Flatulent tosspottery

David Olusoga explains it all to us:

In the second half of 2020, one strategy for filling the post-Brexit blame vacuum was tried, tested and war gamed, all of it executed with levels of proactive forward-thinking and strategic planning that the government struggled to muster when dealing with the pandemic. New enemies were identified and the attack lines against them fine-tuned in the focus groups.

Firmly in the crosshairs are black and brown working-class people, who are to be stripped of their class identity so that their interests and their histories can be falsely presented as a dangerous threat to those of working-class white people. Hence the demonisation and deliberate mischaracterisation of the Black Lives Matter movement. But among the new enemies are academics and, in particular, historians, whose work focuses on the histories of empire and slavery. They and the institutions that have commissioned research from them have been subjected to a new order of hostility. Expect more of the same in 2021.

What he actually means is that some people have been Meanies to him and not wholly, entirely, unquestioningly, accepted his view of past events. And how Blue is that?

We must acknowledge structural racism because:

She and I were meeting from our respective bedrooms in the now familiar, strange intimacy of a one-on-one Zoom meeting. She has developed a massive rash all over her boobs.

“It’s years of bullshit – racism, micro-aggressions,” she told me in a matter-of-fact tone. “I have never had any eczema before. My doctor said it’s erupted now because I’ve finally given myself permission to acknowledge the toxic stuff I’ve been putting up with during all these decades of my career.”

Well, that logic sure convinces me.

‘Love always wins,’ Harry and Meghan tell listeners in their first podcast

That’s entire swathes, even concepts, of literature entirely abolished then, isn’t it? Anna K, Desdemona, etc etc…..

To the generation that grew up watching Flash Gordon, Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless was one of the great screen villains.

He was also a “discriminatory stereotype”, according to the British Board of Film Classification. The censor has added the warning to its rating for Flash Gordon, saying the casting of a white actor in the role could be considered “dubious if not outright offensive”.

Ming hailed from the Planet Mongo but, the BBFC said, was clearly of East Asian origin.

The organisation will conduct research in the New Year to establish if other old films contain racial stereotypes that need to be caveated for modern audiences.

Note what they’re saying.

Not that the evil and merciless Easterner is a racial stereotype and thus offensive. But that a white actor paying a stereotype is offensive.

This is where we take off and dust from space, isn’t it?

And unlike a household, the government does not need to worry about paying back debt when interest rates rise. Interests rates will only rise if economic growth returns. When it does, this will mean higher revenues in state coffers and, with higher employment, less public spending on safety nets for poorer households. At this point, taxes should go up, to ensure that corporations and the rich pay their fair share.

Tax revenue rises because economic recovery therefore tax rates should also rise in an economic recovery?

Surely – and as Mr. Venning said, the answer to any question which includes the word “surely” is “No” – peoplpe were aware of this?

As if the Danish government’s rushed decision to cull and bury more than 10 million minks wasn’t a grisly enough story, thousands of the animals’ bloated cadavers have begun to re-emerge from their shallow graves.

The phenomenon was reported by Denmark’s state broadcaster DR on Tuesday after mink carcasses were spotted popping up to the surface at a mass burial site at a military training field on Sunday.

“It is an extraordinary situation,” Thomas Kristensen, a press officer with Denmark’s National Police, which is responsible for the mink burials, told state broadcaster DR.

“In connection with the decay, gasses form, which cause the whole thing to expand a little, and then in the worst case they get pushed out of the ground.”

Bodies need to be buried deeply to stop this happening. That’s why it’s “six foot under”.

OK, doesn’t have to be six foot for a mink but the principle remains. We don’t use shallow graves for a reason.

Online shopping saw a boom during the first lockdown, and that looks set to continue with Black Friday and some Christmas shopping to take place online due to lockdown V.2.

But at what cost to the environment does this have? The personal finance experts at money.co.uk have investigated how much CO2 could be produced by the millions of packages set to be delivered across the country in their new Dirty Delivery Report – with Amazon’s 2020 Black Friday set to be less green than ever before.

Amazon processed 4.4m transactions on Black Friday in 2019. Based on the average parcel being delivered and the predicted 14% increase in online spending, Amazon could be set to process a whopping 5.1m transactions this year. We estimate Black Friday purchases via Amazon alone could result in at least 18,854 tonnes of additional CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.

Such terribly naughty boys Amazon are, eh? This PR email brought to you by:

Sophie Clinton [email protected]** via amazonses.com

Tsk, Amazon are just such naughty boys.

No, I don’t know either.

Clearly, they’re idiots so that could be why:

Amazon does that untaxed bit by not making very much profit to be taxed. By, that is, reinvesting earnings in any one period back into expanding the business. Such a horror, eh?

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?