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It’s The Jooos, The Joooos I tell ‘ee!

….while at the same time one third of the MPs in the cabinet and one quarter of MP’s altogether receive funding from organisations sympathetic to Israel.

There is a massive problem with the purchase of influence within the UK government, but it does not come from Iran. The problem is with Israel, which can now be quite reasonably described as the biggest rogue state on earth, and is undoubtedly a greater threat to UK security given the current consequences of its actions in the Middle East.

Sigh.

Ahem

I can think of no conceivable gains to humankind as a consequence of wasting so many of the world’s resources blasting a few people into space to explore the dark side of the moon.

I strongly suspect that it will be claimed that there are some spin-off benefits, but the probability that these could have been found without the excesses of this programme is very likely, and there is no prospect whatsoever of human habitation of the moon, or of the exploitation of its resources to benefit people here on Earth.

It is therefore appropriate to note, as the New York Times do, that this programme is nothing more than a giant exercise in political pettiness waged between world leaders with very small, and easily bruised, egos.

Is it possible that we might ever get to the point where politicians might think about the greater good rather than meaningless point scoring?

So government pisses the money away on doing useless things then. At the same time private indistry – Musk’s SpaceX – can do the same thing vastly cheaper and also provides broadband internet anywhere on Earth and is about to start rolling out satellite telecoms everywhere too.

All hail the private sector then.

I know, I know, expecting Spud to grasp an implication is like trying to seize a rainbow.

No, this isn’t the same as 2008

A leading Wall Street shadow bank has been hit with a surge in withdrawal requests of more than $5bn (£3.8bn) from spooked investors amid warnings of a 2008-style financial meltdown.
Blue Owl Capital said on Thursday it would block some redemptions from two major funds after it was swamped by demands from its financial backers to withdraw their cash.

The reason it’s not the same is that they can – and have – blocked redemptions.

Bank deposits are an “open ended fund”. Turn up, ask for the money back, get it. Deposits are recallable upon demand that is. As a bank must have a deposit to finance a loan this means the bank is bust if deposit withdrawals happen faster than the loans can be called in.

If you can tell people they cannot have their deposit back you are both not a bank and also not subjecty to a bank run. So, no, this is not like 2008. These are “closed end funds” and a closed end fund cannot suffer a run.

Sure, sure, many of those loans could go wrong. But the effect, if they are, is that we watch the capitalists lose money rather than the financial system falls over. It’s not 2008.

A useful test of financial market idiocy is people claiming that it will be the same.

But there is no resolution to the strike

She said: “The council continually denied it but the figures here, that the Guardian have exposed, show the truth. The facts are clear. The council needs to stop wasting Birmingham residents’ money trying to break the strike and instead resolve the strike.”

The Equality Act says that binmen must be paid the same as workers of equal value – teaching assistants and school dinner ladies. Pay sufficient to get binmen to turn up must be offered to all those many, many others when they’re already happily enough turning up for work.

Brum is not allowed to vary pay so that they get enough binmen without paying all those many, many, others more.

Rewscind the Equality Act at the strike would be over 30 minutes later.

Fiscal drag in the NHS

Stonkers!

They are now available because the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) from this week has increased the amount of money the NHS can spend on a treatment in the hope of giving patients a longer and higher quality of life from £30,000 to £35,000 a year.

That’s per Qualy, per decent life year gained by the treatment. We are saved etc:

While NICE was established in 1999, the explicit range of £20,000–£30,000 became commonly recognized as the guiding threshold in the early 2000s.

£30k then is worth about £15k now. So, the amount the NHS is willing to pay to save us hsa halved in only a couple of decades. Isn’t a nationally planned – for our benefit of course – health service such a lovely thing?

It’s also a lovely retort to that argument that the reason the NHS becomes more expensive is because all these new expensive treatments keep arriving. But as the NHS doesn’t spend on all these lovely new and expensive treatments that cannot be the reason for the rising NHS bill, can it?

Oh, well then

A federal judge has thrown out the majority of Blake Lively’s claims against Justin Baldoni.

In a court ruling on Thursday, Judge Lewis Liman dismissed 10 of the 13 claims in Lively’s lawsuit against her co-star and director of the domestic violence film It Ends With Us.

Among the 10 claims that Liman threw out were Lively’s claims of sexual harassment, conspiracy and defamation. Just three of the actor’s claims will now be heard at trial: breach of contract, retaliation, and aiding and abetting in retaliation.

Retaliation is a crime now?

This decision leaves Lively’s case with a narrower purview, with its focus limited to the actor’s claims that Baldoni was behind a retaliatory campaign which shared and boosted negative stories about her online.

Apparently so tho’ isn’t that just free speech?

We need advice from Ely on this!

More than half the countries that have qualified for the World Cup are facing additional costs and potential losses due to Fifa’s failure to agree a blanket tax exemption with the United States government and significant variance in the host country’s international tax treaties.

As a not-for-profit organisation Fifa has had tax-free status in the US since the 1994 World Cup, but that exemption does not apply to all of the 48 qualifiers, whose national associations must pay a range of federal, state and city taxes on their earnings from the tournament this summer.

Players also need to pay US tax on their earnings in the US.

I recall emanations from Ely back when the UK hosted summat. Can’t recall what it was but a big jamboree. And there was outrage that the participants had a blanket protection from UK taxation for the period of the jamboree. This is outrageous, tax foreigners etc.

Jus’ wonder what the commentary would be now that it’s Trumpy following the policy formerly recommended?

This is gloriously funny

An investigation by Canada’s national broadcaster has found that a major Quebec producer has been diluting its maple syrup with cane sugar and selling the fraudulent product to grocery chains.

OK, well, adultereated products are hardly new, But:

The industry is worth nearly C$1bn annually and the immense value of the market has lured criminal elements to Quebec’s global strategic reserve of syrup.

In 2011, thieves slowly siphoned off maple syrup worth nearly C$18m from the stockpile, a heist that led to 40 arrests and jail sentences for five men.

The “strategic reserve” is actually the amount that is kept off the market in order to keep prices high.

So we have that well known phenomenon, people being people. Prices are deliberately kept high and therefore there is adulteration to bring prices down. Which, you know, increases the amount that must be spent upon keeping prices high…..

One of those little strangenesses

It’s Trans Day of Visibility today, a day to celebrate trans people’s lives and raise awareness of discrimination. And like any other day, it’s a day when trans people continue to be invisible and powerless.

There are no trans people elected to any of the UK’s parliaments;

I once worked rather hard to get a trans person elected – for 10 months in fact. OK, it was the European Parliament but that counted at the time. Got her elected too.

Perhaps it’s that it was alongside Nigel Farage and Ukip that makes people forget this…..

Well, sorta, maybe

Trans panic is a variation of the gay panic defence, which is a tactic used in murder and assault cases to blame the victim rather than the attacker. In the UK it’s sometimes known as the Portsmouth Defence. It argues that if a straight person experiences sexual advances from someone who is gay, or has sexual activity with someone they then discover is trans, any ordinary person would be so horrified, outraged and disgusted that they would lose control and beat, stab or shoot the gay or trans person. It’s been abolished as a legitimate defence tactic in courts in many countries, but in the UK it’s been enshrined in law.

We also have laws that say that if you pretend to be something you’re not then completing a sexual advance under such terms could be rape. So, sorta, you know….

Surprise!

The UK is in a war economy, and most people don’t realise it yet. The Middle East conflict has already cut global oil supplies by around 20% and gas supplies by roughly 30%. With approximately half of all UK food imported, and global fertiliser supplies under severe pressure, the shortages hitting our shelves and energy bills are only the beginning.
Markets cannot solve this. When supply collapses, markets ration by income and those with money survive; those without do not. That is not a policy choice. That is a failure of government. The energy crisis and emerging food shortages demand an active UK state response.

Drawing on Lord Keynes’s approach at the start of World War II, and John Kenneth Galbraith’s wartime work in the United States, this video argues that the only credible response to this supply chain crisis is a combination of government-led rationing and a serious redesign of the tax system.

That means rationing oil, aviation fuel, heating oil, and food.

It means equalising capital gains and income tax rates, extending national insurance to investment incomes, and adding VAT to financial services.

I’ve now found an excuse to do everything I’ve always wanted to do.

It’s the hypocrisy, eh?

Patricia Pino has written a thoughtful and detailed response to my recent posts on modern monetary theory (MMT) and the Job Guarantee (JG), which I shared this morning. I welcome that. These are issues that deserve serious engagement, not sloganising. And if there is one thing that matters in political economy right now, it is that we are willing to interrogate our own assumptions as rigorously as we challenge those of others.

People who do, consistently, examine and respond to his assumptions get banned.

That’s humans for you

The borderless, unifying sense of our world as a single global community that entranced us after Apollo, and might have marshalled us all to act together for a greater environmental good, could have been amplified by social media. Instead, these platforms’ profit-driven, algorithmically tuned echo chambers have driven many of us in the opposite direction. Instead of fighting for the habitability of our home, we are fighting each other; our minds occupied by divisive, polarising politics and broken international relations.

Peky little bastards, aren’t we?

Now four of us have ventured far away from our divided planet again. This international crew of calm, curious, kind, thoughtful people represents the best of us. They symbolise something important. They will ride a spaceship built by communities from 11 nations who have harnessed their inherent diversity of thought and their broader problem-solving abilities to accomplish a new moonshot. Instead of individual nations racing there, the Artemis missions represent a group of united nations going to the moon together, first to fly around the moon this week with Artemis II, then to land there in 2028. Sixty-one countries have signed the Artemis accords, a set of global agreements committing to working peacefully together in space and on the moon.

Like fuck. The Kumbayah this will last 90 seconds then it’s back to normality again. Fractious little beasts that we are.

Democracy eh, democracy

It’s just one of those things:

Swedish PM offers deal that could see far-right allowed into government
Party, which has neo-Nazi roots, will hold ‘important ministerial posts within immigration’ if four-party coalition wins in September

If people keep voting for the Nazis then yues, the Nazis do get to be in government. That’s what democracy is, the folk get what the fikk say they want, good and hard.

One of the things that amuses me about all of this is that the same people who scream no, but, democracy doesn’t mean the will of the people, are also those who – generally at lesat – shriek that we must have true economic democracy. You know, the people who would be insisting that even if the people did vote for it we couldn’t have tiots oot fer the lads, donuts and fracking. Because democracy doesn’t actually mean dong what the folk want, does it?

Ah, well now

Yes, everyone loves a sailor and etc. But:

During a trip last year she allegedly behaved inappropriately towards a senior naval officer after becoming heavily intoxicated during an evening in the officers’ mess, according to the Times.
…
A Royal Navy captain in charge of one of Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines stepped back from his duties over his relationship with the MP Joani Reid, whose husband faces allegations of spying for China.

The married senior officer was investigated by the navy last year over his contact with Reid after the messages, described as inappropriate, prompted an assessment of a potential blackmail risk, the Financial Times first reported.

The investigation, launched because of “due diligence”, found the pair had exchanged messages described as flirtatious.

This is the MP whose hubbie is under suspicion for spying for China. Quite the very pair, eh?

Well, yes

This, though, is not simply about Trump’s erratic behaviour or the latest Iran news. There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed.

Stalin was so careful with civilian casualties, wasn’t he?

But then I suppose Stalin’s a neoliberal by now. And Mao.

Usual foolishness

Bangladesh could become the first foreign casualty of Donald Trump’s war in Iran as it faces running out of oil and gas within weeks.
After weeks of rationing, the government in Dhaka is struggling to formulate a plan and is becoming increasingly desperate at the prospect of running out of fuel, sources have told The Telegraph.

Because they’ve been rationing, not allowing the price to rise. Making the samemistake the Americans did under Nixon.

Every time we have to re-learn the same basic lesson — price is the most efficient way to ration demand. That we have to re-learn it is because all too many think it is unfair, in some manner inequitable. Which, well, it quite possibly is but price is still efficient.

This time around it’s the jump in international fuel prices as a result of the war affecting transport out of the Persian Gulf. Should that be happening, should the war be going on? I might not be the right person to ask — the translator of an article of mine into Farsi was jailed for translating my article. I could, perhaps, be a little biased on the question of who should rule Iran.

But given that the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has happened, the prices of oil and gas (LNG) have jumped, what should we do then?

Well, we need to reduce our consumption of those items, obviously enough. What’s the best way of doing that? Economists — well, most of them — insist that price is the most efficient way of allocating that newly scarce resource.

But then no one listens to me…..

Excellent!

Politicians hoping to persuade young people in the UK to have more children should prioritise tackling housing affordability, according to research by the Resolution Foundation thinktank.

Abolish the TCPA, kill the Green Belt. ‘S for the children, see?

The security of the vote is important, yes

The action, which the president has framed as an effort to enhance “election integrity”, directs the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to create a national voter list and share that with states.

It also directs the postmaster general to require all mail-in and absentee ballots to be placed in “secure ballot envelopes” with official markings, and the postal service to send mail-in ballots only to those on the list, and orders the attorney general to withhold federal funds from “non-compliant” states and cities. Under the order, the attorney general is also supposed to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of election officials and others who distribute federal ballots to ineligible voters.

There’s always the obvious point that those arguing that the vote should be insecure well, why are they?

There’s also that historical point that it’s been the Feds who ensured the validity of the vote – it wasn’t the states and the counties that allowed the darkies to vote now, was it?

On the other hand the idea that a national database is going to be accurate, well, pfffft.