Flatulent tosspottery

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Despite these challenges, Sal, 24, said he is still expected to conform to an outdated working structure, putting in long hours without the payoff older generations had.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?

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.