UK universities are being killed

Great. How many will be left? Half a dozen? A score? No more than that, right?

The post Huzzh! Huzzah! first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Police forces are hiring diversity officers on high salaries while crime rates in their areas rise.
Jobs being advertised by police forces with rising crime rates include a £75,000 equality, diversity, inclusion and human rights role and a £64,000 culture and inclusion lead.

C Northcote would approve.

The post Hang the Lanyards first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Last week, the British state took another extraordinary step in its campaign of repression against pro-Palestine figures, blocking US commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from entering the UK. The Home Office did not explain its reasoning, simply saying their presence in the UK was not “conducive to the public good”. The Guardian reported that it was “understood that both men have been blocked because of concerns that they could exacerbate antisemitism”.

The actions are opaque, the message unmistakable: there are political causes the British establishment welcomes but also political causes it very much fears.

Precisely when speech is controversial that’s when it must be defended etc.

Quite so. So we all do recall Mehdi’s insistence that those 7 be allowed in to go to Tommy’s march, right?

We do?

The post Mehdi Hasan on free speech first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Now, me, I think this is just an excuse to start censorship. But then I know very little to nothing about the tech here. Even, is this actually possible? If it is, how?

Anyone actually know?

The post So, there’re some phone tecchies here first appeared on Tim Worstall.

For years, I have been caught in a tiresome, expensive cycle: when I’m bored (or sad, or insecure) I scroll through my phone, looking for stuff to buy. In those moments, it feels like the right purchase will relieve me of ennui or unpleasantness. These shoes will make my life more glamorous! This face wash will make me feel forever beautiful!

Sometimes this rush lasts up to two days after I receive my item. But the excitement fades – sometimes as soon as I click “confirm purchase” – and I inevitably think: “Why did I do that?”

So how does one start shopping less? We asked experts and people who have pared down their own spending.

One of those essentials to snag a spot in The Guardian – a neurosis or two.

The post Neuroses first appeared on Tim Worstall.

“As a barrister, I have stood in family courts and watched judges normalise abuse, trivialise trauma and silence survivors,” Dr Charlotte Proudman, a co-director of Right to Equality, said.

Ah, there we are then.

A report has found “widespread and concerning evidence” of bias and victim-blaming in the family courts – primarily disadvantaging women.

Bin it, it’s nonsense.

The post How to tell something is bollocks first appeared on Tim Worstall.

With many Democratic voters hanging on to their ballots until the election’s final days and California’s notoriously thorough, but slow, processing time for ballots,

Unh hunh.

The post Yeah, yeah, sure first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Today, however, the Bank of England is doing the opposite. Despite ongoing economic weakness, a cost-of-living crisis, stagnant growth, unaffordable housing and rising business pressures, it has deliberately pushed real interest rates back into positive territory. The result is a transfer of income from borrowers to lenders and from ordinary households to those who already own substantial financial assets.

House prices are falling. Mildly, in nominal terms perhaps, a bit more in real terms, yet more as a multiple of incomes. So, positive real interest rates are aiding in solving that unaffordable housing thing, no?

Yet Spud whines.

The post Sigh first appeared on Tim Worstall.

What is more, unlike any other business, banks’ business is explicitly underpinned by the government through the provision of a guarantee to those who place deposits with them. No one would trust them without that guarantee. People need to know that they will be bailed out when banks fail, but as a result of it, banks know they will be. Their profit-extraction model, which is based on these guarantees, deserves special tax treatment as a consequence.

The banks are – righteously – charged an annual fee for this insurance. So, we’re done, right?

But, of course, Spud doesn’t know that.

The post Spud betrays yet more ignorance first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Extra £174m earmarked for ‘spiralling’ bill for Lower Thames Crossing

It’s the only way.

The post Hang the Lanyards first appeared on Tim Worstall.

This is a legacy of a much wider erosion of the ways in which we can come together as a collective around things that aren’t just about competitions with other races for the prize of most subjugated. A rapacious individualisation is the legacy of the smashing of places to gather, where people could once identify material concerns (rather than race hallucinations) and collectively bargain for their delivery. The trade union movement is weakened, labour itself is changing into something more precarious and atomised. Deindustrialisation wrecked working-class systems and the halo of social and cultural life around them. Austerity undermined the ability to commune in free spaces and mix socially, in youth clubs, in family support centres, and drove people indoors and on to their phones and into a state of hermetic siege.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of scarcity of all sorts. Not just cost of living crises, but more stressed housing, healthcare and state schooling, which intensify that state of siege. This is not to suggest that actual racism, pure and uncomplicated, is not a factor, but that its activation into something violent and aggressive is more easily achieved in such conditions. The correctives to these conditions are hampered by the long march of modernity and by governments, both Labour and Conservative, that have resigned themselves to the inevitability of austerity. And with that has come a failure to articulate a new class politics, one in which people no longer array themselves in terms of work or industry, but would recognise themselves as being on the sharp end of a capital- and asset-owning class that privatises, gouges and exploits. However, that dynamic is never identified. Appealing to vague groups such as “working people” isn’t going to cut it.

Rampant individualism and neoliberal, capitalist, austerity. ‘S obvious, innit?

And, of course, she assumes that the cold, pure, rage, is about the murder itself. Which, well, no, it ain’t. Murders happen, they’re vile and appalling when they happen and that’s that. We all know they happen. What has got people going is that the victim was left to drown in his own blood as the one who’d cried waaacism was comforted by the police. The fucking police! Which is, to the average man and woman in the street, something to rage about.

Just not getting it in the slightest.

The post Nesrine on Nowak first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Marie-Annick Gournet is an associate professor and associate pro vice-chancellor for reparative and civic futures at the University of Bristol

Her views on the subject of slavery are going to be?

The French government therefore does not need to invent a model from scratch. There are examples to draw upon. The Caribbean nations’ 10-point plan for reparatory justice offers a practical framework, combining historical acknowledgment with measures addressing public health, education, economic development and psychological rehabilitation.

Open your wallet, Frogs!

We are so surprised, eh?

These two amuse:

They remain visible in contaminated land, unequal economies

Lots of economies are unequal unrelated to slavery or not slavery. Therefore the inequality may not be anything to do with the slavery.

And:

Consumers in the overseas territories routinely pay substantially more for basic goods than in mainland France, despite lower average incomes.

Small populations on islands without much local production face higher living costs, do they? My word that is just such a surprise.

The post Guess what this lassie is going to say, eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Jakupovic was referring to the comic book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which depicts the lives of four turtles who live in the New York City sewer system. The turtles, who are brothers, were exposed to radioactive waste as youths, which turned them into human-turtle hybrids. Trained in martial arts by a large rat, the turtles fight New York criminals. The story is not based on real events.

The post So the sub has his fun first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Survivors of abuse perpetrated by the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed are calling for a full trafficking investigation to be launched, arguing that without it the “true scale” of the billionaire’s alleged network would remain hidden.

What we used to call the White Slave Trade. Innocent lovelies drugged and kidnapped to wake up in a foreign brothel where they are raped forevermore.

Lawyers representing the Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors group said 421 people had come forward about abuse that allegedly took place at the luxury department store in central London, as well as the Ritz hotel in Paris, Fulham FC and other places owned by Fayed.

The Met is investigating 155 victims who have contacted the force directly, 21 of whom came forward before Fayed’s death. However, NOA has argued the Met should focus primarily on trafficking to ensure a wider international network of people who enabled the abuse were also investigated.

Sexual abuse – which shouldn’t happen, agreed – is not really the same thing now, is it?

The post Trafficking, eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

A doctor stopped me in the street recently to thank me for making videos that make sense of a world that doesn’t. I get messages like that all the time. And I want to say this clearly: you are not going mad. The world around you is.

The post I’ll take things that did not happen for $1,000, please first appeared on Tim Worstall.

In his own statement, Sullivan said: “After a lifetime spent building businesses in the adult industry in which I have met thousands of women, it is sadly inevitable that a small number of improper conduct claims are being made against me.

The strategy has, after all, worked elsewhere, no?

The post He could well be right about this too first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Scotland Yard has been captured by the “woke mind virus” and no longer treats citizens equally under the law, a veteran police officer has claimed.
Rick Prior, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said the force had prioritised equalising outcomes among different ethnic groups over ensuring equality of opportunity for more than a decade.

The question now is, what do we do about it?

Which is a problem. Cultures are notoriously difficult to change. It’s taken them these decades to get to this point, where the idea of equity not equality dominates. So, how do we shift it back?

The post Yes, we know this first appeared on Tim Worstall.

17% is LBGTetc? And wishing to be mongamous with it?

Ho Hum.

The Observer then goes on to talk about, well, why monogamy? In their preview of the science they manage, not once, to mention children. The human experience is that to raise children requires a pair for a decade or three. The resources necessary to raise ’em need to come from two people. That intent toward monogamy is because we are descended from those who were a pair for the necessary time to get grandchildren. Now, whether you’re monogamous within a pair bonding is indeed another thing. But we can see the constraints that poses – the bloke won’t want to be raising what isn’t his, the bird will be pissed if he’s spreading his resources over those not hers.

Which is what makes it all rather fun. That discussion of monogamy doesn’t even mention that likely reason for the tendency – bints and bins.

The post Kids these days, eh? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

I’m willing to be corrected – don’t want to cause a schism – but that does, I think, betray a certain ignorance of the Holy Screed. ‘Ee might know ‘is Matthew from his Mark but of the canon of Pelham G I’m not so sure. Bertie would misremember, no?

Other than that it’s a darn good review actually.

The post The Archbish might not know his Holy Books, you know? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

And sure, they do now allow the peasant plots. Which do have much better yields than the state farms. They use a lot of “agroecological” techniques which is, I think, the modern code word for medieval peasantry methods. But they’re not growing wheat, they’re growing yams, yucca, beans, light veggies and citrus. Things where the peasant farmer can indeed produce a considerable surplus even using those medieval techniques, no fertiliser – other than night soil – etc.

So I was still not quite getting why horrendous food shortages. They’ve got those peasant plots, peasants can sell in free markets, should all work out even if there’s going to be a shortage of beefsteak on such a basis.

Ah. You’ve got sell 80% of your crop to the state at state determined prices. Yea, even if you’re farming half an acre with a hoe and machete. And guess how efficient the state is at coming to pick up your crop, let alone take a guess at the prices the state offers……

Sure, I know, pretty silly thing to thing about but there the thought arrived as I was hacking at weeds in my own garden in fact. Yes, I’m getting, for the very first time in my life, a real and direct idea of how much physical effort goes into hand farming. I’m not being stupid enough to actually try to feed myself – a few chili peppers just to show I can notwithstanding. And the muttering I’m doing to myself is, well, if you know what you’re doing (!) then yes, you really can feed yourself and household off a few acres. With a substantial surplus to sell too. It’s not going to be grand riches, by any means, but there wouldn’t be a shortage of plant based food calories.

A general shortage of basic plant – and perhaps eggs, say – calories has to be about something else therefore. And there I found it – the 80% confiscation (because their prices are confiscatory) by the State. The peasants are growing enough to feed their families, which no doubt disappears into bellies before the state calculation of yield, then there’s only a bit on top.

And that, I assume – or even would insist – is why beaucoup de fertile land on a tropical island – citrus is damn near a weed in such places, ‘nananananas too – with private plots allowed still has basic food shortages. Because, effectively, the state steals 80% of what the farmers don’t simply stuff into their own bellies.

It should even be possible to test this. Check the diets of the peasant farmers. Really test them – and find out whether they’re living off the declared crops that the state takes 80% of or there’s a bit of leakage before that calculation.

The thing that’s always got me about the Cuban variety of socialism is just how drearily shite it is. Yes, yes, gross political repression, the early days most certainly saw more than a few bourgeois up against the wall and so on. But over the decades it all just seems to be so, well, shite. I mean, seriously,. food shortages on a tropical island with a surplus of fertile land? How fucking shite do you have to be to achieve that?

The post So, just thinking, as you do….. first appeared on Tim Worstall.