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Tim Worstall

Politics, “real politics” is not his thing, is it?

Seventhly, there’s also a chance that the obvious corruption of the Orbán years might be addressed. So blatant has been the devotion of funds to his own family that it must be hoped that Orbán himself will be prosecuted. That would be an exceedingly useful precedent, not least in the message it might send to the White House.

The reason you don’t prosecute those leaving power is that if you do then those fearful of being prosecuted won’t leave power…..

No doubt terribly unfair and all that but realpolitik is a thing.

Surprise!

Most Australian children have evaded the government’s ban on social media for under-16s, a new survey has found.

Now that is just astonishing, isn’t it?

There’s an obvious solution here

As Laurie Penny will not agree to:

Which is what happened in 2014. In May of that year, the terrorist Elliot Rodger killed six people and brought global attention to “incels” – young men radicalised by sexual resentment.

80% of women have to stop doing what they are doing, chasing the top 20% of men, and start plugging uglies with the ugly. Then there would be no incels.

Well, yes, but Rhiannon

Does having children make you happier? Apparently not, according to a new study published in Evolutionary Psychology which, despite involving more than 5,000 participants in 10 countries, including Britain, could find no strong evidence that parenthood led to a measurable increase in positive emotions. The researchers, led by Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia, looked at both hedonic wellbeing (day-to-day emotional states such as joy, sadness and loneliness) and eudaimonic wellbeing (a feeling of purpose and meaning). With the exception of mothers in Greece, who felt a greater sense of the latter, there was no statistically significant difference between parents and non-parents, suggesting that becoming a parent leaves your emotional wellbeing largely unchanged.

There’s rather a lot of study of this which suggests that humns have a pre-set happiness level. Not wholly, not exactly, but some folks are happy, some ain’t. And while those levels can change fairly drastically given events – losing a leg say – they do seem to gravitate back to that pre-set level over about 6 months.

Pity a column about all of this didn’t include all of that really, no? Just the usual navel gazing – “but am I happier?” – plus the nod to correctness – but of course people can be happy if they decide not to have children. Sigh.

Doublespeak

A government spokesperson said: “Diego Garcia is a key strategic military asset for both the UK and the US. Ensuring its long-term operational security is, and will continue to be, our priority – it is the entire reason for the deal.

We ensure the security of a military base by giving it away to a foreign govt largely controlled by one of our enemies/rivals.

Only someone who did PPE could believe that.

Oh, very funny, very funny indeed

The United Nations is reviewing whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos surrender breaches international human rights laws in what could jeopardise the deal.
Officials are assessing allegations that the Prime Minister is committing a “crime against humanity” for attempting to evict native Chagossians from the archipelago as part of his plans to cede the British territory to Mauritius.

The entire pay to give it away idea stems from the ‘uman rights lawyers. Hoist petard etc.

Of course, the reaction is going to be but, but, that’s not real ‘uman rights law, is it?

Bureaucracy doesn’t do nuance

It’s a big problem for the National Trust, which rents out 2,500 properties – a large number of which are thatched and built with cob and timber. The charity must upgrade them under the net zero rules at significant cost, and many of the properties are listed or else impossible to upgrade to the required standard.

All must, etc etc. But that’s the problem – some cannot. So, what do we then do with old properties – like listed ones – that cannot be brought up to standard?

Bureaucracies simply don;t do nuance, nor do dictats from the centre. Sigh.

He’s flipped

The extension of this idea into supermarkets is, however, what truly worries me. As Steve Keen and I discussed today in our podcast/video, the risk of potential famine, including in the UK, is high right now.

Famine? Jeebus.

It is easy to imagine where this might be most easily achieved. I suspect, in view of the current uncertainties over petrol and diesel supply, the likelihood that these will be subjected to dynamic pricing quite soon is very high indeed. We are already used to the price of these products changing regularly,

And, so, pricing which changes is a disaster because we’ve already a system in which prices change?

The reality is that we are very likely to need food rationing and price controls this year to ensure the supply of essential items to everyone in the UK.

Wholly flipped.

even in a country such as the UK, where there is a high likelihood of there being sufficient food to go around if properly allocated,

We can imagine who will be doing the allocation here, can’t we? As with the Soviets – the party vanguard will require higher rations given the importance of their work.

a reliance upon rationing by price would represent reckless irresponsibility on our government’s part.

But price is the efficient method of rationing. Both by people reducing demand – no, it is not possible to state that every calorie currently eaten by a Brit is necessary – and also by increasing supply. Potatoes rise in price, more people plant potatoes in the back flower verge. And yes, everything happens at the margin…..

This is one of Spud’s stolons

Starbucks’s UK retail arm received a £13.7m corporation tax credit last year, even as its sales increased 6% and it added more than 90 stores.

The credit, which can be used to offset future tax bills, comes after losses widened to £41.3m in the 12 months to the end of September – almost matching the £40m it paid in royalty and licence fees to its parent company.

Starbucks said price increases, new loyalty schemes and the introduction of “freshly baked in-store food” had helped to increase sales to £556.3m, accounts filed at Companies House show.

Paul Monaghan, the chief executive of the Fair Tax Foundation campaign group, said: “This all feels so very Groundhog Day. As per a decade ago, Starbucks UK reports annual growth in income and store numbers, whilst at the same time declaring a loss due to the payment of hefty royalty fees to other Starbucks subsidiaries. The end result, no corporation tax is paid.”

As when Murph was complaining about Starbucks all those years ago. The issue is indeed transfer pricing. Starbucks does franchise out the name in some territories. In order not to move profit around Starbucks must therefore charge its own stores that same amount. That’s what the transfer pricing rules demand – subsidiaries, related companies, are treated as if they are third party and are charged the same prices as third parties.

That is, this is all known as “obeying the law”. Obeying not just the jot and tittle of it but the intention, meaning and spirit of it.

Yes, HMRC did have an investigation into the prices Starbucks was charging. They said they were fine.

The Fair Tax Foundation is one of those little groupuscules Spud founded. Wouldn’t it be nice if a groupuscule Spud founded actually grasped tax law?

It’s an interesting mindset

Imagine your house is on fire, and when you dial 999 the call handler suggests you try putting the blaze out yourself. Resources are tight, you see, and demand high, and the service increasingly relies on volunteers. Or perhaps your child’s maths teacher is off sick. The headteacher texts and asks if you can leave work to explain algebra to the class. It’s your family, after all, so shouldn’t you be the one to help?

The idea is ludicrous of course. And yet that’s exactly what is happening to the almost 6 million people in the UK who are unpaid carers for sick, disabled and older relatives. While we rightly wince at headlines of DIY dentistry and patients on NHS waiting lists crowdfunding for surgery, it has long been normalised for family to fill the gaping holes in the social care system.

Or a horrific one, obviously.

Is the state there to fill in the gaps between society’s activities? Or should the state do everything and society fill in the State’s cracks?

What a lovely view

Since then, the US has pushed countries across the region to terminate these agreements, branding them “forced labour” and even “human trafficking” because the Cuban state retains a share of salaries. Conveniently ignoring that these doctors were trained free of charge by the Cuban government, unlike their heavily indebted counterparts in countries such as the UK where medical graduates have the onerous burden of student debt for decades.

So, if you get trained by the State – say, we go back to grants for uni – then the State gets to allocate your labour forever? You become, in fact, helots of the State?

Well, there’s an argument in favour of student loans then, eh?

As before, I think about

The 21 year old lass who wanted to sell some of her paintings to Eppie and ended up taking a concubine’s posting (free flat in NY, pay in sex) from him:

Survivors of Epstein’s abuse accuse Melania Trump of ‘shifting burden’ on to victims

It’s very difficult for me to think of that lass – who is suing the Giuffre estate for some reason – as a victim. Unwise quite possibly but that’s not the same thing.

More than a dozen survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have accused Melania Trump of “shifting the burden” on to them after she called on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.

“Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” said a group of 13 people and the brother and sister of the late Virginia Giuffre, who was one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, in a statement. “Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility not justice.”

And that is just pathetic.

Yep, wrong again

Steve’s data shows that the correlation between energy availability and consumption as expressed by GDP, or rather gross world product, which he calls GWP, is very clear and direct. If energy availability is reduced, so too will GWP fall, and the rather ridiculous neoliberal belief that there are alternative supplies to turn on to replace the lost capacity is based on the idea of efficient markets, which can always supposedly react in a moment to price signals, with time to create capacity never being a constraint. That assumption is going to be cruelly exposed at this moment as the nonsense it really is.

The efficient markets hypothesis does not say that markets are efficient. Not in the sense that Murph is using here that is. We all agree that there are some things markets do not do efficiently, just as there are things they do do so.

The EMH says that markets are efficient at processing the information about what prices should be in a market.

Thus, as so often, Spud is chasing a strawman.

Moron

“The UK’s glyphosate addiction has spiralled out of control,” said Nick Mole of Pesticide Action Network UK, a campaign group which carried out the analysis. “We know that glyphosate has links to a range of cancers and other life-threatening diseases. And that it damages the environment, polluting our waters and harming wildlife.

“The government urgently needs to commit to phase out – and ultimately ban – glyphosate and support farmers and local councils to adopt safe and sustainable alternatives.”

There are no alternatives that actually do the job. That’s why we use it.

“The primary use of glyphosate in the UK is it’s applied before the crop is planted to kill off all the weeds that are growing in the field,” said Helen Metcalfe, an agricultural ecologist at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

The turn toward less destructive “regenerative” farming is a key reason for the increase in the use of glyphosate, Metcalfe said. The alternative would be to plough the field, destroying the weeds. But that would also damage the soil “and that’s what farmers are trying to protect”, she said. “They’re trying to protect their soil, trying to prevent erosion, trying to build up carbon in the soil and all that good stuff. To be able to do regenerative farming well you need to apply glyphosate.”

Quite.

It’s a shocker of a negotiating tactic, innit?

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilization” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran. The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war. Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump – thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

In other words, Tuesday’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he’ll frame it as a victory).
In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Greenland.

Of course, this is Robert Reich who would diagree if The D said “Good morning”. But – if you don’t then I’ll and then they do so you don’t have to – the tactic of people doing what you want is so obviously a defeat, right?

Sounds very evil really

As dystopian as this sounds, Doyley’s story is one among several of its kind, where pregnant people are being forced to undergo medical procedures such as C-sections. And it’s right on theme with the broader ways the US government is working to strip women of their bodily autonomy and their rights.

Gosh. As opposed to our Own Dear NHS whree babbies die because the madwives insist upon natural birth, right? But:

Doyley, who worked as a birthing doula, had been clear that she didn’t want a C-section unless there was an emergency. At an hours-long online court hearing conducted from her hospital bedside – while she was in labor – a judge ruled she could continue to labor, but if there were an emergency, the hospital could operate whether she wanted it or not. Hours later, she woke up to find herself being wheeled into surgery – doctors said the baby’s heart rate had dropped for seven minutes overnight – and she gave birth via C-section.

There’s at least an argument that such is a medical emergency, no?

Researchers have also found that Black and white patients declined care at the same rate, yet practitioners were more likely to accept the wishes of white patients, and more likely to go ahead with the procedure without consent when it came to pregnant Black people. This disparity falls right in line with the ways that Black women have historically been subject to all kinds of reproductive abuse, from forced sterilization to unethical experimentation.

And yet everywhere – well, everywhere there are decent statistics – black babbies die at a higher rate than white. Perhaps there’s something about the physique etc?

Ahh, here’s what it’s really about:

Another deeply troubling and dangerous aspect of all this is the way the fetal personhood crowd positions pregnant people as incubators,
….
It’s also a sign of just how far the government plans to go in stripping pregnant people of their bodily autonomy.

If more states dig their heels in on the fetal personhood movement, that will mean even more vulnerable patients at risk of being forced into procedures they don’t want.

Medical intervention means the babby is being thought of as a person, a person whose interests must be taken into account. If that happens then what happens to abortion rights?

One step forward

With no options left, the doctors offered a treatment known as CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy, which has proved gamechanging for certain cancers. The team extracted the woman’s white blood cells and isolated her T-cells, which patrol the body and kill infected or abnormal cells. The doctors engineered the T-cells to recognise a protein called CD19 found on B-cells and re-infused them into the patient.

I’m always amazed by people who say that there’s no innovation, no technological advance these days. Even if we take out the AI, phones and internet, there’s still this sort of stuff. 30 years ago no one would even have known whih three diseases the poor woman had let alone how to treat them….