Something of a thrashing

The contest was triggered by the death of former Cabinet minister Dame Cheryl Gillan, who took the seat with a majority of 16,233 in the 2019 general election – some 55 per cent of the vote.

In a stunning result, Ms Green took 56.7 per cent of the vote to secure a majority of 8,028 over the second-placed Tories.

“This Conservative Party has taken people across the country for granted for far too long,” Ms Green said.

The Green Party came third with 1,480 votes, with Labour trailing in fourth with just 622 votes, losing the party’s deposit in the process.

Isn’t Labour just looking like a government only temporarily in opposition?

Reason Not to use PayPal v.56930

  1. Two months ago we were told that we could no longer access our PayPal account as they seemed our content to be extreme and they did not like our politics. We moved to Stripe for all donors. Yesterday the re-enabled our account only for it or be banned again a few hours later citing that our content is “extreme”. We hope you agree that our views are in no way “right-wing extreme” and that we so not condone any right or left wing extremism (Centrists need not worry!)

With this is mind we will no longer be able to accept PayPal for donations or for the purchase of literature.

This is once again the big guys weighing down against the unpopular (but nonetheless true) opinion.

We still need your help more than ever.

From the outset we’ve scrutinised the ever-changing rules and regulations and numbers to and allow people to understand them and why they are wrong. By contributing, you will be helping fund our sites and the coming together of thousands of other people around the country who believe in defending our rights and making Britain fairer for all. Big corporate or small, we’re in this together.

Enjoy- Tim & The Team

Donate here.

From a PR email

Many people dream of having a consistent, lucrative passive income. I mean, who doesn’t want a little more money, right? Cash back apps, coupons, credit card rewards, these all offer a little bit of $$$, but times are changing. Monetizing your personal data could well become the most lucrative source of passive income for people.

XXX is on a mission to help people take back control of their data while making money from it.

It isn’t going to work, is it?

Two reasons.

1) The data’s not worth much. A few dollars per month per person. Because that’s the revenue that Fbook and Google get, a few dollars per month per person.

2) The individual data is worth even less than this. Because it’s the database that’s worth money. Therefore considerable amounts of the revenue flow to the people who collate, not the owners of each individual datum.

On the subject of corporate buying of housing

So, why have the corporates gone to buy houses?

QE.

What’s the point of QE? To lower the long term risk free interest rate. Therefore people must, in pursuit of income and yield, move out along the risk curve.

So, why do corporate buyers invest in housing? They’ve moved out along the risk curve in search of yield.

QE works that is….and if you want to stop it then stop QE and allow the risk free interest rate to rise.

What fun

The result is we get almost (I use the word with care, because I am not talking absolutes here) universally hopeless, helpless and useless politicians who fail to offer hope to the country. We can all nominate some exceptions. They do exist. But they are rare. And that must be because of systemic failings in our political system because I meet competent people with political opinions on a day to day basis, many of whom would more than ably rise to the challenges that government presents.

So says the man who insists that government must have much more power. So also says the man who is incapable of seeing the illogic of believing both things at the same time.

He just never does believe that other people have thought about the same things, does he?

Work is, then, about status. It occurs to me as I begin to see my generation retire that this loss of status is a big issue for many of them. Appending the word ‘retired’ to whatever their former work role might have been appears a way of clinging to that status. That they might be liberated from it takes getting used to.

But suppose we could do that? Suppose we could identify ourselves beyond our work? Why can’t we identify ourselves by our passions? That thought occurred to me when noting a young trainee doctor win The Sewing Bee this week. ‘Doctor’ will remain her chosen identity, I am sure. ‘Phenomenally good sewer’ will always be sidelined, I suspect. And yet in the hobbies I have I see people with skills that probably far surpass those that they take to their workplaces, so good are they at what they have chosen to do. Why can’t we recognise that?

Hmm, right.

Do we need to rethink work? Surely Covid has taught us that in a way few other disruptions might have? My sincere hope is that work will not go back to normal. Whilst wanting work for all who want it, work need not be the absolute that for too long it has been.

I am not suggesting I have all the answers on this. I don’t, and nor am I saying my own experience is one to replicate as it clearly won’t suit all. But nor does work as it is suit a great many people. For something so important we require better models than we have which can still be sufficient to maintain life as we want it.

Beating rentier capitalism is a necessary condition for better work. The yoke of debt burdens have to be reduced to make better work possible. But it’s not a sufficient condition. The rest is down to us to reimagine the processes. Indeed, that task might come first so that we have a goal to achieve. It seems to me that this is critical to our path to a better future.

And yes, this has been thought about:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

The thing being that communist society does not come about through the destruction of rentier capitalism. It comes about through its maturation. A necessary – please note, necessary – precondition is that capitalism carries on until the problem of economic scarcity is solved. It is only then that true communism is even possible.

It’s the usual P³. Too ignorant to know that peeps have thought about the same concepts before. Some of them even came up with answers.

Isn’t this gloriously fun!

Hanton joined RTZ (now Rio Tinto) in 1964, analysing investment opportunities for proposed mines in South America and using discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques to predict future revenue from the asset over time. He had helped to develop these analytical methods with his friends AJ Merritt and Allen Sykes, contributing ideas to their seminal book, The Finance and Analysis of Capital Projects. Today DCF techniques are a fundamental tool of the investment community.

In retirement Hanton became deputy chairman of Christian Aid as well as chairman of Living Streets and the London Cycling Campaign. He turned a Quaker-led trade justice group into the Fairtrade Foundation, involving Christian Aid, Oxfam and Cafod, effectively inventing a process by which, in exchange for using the Fairtrade label on coffee, tea and bananas, supermarkets would guarantee a fairer price to producers as well as paying a small royalty.

The P³ is resolutely against the use of discounting. Despite that source……

That’s not the correct comparison

The average fees for privately run children’s homes are £4,100 a week, roughly five times the cost of keeping an adult in prison. Local authorities are legally responsible for children in care and rely on private providers because of a shortage of places and budget cuts.

What we want to know is what is the cost of a local council place for such children?

Mr Shaxson is an idiot

As we get braver we should also aim to tax all those unrealised gains – so if a billionaire’s wealth rises, they pay tax on that annually, whether or not they sell (or “realise”) assets. Some powerful Democrats in the US are now pushing for just this.

Sigh.

So where does the money come from to pay taxes on unrealised gains? The gains must be realised, right?

Etymology

The fruit and its leaves, known botanically as Citrus hystrix, are native to Sri Lanka and are also found in Mauritius and South East Asia, where the plant is known as Makrut.

It is thought it became known as kaffir lime in reference to the Kaffirs ethnic group in Sri Lanka who traditionally smeared it on their legs and feet to ward off leeches.

However, the word kaffir also became a term for a non-Muslim, or disbeliever, in Arabic, which was in turn applied to sub-saharan Africans who did not practice Islam. From here it became a racist insult used by South African whites against the country’s indigenous population.

And of course we do not use the word any more because we’re aware.

But do Arabs?

Would, for example, Nesrine Malik, that Sudanese Arab, use the word to refer to sub-Saharan non-believers?

The disgusting racism of our modern society

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding cellist has passport cancelled by Home Office
Sheku Kanneh-Mason is unable to travel after he applied for second passport to help with visa applications when performing abroad

Typical, eh?

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are in contact with Mr Kanneh-Mason to resolve this situation and apologise for any inconvenience caused. A replacement passport will be issued as soon as possible.”

Oh.

This is despite his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason, an award-winning pianist, submitting the same paperwork 15 minutes apart and receiving both the original and second passport within a week.

So, just a fuck up in the bureaucracy.

And as to the disgusting racism of modern British society:

Sheku Kanneh-Mason MBE (born 4 April 1999) is a British cellist who won the 2016 BBC Young Musician award

Oh, right.

Kanneh-Mason grew up in Nottingham, England. He was born to Stuart Mason, a luxury hotel business manager from Antigua, and Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh, a former lecturer at the University of Birmingham, from Sierra Leone.

Child of immigrants, shows talent, is educated and lauded for that talent.

At the age of nine, he passed the Grade 8 cello examination with the highest marks in the UK,[7][8] and won the Marguerite Swan Memorial Prize.[9] Also aged nine he won an ABRSM junior scholarship to join the Junior Academy of the Royal Academy of Music, where he was tutored by Ben Davies.[1][10][11] Kanneh-Mason received his non-specialist education as a pupil at the Trinity School, Nottingham,[11] where he studied for A levels in Music, Maths and Physics.

Aren’t we just the most racist, exclusionary, society ever?

If only Alan Coren were here

Rape as a weapon should be taught in schools, says Sophie, Countess of Wessex

His feuilletons often would start with a headline then misunderstood to cause a flight of fancy. Or perhaps we should invoke the Monty Python bit of the sex lessons at school.

We’re going to teach rape at school are we? The use of rape as a weapon? Who gets to be the rapee, who the rapist, in the classroom demonstrations?

Well, actually, you know…..

Prof Lee Elliot Major, who advises the Government on social mobility issues, said: “The incredible academic success of a select few elite schools shines a stark light on the national social mobility challenges we face.

“There is no reason why we shouldn’t have candidates for Oxbridge colleges and other highly selective universities from every one of the thousands of schools across the country.”

There are two possible reasons why we might not.

1) Pupils self-select into those academic style schools that teach or Oxbridge levels. Or parents select, or the system of bursaries does, or the system does.

2) The vast majority of schools in the country are shit.

We can even propose a test to sort through these two possibilities. If those bemoaning the selectivity now start to argue that those good at getting into Oxbridge schools must be abolished then that’s an admission that we must kill good schools because the rest are shit.

Given that is what is usually proposed now we know.

Intimate partner murder

A woman who poured a mix of boiling water and sugar over her husband to “extract vengeance” after a family row has been found guilty of his murder.

Corinna Smith, 59, attacked 81-year-old Michael Baines while he was in bed at their home in Highfield Road in Neston, Cheshire, on 14 July 2020.

He suffered extensive burns and died five weeks later in hospital.

Smith denied murdering her husband of 38 years but she was found guilty by a jury at Chester Crown Court.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Smith, who was also her husband’s carer, had been involved in a dispute with him and another family member prior to the killing.

Shortly after midnight, she took a bucket from her garden, boiled up two kettles of water and mixed the water with three bags of sugar, the CPS said.

A row, not years of abuse. But of course femicide is always about the women being the victims.

Ignorant is ignorant

At the same time there is a very obvious and growing demand from the investment community for data on climate change that is not being met. It is easy to see why. I attended an Institute of Chartered Accountants seminar on climate change accounting yesterday. 35% of those attending made no climate related disclosures. 51% only made them in the narrative part of the accounts. That left 14% at most making any reference to climate in their figures. The biggest economic issue on the planet is not being accounted for, as yet

This is, of course, untrue.

The fuel duty escalator was imposed in order to meet “our Rio commitments”. It has added 25p a litre to petrol prices. The Stern Review amount for a carbon tax is 11p a litre.

So, the costs of climate change are there in every piece of accounting to do with transport in the UK. It’s in refinery accounts, as volume purchased has fallen as a result of the higher taxation. It’s in the accounts of every company that transports something, in the prices they pay for fuel. It’s in the accounts of every company that deals with something that has been transported, in the price they must pay for transport.

Climate change is, via those fuel duties, embedded in every price faced by anyone in the economy. And yes, accounts are made up with respect to market prices.

This is also true of all that greenery in the electricity supply system. It’s in prices, accounts are made up of prices, therefore climate change is in accounts.

The P³ wants more climate change to be in accounts. OK. So, he should want the carbon tax to apply to more things so that it is all reflected in accounts via the price mechanism.

The only problem with this is that it doesn’t provide a job for the P³ and let’s face it, grifters gotta grift.

Not really love, no

Capitalism is reshaping the property market, locking younger generations out of buying somewhere to live and expecting us to be happy about it

Anticapitalism in the form of excessive planning is making housing expensive.

If the bureaucracy would issue more planning permissions then housing would be cheaper.

Just a small thought

GB News has been struck by an advertising boycott from some of the world’s biggest brands after the right-leaning news service was targeted by political activists.

Kopparberg, the Swedish cider maker, was joined by Grolsch, Ikea, the Open University and skin care brand Nivea in suspending advertising ties with the network. Insurer LV=, Pinterest, Specsavers and Octopus Energy also said they would review their advertising.

However, some GB News advertisers warned against taking “knee-jerk decisions” following the backlash prompted by Stop Funding Hate, a social media campaign group that has gained prominence by organising boycotts of some national newspapers promoting right-of-centre views.

OK, usual Woken SS nonsense. However, a thought.

Advertisers advertise because it makes them profits to do so. They given in to wokeism for the same reason.

So, after the fuss dies down where’s the balance going to be? The boycott will gain enough support or it’s three idiots on Twitter? The loss of trade from not advertising will bite or not?

Have a look at this

She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” said Yeonmi. “It felt like the regression in civilization.”

“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she admitted. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Really, go read the rest of it:

With the help of Christian missionaries, the pair managed to flee to Mongolia, walking across the Gobi Desert to eventually find refuge in South Korea.

In 2015 she published her memoir “In Order to Live,” where she described what it took to survive in one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships and the harrowing journey to freedom.

“The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most,” the human right activist said.

She accused American higher education institutions of stripping people’s ability to think critically.

Stampy feet

Reality is disagreeing with the P³:

Bobbie Wickham says:
June 14 2021 at 1:43 pm
Can’t agree with this part:

“What is absolutely certain is that the UK’s failure to properly double vaccinate people in short time scales has left more people vulnerable to it than is necessary.”

The UK is comfortably ahead of all EU nations and the US in the % fully vaccinated.

That’s despite the 2nd dose delay, which may or may not have been the best course but at least has solid logic behind it. It’s hard to see the UK vaccine rollout as anything but a success story.

Reply
Richard Murphy says:
June 14 2021 at 1:50 pm
You clearly have not looked at the data

We are now way down the list

We did well

Not any more we do not

Reply
Bobbie Wickham says:
June 14 2021 at 2:06 pm
Way down the list? Have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Fully vaccinated as of the 11th June (the most recent date when all are updated):

UK = 43% (5th behind Israel, Bahrain, Mongolia and Chile)

US = 42%
Germany = 25%
Italy = 23%
France = 21%
(EU = 24%)

That doesn’t look “way down the list” to me.

Richard Murphy says:
June 14 2021 at 2:51 pm
Who pays you trolls?

Why don’t you realise one dose is not vaccinated?

Max says:
June 14 2021 at 2:13 pm
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Maybe you should look at the data again before you get things wrong.

We are still ahead of all of Europe and still at the top of the list.

Richard Murphy says:
June 14 2021 at 2:48 pm
One does is not vaccinated

It’s a jab

But no useful protection at all

I referred to people vaccinated

John says:
June 14 2021 at 8:01 pm
The Our World in Data page has a section headed: “What share of the population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19?”, which they clearly explain as: “The following chart shows the share of the total population that has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. This represents the share that have received all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol. If a person receives the first dose of a 2-dose vaccine, this metric stays the same. If they receive the second dose, the metric goes up by 1.”

Those are the numbers correctly quoted by other commenters. The data is very clearly presented.

Naughty reality, eh?