midst of a serious financial slump.
De Benedetti wants the newspaper, due to launch online and in print in mid-September, to be a progressive, independent voice in a market weighed down by political and economic influence. And, as its name – Domani (Tomorrow) – suggests, the focus will be on coverage that looks to the future.
Domani is used in Italian to mean much the same as the Spanish “manana” but without that culture’s – language’s – sense of urgency.
The Bank of England has warned that the UK is more exposed to lockdowns due to its higher share of “social consumption” in the economy. Spending on activities involving interaction with other people – such as cinemas, restaurants or live sports – accounts for around 13pc of the UK economy, compared with around 11pc in the US and 10pc in the Eurozone.
We spend substantially more on experiences rather than things than other peeps. Like wot the Greenies tell us we must do. Althoughm for some reason, they never seem to point out that we already do more of what they say we ought to.
From Richard Murphy:
Second, to claim that we are dependent on growth as he defines it is simply wrong. The financially engineered, fossil fuel driven growth of modern capitalism is what is driving us to extinction and there is not a shred of evidence that it can continue into the future and be reconciled with continuing human life on earth.
Third, if he wants to talk growth then it is growth of the state sector that he should have been promoting, but did not. We do need more care, education, social housing, sustainable transport infrastructure and so on. But we do not need more long haul holidays, heavy weight cars, monoculture farming, junk fashion and much else, all designed to fuel the inexorable demand for an interest return to banking.
And fourth, talking green and about growth in the way he does is simply impossible: carbon and temperature targets (let alone those required to secure biodiversity) cannot be reconciled with the sort of GDP growth his report envisioned. We can do more for each other, without a doubt, but only in a radically transformed society and it’s the height of in difference to the fate of humanity to pretend otherwise.
From the actual science on the subject:
RCP 2.6 is the one where everything is kept below 2 oC and where everything is fine. The perceptive will note that GDP is *higher* in this scenario than in more emittively polluting ones.
Why doesn’t the damn fathead ever, I mean ever, bother to check the source materials? Why do we always get these confident predictions entirely at loggerheads with the actual science he professes to be backing up?
Crippled JC on a pogo stick it only takes two minutes to look up the emissions models and their associated GDP levels after all.
Keynes suggested the job of the political economist in the role of statesman (which is what I see him as) was to tell ‘plausible lies’. They have to reduce complexity to the point of approximation but remain believable, nonetheless. That’s the progressive economist’s job now.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) August 8, 2020
A good start would be to make your lies plausible matey.
One of two 90-minute rapid coronavirus tests bought by the UK government and announced on Monday has yet to be approved by regulators, while no data on the accuracy of either has been published, the Guardian has learned.
The test, from Oxford Nanopore, a young biotech company spun off from Oxford University, has not yet gained a CE mark. Before Covid-19, Oxford Nanopore had been involved only in research, not tests for patients.
We’re in an emergency, government should still only buy things that have all the boxes ticked? Or, CE is a European thing. We should be berating the bureaucrats for not pulling their thumbs out?
What, actually, is the complaint you want to make?
An elderly millionairess accused of trying to “seduce” a celebrity dermatologist in a campaign of harassment was trying to seek redress for botched treatment, a court has heard….
OK, there are women like that out there but “I’m going to punish you by having sex with you” is still a fairly low estimation of one’s own worth….
The trip-ups show the political dangers in Mr Biden’s engagement with the media
Which is why the Ds are arguing that there need be no debates and the Rs are calling for more of them.
Stuart Adamson says:
August 6 2020 at 8:28 pm
I remember one prediction you made..“deaths of more than 10,000 a day are likely in little more than a week”
That was off the mark
Reply
Richard Murphy says:
August 6 2020 at 8:39 pm
Lockdown then happenedUnemployment need not be as high as I forecast if action is taken
Context matters
Hmm, well:
As he says, what is notable about the first chart is that everyone else is succeeding in curtailing covid-19 now. We are not.
If the UK current trajectory continues – and as we run out of medical facilities that is a reasonable assumption for the next week or more – then deaths of more than 10,000 a day are likely in little more than a week if the rate of growth seen yesterday continues.
OK, that was on April 2.
Except, UK lockdown started on March 16, went into overdrive March 23. His prediction was 10 days after lockdown, not before.
Does he just think that no one will check these claims?
Corporate Britain is cutting its dividend payments. Despite this, the FTSE 100 index of the largest quoted companies is 20 per cent higher than it was on March 23, the day Boris Johnson announced lockdown.
75% of FTSE 100 revenue comes from outside the UK. The FTSE100 is companies listed in London, not companies working in Britain. Some of them have no connection nor business in the UK other than their listing.
But then Ollie Kamm, everything that’s wrong with the establishment view, always.
For the deer on the Isle of Rum it was mating season, but for Gerald Lincoln the nights were lonely. He was on the island to study their breeding cycle, and would not see his girlfriend for weeks at a time. As the chance to see her approached, Lincoln noticed something strange. His face stubble seemed to grow faster. To check that this was the case, he decided to weigh his shavings every morning, and indeed they were heavier by the day. From this he deduced something remarkable: that the level of testosterone, which determines the pace of beard growth, must be controlled by the cerebrum, the part of the brain from which complex thoughts emerge. The more he thought about his girlfriend, the higher his testosterone rose and the faster his beard grew.
He wrote a paper about it, which the prestigious scientific journal Nature agreed to publish. Highly unusually, the piece appeared anonymously, to spare his mother from the knowledge that he was having sex before marriage.
The truly old days, there was also that interim moment when it would have been her father spared such news.
On the Bristol Bus Company boycott:
At the time, the Bristol Omnibus Company was notorious for racial discrimination in recruitment. Hackett says labourers from the colonies and former colonies were allowed to “wash the buses at night”, but barred from the better-paid work on the bus crews. This segregation was not only upheld by the bus company, but also vigorously defended by the local branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which did not want its members to lose jobs to immigrants.
They even point out that it was a nationalised company too. government and unions, at the time, being more racist that the society around both. Good on them for actually telling the story straight.
Understanding gender identities and personal pronouns?
The musician and poet formerly named Kate Tempest has changed their name to Kae Tempest, and announced they are non-binary.
No, me neither. But let us progress:
In an interview with Notion in August 2019, they discussed their queer identity: “It took me a long time to be able to stand with my own queerness and where I sit on the gender spectrum.
Hmm.
So, queerness – where it doesn’t mean odd – means same sex attraction. If you’ve just declared that you are non-binary you cannot have same sex attraction. Well, presumably. For to do so would require identifying as the sex one is attracted to, no? Or would this mean that one is only attracted to other non-binaries?
So, can you be both non-binary and queer? And if so are peeps being logically serious or just playing around with words?
Of course I know nothing at all about the Maori language but then entire ignorance doesn’t stop most economic commentators either. I think what we’ve got here is euphemism:
A Canadian brewery and a leather store in New Zealand have found themselves in a hairy situation after using te reo Māori to unwittingly name their respective brands after pubic hair.
Canadian brewery, Hell’s Basement, called its New Zealand Pale Ale Huruhuru, while a shop in the New Zealand capital, Wellington, gave its entire outlet the name.
“Some people call it appreciation, I call it appropriation,” te reo Māori exponent and TV personality Te Hamua Nikora said on Facebook, after explaining that most Māori would use the word “huruhuru” as a reference to pubic hair.
Most, use, reference……that is, the word doesn’t actually mean pubic hair at all. It’s a euphemism often used to refer to it. As with, say, the word twat. It can of course mean the female genitalia but that is a euphemism, the correct and actual meaning is “Richard Murphy”. We can see how the euphemism arose, obviously.
This though is more controversial:
“To those who feel disrespected, we apologise. We also do not think pubic hair is shameful, though we admit it may not go well with beer.”
Some portion of that beer is bought in order to gain access to that type of hair….
In their collective resignation, submitted last month, the seven signatorieswrote: “Nobel Women’s Initiative, in our view, requires profound organisational reforms – based on transparency, equity, inclusivity and a commitment to uproot embedded patriarchal practices – in order to fully uphold its values.”
They said the decision to resign followed several attempts to raise their concerns. “Failure to prioritise and address our concerns in a transparent and inclusive manner, and attempts to devalue and diminish our voices, led to our collective resignation. We speak out today to protect future staff and women activists.”
A wimmin’s organisation run by and for wimmins. And all the concerns seem to be about how the organisation is organised, not very much concerning what the organisation does.
It’s not exactly shattering the stereotype that it’s the men who get things done, actually advance society.
The attorney general of New York took action Thursday to dissolve the National Rifle Association following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is “fraught with fraud and abuse.”
The level of self dealing and near looting looks almost Clintonesque to be fair. But it’s this:
The turmoil at the NRA also could have political ramifications ahead of the 2020 elections. The NRA spent tens of millions of dollars in 2016 to support then-candidate Donald Trump — a role it appears it will be unlikely to be able to repeat given its current financial condition.
Gosh, that is a surprise.
The AG of NY is a D.