Newspaper Watch

This is terribly fun, isn’t it?

Even when an investigation does take place, the prime minister can suppress its conclusions, as Johnson has done with the report on Russian interference in the British political system, which remains unpublished. Does it contain details of unlawful donations to the Conservative party? Or of Conservative Friends of Russia, whose launch party was attended by Cummings? A key figure in this group was a man who has subsequently come under suspicion of being a Russian spy. He has been photographed with Johnson, whom he described as a “good friend”. What was going on? Without parliament’s intelligence and security committee’s report, we can only guess.
…..
These formal rings of power are supported by further defences beyond government, such as the print media, most of which is owned by billionaires or multimillionaires living offshore, and the network of opaquely funded thinktanks, that formulate and test the policies later adopted by government. Their personnel circulate in and out of the prime minister’s office.

Oh, for those halcyon days when it was the right sort of Russians sending the Moscow Gold to the Morning Star and the like…..

Kill them, kill them!

Liverpool squad take the knee in tribute to George Floyd

No, not the players, none of us expect young footballers to be intellectual giants – no, not sneering, just a different application of talents – but the journalists. Taking the knee? We’re not Americans damn you. They’re kneeling!

Well, yes, David Sirota

David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and Jacobin editor at large who served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter.

He’s also the bloke who praised Chavez and Maduro as doing pretty well.

And it’s Mr. Sirota who tells us this:

Moreover, corporate health insurance has far higher administrative costs than single-payer programs like Medicare, and even the much-vaunted Affordable Care Act allows insurers to siphon up to 20% of customers’ premiums to corporate profits rather than actual medical care.

No, It allows up to 20% to go to corporate costs. Of, you know, running the company? 80% must be spent on actual medical care. And if someone who wants to tell us about the economy doesn’t know the difference between revenue and profit then we can ignore everything else he says, can’t we?

Times subs!

Joe Biden vows to cancel oil pipeline to Canada

It’s an oil pipeline from Canada. This being easy to prove, look at a map. Now, the oils not going to run up now, is it? Quite, clearly, gravity works so it will flow from Canada into the US.

Tsk

North of Naples is a vast underground supervolcano that vents itself in mysterious earth movements and noxious gases. The Romans noticed. They concluded that Lake Avernus, in a round crater in this fuming landscape, was the entrance to Hades.

An entrance to hell, not the.

You what?

and the typical US graduate earning about $1 million over their lifetime.

Median weekly income is $865 for a full time worker, $44k a year. Average annual personal income is more like $33,000.

Graduates, still, make a premium to median incomes. Working life of 30 to 40 years?

Nope, not right.

Innumerate Guardian journalists

Look, we know they have problems with numbers – being all arts graduates – but this is ridiculous:

Europe Day, additional to VE day, marks the moment 50 years ago when Robert Schuman, the foreign minister of France, in a landmark speech laid the foundations for the European Union as a response to the devastation of the second world war that had ended five years earlier.

Schuman’s speech was in 1950. As anyone with a brain would realise when writing that sentence. It’s the 75th of VE day, right? 75 minus 5, as stated, is 70, not 50.

Jeez, yes, arts graduates and numbers, but really, who believed that it extended to dates?

Tsk, subs, really

Boarding an airliner before Covid-19 halted mass air travel, most people gave little thought to who owned the aircraft on which they were about to fly.

Most would have assumed it was the airliner they had booked their tickets with.

You might suppose the airliner is owned by the airline….

Union organising in digital media

A very good thing, oh yes:

Five years ago, unions barely existed in digital media. Today, they may save the industry from the worst of the COVID-19 depression—and provide a model to other working professionals.
…

Within just a few months, five new digital-media companies unionized—Salon, The Guardian US, Vice’s editorial team, ThinkProgress, and Al Jazeera America.

Two of those five are bust and another employs – still – Amanduh.

Can’t see this is a great advertisement in favour of unionisation.

Ahhhh

That explains that then.

When the JC went bust and straight to liquidation I emailed a contact there thinking that this was all a bit sudden. To be told that they couldn’t possibly comment. That now makes sense.