Trump, ever the embellisher, has upped the ante from socialism to communism. And, as with the red-baiting of the past 40 years, he hardly cares about the gulf separating the economic system of communism and the social democratic politics that progressive candidates espouse. Trump hurls “communist” indiscriminately and hopes it’ll stick.
Like lefties distinguish between pro-consumer advocacy of more markets and pro-capitalist advocacy of more corporate power. Right?
John Healey, the Chancellor, has warned supermarkets that he will not allow them to take the public “for a ride” as a result of the Middle East crisis.
Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Healey said he would be watching closely for “any suggestion” that customers are being ripped off, either when shopping for essential groceries or when filling up their car at the petrol pump.
He promised to get tough on “price-gouging” at the pump or the till, cautioning that regulators “have the powers to clamp down on it if it happens”.
Our remarkable bureaucracy, those Rolls Royce minds, have taken unto themselves the power to insist upon what prices should be in the shops.
This will not work out well.
In late June the US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick requested a meeting with executives from ASML, a Dutch company that produces chip-making equipment, to share concerns that one of its machines had found its way into China in violation of US-led export restrictions.
ASML denied the accusation. It says it knows the exact location of all 340 of its extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines – laser-powered devices that effectively act as a bottleneck for making the most advanced semiconductors used in AI technology. Not one of them is in China.
But in a way, Lutnick was right to worry. Reports emerged last week that an unnamed Shanghai-based company has worked out how to make its own slightly less advanced version of the huge and extraordinarily complex ASML machines, and aims to produce five of them next year.
You might not make it quite as well, might not be quite as accurate and all that. But nothing that can be done by one set of engiineers cannot then be done by some other set. A technological lead never does last, not unless the boundary itself is continually being pushed further.
The reason is obvious. The grand difficulty of any sort of development is in finding out what can be done at all. Once it’s known that this, this ‘ere, is possible then it’s simpler – note, not simple, but -er – to work out how to do what it is known can be done.
A technological monopoly can exist for several reasons. Law on IP, for example, or it’s so small that no one can be bothered breaking it, or that the leading monopolist keeps inventing new stuff and so recreating the monopoly. But just I’ve made this and no one else has is very different from no one else will make this now I’ve shown it is possible.
The extreme heat and drought stoking huge wildfires in Spain and France were made far more likely by the climate crisis, a scientific analysis has found.
Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France, experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated. The finding is the latest to pin the blame for the continent’s sweltering and deadly summer firmly on the heating caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal.
As I keep pointing out, we had a wet winter therefore were going to have a fiery summer. It’s always hot and dry here, there are always fires, this is how the local environment works. How many, how big and how much burning the fires do depends upon how much fireload there is from the previous winter.
Lying bastard twats.
The punters of Monaghans seafront bar had barely finished watching the Nations League final on 8 June when a car pulled up outside. A masked gunman emerged and headed to the table of 46-year-old Eddie Lyons Jr, shooting him at point-blank range. The assassin turned the gun on Lyons’ friend, the bar’s owner Ross Monaghan, 43, but it jammed.
Grainy CCTV captured Monaghan racing inside the bar, pursued by the gunman, and falling to the ground, where he was shot three times while crawling on his hands and knees. The shooter fled the scene and, allegedly, the country too.
This double murder in a public place was the apex of 25 bloody years of feuding between two Glasgow families and their allies in organised crime: the most untouchable gang in Scotland, the Lyons, and their bitter rivals, the Daniels.
As I recall BiS got very sniffy about that bar.
Quite right too – who would want to buy Guinness off Scots?
To do so, I look at why millions of graduates in India cannot find work,
Because they sent million upon million to third rate universities with fourth rate teaching staff?
The rate is staying fixed for now, but three of the nine members wanted an increase, apparently thinking that inflation caused by oil price increases, in turn caused by war, represent excess demand in the UK economy that they must stamp out with an interest rate rise, when the exact opposite is true: the inflation is a sign of shrinking demand in the eocnomy as spending power is shifting to oil and we need a rate cut as a result.
By simply ignoring everything about a subject.
The policy relevant inflation rate is the core one, the one without fuel prices. Therefore the MPC looks at inflation *without* fuel prices to see whether they should change rates and in which direction. They specifically, and deliberately, exclude the very thing Spud is wibbling about.
Sigh.
Families to be moved out of billionaire-owned tower after suffering without air con
Several councils to stop housing tenants in glass-fronted Britannia Point in London, where tenants were earlier told they could not use air con
Air conditioning is immoral, isn’t it? It’s escaping Gaia’s wrath and therefore no one should have it?
The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, who cut short a tour of France on medical advice that at seven months pregnant she should avoid breathing smoke-filled air in the south-west near a huge wildfire in Gironde, said the political class still had its head in the sand.
She said the government had ignored her plea for cross-party crisis talks to declare a national state of emergency on the climate this summer. She called for a new “climate welfare state” in France to help those whose lives were being affected as about 260,000 people were evacuated because of wildfires across the country.
But French politicians focused instead this week on arguments over budgets, crisis planning and criticisms over the levels of state funding for emergency services and equipment to fight fires, including water-bombing planes. The more complex longer-term issues of cutting emissions and structural societal changes to address climate heating were largely left aside.
You mean that no one was willing to agree with “structural societal changes” ? You know, abolish capitalism in order to appease Gaia? Shock, eh?
On Thursday evening, Spain’s interior ministry announced that 60 members of the armed forces would be deployed to Ceuta, along with an additional 30 Guardia Civil officers. “The armed forces will reinforce the Guardia Civil in the exercise of its powers and any others that may be necessary to maintain security in the city of Ceuta,” the ministry said.
But it rejected calls for the declaration of a national emergency, saying such emergencies could not be declared over migration issues, and could be declared only in response to dire meteorological events – such as the current wildfires – or in the face of a volcanic or nuclear threat.
Caesar, the Alemanni have overrun Gaul!
Pity we cannot declare an emergency, eh?
In this video, I look at the evidence on lifespan and healthy lifespan, explain why they are diverging, and ask what is driving the trend. Poverty, insecure work, poor housing, ultra-processed food, excessive reliance on medication and growing inequality all play a part. Unless we tackle those underlying causes, social care costs will continue to rise.
The reason I wrote the book is that there’s an opportunity here: what’s collapsing is the post-industrial, colonialist, extractivist, growth-based system. If we tether ourselves to that system, we will go down with it, but if we start to distance ourselves, see what’s happening and refuse to take part in its worst excesses, the better chance we have. The way it’s going, the ultra-rich and the tech bros are going to take everything anyway. The market is going to collapse, the millionaire set will suddenly be without assets, and that’s when revolution happens.
This is not particularly new. Every generation has had such an anti-Cassandra.
Anyone who tries to tell you when and how collapse is going to happen, I wouldn’t believe them. We know that certain models are going to decline, but how that plays out will depend on how those things interact together, and also where you live.
Always the handwavey but it’s gonna be terrible, see?
we took individualism too far, capitalism no longer serves us
Sigh.
Not everyone has the capacity to comprehend all of this. Those of us who do,
Shut up, proles, and listen to the self-selected elite. So unusual, no?
Researchers have found that the two determinants of the speed and likelihood of collapse are basically levels of inequality and polarisation.
How fashionable.
We need to be going collectivist.
Shut up, proles.
Abject tossery from start to finish. But it will sell, obviously it will.
A quarter of young Africans believe aid cuts by the US could have a positive impact, saying that losing foreign money will force leaders to confront and solve their own challenges, according to a new survey.
Very Peter Bauer in fact.
There is debate among experts about how far the fifth amendment extends. Some argue that once a person accepts a presidential pardon, they cannot invoke the fifth amendment for federal crimes. Without that right, Congress could hold a witness in contempt, which can lead to fines or – in the extreme – jail time. Others have argued that the right extends as long as there is a valid threat of prosecution, particularly by states.
And this part is untrue:
The hearing was a continuation of Paul’s years-long support of the “lab leak” theory, or the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic began as a release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a theory many virologists contend is improbable.
As Matt Ridley’s reporting the messages from virologist to virologist seem to indicate that pretty much everyone thought it was lableak. Just weren’t willing to say so. Which is, you know, fairly important?
Memory giant Sandisk — which fell 11 per cent on Monday — plunged more than 13 per cent on Tuesday. The stock has lost more than 50 per cent of its value this month, but nevertheless remains more than four times higher since the start of 2026.
There is no logic to any of that.
And we are told markets should be relied upon and that they know the answers to all questions.
If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that they don’t.
AI uses lots of momery, memory prices rise, makers of memory rise as their profits soar – their production costs have not gone up, only their selling prices.
Then, some time later, we find out that maybe AI isn’t going to be quite the thing we thought it was going to be. Thus memory prices, the margins of memory makers, might fall. Moemry maker prices fall.
Prices in markets have reacted, twice, to new knowledge about what prices should be. This is proof that markets don’t know? Rilly?
Let me then suggest a better tax, if we do want a progressive consumption tax, which I happen to think might be desirable.
I’ve described this alternative on a number of occasions. It is a financial transactions tax on all financial flows through UK-based bank accounts,
A financial transactions tax is not a consumption tax. For it’s a tax on financial transactions, not on consumption. Obviously.
Anyway, institute that and gaze in wonder as cash usage soars.
Of course, the scale of big oil’s climate liability will only grow in the coming years – this is, after all, not just the hottest summer of our lives, but the coolest summer for the rest of our lives. Someday, we can hope that the corporate actors responsible for such breathtaking havoc will face a made-to-fit tribunal that can fully address the ways they have condemned my five-year-old and countless children like him to a dangerous future. But we don’t need to wait.
Climate victims deserve justice now, and the officials responsible for pursuing that justice have all the laws they need to begin prosecuting big oil today. So next time you hear a climate disaster described as a crime, remember that this isn’t just rhetoric. These really are crimes. It’s time we treated them that way.
So let’s charge them all with involuntary manslaughter or some such and ……well, and then what? The lawyers get lots of money and then what?
Well, then we will have to move on to the idea that it’s actually us that uses oil, us that likes using oil. So do we all get prosecuted too?
Flawed and racialised models that underpin the AI-powered age-detection systems to be introduced by the British government will endanger children, rights groups and children’s charities have warned.
Urging ministers to reverse plans to introduce facial age-estimation technology to screen migrants, critics have warned that black children arriving from conflict zones are at risk of being of thrust into the adult system.
So, correct the models and then use it.
Shrug, this isn’t difficult logic here.
The observatory’s funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), said on Monday it would withdraw funding for the e-Merlin network, the UK’s national radio astronomy facility at Jodrell Bank, when the current agreement ends in March 2028.
Find the list of what UKRI does fund. Highlight the £3 million going into the PhdD on gay pornography or whatever, compare and contrast.
Anyone with any young relatives looking to get into journalism, set them that task. Lovely bit of training, that.
It also suggests that the replacement of one group with another, such as evidence of the near-total disappearance of the Stonehenge-building Neolithic Britons, just a few centuries after the arrival of the Bell Beaker people around 2400BC, was relatively common. But it cannot answer why or how that replacement took place. These are big questions that will keep scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists busy for decades.
Why actively import your replacements?