Everyone else is insisting that if Trump wins in 5 weeks then democracy is dead. Bobbie Reich now insists it’s if Vance wins in 2028 that democracy is dead.
Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.
Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.
Novel….
Look, EVs might be lovely things, might not be. Save the planet or strand us all as the ‘leccie runs out. But this?
In their letter to the Chancellor, carmakers insisted they remained committed to EVs in the long run and believed the switch would boost economic growth, but “only if the conditions are right and the consumer can afford it”.
Why would the switch increase economic growth? As I say, could be good or bad, but the link to economic growth from the switch seems tenuous – as in, not there.
Russian performance artist says Phoebe should go free because Van Gogh spoke to her. The Russian artist that is, not Phoebe.
OK, more coherent than Fabianism but still….
The south of England received almost 50pc of public spending on the UK railway last year, official figures show, despite having slightly under a third of the total population.
The North, by contrast, was allocated just 18pc, yet is home to almost a quarter of the national population.
The South is where the population density is, density being what makes railways work….
Who knows? No explanation is being offered. All we do know is that Starmer has dug another pit and jumped into it, giving anyone with remaining interest in his already discredited premiership yet more reason to despair about his total lack of judgement and utter incompetence.
Not that he was all that in favour to begin with.
The trouble is that so effective has his operation to shut down opinion that is associated with talent, flair and ability in Labour been that there is no-one left to succeed him.
Ah, that’s where it’s leading. Cometh the hour, cometh the potato
The Labour peer at the centre of the donations row bailed out a baroness after she was found to have wrongly claimed £125,000 in the parliamentary expenses scandal.
Lord Alli, a multimillionaire former banker and fashion entrepreneur, gave a £62,000 loan to Baroness Uddin more than a decade ago to help her repay the expenses after the Lords authorities ordered her to refund the taxpayer.
Sir Keir Starmer would later announce that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which he ran at the time, would not pursue fraud charges against her.
We’re getting to the point that it doesn’t, in fact, matter who has done what with which cash. Politics is what people believe, not what is true. And this is spilling over into the beliefs of the general public, it’s not just SW1.
They’re all at it, all the same, ain’t they?
That’s the real political import.
The BBC has been forced to cancel a Laura Kuenssberg interview with Boris Johnson after she sent him her briefing notes “by mistake”.
Kuenssberg was due to meet the former Prime Minister for an interview to be broadcast on BBC One on Thursday night.
But in a statement on X, she announced: “While prepping to interview Boris Johnson tomorrow, by mistake I sent our briefing notes to him in a message meant for my team. That obviously means it’s not right for the interview to go ahead.
“It’s very frustrating, and there’s no point pretending it’s anything other than embarrassing and disappointing, as there are plenty of important questions to be asked. But red faces aside, honesty is the best policy. See you on Sunday.”
What’s wrong with the interviewee seeing the briefing notes? You weren’t, say, going to try to ambush him, were you?
We face the prospect of an escalating war in the Middle East.
The politics of this are obvious. The struggle to control oil is clearly in play.
The places going bang bang are the only parts of the Middle East that don’t have any oil. This is, in fact, about killin’ Jews and Jews not being willin’ to be killed.
But then getting our geopolitical analysis from a potato is always going to lack a certain subtlety
As the far right celebrates election success in Austria, this much is clear. It must be denied power
Can’t have a democracy where the people are allowed to make the wrong choice now, can we?
Four key factors have been identified that together account for more than one-third of the inequalities in infant deaths between the most and least deprived areas of England.
Researchers say targeted interventions to address these factors – teenage pregnancy, maternal depression, preterm birth and smoking during pregnancy – could go a significant way to reduce inequalities, although higher-level structural changes to address socioeconomic inequality will also be necessary.
If rich and poor people all stop doing the bad things – the smoking etc – then why would reducing inequality make any difference?
Deprivation could have an effect, sure. So could absolute poverty. But relative poverty – inequality? How?
Teachers are buying soap and toiletries for primary school pupils because of an increase in “hygiene poverty”, according to school staff.
A survey of 500 school staff in the UK suggests that nearly three in 10 (28 per cent) have seen children repeatedly miss school because of hygiene poverty.
The majority of teachers said they had seen children arriving at school in dirty clothes, with unwashed hair and unbrushed teeth over the past year.
Lidl does a litre of liquid soap/shampoo for £2. Everyone else does something very similar.
That is, it’s not money that’s the problem here. Unless we want to start calling it poverty of habit, poverty of culture, poverty of expectations – all of which would be anathema for all cultures are equal, right? – then it’s not, actually poverty. It’s also something not solved with money.
Anyone but Badenoch should be next Tory leader, says Nadine Dorries
Nothing quite so bitchy as a woman seeing another outshine her.
Washington Post reporter leaves paper over Instagram post calling Joe Biden a ‘war criminal’
Taylor Lorenz,
The mystery was never why they didn’t fire her it was why did they hire her?
She’s on a feed I check for some work I do. And her own use of “internet culture” seems to be excessive self-promotion (no, really, even for an American bird excessive) and whining about why won’t people wear masks. Not really what makes social media interesting….
So, what do these three strategic shifts really mean? Let’s start with the first one – moving from hospital to community.
Privatised medical providers do not like hospital care. They know that those people who end up in hospital – and all of us do at some point in our lives – will require complex medical treatment.
Those who are in A&E will never get private medical care.
Those who get through that process because they have heart attacks or strokes, or they’ve got cancer, or they’ve had a road traffic accident, or they require a major surgery for whatever that reason might be, will never, in most cases, ever have private medical treatment.
These acute cases all involve complexity, and private medicine really does not want to go anywhere near acute cases and complexity if it can avoid them. So, the whole basis of the transfer of medicine from hospital to community is to outsource from hospitals all those things that can be run by medical algorithms.
Like what? Things like diabetes control, things like the control of cholesterol through statins, everything to do with hypertension and heart disease, and maybe even the control of what I call the diseases of despair, which are things like depression. Those all run, to a very large degree, on the basis of an algorithm that says, if you see this, do that. And those are the conditions. that private medicine loves.
Those things we can do cheaply and simply with partially trained labour should not be done cheaply and simply with partially trained labour because…..well, no really reason is given other than worship at the Church of the National Health Service.
Spud, if he’d been around then, would have been against the introduction of aspirin because all should have an equal chance of trepanning.
Aston Martin shares hit skids after profits warning
Hasn’t that been an idea that’s eaten the capital.
Ho hum.
Is it 6 or 7 times the brand (note, not this company) has gone bankrupt?
Which of course might suffer from that problem of being simple and wrong:
One possible explanation is the rise of the “western” diet, which is high in ultra-processed foods. A 2022 study of nearly 3,000 children and 4,256 adults in the US suggested that consuming ultra-processed foods was associated with allergy symptoms in children and adolescents. Perhaps the full detrimental impacts of ultra-processed foods are only now being recognised, as data is collected and analysed. There are close links between the gut microbiome and the immune system; similar concerns have been raised about their possible link to digestive-tract cancers in young people.
Another theory is that those who develop allergies are deficient in vitamin D, the vitamin our body produces when exposed to sunlight. Surveys have shown that children are spending an increasing amount of time indoors on screens instead of outdoors playing. This isn’t just a post-pandemic trend: it has been happening for more than a decade, alongside the growing use of tablets, games consoles and phones.
Other explanations have included the widespread use of antibiotics in young children (for ear infections or other ailments), which affect the digestive tract, rising air pollution and early exposure to skin infections. The health community will continue to look to scientists such as Turner, who is also a paediatric allergy consultant, to test the various hypotheses on why these allergies are developing and what can be done to prevent them in children.
The previous 50% death rate in children cdovered up a number of allergy deaths. Add in a bit of genetics – those who would have died did not and so the genes pass on down the generations – and here we are, two to three generations after the collapse of the child death rate with allergy problems.
It explains the available information but whether it’s correct or not is another thing.
A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced.
In a 26-page opinion, the Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.
“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.
Effectively, around and about, the State court judge is insisting upon the Roe argument – privacy. This could also be true under the Georgia state cnostitution. We know from Dobbs that it’s not under the US federal one. But it could be true more locally.
Have to wait and see really.
McBurney’s ruling arrives weeks after ProPublica reported that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned. In statements after McBurney’s ruling, abortion rights supporters highlighted Thurman and Miller’s deaths.
“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a plaintiff in the case that led to Monday’s ruling. “At the same time, we can’t forget that every day the ban has been in place has been a day too long – and we have felt the dire consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”
What excellent Newspeak that is. Both women died after actually having medical abortions – you know, those pills that are so safe people are prescribing them over the internet? At least one of them then got truly loousy, no good, treatment for the partial failure of the pills but it’s wasn’t the absence of an abortion that killed her.
Why The Guardian thinks it has to lie about US politics I’m not sure.
Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale
Montana’s Tim Sheehy claims he and wife lived in poverty but own book reveals he had $400,000 to build company
Sigh. “Poverty line” is income in any one year. Not resources, not whatever capital you’ve spent on setting up a business. It’s income.
At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.
“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”
So the business is making no money. OK, that’s actually pretty normal at some stage. So, you’re blow the poverty line of $14k per person or whatever it is. Or $25k per family, that sort of level. OK, shrug.
“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”
In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.
Great, Saved capital is not, in fact, annual income, is it? Super, so why compare the two?
It is, in fact, entirely normal that people bootstrapping a business fall below the poverty line income at some point. Well, OK, not uncommon at least.
So, why……ah, sorry, election season, this guys an R so any lies or distortions are just fine.
The idea that this country benefits by allowing the best of UK plc to be creamed off by overseas buyers, or become their mere subsidiaries, is absurd.
Actually, it’s very nationalistic. Not really sure why, either.
Meanwhile, the sale of chip designer Arm – arguably the most successful technology company Britain has ever produced – in 2016 to Japan’s SoftBank must rank as one of the greatest acts of self-harm ever committed.
But the shareholders of ARM – who are the owners of it – made out like bandits. Why isn’t this a good idea?
Poor laddie has this idea that companies belong to the nation in some way. Rather than, you know, the shareholders?
A British clergyman has reportedly died during a night of alleged drug-fuelled sex with a Belgian priest.
The 69-year-old English priest is understood to travelled to the country for the papal visit, but died after consuming “ecstasy and poppers” and engaging in sexual relations, according to a Dutch-language newspaper.
Father Bernard, 60 – the priest who allegedly entertained the unnamed British clergyman in his rectory – had since been arrested, Het Laatste Nieuws reported on Sunday.
No, that’s not the amusement. Such things happen.
It’s that no one at all – and I’ve looked at a number of reports on this – tells us which denomination the priests were.
I don’t know whether the Flemish are generally C or P for example. The Walloons, yes, C but…..
At which point, some sterling detective work by yours truly. This is the church of the Belgian priest. Roman Catholic Dioceses of Antwerp. Thus at least one of them – and we’d assume both I guess – are Papists.
At which point we can all get back to the usual commentary. One I’ve seen was “Good on ’em, no kids, eh?” and another “Chemsex at 69? Most sporting” etc….