Current Affairs

Most interesting:

The bill includes a plan for Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies that would set a ceiling for what Medicare would pay for certain medications: no higher than 120 percent of what several other wealthy countries pay. Pharmaceutical companies that did not participate in the negotiations would be subject to a severe excise tax.

I can see negotiate meaning “would you like to give us a nice price?” I can see negotiate meaning as the NHS does, we’re a big customer, give us a discount or we won’t buy it.

But negotiate as in cut your price or we tax you? Bit Lucky Luciano there, isn’t it?

Biden Calls Withdrawal ‘Messy,’

NYT headline.

Vaccine passports are less a threat to liberty than a mark of solidarity
David Robert Grimes

1) Solidarity with you, Matey?

2) We must check your papers for the Jew stamp to ensure solidarity with the Aryan Nation!

Actually, on that second one, I knew a whole bunch of guys who fell afoul of that. Soviet passports contained a “nationality” line of which “Jew” was one possible answer. When they graduated from programming school/university in Moscow all those with “Jew” on that line got offered jobs in godforsaken factories hundreds and hundreds of mile from anything like civilisation. Because, you know, can’t have such racial distinctions in passports without making use of them, right?

This autumn she also plays one of the leads in the eagerly awaited reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise.

Eagerly might be a bit much. As to reboot, that means they’re agreeing that the last one was, as many said, shite? And franchise? A movie and a squib is a franchise now?

Briton suspected of spying for Russia ‘kept himself to himself’

The allegation is that he was pretty open in the one direction….

Roman Abramovich is not Vladimir Putin’s “willing tool” or “cashier” and did not buy Chelsea FC to help Russia corrupt the West, his lawyers have told the High Court.

One muttering going around was that by buying a non-Russia trophy asset he was signalling that he wasn’t interested in – or worried about – internal to Russia power struggles. “Look Boss, I’m out of that game”.

Central London will never return to normal, says NatWest chairman

Not really. What London ends up doing will be normal……

When the 78-year-old widow of a Swiss baron

The Swiss don’t have titles of nobility. Well, other than “Managing Director of private bank” at least.

The Wiki page is fun:

Hans Henrik Ágost Gábor, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva (13 April 1921 – 27 April 2002), an industrialist and art collector, was a Dutch-born Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title and heir to a German fortune, a legal resident of Monaco for tax purposes, with a declared second residency in the United Kingdom, but in actuality a long-time resident of Spain, and son of a German father and a Hungarian and English American mother (related to Daniel M. Frost and John Kerry).[1] His fifth and last wife, Carmen “Tita” Cervera, is a former Miss Spain titleholder.

A European then……

But still, Greer makes two fundamental errors. The first is in believing that the left’s victory for the young arises from a determined manipulation of academia, media, and cultural spaces, rather than a mostly organic reaction to the horrific conservative policy and politics.

So what was that long march through the institutions all about then?

The Queen has awarded the George Cross to the entire NHS, making public a handwritten note in which she praises the “courage, compassion and dedication” of health workers over more than 70 years.

It’s a political award and not a directly Royal one. Boris and mates, not Brenda. She signs, not decides here.

It diminishes all other awards of the GC. As always happens with titles and medals of course. Precisely the value and honour accruing to some really especial gong means that the politicians will, over time demean it.

Duke used to mean war leader, war leader in a real top dog way, the bloke who directed ‘fousands to protect the homeland against Johnny Foreigner. It became the go to title for spare royal bastards requiring a name. A knighthood meant actual prowess in battle, prowess at something at least. Now it goes to whichever civil servant greets Brenda on an overseas trip.

There was hope that GC and VC could avoid that, stay above that fray. And sadly politics doesn’t work that way, does it?

Veterinary college to neuter its courses of colonial bias … if it can find any
The Royal Veterinary College plans to tackle racism in its curriculum, despite staff saying they cannot think of any examples

The task is to operate as race mongers. To identify what is indeed racist and colonialist in vetting. Clearly it is because society as a whole is and that’s all the proof that’s needed. It’s just the examples needed now.

For example, they use the Latin language. That’s racist and colonialist. Equus equus is racist because it doesn’t use the Hausa word which it should instead. No, really, imagining that there is just the one correct phrase to use across all the dark folks languages – without even reference to them? Colonialist bastards. This is not a joke: “Addressing the difficulty of decolonising, an academic on the diversity committee advised that it would include tackling “a colonial legacy” which presents “the white, global North intellectual tradition as superior and universal”.”

They refer to knees. Which sounds like nee as the first part of gro. That’s racist, obviously. Calling something a mandible is clearly sexist, it’s a personible.

See how this game works?

Apparently Jamaicans don’t think much of African Americans – so it is said.

So, err, here – or there – in the UK there is rather a lot of thought about the Jamaican and other Afro Caribbean breakdown of the family and all that.

And these are the people who look down upon the African Americans? Jeebus, how screwed up does that make them?

Biddle’s stories suggest the industry is built to meet the needs of volunteers, not communities. But the problem is not simply that volunteers are unqualified, the entire industry seems to be an extension of a colonial mindset and with colonial structures of economic and political power.

Because colonialism did actually mean sending someone who knew how to dig drains out to dig drains. The problem with this form of volunteering is that folks who have no damn idea go out there to “help”.

We’ve a Chesterton’s Fence here. So, Voluntary Service Overseas. It is decades back that they stopped taking the unqualified and insisted on sending trained nurses to do nursing etc. So, why did they do that?

Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger flight of his space company Blue Origin, which the company plans to launch on July 20, the billionaire announced on Monday.

“I want to go on this flight because it’s the thing I’ve wanted to do all my life,” Bezos said in a video posted to his Instagram.

So this bloke wanted to go into space. He sets up a company, makes a passel of money, builds his own rocket and goes.

How different from wokeism in its varied guises. Which is that the newly favoured must be given space on the rocket someone else has built.

Madeleine McCann is ‘dead and buried in a forest six miles from where she went missing’ claims clairvoyant, who says he has given police ‘exact co-ordinates’ of where her body is

It’s a fairly windblown area and forest isn’t exactly how you’d describe those areas where there are trees.

An event to mark the centenary of one of the worst race massacres has been cancelled in a dispute over payments to descendants of three hundred black Americans and three living survivors.

White mobs destroyed 35 blocks of Tulsa in Oklahoma during a two-day rampage in 1921, also known as the Black Wall Street Massacre because it targeted the wealthiest African-American community in the country.

Plans for a concert today featuring the singer John Legend and the voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams collapsed after a lawyer for the three living survivors, aged 100, 106 and 107, raised their demand for payment for attending from $100,000 to $1 million each. A second demand for proceeds from the ticketed concert for a fund for heirs of those who lost their lives, homes or businesses was increased from $2 million to $50 million.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission said it could not agree to the last-minute terms and called off the event but plans to go ahead with a candlelit vigil tonight.

Grifters gonna grift but really……

A British scientist who took part in a World Health Organisation mission to investigate whether Covid leaked from a Wuhan laboratory has suggested that China had been “misunderstood” over its refusal to address growing suspicions about the origins of the disease.

Dr Peter Daszak said he sympathised with the Chinese government for refusing to give “oxygen” to “conspiracy theories”, and cast doubt on US intelligence suggesting that three workers at the Wuhan lab fell ill shortly before the first recorded case of Covid-19.

This is the bloke who took the money from the US government and then hired the Wuhan institute to do the work. On adding stuff to coronaviruses in that “gain of function” stuff.

Hey, it’s even possible he’s right but it’s also obvious that this is what he would be saying…..

President also asks US intelligence community to explore the unlikely possibility that virus origins trace to Chinese lab

Still “unlikely” at The Guardian…..

Biden’s request included asking the US intelligence community to explore the unlikely possibility that the origins of the virus trace to Chinese lab. After months of minimizing the possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is responding both to domestic and geopolitical concerns about putting pressure on China to be transparent about the outbreak.

Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory accident, rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal.

Because if Trump said it therefore of course it must be wrong, right?

Social distancing on buses ends as restrictions are relaxed
Strangers will sit next to one another on buses once more with capacity doubling to 60 passengers in London as coronavirus restrictions ease

Now the nutter can find me…….

At an Independent Sage briefing on Friday, we heard from Global Justice Now, an NGO that has been leading calls for a “people’s vaccine” approach. This would enable the production of open-licence Covid-19 vaccines that are available to everyone, everywhere, regardless of income, status, or background.

Vaccine production is not currently being limited by patents. Rather, by knowledge of how to make the vaccines and the equipment to do so. Malawi – just to take an example at random – does not have the ability to produce vaccines. Thus patents are not the limitation upon vaccine production in Malawi.

But there’s a better guide to nutterdom.

If you’re allying with Global Justice Now then you’re a nutter. Simples.