Super-rich must stop meddling in democracy, says Disney heiress
No, it gets better.
Pressure group Patriotic Millionaires said a survey it had undertaken of the world’s wealthy found almost two thirds viewed the influence of the super-rich on the new US president as a danger to the world.
Don’t listen to those rich people over there, listen to us rich people instead.
From London and other overpriced cities, we often look to Berlin as a beacon of progressive housing politics. Renting in the capital, as some 84% of households do, is associated with secure, unlimited, rent-controlled tenancies. Berliners have rallied behind moves to freeze rents and expropriate hundreds of thousands of apartments from corporate landlords. But in the last few years, Berlin’s housing crisis has escalated to unprecedented proportions, with median asking rents across the city rising by 21.2% in 2023 alone. Far from “poor but sexy”, as it was once dubbed by its own mayor, Berlin now has one of the most overheated property markets in the world.
The reasons for Berlin’s housing crisis are complex,
Always amazin’ how lefties insist they’ve got really great policies it’s just that the outcome isn’t what they desire for some strange reason.
You know, the kulaks – the productive farmers – are wreckers so we’ll disposses all of them and bugger me, why’s everyone dying of starvation?
Cornwallis Academy, in Boughton Monchelsea, near Maidstone, Kent, has been unable to use the pitch since August, or rent it to community groups on evenings and weekends.
When the school applied for planning permission for the pitch in 2022, a key element was to make it available to outside sports clubs after school hours, which raised concerns from Maidstone Council about increased disturbance for neighbours.
The school provided a survey suggesting the only real disturbance would come from the referee’s whistle and not cheering or jeering supporters, and it offered to introduce a “no-whistle” policy on the pitch for games played outside of school hours.
The council accepted the proposal, granting permission in January 2023 on the condition the “no-whistle” policy was applied.
However, whistles were used outside school hours and neighbours repeatedly complained over the disturbance.
When one resident reported the council for failing to enforce its planning conditions, the authority threatened enforcement action against the school.
Because Cornwallis Academy had breached its planning permission it stopped the school from being able to use the pitch at all.
You live in an urban area. Noise from others living in the urban area around you will be inevitable.
True, some noises rise above the civilised limit – a new outdoor nightclub say. Some are below it – whistles from the sports pitch.
Be off to Calais with you all.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has confirmed that her government will seek to enshrine a ban on e-cigarettes and vapes in the country’s constitution by the end of the year.
Though the move is driven by public health concerns, it has prompted fears that it would only boost a thriving black market for vapes in the hands of powerful organised crime groups, such as the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel.
It’s a nailed down certainty that there will be a black market. And why would public health be aided by banning the less dangerous substitute for cigarettes?
So here’s the question. Here are two individuals who totally control two organisations – Facebook and X – that have had devastating impacts on the lives of some of their users (and in Facebook’s case, whole countries such as Myanmar), as well as polluting the public sphere and undermining democracy in the west. Why has neither been held accountable for the societal damage their organisations have wrought? The answer is simple: they have the impunity that their immense wealth provides.
Both of them have actuallky created something through that same arrogance. Quite big things too. But of course Naughton thinks that those big things, having been created, should now be confiscated by those who did not create them – like Naughton.
Employers should be fined if they create unhealthy workplaces, as part of Wes Streeting’s plan to get unemployed people fit to work, according to a leading thinktank.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said employers that fail to provide a healthier work environment for their staff, such as subsidised nutritious food, should face regulatory action, including fines and public censure.
If they’re already healthy enough to go to the works canteen then they’re already healthy enough, right?
Arrojo-Agudo said water companies should be non-profit with public-public partnerships, public investment and new participatory management models to involve civil society groups. England’s privatised system was picked out as anomaly; he said more than 90% of the world’s cities ran water in public ownership and increasingly members of the public were being given a voice on the company boards.
In Paris, he said, water was 100% municipally owned. “The French capital has demonstrated the transformative power of public ownership, prioritising human rights, reinvesting profits into the system, ensuring transparent governance, reducing tariffs and increasing its self-financing capacity,” said Arrojo-Agudo.
Paris being something of an anomaly in hte French system – most of it has been private suppliers for a century. But also, recall the problems with shit in hte Seine when they tried to have the Olympics there?
A study by the UK’s biggest food bank network, Trussell, estimates one in seven of the UK population are struggling in a category of deep poverty it calls “hunger and hardship”. But what does it mean, who is affected by it, and why?
What is hunger and hardship?
The term was created by Trussell to define a group of 9.3 million people (including 3 million children) whose low household income and financial vulnerability makes them most likely to be using food banks or at risk of using them.
Essentially, they’re saying people who use food banks are in this hunger and hardship. Which means that before 2000 – about when food banks started in hte UK – there were none in hunger and hardship. Which doesn’t really strike as a useful measure TBH.
Further, we end up in the odd position that someone whose hunger is alleviated by gaining access to a food bank is now defined as being in hunger for having had their hunger alleviated. Not a wholly useful measure TBH.
Finally, food banks are that new technology. So, we’re defining hunger as having risen at the very time that the new tech is reducing it. Not a useful measure TBH
Look at this photo of Ursula von der Leyen’s new team – and tell me the EU doesn’t have a diversity problem
Shada Islam
How very dare ethnic Europeans run Europe?
For illustration’s sake run this the other way around. Howsabout a European running Gaza?
Isn’t that what they’re complaining about there?
This category is made up of food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using artificial flavours, emulsifiers and colouring. They include soft drinks and packaged snacks, and tend to be extremely palatable and high in calories but relatively low in nutrients.
Calories are nutrients. Try living on a diet that doesn’t contain calories….
“We each have a Nazi within,” the Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger has written – pointing, in my observation, to a near-universal reality. Many of us harbor the seeds for hatred, rage, fear, narcissistic self-regard and contempt for others that, in their most venomous and extreme forms, are the dominant emotional currents whose confluence can feed the all-destructive torrent we call fascism, given enough provocation or encouragement.
Nazis weren’t the only fascists and fascists weren’t the only muderous authoritarians of the last century. Commies murdered just as many, if not more. So:
Looking at the hideous demigod of fascism, Adolf Hitler, or at his present-day caricature Donald Trump, who is often compared to him – including some years ago by his current vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance – we find many remarkable characteristic similarities: relentless self-hypnotising mendacity, mistrust bordering on paranoia, devious opportunism, a deep streak of cruelty, limitless grandiosity, unhinged impulsivity, crushing disdain for the weak.
Ah, OK, so this isn’t even an attempt at science or understanding. It’s just an excuse for a bit of two minute hate. Ho Hum.
‘In Britain, we are still astonishingly ignorant’: the hidden story of how ancient India shaped the west
Eh?
In AD628, an Indian sage living on a mountain in Rajasthan made one of the world’s most important mathematical discoveries. The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less invented – and certainly defined – the concept of zero.
We actually call the whole lot – including zero – Arabic, because of the path they took to us, Indian or Hindu numerals.
What the fuck do you mean we don’t acknowledge it?
The US advocacy group GLAAD just published an absolutely blistering fact-check of a very biased New York Times article that was yet again scaremongering about trans healthcare for teens, part of an ongoing panic that the paper has been fuelling for 16 consecutive months.
Among the key points is a staggering statistic. The number of trans teens getting gender-affirming surgery in the US, the subject of the endless why-oh-why articles in the NYT, is around 514 per year. The number of cisgender teens getting gender-affirming surgery, which includes operations such as breast reduction or breast enhancement, is 229,000 per year. And yet the NYT is not running any articles about that.
Tarting up – or down – tits is just the same as slicing nadgers off.
No, really, ’tis.
Type 2 diabetes used to be a condition linked to ageing and getting older. It’s the most common metabolic chronic condition in elderly people in the UK, and the likelihood of developing diabetes increases dramatically after the age of 45. People of south Asian heritage have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes, and I’ve grown up watching my grandparents and elderly relatives develop it, one after another. India is often referred to as the “diabetes capital of the world”, accounting for 17% of the total number of diabetes patients worldwide.
But in Britain, recent data has shown a major change in the profile of who is getting diabetes: it’s now young people. The number of under-40s being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has risen 39% in the past six years. This was especially the case for people from deprived areas and those from black and south Asian backgrounds. In 2022, Diabetes UK highlighted that the number of children receiving treatment for type 2 diabetes in England and Wales had increased by over 50% over the previous five years.
So, is the change in hte population being studied as a result of immigration the reason for the rise in diagnosed diabetes?
Guess which possible cause this professor of public health does not discuss? Sure, sure, the immigration supposition could be wrong but it does need to be considered so that it can be ruled out, right?
This still needs a little work. But I think the difference is between singular and plural. One grand tit and the other grand….
A primary school teacher was sacked after she taught pupils as young as nine how to do a TikTok dance.
Georgia Rogers was fired after bosses found she had “condoned” under-age students using the social media site – which bans children aged under 13.
She was also accused of breaching the school’s safeguarding procedure by failing to report her pupils’ use of the app, an employment tribunal heard
It was after, but not because of, teaching them a “TikTok Dance” (which meerely means something seen on a video there).
So, the kids saud “Please Miss, teach us this!” and she did. Nowt lacivious or what, just some dance steps. Filmed it on hte school iPad and that’s that. No, no uplopading or anything. Kiddies get to do what kiddies have seen and all have lots of fun.
So she gets fired. Because if 10 year olds are talking about TikTok then this means that they’ve been loking at it and they shouldn’t because they’re under 13. Therefore she needs to be fired because she didn’t nark on the 10 year olds watching TikTok.
Sounds a little Stasi, doesn’t it? Winston, where art thou now sort of stuff? Possiblky a whiff of Victory Gin about it?
It’s even possible that 10 year olds shouldn’t be watching TikTok but if this is the sort of end result of such an insistence might I recommend bloody revolution as a suitable response?
Queen Charlotte was a “person of colour”, a museum’s LGBT audio guide has wrongly claimed.
The audio guide for the Royal Museums Greenwich tells visitors that despite what “insecure white boys” have said, George III’s wife was the first British royal from a non-white background.
Queen Charlotte’s purported ethnicity has been sidelined because of “structural racism”, according to the guide, which states that she was a “person of colour”.
Someone been reading too much Bridgerton?
Err, yes, appears so.
For years, the Tories said austerity was over. But look around: it’s getting worse, and there’s more to come
John Harris
This week’s budget is certain to bring more cuts. Westminster is missing the stark fact that people simply cannot take any more
Tax take is at 70 year high, public spending up in cash, in inflation adjusted and in GDP terms.
What sodding austerity?
And this requires another kind of realism – understanding what might appeal to the greatest number of people globally, from peasants in the global south to farmers in the global north. It’s unlikely, he says, that we’ll get communism or socialism in the next 10 years – a small farmer in Iowa “doesn’t want to obliterate private property”. But we can get “some pretty good stuff” through “decommodifying many of the key pillars of socioeconomic life and creatively working within ecological constraints”, even if “we’ll probably still have basic market mechanisms for some things”.
If some of this sounds like triangulation, he insists it isn’t. “In between meaningless reform and impossible revolution,” he writes, “we find mixed existing and historical models of formal state, civil, and guerrilla strategies.
Another of those idea sets clearly produced by frotting over Das Kapial in Mom’s basement.
“Sure, it’d be a lot more convenient if you could harvest it whenever you wanted. But doing it the right way is part of our culture,” he said. “And so it makes absolutely no sense to me that our ancestors would just get rid of the woolly dogs because it was more convenient to use something else.”
Not understanding human beings at all.
The background:
But it was a dog, cultivated over millennia, that produced one of the more unusual materials for their weaving.
To ensure breed purity, the dogs were kept on islets, tended by Salish women who visited by canoe, bringing food including Pacific salmon, herring and other marine mammals. The dogs were sheared with mussel shell knives.
So, the claim is not just normal humanity but whitey did it. Ho Hum.