80mph speed limit \’risks rise in road deaths and obesity’
and a potential rise in obesity due to more people taking advantage of shorter car journeys.
Eh? They\’re raising the speed limit on motorways for cock\’s sake.
A motorway journey is not a subsititute for a waddle around to the corner shop for lardy buns.
A MONK who used to teach at one of England\’s premier Roman Catholic boys\’ schools has been jailed for five years after being found guilty of abusing pupils under his charge in the late 1980s.
Richard White, now 66, was a geography teacher at Downside School near Bath when he was identified as a possible risk to pupils, but no legal action was taken. Instead, Father Nicholas – as he was known at the school – was warned about his behaviour towards a 12-year-old and was switched to teaching older boys.
No, don\’t know him at all, just after my time there.
But something really doesn\’t ring true about this at all. A monk teaching geography? Surely not.
Every public school I\’ve ever heard of reserves that subject for the games masters I thought.
You know, on the basis that it\’s a simple enough subject that they should be able to work out which end of the book to start reading to the class from?
Certainly for years I thought that a geographer\’s uniform was some variation of a tracksuit.
The Budapest protests must be heeded in a region walking a line between budding democracy and revisionist nationalism.
Could anyone parse that sentence for me?
I\’m not in favour of what Fidesz is doing myself but what on earth does what they\’ve said there mean?
For example, what is the conflict between democracy and revisionist? Even, between democracy, budding or otherwise, and nationalism?
I think we\’d all agree that Scotland is becoming more nationalist as time passes and I\’ve not seen anyone complain that that is either an affront to or incompatible with democracy.
In effect a deeply neoliberal government has done all it can to completely gut the Hungarian constitution and leave single party rule in perpetuity. In the process it is silencing the opposition, rigging the judiciary, stacking all government positions with its place-people, over-ruling local government and ensuring a flat tax system for the benefit of the rich in perpetuity.
This is totalitarianism back in Europe.
Apparently he doesn\’t actually like a Courageuous State in reality.
Her government\’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain\’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a \”productivity miracle\” that never was, and we\’re living with the consequences today.
Strange that manufacturing output was higher when she left office than before she took it really.
What she did succeed in doing was to restore class privilege, boosting profitability while slashing employees\’ share of national income from 65% to 53% through her assault on unions.
And you don\’t know your economic statistics, do you?
GDP does not split into labour income and capital income.
A goodly part of that fall in labour income is in fact the introduction of VAT, the raising of VAT, the raising of employers\’ national insurance payments and the rise in self-employment.
One day, if I get bored enough to work out how to use Excel, I\’ll prove it too.
Yet government is nothing if it is not asserting moral imperatives and if it is not trying to act in a moral way
Government is a method of working out who empties the rubbish bins not a form of moral imposition.
As long as it\’s consenting adults and they\’re not frightening the horses the morals of the populace, the actions of the citizenry, are not the concern of government in the slightest.
It\’s one of the reasons I despise conservatives: they\’re just as eager to impose their strictures on us all as the socialists, the puritans and the various flavours of moral idiots are. It\’s just that they are different strictures.
Fuck off will you, we\’re free people in a free land.
This might not be widespread news over here as yet. But Rick Santorum, while running for President (actually, at present, for the Republican nomination for such) has something of a problem.
It\’s delicately referred to as Santorum\’s \”Google Problem\”.
Nothing illustrates this better than what Mr Santorum calls his \”Google problem\”, which has been an irritation for nine years.
In retaliation for his comparing gay relationships with bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, gay rights activists flooded the internet with graphic false claims about what his surname really meant.
This explicit description remains the top web search result for the former Pennsylvania senator, a 53-year-old father of seven children.
Well, no, it\’s not the top result. The Wikipedia entry about it is, then there\’s his own Wikipedia entry and then, at least on my version of the results, comes the entry which is indeed his problem.
The basic background is that he did something (can\’t remember what) to piss off Dan Savage, the sex columnist at the Village Voice. Who then launched a campaign to get a new meaning associated with the word santorum.
Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.
That is something of a problem. That the dastardly liberals have done this to him might whip up his base among the die hard cultural conservatives but a politician who is being laughed at really does have a problem.
As to who I want to win, well, it\’s not my country, not something I have a vote in but Santorum would be a retrograde step I think. To put it mildly. Romney, well, there\’s a problem again. I think that the worst thing that Obama has done is his horrible mangling of health care reform. Given that this is based on Romneycare (ie, what Romney instituted when Gov of Massachussetts) then that\’s not something that would be undone or corrected under Romney.
Other than Gary Johnson (who has no hope at all, sadly) the rest of the Repubs are worse. And it isn\’t as if Obama\’s been all that good on anything is it?
Doesn\’t bode well for the American Republic that they\’re going to end up choosing from among that bunch of political pygmies and outright idiots.
1) Write about Google at a well known media outlet.
2) Write something about Google at a well known media site that Google would like to finesse.
3) Profit!
The Budapest government saw borrowing costs soar and the currency plunge as traders bet that international authorities may abandon Hungary, letting it become the first European Union country to default on its debts.
The florint fell more than 1pc to a record low against the euro and bond yields soared over 10pc. The Hungarian government, which has defied Brussels by introducing a raft of radical constitutional reforms, called off its plans to swap old debt for new because it would be too expensive.
I don\’t know the details there at all. Only that yields of over 10% when base rate is 7.5% don\’t seem that terrible.
Yes, Hungarian base rate is 7.5%. For they\’ve their own currency you see, the forint.
And according to absolutely everyone a country with its own currency, its own central bank, its own printing presses, can never actually go bankrupt, never actually need to default.
As long as it is borrowing in its own currency that is and these bonds are indeed forint bonds.
So, what is special about Hungary that this \”it can\’t ever happen\” rule doesn\’t apply to them? Or alternatively, maybe the can\’t ever happen rule is wrong?
And if its the latter, then some of the people urging reflation and borrow and damn the bond vigilantes here in the UK have some \’splainin\’ to do, no?
but no article on pensions “reform” would be complete without special mention of Mr Brown’s act of pensions vandalism, when he removed the tax credit on dividends to help fund public spending. Without the abolition of this tax break, many funds would still be in surplus.
Is it actually true though? Anyone know?
Back when he did it it cost £5 billion a year, meaning a capital value of £50-£100 billion or so.
Is that enough to swing the whole system from viability to inviability?
The Stiglitzian prescription is to raise the profile of fiscal deficits, that is, to issue more debt and to print more money. You seem to believe that if a distressed government issues more currency, its citizens will suddenly think it more valuable. You seem to believe that when investors are no longer willing to hold a government\’s debt, all that needs to be done is to increase the supply and it will sell like hot cakes. We at the IMF—no, make that we on the Planet Earth—have considerable experience suggesting otherwise. We earthlings have found that when a country in fiscal distress tries to escape by printing more money, inflation rises, often uncontrollably. Uncontrolled inflation strangles growth, hurting the entire populace but, especially the indigent. The laws of economics may be different in your part of the gamma quadrant, but around here we find that when an almost bankrupt government fails to credibly constrain the time profile of its fiscal deficits, things generally get worse instead of better.
And it’s also about time that Labour asked why it is so important that the state subsidise the lifestyle of so many people working for large companies who do not pay high enough wages, and have no intention of paying enough to ensue their employees have a hope of making ends meet. Because let’s be clear what these benefits are – many of which go to those in work. What they actually represent are straightforward subsidies to the profit of companies who can underpay their staff as a result, and as such they’re another shift from the poorest to the richest in society.
Quite right too.
And we most certainly shouldn\’t be subsidising the profits of large companies nor aiding the shift of incomes and resources from the poorest to the richest.
And it is indeed these in work benefits which cause this. Therefore of course we should abolish all in work benefits, to stop the subsidisation of such large corporate profits.
The Nobel prize, and now honorary knighthoods, awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov reaffirm the old adage that the simplest ideas are the best.
Mssrs Geim and Novoselov are British citizens. There is nothing honorary about their knighthoods they are now, respectively, Sir Andre and Sir Konstantin.
Grrr.
The Independent Healthcare Advisory Service, which represents all the major cosmetic surgery chains, is calling on the government\’s expert working group, which begins its investigation on Wednesday, to look carefully at new figures it has obtained from an audit of all its members.
The figures, from thousands of patients, show a rupture rate within the accepted norm of 1%-2%, says the IHAS. The organisation is publicly distancing itself from the figures supplied before Christmas by Transform, an IHAS member and one of the biggest cosmetic surgery chains. Transform reported a rupture rate of around 7%, but from a group of around 100 clients, triggering the government inquiry.
This still leaves the problem of their being made of industrial rather than medical grade silicone but at least, while the ingredients weren\’t up to snuff, the actual manufacturing was.
But I have to say what interested me most was the picture the Guardian (of all places) used to illustrate the story.
![\"\"](\"https://www.timworstall.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/A-breast-implant-produced-007.jpg\" "\\"A-breast-implant-produced-007\\"")
That\’s an airbag and a half, isn\’t it? Suitable, one would have thought, only for strippers and a certain type of \”actress\”.
Which I rather thought the Guardian was against really.
Manufacturers ended 2011 with their worst quarter since Britain was in the grip of recession, although the pace of contraction slowed in December.
The closely watched Markit Purchasing Managers Index survey, which asks manufacturers about their output and order books, showed a reading of 49.6 last month — an improvement on the 47.7 recorded in November, but still below the 50 mark which signals expansion.
The MPMI explores the rate of change, not the absolute level.
\”Worst\” describes the absolute level not the rate of change.
Acceleration and deceleration are simply not the same thing as speed.
Surrounded by the wreckage of their system, some Eurofanatics are still asking for more time. The Marxists used to do the same. It is now time for the federasts to follow the Inquisition, Apartheid and the Marxists – out of history.
No, not because I\’m some scumbag racist, no, not because it\’s a bad idea that murderers go to jail. Rather, this:
But in 2005 a chink of light emerged when the double jeopardy rule was abolished, meaning the men could be re-tried.
Double jeopardy is one of our protections against them. Us as citizens against those who would rule us.
The abolition of it leaves us open to continual prosecution: if they don\’t manage to get a jury to convict us first time they can just try and try again.
This is a very good example of why hard cases make bad law. That racist murderers go to jail, Hurrah!
That all 65 million of us are stripped of a protection in order to do so, Booo!
His comments follow the revelation that Barclays has stockpiled billions of pounds of \”losses\” to reduce future tax bills, despite not having made a loss at group level for over a decade. They also come shortly after the pledge by Bob Diamond, Barclays\’ chief executive, for \”banks to be better citizens\”.
He then goes on to repeat the nonsense he spouted yesterday.
I mean seriously, what the hell is this with \” \” around losses?
As an example: I\’ve no idea about the Telegraph\’s finances but I\’m sure that there are some parts of the group that make losses, other parts that make profits. You get to offset one against the other. That\’s certainly true at the Guardian Media Group, is it not?
However, when you start going over tax jurisdiction boundaries then it\’s not quite so simple. You don\’t get to say well, we made a loss in Spain therefore the tax on our UK business is reduced. The loss in Spain gets \”warehoused\” until you\’re making a profit in Spain against which you can offset those previous losses.
So it\’s entirely obvious that you can have losses in an international group, even while having overall profits…..and thus tax credits in places even while having overall profits.
So what is Aldrick doing? Is this simply that he\’s got the wrong end of the stick? Or is he being told to write this nonsense?