Getting at Georgie

That is, this is not a knee-jerk reaction, this idea that individual choice and action within markets works better than politics, government and democracy. It’s a result of direct observation of the world around us. The CFP is vile and governmental, more market and private property based fishing systems work better.

That is, the only neoliberal knee-jerk that exists is a propensity to believe that “the market” works better than the alternatives. A propensity that we’re entirely willing to see disproven as it is in the case of, say, nuclear weapons, the price regulation of a natural monopoly – it was us who insisted that the national grid and the like needed price regulation – and public goods.

That is, the neoliberal reaction to a proposal that government solve a problem is not to run from the room shrieking in horror, it is to insist upon “Prove it, Sunshine”. Something that doesn’t in fact work with fishing, as Monbiot complains. Which is why we support more market based solutions to the agreed problems of fishing.

Umm, guys, really now

Perhaps just as significantly, the study allows scientists to peer into the past of the Americas prior to the horrors of European colonization — which, due to genocide, violence and forced resettlement, marred our ability to study human migration.

Europeans climbing all over the Americas is human migration. True, advances into terra nullius have happened. But other than that human migration has meant genocide, violence and so on.

The Neolithic inhabitants of England fell to the Celts, the Saxons to the Normans. The Twa and Khoi San to the Bantus in Central and Southern Africa. The Ainu to the Japanese, there are autocthones in Taiwan. The Hindu caste system sets in place the Aryan (?) conquering of the south of India. And on and on and on.

America is different in details but not in kind……

PayPal Suspended Us 🛑

I was wary about getting involved with PayPal to start as i’ve heard about them terminating accounts, but…

Over the weekend PayPal informed us that they would no longer be willing to process payments for us due to “inappropriate content”. What this actually means is “we dont believe in your political opinion” both yours, and my own. Fine, they’re free to go about their business as they wish.

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

Let’s move on, plenty of more payment processors in the world..

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

But on the brightside, one week to go till the pub in the UK (lets hope the weather clears up!)

We still need your help more than ever.

Oh Dear God. Again.

Richard Murphy says:
April 6 2021 at 3:51 pm
There has been some testing

Pfizer works best it seems with 3 week delay. Extension seems to provide no gain and maybe loss of effectiveness

AZ seems to provide a gain by being delayed more than three weeks. 12 weeks seems not to have been tested.

But the decision was political and not medical. Jabs in arms mattered most

We’re in the middle of a pandemic and you want to extend the vaccine testing period by nine weeks? Or just get the damn thing out the door when the results are good enough?

Myself I’d call that a medical decision but then what do I know, I’m not The Fat Controller.

Oh Dear God, Tosser is Tossing

The point I am making is a simple one, but essential. If a great deal about our society, way of working, travelling and interacting is going to change – and I think it is – we need to get our thinking straight in what this means and embrace the uncertainty it creates.

This is, of course, entirely true.

Apparently, 88 per cent of 4,600 people surveyed wanted to spend most of their time working from home.

It is, unfortunately, not possible to know what the data on this question might have been before coronavirus. No one asked in the same way because no one really took this option seriously in the way that they do now.

What I do know is that I was on Ely station last night when the 16.45 (or thereabouts) out of Kings Cross arrived. In my long experience this was a packed train before March 202o. Last night it was almost empty. Things have changed.

An entirely valid observation.

Then comes the tosser bit:

I see no evidence that the government is anywhere near doing this.

Well, what would a sensible government do?

I think the state will have to do a great deal more in coming years, and if the private sector denies it the resources it requires to meet need then tax will increase to restrict market based activity so that public need is met.

Not that.

So, to recap. Recent events have meant that society is about to change. We do not know how. Take the work from home, not commuting thing. Some will change their behaviour entirely. Some will change it not a whit. Some portion of the peeps will change it a bit. We do not know the proportions.

We cannot even ask people because we know that expressed and revealed preferences are not the same.

Hmm, so, what do we do then? Well, we let people get on with it and see what happens. The answer, that is, will be emergent from individual decisions. That is, you know, free markets.

At which point the P³ wants to raise taxes because summat?

We cannot plan for unknown change because it’s unknown. Therefore we must plan for it?

Something I look forward to

“I wanted to prove them wrong, that in fact they are the origin story and that United States racism is just the continuation of a long history of Eurocentric domination,” he told the Guardian via phone from Paris. “If Baldwin’s words are not sufficient to understand what it is about, what else can? I felt the need to even go to a broader scope of the story of racism and white supremacy.”

His new HBO series Exterminate All the Brutes is a sweeping journey back through some of the most horrific moments in civilization over the past half-millennium to trace the roots of humanity’s worst impulses: genocide, slavery, fascism, white supremacy, colonialism. Written, directed and narrated by Peck, the four-hour series (pruned down from 15 episodes) is scaffolded by the ideas of three cornerstone texts: Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes (examining Europe’s genocidal colonization of Africa), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (the first history of the country told from the perspective of indigenous peoples) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (an analysis of power and silence in history, focusing on Haitian history). The work of the three authors, who are credited in the opening titles, serves as a lodestar in the same way Baldwin’s writing did in I Am Not Your Negro.

The documentary looking at the Bantu expansion out of West Africa. With a certain concentration upon the experiences of the Khoi San, the Bambenga and so on. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

The story of an Iron Age and farming people taking over the lands of the previous Neolithic inhabitants?

D’ye think Channel 4 might fund it?

Gender affirming treatment

Arkansas has become the first state to ban gender-affirming treatments and surgery for transgender youth, after lawmakers overrode the governor’s objections to enact the ban on Tuesday.

The state’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, had vetoed the bill on Monday following pleas from pediatricians, social workers and the parents of trans youth who said the measure would harm a community already at risk for depression and suicide. The ban was opposed by several medical and child welfare groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

However the Republican-controlled house and senate voted to override Hutchinson’s veto.

The ban prohibits doctors from providing gender-affirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old, or from referring them to other providers for the treatment. The treatments are part of a gradual process that can vastly improve young people’s mental health, and can be life-saving, experts say.

Opponents of the measure have vowed to sue to block the ban before it takes effect this summer.

“This legislation perpetuates the very things we know are harmful to trans youth,” said Dr Robert Garofalo, the division head of adolescent and young adult medicine at Lurie Children’s hospital in Chicago, speaking on a press conference call held by the Human Rights Campaign. “They’re not just anti-trans. They’re anti-science. They’re anti-public health.”

So the law bans cutting the knockers off children. There are people opposing this idea.

What consenting adults get up to, absent third party harm, is up to consenting adults. A child is, by definition, not a consenting adult.

For example, in Arkansas, a 17 year old may not rent out their genitals for the sexual pleasure of another. But the argument is that they should be allowed to surgically modify them?

Don’t see it myself…..

Weird but there we are

Over the weekend PayPal informed us that they would no longer be willing to process payments for us due to “inappropriate content”. What this actually means is “we dont believe in your political opinion” both yours, and my own.

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

We’d fight it, but we’re small fry and its easier to move on, plenty of more payment processors in the world.

No, I don’t know why, not really, either.

On the subject of art repatriation

Around the day the Louvre announces the Mona Lisa is to return to Florence then we can discuss other matters.

Nope, that that’s different doesn’t wash. The difference is as with Gibraltar and Cueta – not a difference.

Really?

Where is Boris Johnson?
Cometh the hour, cometh the leader — or not

Is Carrie being sidelined already?

I’ve been transfixed, these last twelve months, by the zest with which Boris Johnson bangs elbows with startled strangers

Elbows?

Umm

Third, there is the problem of determining what tax charge is to be considered. Deferred tax has to be ignored. It is quite literally made up and is, of course, never paid, so it must be discounted, entirely. But what we also know is that historically the current tax provision in most accounts is also overstated. I first noted this in 2006 and more recent evidence suggests that the trend continues. Companies over-provide for their current tax and then release their provisions when their tax avoidance proves to be effective. So the tax provision in the accounts of a company for any one country may also not be the right basis for determining an acceptable effective tax rate by jurisdiction.

Is cash paid the right basis, then? It may be, but critically this has to relate to a year rather than be the sum paid in a year. This will take time to calculate, and be subject revision.

Isn’t the second paragraph just saying that we do in fact have to use some measure of deferred tax?

Something of a big ask

That something else seems to involve a continuing acceptance of coronavirus. There is no elimination strategy of any sort now apparent.

It’s not just the ignorance of the costs of trying to eliminate a pandemic disease. Eliminate rather than control to an acceptable limit that is. It’s that, well, umm, how?

Do we actually have an example – a non-vaccination example perhaps – of how to eliminate a pandemic disease?

We rather knew this, didn’t we?

“It is necessary to deprive the German command of all initiative, forestall the adversary, and to attack the German army when it is still in the deployment stage and has no time to organise the distribution of forces at the front,” wrote the Soviet commanders to Joseph Stalin. The day on which they did so is by far the most surprising part of the document: 15 May 1941, one month and one week before Hitler attacked the USSR. In the spring of 1941, the Soviets considered attacking the Germans first, writes Sean McMeekin in his latest book, Stalin’s War.

The grand mistake? The only useful way of defending against an armoured invasion being defence in depth? The one thing Stalin absolutely forbade?

No it won’t you silly man

With the crucial Cop26 summit in Glasgow taking place in November, we are in a vital year of the decisive decade for the climate emergency. And deciding next month who runs England’s capital city will also be a defining question in whether we can win the fight against the accelerating climate crisis.

Which apparatchiki gets to have the two Zil parking spaces at the new HQ really won’t make an iota of difference to the global climate.

Silly man.

Guardian subs

It’s hard not to blanche when you consider the sheer number of records that have been sold featuring his work.

Why would you turn into a female Belgian popster when so considering? Or did you mean blanch?

The local criminals

Victims who lost their life savings when a currency exchange firm collapsed have waited nearly 1,000 days to find out whether they will ever see their money again.

Premier FX, an exchange firm, was placed into administration in August 2018, despite being given a clean bill of health by the City watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, just months previously. The firm collapsed following the death of Peter Rexstrew, 55, the sole director and shareholder of the firm.

Classic Ponzi scheme stuff. Run a foreign exchange service for expats. Lift chunks of the money, finance through delays on FX transfers for new customers. It all keeps working until there’s no more new money coming in. Which the death of the principal might well cause:

The firm encouraged British customers both in the UK and expats living in Portugal and Spain to leave large amounts of cash with it in the hope that they would benefit from exchange rates, helping them buy holiday homes. But Premier FX did not have the right regulatory licences to hold customer money beyond remittance.

That’s how to increase the amount supposedly within the company and thus cover the money that’s been appropriated.

The Financial Conduct Authority asked the UK courts in August last year to declare Premier FX insolvent because after the death of the sole director and shareholder, the firm was unable to pay its debts.

No, didn’t know him but I’m sure I know people who did.