Flatulent tosspottery

So, the Guardianistas have been telling us for decades that we’ve got to have poor living alongside rich. We must not have ghettoes. This is why we have council flats in the middle of Westminster.

A Guardian analysis of figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – looking at the most and least deprived 10% of areas in England – reveals how deep inequality can run, sometimes across nothing more than a few metres of asphalt, a line of hedges or, in this case, a 6ft wall.

Years of austerity and underinvestment mean almost two-thirds of councils now contain a neighbourhood that ranks as one of the most deprived in the country, compared with just under half in 2004. As deprivation has become more geographically widespread, there has been a stark increase in the number of places where deprived and affluent people find themselves living side by side.

Now they’re complaining about the poor living cheek by jowl with the rich.

Sigh.

Fundraisers collecting for Palestinian civilians in Gaza are seeing a “catastrophic” drop-off in donations since the ceasefire was announced in October.

Donations collected by volunteers and funnelled to needy families living in temporary shelters and struggling with illness, hunger and malnutrition have been harder to raise since then, according to organisers, many of whom have been running volunteer initiatives for Palestinians in Gaza on third-party crowdfunding platforms over the past two years.

Megan Hall, based in Australia, runs 95 such mutual aid funds across social media accounts for individual families in Gaza, and has raised more than $200,000 (£152,700) since February 2024.

Hall said that although donations started slowing down in September, they declined significantly after the 10 October ceasefire came into effect.

Now that the usual aid is getting through – so we are told at least – then the requirement for cash will decline. No?

A disabled child was banned from summer camp after his mother expressed gender-critical views, The Telegraph can reveal.

The eight-year-old was preparing for his first residential trip in July organised by Over the Wall (OTW) – a Derby-based charity that runs getaways for disabled children and their families.

But he and his mother, 52, were turned away after she insisted, during a heated discussion with an organiser from the camp, that people could not change sex.

The phone call took place after the boy’s mother was asked to explain why she had replied to a question on her son’s application form asking her to state the eight-year-old’s pronouns, by saying: “Seriously?”

You must support all of the policies. It is not enough to be in need, you must praise Comrade Stalin.

Some of Britain’s leading cultural institutions including the National Trust have warned the prime minister that they face being “crippled” by new consumer rights rules.

The legislation could be catastrophic for the business models of charities and museums because it contains a “loophole” allowing abuse of their financially important membership schemes.

Charity membership schemes will be subject to a “two-week cooling off period”, allowing people to cancel them and get a refund, under the provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA).

The heads of the National Trust, Tate, Historic Royal Palaces and other organisations wrote to Sir Keir Starmer on July 31, saying charities must be treated differently to commercial organisations.

Why?

People take out a membership, use it for a couple of days, cash it back in at full price. OK.

Why are charities different?

Chemical pollution is “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned.

The industrial economy has created more than 100 million “novel entities”, or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer.

“I suppose that’s the biggest surprise for some people,” Harry Macpherson, senior climate associate at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which carried out the research, told the Guardian.

OK, everything past the invention of fire murders us in our beds which is why we all live so long now. But is this a prescient warning or a nutter?

“Unfortunately, it is a recommendation to eat more organic food, but it is more expensive in general. So at least washing fruit and vegetables before eating them, but organic if you can afford it.”

Ah, yes, a nutter. 99.9% of the pesticides in your food are produced by hte plant itself to kill the things that would eat it.

The Westminster event came the day after meetings in Brussels, where delegates, hosted by the Irish MEP Seán Kelly, met MEPs from the European parliament’s political groups to build support for reparations from former colonial powers.
….
The lobbying event was organised by the Repair Campaign, an independent group funded by the Irish telecoms billionaire Denis O’Brien, which commissioned the researchers to produce plans for what reparations might look like in different Caribbean countries.

Dublin was once Europe’s biggest slave market. So what are the Irish chipping in then?

The UK signed off on the Commonwealth summit statement which set out the need for “inclusive conversations” about reparations for slavery, and the need to address “chattel enslavement… dispossession of indigenous people, indentureship, colonialism” in order to move to a “future based on equity”.

So the black folk, the descendants of the slaves so cruelly transported, will have to pay repearations to the indigenous near wiped out for occupying, today, the indigenous ancestral lands.

Seems fair.

Sal, a New York-based compensation specialist who declined to provide his full name for privacy reasons, believes his generation is facing new hurdles in the workplace such as rising mental health concerns, and stagnant wage increases in the face of inflating living costs.

Despite these challenges, Sal, 24, said he is still expected to conform to an outdated working structure, putting in long hours without the payoff older generations had. “We’re graduating with a high amount of debt [from university] and then working a job that is burning us out, and it’s not even paying for this debt,” he said. “A lot of people my age are job hopping because they’re burnt out or cannot find longevity in their roles.”

Sal’s first year in his current role led him to seek therapy because the workload seemed to be a “constant queue” and he felt perpetually anxious despite “being in a spot that is better than most people in my generation”. He was diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder.

Sal’s great grandfather had stormed the beaches at D Day, fought across Europe, gone home, got a job a wife and kids by that age.

General anxiety, eh?

Grow a pair, manbaby.

“Looking around the world, we see one really big change which coincides with the fall in fertility,” Evans says. Over the past 15 years or so, smartphones have become ubiquitous, and we have seen the rise of an astonishing array of online entertainment — from online sports gambling to pornography to television streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu.”

Jeez.

Teachers at Charlotte Sharman school in south London’s Elephant and Castle are on strike this week, protesting against the fact that the primary school will be forced to close at the end of term. It is one of many inner London schools facing closure as a result of a 25% drop in under-fours in some boroughs, according to the most recent census. Charlotte Sharman is just around the corner from the site of the Heygate estate, which was demolished in 2014 and replaced by Elephant Park, a development of thousands of luxury apartments, built by the Australian developer Lendlease. After the Heygate was knocked down, the school roll slumped.

Elephant Park, which has won many awards for “placemaking excellence”, is seen as an exemplar of a new global regeneration industry. In place of lower- and middle-income family housing, the new neighbourhoods are typically created to include luxury apartments set in high-security privatised public space, global retail brands, pop-ups, expensive bars and restaurants, and often a university or art gallery to provide cultural capital.

When you build a new development you, the developer, have to pay for all the infrastructure to surround it. Section 106.

But once the development is built you can’t change it because that would mean the infrastructure that has been built won’t be needed any more.

At least 236,500 properties across England and Wales, worth at least £64bn, are hidden behind these “opaque” structures, according to research by Transparency International.

The campaign group said this risked allowing wealthy individuals – including those linked to corruption – to shield their assets.

How can we expropriate the capitalists inless we have a little list. Comrade?

The NHS is treating nursery-age children who believe they are transgender after watering down its own guidance, The Telegraph can reveal.

Some goodly portion of kids at that age will think they are dinosaurs too.

Sigh.

Lock up the parents, that’s what I say.

Topless trans protesters claim climate change hits them hardest

Really?

A dozen female, intersex, non-binary and trans activists held a topless blockade outside the US air force base at Lakenheath, in Suffolk, on Friday.

Organisers said war and climate change were both strongly linked to gender-based violence around the world.

“Women, trans, non-binary, and intersex people are hardest hit by climate change, war and rising fascism,” according to Lucy Porter, who took part in the protest.

“They often struggle to access food, water and healthcare, and face a higher risk of violence and displacement during crises. These groups are rarely included in decision-making, and emergency aid often overlooks their needs.”

Well, there we are then, that’s us told. And don’t forget it.

The BBC has accused Apple of putting the licence fee at risk by destroying the value of its content, escalating tensions between the broadcaster and America’s biggest tech giant.

In the latest spat between the two parties, the BBC has attacked Apple and its smartphone rival Google for presenting its news and podcasts on iPhones in a “diminished” way that “erodes” quality.

It said this was weakening its “relationship with the public” and harming its “unique licence fee model”, potentially piling further strain on the corporation’s stretched finances.

The BBC said the “aggregation” of content across smartphone apps, such as Apple News and Apple Podcasts, meant that users were less likely to appreciate where it had been produced.

Simple aggregation is now a threat to quality, eh?

Like Heinz complaining the budget beans are also in the supermarket, right?

Popular sportswear company Hoka has been accused of failing to acknowledge the Māori origins of its name by Indigenous intellectual property experts in New Zealand, making it the latest in a string of global brands to be accused of misappropriating Māori culture.

The French American firm, which specialises in running shoes, takes its name from the Māori word hoka, meaning “to fly”. Its logo, a bird in flight, mirrors the word’s meaning, as does its tagline “fly, human, fly”.

In its early days, the company attributed its name – which was then Hoka One One, loosely meaning “to fly over the earth” in Māori – to the “ancient Māori language”. That attribution disappeared from its “about” section after Deckers Brands took ownership in 2012. The brand now makes no mention of the name’s origin on its website.

“If they don’t want to associate themselves as being a Māori word – they need to stop using it,” said Lynell Tuffery Huria, who is recognised as the first Māori patent attorney and is a leading expert on Indigenous intellectual property rights.

“Why are you using that word if you’re not prepared to acknowledge its whakapapa [origin] and its history and to engage with the Indigenous people from which the word comes from?” she asked.

The correct answer here is “Fuck off, Honey”.

The Japanese makers of that famed soft drink “Pocari Sweat” did not have to acknowledge anything to us Anglo Saxons. There is no such thing as “Indigenous intellectual property rights”.

Sure, sure, it’s very lovely that you’ve managed to carve out a grift for yourself among the credulous. The rest of us don’t give a shit.

What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America’s unbeautiful suburban sprawl
Alexander Hurst

I drove 2,000 miles with a French friend across my home country – and saw the endless nowhere land that is the crucible of Trumpism

“But Dear God, do you see what happens when the proles have their own money they can spend as they like? They want houses with gardens, a patio deck, a pool! Shops full of things, cars so they can go wherever, anywhen! This is why we have to take control, force them back into hovels where they’ll be happy nibbling their raw turnip.

After all, if they, the working class, get all that then what market will there be for our own status as bourgeois?”

That is Hurst’s point. And he can fuck off along with that horse he rode in on.

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?