Current Affairs

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.

“Because I was horny”

is one potential answer.

“How dare you plebs question the behaviour of your superior”

is another one.

Of course, I’ve not bothered to read the article to find out which one he deployed. Given that the second is clearly the one he meant.

Deloitte’s diversity champion Dimple Agarwal, one of the firm’s most senior UK consultants, is being investigated over accusations of bullying and inappropriate working practices.

Ms Agarwal, who is deputy UK chief executive and head of “people and purpose” at the Big Four firm, faced complaints from distressed staff over allegations she communicated aggressively and demanded that workers attend extremely early morning meetings.

10 am?

An activist appointed by Sadiq Khan to review London’s statues has been labelled “racist” after he accused Diane Abbott of being “disloyal to her own community” and David Lammy of being a “poor example of Africans”.

Toyin Agbetu, who was recently appointed to the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, made a series of disparaging racial remarks about senior black Labour politicians in a blog online, The Telegraph can disclose.

The remarks have led Shaun Bailey, the black Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, to urge Sadiq Khan to immediately remove the commissioner due to his “racist past”.

It comes after the Mayor faced intense criticism over the composition of the commission to review London’s landmarks, with historians claiming it lacked expertise and excluded conservative opinions.

In a blog post condemning Ms Abbott’s decision to run for the Labour leadership in 2010, Mr Agbetu said the Hackney MP had been “disloyal to her own community and, worst yet, with minimal coercion, willingly betrayed herself” by engaging in frontline politics.

He added that Labour would not win black votes by “elevating a woman who – to be frank – the African community is embarrassed about”.

Mr Agbetu directed similar criticism at Mr Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, Baroness Scotland, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, and Baroness Amos, who has served as British High Commissioner to Australia.

“Lammy, Amos and Scotland are all poor examples of Africans whose quest for influence and status has dwarfed their duty to human rights, social justice for African people and opposition to imperialism,” he said.

He added: “Many Africans in positions of status cling to their scraps of celebrity as if they are owed it by virtue of their ethnicity.”

None of those named are in fact Africans. Respectively, either birth or parents are from Jamaica, Guyana, Dominica, Guyana.

These are not places in Africa.

We can call them Caribbeans, possibly Afro-Caribbeans, we can say that they’re of a certain race perhaps – although race, obviously, doesn’t exist it’s merely a social construct – we can even say “British” as that’s what they are.

But African is one thing they’re not.

Sure, the bloke’s one of the more pernicious of the race baiters but still, the distinction does need to be made. After all, one group is victim of the original wipipo sin, the slave trade, the other isn’t. And if the difference isn’t a difference then what’s all the fuss about there then?

20 years on from the foot and mouth disaster, have any lessons been learnt?

The correct lesson of that was “Do not listen to Ferguson” which is something that we haven’t learnt.

Oh it’s-a lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night we’ll hear the wild dingoes call
But there’s-a nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer

Now the publican’s anxious for the quota to come
And there’s a far away look on the face of the bum
The maid’s gone all cranky and the cook’s acting queer
Oh what a terrible place is a pub with no beer

These people cannot really be serious, can they?

Pubs and restaurants could reopen as soon as April if they agree not to sell alcohol under options being discussed to allow the widespread relaxation of coronavirus restrictions after Easter.

Something else going on, is there?

I read through Jill Biden’s Ed.D thesis.
…
Opinion: if I was one of the people who signed off on this (pages 3 and 4) I would be very quiet about it if someone at a party started spouting off that Jill Biden deserves to be called “Doctor”.

One of Donald Trump’s former Atlantic City casinos will be blown up next month, and for the right amount of money, you could be the one to press the button that brings it down.

The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1m.

Fun in the sense that it is fun. Tee hee and all that.

Silly in the sense that this is a monopoly owned by the city. It is, in the economic sense, something akin to a land rent in fact – like spectrum and all that. Therefore the revenue should go to the city coffers. Because as Henry George told us, land rents are how we should finance government.

But despite the recent attention, some say the rise of Parler fits into the larger history of American conservatives and their relationship with the media.

“This follows a pattern of what the right wing has done [since] the rise of talk radio in the ’80s, and then through live cable TV, and then the rise of social media,” Lawrence Rosenthal, the chair of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies, told Recode. “In each case, what you found is that the right wing gives up on participating in mainstream media and creates an alternative universe.”

Parler is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon, Rosenthal explained.

I guess that’s one way to put it.

As it’s grown, Parler has become a way station for hate speech and misinformation that Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t allow. The site is also where many Trump supporters are spreading the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. The burgeoning influence of Parler is part of a broader trend of fringe outlets like One America News and Newsmax hoping to reel in an audience of Trump loyalists, especially after he leaves office.

Another might be that as the Woken SS take over a place then normies go off somewhere else.

PM who won Nobel peace prize takes Ethiopia to brink of civil war
Abiy Ahmed made his name as a reformer – but was there always an authoritarian waiting to come out?

The Nobel Peace Prize committee doesn’t exactly have a great record, does it?

A leading Labour-run council has banned staff from smoking at their desks if they are working from home, in what campaigners say is an emerging “moral crusade” by local authorities against tobacco lovers.

Hammersmith and Fulham council, which represents one of the richest areas in London, told its staff in guidance that “any part of a private dwelling used solely for work purposes will be required to be smoke-free”.

The guidance was issued in a joint “bi-borough corporate health and safety document setting out the council’s no-smoking policy with Royal Kensington and Chelsea”.

Well, yes, employers are supposed to make sure you’re not exposed to danger while working. we can all point out that smoking is up to the individual and all that but that horse bolted a long time ago.