Flatulent tosspottery

As it tried to elicit from them answers on whether Apple abused its monopoly with its App store, about Facebook’s monopoly of online advertising,

Google’s revenue comes almost entirely from online advertising. And what is Google, chopped liver?

And yes, this is more important than just pointing out that Hutton is an ill-informed idiot. This is the guy who insists that he and his know how to plan the entire global economy for us all. And yet he’s also proving how ill-informed he is as he does so – in which case why would we give him the power to run the global economy for us?

Short version – Hayek was right.

The average monthly income of each household was Tk19,425 in March which came down to Tk15,492 in August, the Perception Survey on Livelihood 2020 found.

That’s for Bangladesh. There are ¬ 100 Tk to the £ and the PPP factor – to take account of different living costs – is about 0.4. So, average household, household mind, income of £375 per month. For the UK it’s about £2,500 per month.

Someone on dole alone, an individual on dole alone*, is on more than Bangladeshi average household income.

now then, let’s talk about poverty in the UK shall we?

*Well, nearly.

Nick Eagleton, of the branding agency Saboteur,which led the public engagement exercise, said: “We had to plunge into the heart and soul of Bristol and we did that with a huge collaborative group that spanned the whole community, from schoolchildren to the mayor. It was a joy, because Bristolians don’t hold back – if they’ve got something to say, they say it.”

You’ve changed the name of a theatre from Colston Hall to Bristol Beacon. Not created world peace.

With healthy foods three times as expensive as less healthy ones

You what?

METRIC 5: FOOD PRICES. What we decide
to buy is often influenced by price

Alert the media!

Advertising spend on fruit and vegetables has increased since 2017,
but remains low, with just 2.9% of ad spend on food and drink going
towards fruit and vegetables.

Well, yes, because branded veggies – buy mine, not his! – is a difficult task. and advertising is about switching purchases, not creating them.

Ahh, here’s what the fuckers are doing:

The price of healthier foods continues to remain much higher than less healthy foods.
Using a binary more/less healthy categorisation according to the FSA’s nutrient
profiling model reveals striking dierences, with more healthy foods three times more
expensive than less healthy foods for the equivalent number of calories. The mean cost
of more healthy foods in 2019 per 1000 kilocalories was £7.68, compared to £2.48 for
less heathy foods. Although at the time of writing we have incomplete data for 2020,
the upward trend in price for more healthy foods seen in the first quarter of this year is
concerning one, with the mean price at its highest level since 2013.
Breaking the data down into the government’s five Eatwell Guide food categories tells a
similar story. While the mean price of fruit and vegetables is on an upward trend (£9.39
per 1000 kilocalories in 2019, up from £8.88 in 2017), the price of food and drinks high
in salt, sugar and/or fat has remained fairly stable at a much lower price point. The
mean price of foods in this category was £3.54 in 2019, compared to £3.42 in 2017.

Fruit and veg don’t contain many calories. So, if you measure their price by calories then you’ll find they’re expensive.

Lying fuckers are lying fuckers, eh?

Johnsonism’s response to Coronavirus aims to reconfigure state-capital relations both in guaranteeing private sector activity and in extending the commodification of social reproduction.

So we’re not going to be reading that for the literary style then…..

No election can be won without significant support from within the popular classes. Johnsonism represents the hegemony of the most reactionary fractions of capital because of their capacity to command this support.

Eh?

In the 1980s Raymond Williams was the thinker of the relation between the conjunctural and the organic. This grounded his position on electoral and political strategy.

Oh, rightie ho then.

It would appear that some have found something to do after the student union.

Park named after William Gladstone could be given new title over slavery links

What slavery links?

Early in his political career, four-time Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone lobbied for compensation for former slave owners

Lobbying for an effective method – OK, call it what it was, bribe – to end slavery is links to slavery now, is it?

Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical NGO, is riddled with institutional racism and bolsters colonialism in its humanitarian work, according to an internal statement signed by 1,000 current and former members of staff.

Here are all these – largely – Europeans doing largely European and American invented stuff, for free, to all these much poorer and darker people. All largely paid for by Europeans and Americans.

Among personal testimonies from signatories cited by the Guardian, one complained of an “almost suffocating” white saviour mentality.

Could be really, could be.

Capitalism’s inseparability from anti-black racism lives on through neocolonialism, which compounds black suffering across Africa through extractive, ecologically damaging multinational corporations, the predatory practices of international lending agencies, and Euro-American military intervention. The assassinations of anti-colonial African revolutionaries by ex-colonial powers and suppression of grassroots social movements further entrenched economic dispossession. Today, we see staggering class divides within many African nations widen, as elites benefit from their lucrative alliances with this neocolonial order.

We are all guilty.

Dr. Kiosk is alive and well at The Guardian.

In a tweeted video message this month, Farage said the UK faced “cultural Marxism”, a term originating in a conspiracy theory based on a supposed plot against national governments, which is closely linked to the far right and antisemitism.

The phrase “cultural Marxism” is now an id of being far right and antisemitic? This is like DeSmog insisting I’m aclimate denier because I recommend a carbon tax.

Cambridge defends academic who said ‘white lives don’t matter’
Dr Priyamvada Gopal, an expert in postcolonial literature, claimed her tweets were ‘speaking to a structure and ideology, not about people’

Can’t possibly mean what it looks like it does now, can it?

Courtney Lawes, the Northampton and England lock, faced a backlash on Tuesday after suggesting it was important to be “financially secure and preferably married” before having children in order to reduce the levels of child poverty in the UK.

Of course, the populace is now shouting at him for having done so.

Hmm, actually, most of the populace would probably cheer, it’s the commentariat having the sours at him.

Chris Lilley’s “Jonah” is not from Tonga, I am.

I’m the same age as Chris Lilley, mid-forties, woman of colour, born in Sydney on the ancestral lands of the Cadigal people. I’m a Tongan woman, indigenous to the Kingdom of Tonga, the last remaining indigenous monarchy of the Pacific. I’m also Australian.

If you’re born in Oz then you’re not from Tonga, are you?

As the world faces a reckoning over racism and police violence, social media influencers are being blasted for making the movement about themselves.

How dare you come out and say this is about me, meee, MEEE! when in fact it’s about me, meee, MEEE!

If there was any doubt about the true nature of this government, it has now been erased: the country is run by a small, tight-knit group of arrogant and talentless entitleds. Apart from riding the public to office, they have no interest in our safety – or our respect. We must do our duty and submit, because these are the new pandemic rules, stripped back to an essence that in normal times would be more carefully obscured. In short: know your place.

Any illusions that we were ever protected from the rank contempt of our rulers by the logic of democracy – because the government embodies the will of the people who elected it – are now gone.

Well, we can in fact say that the majority of the country somewhere between dislike and despise you and your whining. That’s why you’re writing for a minority interest paper like The Guardian instead of something that actually sell like the Daily Mail. So, that he elected government is ignoring you and your whines would show that they’re doing pretty well in that logic of democracy.

The National Food Service is a new public service, built by and for the communities that it serves. Our aim is to eliminate food insecurity and tackle the interconnected issues of social isolation and food waste. We are building a National Food Service right now, with communities across the country stretching from Glasgow to Falmouth. This network of initiatives are providing proof that a National Food Service is possible if we connect. The growth of a grassroots National Food Service will be the seed for bigger change.

If it’s grassroots and voluntary then it’s not a national service in the sense of the NHS now, is it? Might well be more effective than the NHS but that’s another matter.

Crowded buses and trains: it’s the stark new image of Britain’s class divide

Apparently public transport is bad now:

But many commuters have little choice over their start times, or route to work. And so they have to risk their lives at the start and end of every day.

The coronavirus crisis has exposed what already existed – the inequalities we should have been aware of but perhaps for too much of the time ignored. We have had, crudely, a two-tier workforce for many years. While “white-collar” professionals have been able to relocate their screen-based work to home, others, mostly poorer paid, are now cramming in to overcrowded buses and trains to get to work, to complete a shift that provides barely enough to live on. And it is these workers – security staff, transport workers, construction workers, cleaners, as well as health and care professionals – who have been, and remain, most at risk of infection. And if they’re black or Asian, dying at three to four times the rate of white British people, they face a stark race inequality as well as the class divide.

Terrible, isn’t it? Guess we’d better not have any more public transport then, given that it’s so terrible and such a marker of our inequality and class divides.

It also suggested that the government introduce clauses that make any support they provide repayable on demand if companies are found to be involved in unlawful tax avoidance.

Impossible. If it’s illegal then it’s not tax avoidance, if it’s tax avoidance then it’s not illegal.

The phrase they’re not using but should is “tax evasion”.

Revealed: Amazon told workers paid sick leave law doesn’t cover warehouses

Really?

California workers say the company is pressuring sick employees to show up – and flouting a California law meant to protect them from Covid-19

Gosh.

On 16 April, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, passed an executive order providing food sector workers two weeks of supplemental paid sick leave if they have to isolate due to Covid-19 concerns. The law covers “workers at warehouses where food is stored” and is aimed at protecting consumers from the virus and offering additional support to essential workers whose jobs involve the food supply.

Amazon warehouses in the industrial neighborhoods of San Bernardino and Riverside counties handle a wide range of packages, including food items. But employees say that when they have asked about Newsom’s order in recent weeks, the human resources department has ignored their questions or responded that the facilities are not considered part of the food sector.

That’s a little less appalling than the headline, isn’t it. And could someone call Sorites to decide here? Is an Amazon warehouse that is 98% not food but which has a case of Marmite in the corner actually part of the food sector?

While the anti-coronavirus lockdowns springing up around the US came as a surprise to many, the involvement of the conservative billionaire DeVos family, repeated donors to a slew of dubious rightwing causes, should not.

The family – which includes Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary – has been a regular donor to the Michigan Freedom Fund, which helped promote a Michigan protest against the state’s stay-at-home orders in mid-April.

That rally, which saw about 3,000 people descend on the state’s capitol building, in Lansing, sparked a slew of other protests in states, and an endorsement from Trump.

But the DeVoses’ donations to the Michigan Freedom Fund – more than half a million dollars over the past four years, including from Betsy DeVos herself – are the tip of an iceberg of support for conservative causes.

Conservative type people spend their money on conservative type things.

Horrors, eh? Better tax it all off them so that proper progressives can decide upon the allocation of funds.

Coronavirus causing some anti-vaxxers to waver, experts say

Something to which there isn’t a vaccine causes people to reconsider their views on something for which there is?