We therefore call on the Government to:
(1) initiate a health-based food rationing scheme to see the country through this
crisis. This should start from Public Health England’s Eatwell Plate, our official
nutrition guidelines, and draw on expertise from the devolved administrations,
and relevant disciplines
Nowt like making use of a crisis, is there. That’s from Tim Lang by the way. Where’s that bloody wall now the revolution’s here?
while the well-to-do may deploy their private health insurance to circumvent our already struggling and soon to be overrun National Health Service.
1) Wouldn’t we all prefer that those able to alleviate the strain upon that scarce resource of the NHS?
2) How many ICU beds does Bupa have?
Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression
The economic impact could dwarf the 2008 collapse. We need a New Deal–scale response—and fast.
OK, cool, and I like the emphasis on “fast”.
What’s needed is a massive infrastructure and public-health program running into the trillions of dollars. We should start by taking stock of essential activities where government spending could produce economic expansion despite the epidemic, as well as long overdue public improvements.
This should be complemented by significant increases in public-health investments. Both should include significant job training or retraining.
For instance, the bill for deferred investment in basic public infrastructure is pegged at $3.4 trillion by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The Prospect recently devoted an entire special issue to laying out needed and practical investments associated with a Green New Deal.
These are things that can be done “fast” are they?
Idiot.
It goes without saying that all needed medical supplies must be produced domestically.
??
Has Peppa Pig addled my brain – or is it a critique on capitalism?
Séamas O’Reilly
Sigh:
Almost every adult in the show is called Daddy or Mummy or Grandad etc, suffixed by whatever animal they happen to be – Daddy Pig, Grandad Dog, Mummy Rabbit. A rare exception is Miss Rabbit, Mummy Rabbit’s identical twin sister who has, for no explained reason, roughly 18 part-time jobs. Are we to detect a critique of late capitalism in the fact that she works as a cashier, librarian, bus driver, helicopter rescue pilot and training co-ordinator for the local fire service? And what kind of zero hours contract is she on that she must also sell ice-cream on the side? I’ve now watched every episode several times and no answers are forthcoming.
Having to be the Jack of All Trades is pre-capitalist you snivelling moron. It is capitalism and markets which allow the division and specialisation of labour.
Washington has taken a major step toward becoming the first US state to restrict companies looking to extract, bottle and sell local water supplies.
On Monday night the state senate passed a bill that would ban new permits for water bottling operations. SB 6278 states “any use of water for the commercial production of bottled water is deemed to be detrimental to the public welfare and the public interest” and would apply retroactively to new permits filed after 1 January 2019.
The move was hailed by water campaigners, who declared it a breakthrough moment in the fight against the privatization of such a valuable public asset.
What sodding value? Washington State gets 38.15 inches of rain a year. There’s so much water it quite literally falls from the damn skies. For free.
Is it problematic for white models to wear cornrows or “wigs like an Egyptian”? The answer is: “Sometimes; maybe; it depends.” What constitutes cultural appropriation is complex and nuanced.
In an apology, the stylist, Julien d’Ys, seemed to suggest that the wigs weren’t meant to be cornrows – a traditionally black hairstyle – but a nod to Egyptian pharaoh hair, to which the internet replied: why not use Egyptian models?
One good reason for that is that there aren’t any Ancient Egyptians around to be models. Partly because of time and partly because of the Arab conquest. The closest we’ve got to an indigenous culture there is the Coptic one which won’t fly well with the usual suspects who do the cultural monitoring.
On the other hand, you have bigots who seem to think it is clever to say things such as: “Non-white people wearing suits is cultural appropriation.”
By the standards of corn rows it is Luv. As is a Palestinian using English….
Afua Hirsch tells us that, well, British society is racist, innit, and that’s that.
The correct response being:
Squealing about how Racist Britain is just doesn’t work as soon as you lift your eyes and peer at what the rest of the world is like.
As that position of Afua Hirsch shows. A thoroughly racist society does not take a double immigrant (part Jewish, part Ghanaian), provide one of the finest educations in the world (Oxford), allow them to qualify as a lawyer then provide a good metropolitan living on TV, radio and as a columnist in one of the major national newspapers. Nor, of course, would a patriarchal one offer that to a woman. The very soapbox we’re being harangued from shows what drivel the contentions are.
It woz the Russkies:
Labour has been told to “come clean” over whether it has helped to spread Russian “disinformation” during the general election campaign.
Jeremy Corbyn last week published a leaked dossier of classified information which he used to attack the Conservatives over the NHS, but refused to say how he got it.
On Monday night, independent researchers said the documents carried “the spectre of foreign influence” as they had been published online using methods that directly mirror an earlier Russian disinformation campaign.
Well, I’m not sure I would believe this specific allegation. But I would believe absolutely anything about what I think is the source, Nick Dearden at Global Justice Now.
Not even the source of the documents that is, but of the argument being made. That free trade means selling the NHS. Dearden is against trade, by and large. And a believer in all sorts of economic wierdnesses. And as far as I can tell he is the likely source of this underlying argument.
There are two stark facts about British politics. The first is that it is controlled, to a degree unparalleled in any other western European nation, by a tiny, unrepresentative elite. Like almost every aspect of public life here, government is dominated by people educated first at private schools, then at either Oxford or Cambridge.
Given the existence of France and enarques, how can anyone possibly say that?
Entirely willing to agree with too much control by the public schoolboys and Oxbridge graduates. Or even too little if that’s the way your fancy takes you. But elite more than anyone else?
Watching one episode of Britain’s Got Talent could cause children to eat an additional 50 calories, a study has found.
The Obesity Health Alliance analysed adverts during six live episodes of Britain’s Got Talent over one week in May and June, finding that 23 per cent were for food or drink high in fat, sugar and salt such as pizza, burgers and ice cream.
According to the OHA, a child who watched all six episodes in one week would have seen more than 22 minutes of unhealthy food and drink adverts, which the charity calculated could lead to them eating an extra 300 calories.
No one is going to take this seriously, are they?
Riding without a helmet.
Actually, in that sort of weather, riding without a hat.
North Korea leader Kim Jong-un (aka Prince Charming), riding a white horse, inspects Paektu Mountain on the Chinese–North Korean border. pic.twitter.com/oXX0fBmomk
— Keith Zhai (@QiZHAI) 16 October 2019
But then the point is to be able to see that it’s him riding a horse on that mountain, nothing else.
Environmental groups have warned the banks linked to Saudi Aramco’s planned market float that they risk financing the destruction of the planet by supporting the public listing of the world’s biggest oil producer.
The eight green groups, including Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth, warned that the world’s largest IPO would be “the biggest single infusion of capital into the fossil fuel industry” since global governments signed the Paris climate accord in 2015.
There is to be no infusion into the fossil fuel business. The Saudi state is to sell some portion of the company it owns, Aramco. Not, Aramco is to sell new shares in Aramaco.
This puts no more investment into fossil fuels than Legal and General divesting itself of BP shares by selling them does.
Actually, if the Saudis sold all of Aramco that would be them divesting from fossil fuels and you’d have to praise them then, wouldn’t you?
In the UK’s trials of voter ID so far, significant numbers of people were denied a vote. When some majorities can be as small as two, every vote matters.
Voter ID being sold as a solution to a problem that we do not have
So, when we test voter ID we find that a number of people don;t pass the test. This shows that the test isn’t necessary.
Hmmm.
Critics call out Extinction Rebellion’s race problem
Eh? It’s the human race they don’t like.
“Live from the royal courts of justice,” Extinction Rebellion London wrote. “It has been announced that all protesters arrested during the April rebellion will be prosecuted. We are asking the police and legal system to concentrate on issues such as knife crime, and not non-violent protesters who are trying to save our planet.”
For those with ears tuned to hear it, the dogwhistle sounded clear. Stop bothering us non-violent protesters; focus instead on those frightening inner-city neighborhoods, where black children carry knives.
“It was feeding into a racist narrative,” says Guppi Bola, an activist with the Wretched of the Earth, an environmental group that focuses on black, brown, and indigenous voices. “When those kinds of things come up, then of course you are not going to feel welcome.”
I think Guppi can fuck off here, don’t you think?
“We have to face the oil and coal industry, the CO2-emitting industry, Wall Street, Bolsonaro, Donald Trump,” she said to cheers from the crowd. “We can’t and won’t win by staying home.”
“It’s super cool that she came all this way,” said Selma White, 14, a regular at Copenhagen’s Fridays for Future protests. “It’s really inspiring.”
Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Copenhagen on Wednesday morning
The emissions from flying from DC to Copenhagen are what?
Then of course there’s this drivel:
Instead, she said, the world needed to adopt “a cooperative, collaborative” system, “whose economy … benefits the middle and lower classes and marginalised people”.
What do you think a market economy is if it ain’t cooperation?
Eating or drinking on trains and buses should be banned, in a bid to end Britain’s “mindless” snack culture, the country’s Chief Medical Officer has said, in her final report.
So, that train journey from Plymouth to Newcastle – I think there is one? – to be had with no drink, no eats. When do they bring back the cattle cars to make it a truly socialist experience?
Is Vassa a political play, then? For Craig, it is more about family and how politics can muddy the waters. “One thing Mike and I talked about a lot is that families are mostly based on a kind of socialist structure when they work. Which is to say that everyone is considered to be equal; if people are worse off for whatever reason we help them out; there’s a leader but the leader is there to make sure everyone is elevated; we share. In a nice, good family all those things are in place, right? We don’t have favourites, there’s equity, there’s equality, and we like that in families.” In Vassa, however, the central family “have drifted into a capitalist structure, essentially. So there are winners and there are losers, and gains and losses, and they are like ‘Are you useful to me or not?’ Which is a question in the capitalist world, [and] how capitalism fucks over loads of people. So you’re looking at a family who have rejected the socialist structure. What does that do? And can you sustain it? The answer, I think, is no.”
The important point here being that the socialist structure doesn’t work when expanded out to beyond the family, to those who are not so genetically intertwined. That being the useful insight that lefties simply don’t get.
As with AG Cohen’s (hmm, might not be the right name) and his description of socialism as being like going camping. OK, great, and why not? That description rather glossing over the point that everyone who has gone on the camping trip has decided, at the start, to go off on the camping trip and do the sharing. Imposed camping and sharing works about as well as when Pol Pot tried it.
Gary Smith, the Scotland secretary of the GMB union, said the move represented a “troubling glimpse into the post-Brexit future” for the UK. “Scotland and the rest of the UK are sitting ducks after October 31st. The collective strength we have in the EU trading bloc will be gone and there is simply no such thing as a ‘special relationship’ with the United States – Trump will squeeze the UK economy for everything he can get,” he said.
The tariffs on whisky were imposed because we’re in the EU. If we weren’t in the EU then the tariffs wouldn’t have been imposed. Because we’d not be responsible – partially – for the Airbus subsidies.
So, ill effects of being in the EU are being used to explain how awful it would be to not be in the EU?
Some people are insane.
Healthcare systems don’t just include hospitals and clinics. They also include the educational institutions that teach our health professionals. Hence, there is also a need to see change and innovation in the academy for medical and other health professionals’ curriculum.
As a doctor, I have embraced disruption and have chosen to reject conventional medical training pathways. I have been drawn to the public health space because I recognised a need to look at health at a systemic level.
Just as there is a strong need for doctors to be “on the ground” disrupting systems in health services, there is an equally persistent need to be disrupting systems through education, research and advocacy.
We are beginning to see universities championing First Peoples’ leadership in these areas, allowing for a process of decolonising medical curriculum and the way medicine is presented to future doctors. This type of disruptive innovation follows one simple principle. Equity.
Equity in healthcare is providing care that meets the needs of all and is inclusive of individual circumstances and values of health.
It’s not pneumonia, you’re just not properly connected to the Dreamtime.
Wonder if Rupert knows his money is being used this way? Yes, she does work for the Murdoch Children’s Research summat and yes, Rupes did fund it.
Many years ago (before the death of Castro) I had a holiday in Cuba. There was a severe fuel shortage, due to the US blockade.
The US was, from at least the 1960s up until very recently indeed – after the death of Fidel at least – a net importer of oil. So, how could the US embargo – no exports from the US to Cuba – cause an oil shortage in Cuba?