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Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Links - 15th October 2024 (2 - Healthcare in Canada)

Foreign doctors take up more medical residency spots as Canadians struggle to get in - "Canada has an acute shortage of doctors — a staffing crisis that is expected to get much worse in the years ahead as the number of residency positions on offer fails to keep up with rapid population growth.  Despite those challenges, roughly 1,000 Canadian doctors who went to school abroad are turned away every year because they can't get residency spots in Canada, according to a CBC News review of medical school data. Physicians are required to go through a residency in order to be licensed to practice.  Canadian doctors who want to come home to work are routinely told it's not possible because resources are limited and there are only so many residency positions to go around.  But the medical schools that run residency programs still find room for foreign nationals from countries like Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — people who frequently have no intention of staying here to work over the long term. All of this is done with Ottawa's blessing. The federal government has exempted medical schools from immigration laws that require Canadians get priority for a job.  Critics maintain that dismantling the foreign "visa trainee" program — which gives several hundred residency spots to non-Canadians — would free up positions so more homegrown doctors can work here in Canada and help chip away at the physician deficit... Typically, foreign trainees are contractually required to go home when their residency is over. The Saudi government and the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco — two of the entities that pay the way for some visa trainees — demand they leave Canada once their residencies are complete.  That means precious Canadian residency spots are wasted, critics maintain.  These foreign residents are not being permanently deployed to physician-starved rural and remote areas or hanging their shingles in a province like Nova Scotia — where 142,000 people, roughly 14 per cent of the population, are on a waiting list for a family doctor.  IMGs, by comparison, are Canadian citizens or permanent residents who generally want to live and work in the country they call home... Ivy Lynn Bourgeault is an expert on health care human resources and a professor at the University of Ottawa.  She's studied the visa trainee issue and has found that Canadian taxpayers actually foot part of the bill for foreign residents.  About 70 per cent of the funding comes from abroad while the rest comes from public funds, according to Bourgeault's data."
Damn conservative governments underfunding healthcare!
When you need to treat medical degrees from all foreign schools as equivalent in order to not be "racist"...

Randall Denley: The private health-care scare doesn't work anymore. Someone tell Ontario's opposition parties - "The whole public-private health-care debate in Ontario, and the rest of Canada, is a bit of a farce. Most Ontario hospitals are not-for-profit entities, not owned by the government. Doctors’ clinics are mostly owned by doctors. Much X-ray and blood test work is performed by the private sector. We have a system of public payment and private provision. The latest announcement from the Ontario government is more of the same. That’s only controversial to people whose ideology tells them that anything done by the public sector is good and anything by the private sector is bad. It’s not a line of thinking that will fix Ontario’s health-care supply shortages."
The left hate profit more than they love good outcomes. Ergo the common demand that nothing essential to life should be sold for a profit and the demand to destroy capitalism since people still die from a lack of these things. Because clearly, efficiencies don't exist and all gains go to profit because of "greed", and alternatives to capitalism will automatically be better than it

Why immigrants like me don’t stand a chance at owning a home - "As of 2021, it is estimated there are more than 13,000 internationally trained doctors in Canada who aren’t working as doctors, according to the Internationally Trained Physicians’ Access Coalition. My mother is among them."

AGAR: A reckoning for Canada's healthcare system - "Consider a comparison with Germany. The Calgary Herald reported, “Canada has 10 times as many health-care administrators as Germany, even though Germany has twice the population of Canada.”  Germany is rated one of the best universal health care systems, while we are near the bottom. Germany has more doctors and nurses and more equipment.  Where do we spend our money?  “Canada has one health-care administrator for every 1,415 citizens. Germany: one health-care administrator for every 15,545. Even accounting for Canada’s vast land mass and that each province and territory runs its own system, the discrepancy doesn’t make sense.”... “Canada ranked worst out of the countries studied that had data available when it comes to the percentage of patients who waited two months or more for a specialist appointment (30% in Canada but just 3% in Germany) and worst again when it comes to the percentage of Canadians (18%) who waited four months or more for elective surgery compared to best in class Germany (0%).”"

Healthcare professionals, paramedics and other first responders. What vibes is the city currently giving you? : r/askTO - "I'm a family doctor, overall vibe is people are suffering, resources are stretched and healthcare at the primary care level is falling apart.
1. Social issues are increasing; I have so many patients in precarious housing/employment situations. Many of my patients, if evicted or lose their job can't afford new rental prices so they'll end up homeless. Similarly, a large number of my appointments are related to social issues I have no ability to deal with.
2. Specialty services are fucked. Doug Ford shares a huge chunk of blame but physician specialists and hospitals are also responsible. Mental health is the most obvious one; we don't have enough therapy programs and psychiatrists have 1-2 year waits. Psych won't follow patients and generally offer shit recommendations for family doctors. If anything, specialists are cherry picking easy patients for longitudinal care while abandoning complex patients. For example endocrinologists will see stable type 2 diabetes patients every 3 months but the type 1 with terrible blood sugars... follow up every 6 to 12 months. Specialists of all types are refusing to see patients and punting work back to family doctors which is increasing burnout amongst primary care physicians. A common example: I refer a patient to a neurologist for migraines, neurologist replies back "we don't deal with migraines, only XYZ" or you refer to gynecology and they reply back with "we don't deal with endometriosis or fibroids, please refer elsewhere". Now we have to waste more time sending referrals.
3. Social services are being heavily abused. More and more patients are requesting disability/medical leave from work for non-health issues. After taking over the practice from the previous doctor I'm seeing so many people who previously qualified for ODSP, disability tax credits when they never should have.
4. Immigration is fucked; my clinic takes on refugee patients but I'm seeing far more illegal immigrants - people who overstayed visas but refuse to leave. I'm also generally seeing far more elderly patients who immigrated to Canada in the last 4 years but can't speak english. It's my duty to treat people regardless of their background but I can't help but feel bad for Canadians who were raised here, paid their taxes for decades but can't access primary care.
5. Lastly, while not exclusively an issue limited to Toronto, family medicine is dead. I strongly believe this is the last generation of family physicians. The damage that has been done is irreversible. Expect nurses practitioners and pharmacists to take over primary care in the next 1-2 decades. The new cohort of family physicians will go into hospital care like emergency medicine, palliative and hospitalist."

Alberta health care reforms have system on verge of collapse - "Last November Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a massive overhaul of the province’s public health care system — Alberta Health Services (AHS)... the number of for-profit surgery clinics for hip, knee, and cataract operations, which are covered by Alberta Health, continues to expand but we have no idea if those clinics cost the government more, shortened waiting lists, or provided good care.  Research from Parkland Institute in 2023 found that, while the volume of surgeries performed by these clinics had increased 48 per cent from 2018-19 to 2022-23, that increase came at the expense of the public system. Surgical volumes in public hospitals dropped 12 per cent over this same period as funding and health-care workers were diverted to the private CSF stream. In the meantime, pharmacists are given diagnosing and prescription privileges at the expense of the government and nurse practitioners are allowed to set up shop, some with private pay. They are chewing away at the edges of health care while ignoring the major problems and expect us to be satisfied."
How dare she destroy healthcare in British Columbia, Ontario, Newfoundland and everywhere else in Canada!
Left wing logic - an overloaded public system transferring cases to the private system is bad, because public good and private bad. And everything needs to be seen by a doctor, even simple cases pharmacists and nurse practitioners can handle, because that means the government will pay more for healthcare and more spending is always better and if high spending doesn't lead to good results it means even more money is needed
Why are left wingers so scared of change?

AMA president sounds alarm as Alberta hospital wait times rise
From December 11 2023. Clearly, Danielle Smith's reforms were so damaging that in just a month, they managed to destroy the healthcare system

Jerome Gessaroli: B.C. public health is being hijacked by woke agenda - "In analyzing the document’s language, critical functions – including population-level disease monitoring – are eclipsed by vague, unmeasurable, politically-laden concepts. Social justice terminology appears almost as often as health-care terms. Words like equity appear 44 times, climate 41, and reconciliation 34 times, while key health terms like disease prevention and influenza are mentioned far less. Politically contentious terms like colonialism and supremacy appear 19 times. Overall, there are 380 health-care terms and about 320 social justice-related terms in the report... One of the report’s principles is “Health Equity and Anti-Racism.” Here the document says, “Many of the determinants of health, such as income, education, housing … and natural environments, are shaped outside of the health system… [Health equity] …involves challenging and changing the values, beliefs and practices that maintain social and economic inequities, including racism and other forms of oppression.” In plain terms, this means that achieving health equity requires changing social and economic systems that create wealth inequality, racism, and oppression — quite the set of unargued assumptions, and quite the ask! It’s safe to say these goals are outside both the purview and pay grade of our medical professionals. Later, the report claims that “anti-colonial, anti-racist, intersectional, and equity-driven approaches to public health governance” are key to addressing the systems that maintain inequities... Apart from signalling that the ministry has adopted progressive values, these ideas also carry potential adverse consequences. For example, the report says that “evidence-informed decision-making” includes not only scientific data but also First Nations knowledge and lived experience. Instead, evidence-based decisions should rely on scientific data and proven health practices. Including cultural wisdom or personal experience introduces subjectivity, which may undermine evidence-based practices. One could reasonably question whether the ministry’s support for decriminalizing personal amounts of hard drugs and providing free opioids and harm-reduction paraphernalia to addicts is partly influenced by “people with lived and living experience,” a priority population in the report’s parlance, than by sound, scientific evidence. The negative consequences of opioid diversion and reduced street drug prices are well documented. Public health plays an essential role in monitoring infectious diseases, promoting vaccination, informing the public on disease prevention, ensuring universal standards, and addressing emergency preparedness and health-care system improvements. All decisions should be guided by scientific evidence and best practices."

'Anti-racist' doctors would put social justice over medical expertise - "A working group under the auspices of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada believes training future doctors should concentrate more on social justice and anti-racism than “medical expertise.”... As Dr. David Jacobs, president of the Ontario Association of Radiologists, tweeted so succinctly of the idea, “This is bonkers.”... One section of the report, titled “De-centering medical expertise,” called for a shift away from medical expertise to values such as anti-racism, anti-oppression, shared humanity and the ever more ubiquitous concept of decolonization... Jacobs noted that most doctors were too busy to worry about the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agenda. “In daily practice, (DEI) is barely given a nod. We are overwhelmed by the volume of patients that need care on a daily basis,” he said in his statement. “Our work has bled into our evenings and weekends leaving very little time to think about what seems to be both a political and academic exercise. You can imagine the chaos that would ensue if patients were queued based on perceived oppression as opposed to the acuity of their medical condition.” DEI is trying to change medicine from a discipline that cares for patients to one that champions social justice causes, Jacobs added. “The vast majority of physicians have entered the field in order to care for others,” he continued. “There is an abundance of empathy and kindness among my colleagues. (DEI) has tried to piggyback on these noble traits and impose a social justice agenda that is driven by only a handful of activist physicians.” Jacobs said DEI was a divisive ideology that painted people as either victims or oppressors in order to rebalance power which focuses on “social justice and equity of outcomes as opposed to empathy and excellence of outcomes.” Before DEI, the goal in training doctors was to be kind and competent, but with DEI, doctors are also being “tested for ‘purity of thought.’” The DEI movement has now infected most of Canada’s universities, government institutions and schools. Should anyone stand up to this “progressive” movement the results can be devastating... “Beyond the obvious worrisome impact on patients, there is also an impact on physicians’ freedom of expression and thought,” he said in his statement. “(DEI) is governed and policed by a small unelected and unaccountable group that is using the authority of universities and medical governing bodies to establish what is acceptable and what is unacceptable thought.” Medicine should return to embracing respect and partnership with patients, Jacobs said, and “strongly reject those who would try to weave their political and social agenda into the doctor-patient relationship.” The halls of academia appear to have long fallen to the charlatans of DEI, but if the medical establishment has also succumbed then we are all in for a taste of bad medicine."

A woke takeover is coming for Canadian physician training - "these woke wünderkinder are busy building their careers — not on evidential research about disease, because that is an arduous, snail’s-pace affair — but instead, by soul-searching over the pervasive white supremacy they deem is baked into modern western medicine, and the oppressive patriarchal Enlightenment notions (read: modern science) that fails to recognize the contributions and value of Indigenous knowledge. Today, CanMEDS is undergoing an ideological makeover before our very eyes, one that marks a complete departure from the empirical basis for medical practice... the pontiffs who are championing the impending CanMEDS revolution are calling for the decentring of medical practice away from traditional evidence-based medicine in favour of foregrounding virtues of social justice activism; at once demanding that Canadian doctors regurgitate critical race theory and prioritize patients’ lived experiences. This inevitably greenlights a patient’s inalienable right to dictate unilaterally their desired treatment — informed by, well, Google searches. The CanMEDS protagonists, it transpires, are led by a colleague of mine, Ritika Goel, assistant professor at the University of Toronto. On X she self-identifies as a “South Asian woman. Family doctor and Activist. Immigrant and Settler. Mom of two. Tweets on health, politics & social justice.” Some will inevitably read this and recoil, nervous about the intersection, say, between politics and life-and-death decision-making. Of the other nine members of the CanMEDS Anti-Racism Expert Working Group, four are Black — translating to a representation rate 10 times the national proportion. And then there is the other elephant in the examination room: one-third of Canadians are white men; yet on this committee, not a sausage. Naturally, it will be argued that for inclusivity, diversity and equity to succeed, these self-appointed grandees must actively exclude white males. This effectively silences the disquieting voices of the patriarchy, unifies the monotonous narrative, homogenizes opinions and demands everyone nod in acquiescence. Democracy, free thought and, perhaps most crucially, the recognition of merit be damned. Very soon, then, CanMEDS will become “Can’t MEDS.” They don’t like it, you see: the deeply colonial, evidence-based practices that prop up systemic societal prejudices in the West. Some of the more unhinged statements on record stretch as far as the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), Kirsten Patrick, whose editorial declaimed as far back as March of 2021, “I am writing today to state categorically … that systemic racism exists in Canadian society and within its health care systems,” and went on to pledge, “I will work to further an antiracism agenda at the journal.” These are deranged, unsubstantiated assertions. Just in July, a CMAJ article appeared whose sole intellectual contribution to medicine was to scathe governmental bodies for funding research focusing on South Asian populations because the studies weren’t conducted by a posse of doctors with the correct skin tones. For the three female authors, it’s blindingly apparent that far too many white doctors are unconscionably imposing their systemic racism upon a victimized ethnic community. In their words, “White … senior authors in leading medical journals … can misrepresent White academics as experts on South Asian health.” This is monumental bigotry, of course, and constitutes the acceptable face of modern racism in Canada in 2024. Indeed, such unconcealed prejudice is emblematic of left-leaning intellectuals who have imbibed the sacramental wine of the antiracist ideology, a demented religion espoused by proponents such as Ibram X. Kendi — now widely discredited for his academic financial improprieties — and the perilous White Queen of critical race theory herself, the cashmere-clad Robyn DiAngelo. These academics urge the guileless listener to look past their unashamed champagne authoritarianism and embrace the toxic tenets of their cultish belief system, beliefs such as the mythical White Fragility that is the title of DiAngelo’s bestselling book. White fragility is a Catch-22 concept that reinterprets a white person’s denial of their own racist beliefs and behaviour as de facto evidence of racism. Any normal Canadian would instantly call this out as a buffoonish bear trap. The fact that DiAngelo reportedly bills US$20,000 (C$27,000) per hour for her insights is merely a sideshow; move along, people: nothing to see here. The distillation of these facts is to realize that Canada is now on a trajectory to prioritize a doctor’s social justice and political activism over their competence in anatomy, physiology, pathology, biochemistry and medically informed intuition. D’Souza pointed me to a recent embarrassing discovery that emerged in the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine, no less, which declared with some considerable vigour that apartheid, the segregation of racial groups into different cohorts, for the purposes of teaching physicians was “the future” of medical school training. I’m lost for words. What this means for everyday life in Canada is a “physician class” that will be expected — and likely required — by their governing body to prioritize social engineering over and above their knowledge of medicine. Patients who present as, let’s say, arthritic seniors, will need to be evaluated for their social status and privileges at least in parallel, if not ahead of, an assessment of their symptoms. These pensioners might well also be subjected to cross-examination about their current gender identity. No joke: in a 2022 interview for the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Ontario, Alex Abramovich, a transgender man, urged colleagues to discuss pronouns with longtime patients: “Gender identity can change over time … I think it’s important to also let long-time patients know that you are open to speaking about changes in their gender identity.” D’Souza, whose new book Lost & Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us and Three Keys to Fix It launches today, told me that a large number of doctors — nobody knows quite how many — have already complained to the Medical Post, a physicians’ periodical, only to be gaslit by the establishment elites, dismissing these as a troublemaking minority who fail to grasp the true intentions of the new CanMEDS framework. No, these doctors understand perfectly well; mercifully, they are unwilling to acquiesce without a fight. With only four months left to go, the machine that is reimagining CanMEDS seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, slated for implementation beginning in January next year. It will fall to workaday Canadians, doctors not least among them, to resist. A lucky few could, of course, deploy emigration parachutes. Pessimists might welcome our increasingly permissive euthanasia provisions, MAiD, as an existential blessing in disguise. What is certain is that in Canada, in 2025, there will be nowhere left to hide from the social justice reinvention of medical practice."

Murray Mandryk: Feds, provinces now share health-care funding urgency
Fundamental reform isn't needed and more money is always the solution

Reduce wait times by allowing patients to seek care of out of country - "It’s no secret that if you need elective surgery in Canada, you’d better be prepared to wait for a very long time... Canada is not the only country to be plagued with such issues. Some European nations have had to deal with long wait times, as well. The difference is that they were able to resolve the problem. Part of their solution came from what’s called the “Cross-Border Directive.” This policy allows European patients to seek treatment in any EU member country and get their medical expenses reimbursed at a level equivalent to what their national health insurance plan would have covered. Like most policy innovations, this directive emerged out of necessity. In the early 2000s, many British citizens found themselves struggling with long medical waitlists. But through their membership in the European Union, some saw an opportunity to address the delays... Thanks to the Cross-Border Directive, over 450,000 EU residents sought treatment in another EU country in 2022 alone. This policy has brought about a significant reduction in wait times, but it has another noteworthy side effect: it helps reduce the overall cost of individual ailments, both to the patients who suffer from them and the states that pay the bills. This is because the longer a health problem goes untreated, the more the treatment will cost, due to an increased risk of complications. The longer people wait, the more likely it is that their intervention will need to be more invasive (and thus riskier) and will also require more resources to perform. But the effect on spending is not the only one that needs to be considered. Health issues can have an adverse effect on government revenue, as well. While elective treatments are not considered urgent, the ailments they hope to treat can still have an effect on our lives. For example, some of the people on waiting lists are workers who are unable to do their jobs, or who are forced to reduce their workloads, due to the pain they’re experiencing. Some are even on worker’s compensation. Even looking at it solely from a revenue standpoint, it should still be in the state’s best interest to get those workers the treatment they need so they can start paying taxes again. Letting them obtain the required medical attention out of province or out of the country — for the same price the system would pay domestically — should be a no-brainer. Let’s not forget just how many Canadians can’t get the treatment they need within the recommended timelines. In 2019, 30 per cent of patients needing a knee implant were unable to receive it within the recommended 26-week period. By 2023, that number had climbed to 41 per cent. Similarly, the proportion of patients needing hip replacements who couldn’t get them within the established time frames rose from 25 per cent to 34 per cent over the same period."
Just as with school vouchers, left wingers will claim this is diverting public money to foreign pockets

Release Canadian health care from the chains of government monopolies - "Why is it so hard to fix health care in Canada? It’s not for a lack of trying. Many reports, commissions, task forces and consultants have tried. However, this great country has not been able to achieve what many people believe is the crown jewel of its identity... In 1961, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker asked Hall to head a royal commission of inquiry into a potential national health service... It was not to be state medicine; rather, it was to be based “upon freedom of choice, and upon free and self-governing professions and institutions.” That system never came to exist. At present, the provinces and territories each operate their own health services with support from the federal government, notwithstanding the trend to contract surgical care to private facilities — and it’s not working. Each agency operates independently, responding to a myriad of great ideas with “we already do that.” The feds don’t trust the provinces and territories, and the provinces and territories don’t trust the feds. Heck, the various alphabet soups of federal departments and agencies don’t trust each other. Meanwhile, one-fifth of the country lacks basic access to a primary-care clinician. Other countries in our peer group, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, ensure that over 95 per cent of their citizens have a regular primary-care provider and can access one. It’s not working for health professionals either. Data sharing is onerous, even for the most basic medical supplies. There’s no digitized Google or Amazon of health care in Canada to show what supplies are available — no communication with the workforce about shortages. Health workers pick up the pieces and inform blank-eyed citizens that there’s a shortage of chemotherapy drugs. Perform that task, day in and day out, and then ask why doctors and nurses feel disillusioned. Paying them more won’t make them feel better when the only way they find out about a drug shortage is when the pharmacy phones. Why? This is the tough part. We look to governments, federal, provincial and territorial to fix it. Politicians and their multitude of starry-eyed apparatchiks that come and go every few years take great joy in rearranging the deck chairs. Over the years, some have even tried to overlay structures like regional health authorities to put some distance between them and their political authorities, but it never lasts; the pendulum always swings back to more politics, and the only thing politicians do is throw more money at it and reinforce the status quo... Wonder why health care is incapable of reform? Look to the constitutional foundations that divide the spoils among the political victors. Because of the constitution, if you win an election, you’re in charge of health-care delivery. If you want to fix health care for the generations, get it out of the hands of politicians. Luckily, there is a middle ground that steers clear of both privatization and our current state-controlled health care, which leaves much to be desired. Canadians must revisit the Hall commission’s recommendations and return to a publicly funded health insurance model, resourced by the provinces, territories and the federal government, accessible through licensed providers and accredited institutions. This would allow the innovative individuals and organizations hindered by our failing government monopolies to deliver a variety of modern health-care options that meet local needs. A return to the principles of the Hall report could chart a course between the endless debate over public versus private health care, allowing service providers to innovate within the boundaries of a publicly funded insurance program — Medicare for the 21st century. The solution to our health-care crisis lies not in spending even greater sums, but in having the courage to tackle the system’s core flaws. The middle way would focus on prevention and accountability by returning to the elegance of the Hall commission’s insurance model and getting governments out of the business of delivering health care. That’s what progress looks like."

Libs of TikTok on X - ".@TorontoMet's medical school is reserving 75% of its spots for DEI admissions and is allowing DEI applicants to be considered even if they are below the required minimum GPA score. DEI doctors… this won’t end well…"

Canada's newest medical school to reserve 75% of available seats for black, indigenous and equity-deserving applicants. : r/canadian
Clearly, poor doctor performance will be due to insufficient funding. Of course, many people claimed that doctors don't need to be the best - just good enough. This left wing cope comes up all the time and probably ties into their hatred of success and satisfaction with mediocrity (see also: degrowth)

Translation Hijinks

vickyv — whatshouldwecallhomer: throwforharry:...

"for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’"

"my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”"

 

"When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself.
How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”

I was done for the day."

 

"I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”

I did not find my husband in this way.

In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”

“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.

The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)

Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack."

 

"I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English. 

When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.

“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”

“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”

Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG"

 

"My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…" 

 

"I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.

That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.

Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant."

 

"Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.

She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.

American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)

Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)"

 

"Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?

So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.

The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”"

 

"Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely."

"^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one."

 

"Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.

Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English.  Or French.  Or German.  Or Italian.  (He tried all of them.)

Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years).  He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.

She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night."

 

"s/o to my classics professor who managed to get a tire changed on his rental car while doing research in Greece by telling them his chariot had broken down"

Links - 15th October 2024 (1)

Geoff Russ: David Eby going to court over Conservative name just another desperate NDP tactic - "Can we expect embattled British Columbia Premier David Eby to post “STOP THE COUNT!” on X when the provincial election results come on Oct. 19? It would certainly be consistent. On Friday, the NDP took to the courts to accuse Elections BC of violating Charter rights. The alleged violation stems from the fact that the Conservative Party of BC is due to be listed simply as the “Conservative Party” on the provincial ballot. In a court filing, the NDP argued that without a name change, voters might mix up the provincial and federal Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) and write “Pierre Poilievre” on their ballots. Doing so would spoil their votes... This election will not be the first that the BC Conservatives have run candidates: the party has done so in nearly every election in the province’s history, including in 2020. There was no whining about brand confusion four years ago when Erin O’Toole led the CPC, and the BC Conservatives were an afterthought. Now, the NDP government is in a fight for its life that few predicted one year ago, back when the Conservatives had just two seats in the legislature. Premier David Eby’s story was not supposed to be like this... The biggest thing that Eby and the NDP have going for them is that the Conservative candidates have tweeted out some silly and unfortunate words in years past. On a radio debate in Vancouver, Eby spent his time trying to poke Rustad over his candidates’ tweets, coming across like a Twitch streamer arguing with people in the comments, while Rustad largely remained focused on the issues. In a truly embarrassing moment, when asked if the parents of addicted children should be able to place them in involuntary care, Eby responded that “it’s not straightforward.” For context, this is a scenario that has tragically played out under this government: in August, a 13-year-old died alone in a Greater Vancouver homeless camp of a suspected overdose. In February, during a hospital stay for her addiction, her parents were told they were not allowed to put her in involuntary care because it was “her choice.” The answer to the question asked of Eby is as straightforward as it comes. Everybody with a brain knows it, and it is only Eby who stubbornly gaslights people by saying otherwise. Sure, the NDP has released a platform promising the world to B.C. residents, like financing 40 per cent of the cost of a home purchase for first-time buyers, and taxing foreign speculators at three per cent. Few care about these NDP promises when they have been in government for seven years. Besides, Rustad and his Conservatives promised to axe the ban on plastic single-use items and end the toxic regime of paper straws and flimsy paper bags. The mandatory paper bags in grocery stores can be irritating, but they are manageable. It cannot be overstated how much the average B.C. resident utterly loathes the paper straws. These flimsy, soggy instruments bend and break to pieces, releasing their excessive synthetic “forever chemicals” (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS) into your ginger ale... In an election like this, in unfortunate times like these, people do not care about social media posts. They care about who will lead a government that makes their lives easier and more comfortable."

British Columbians want a plan, but all the NDP has is trash talk - "if we are to reduce any political party to its worst tweets and bad moments, the NDP have more than their share. Some evidence of bad behaviour can be found in the party’s shameful treatment of Jewish MLA Selina Robinson, who was ousted from the NDP cabinet for stating that Israel was founded on a “crappy piece of land with nothing on it” in the wake of October 7, and who has since left caucus. Also notable is the NDP’s disqualification of Eby’s leadership race opponent Anjali Appadurai on dubious grounds. So far, Eby has mostly insulted Rustad and treated him more like a misguided child than a serious former cabinet minister. It’s unbecoming and, worse for Eby, it isn’t working. Since day 1 of the campaign, the NDP playbook has been to go negative and try to scare B.C. into voting for them. British Columbians aren’t hearing that message. Sky-high housing prices, a stagnant economy and public safety concerns are overriding any wacky tweets of yore and NDP fearmongering. As the Conservatives pointed out following the radio debate, there have been more than 14,000 overdose deaths in the province since the NDP came to power. That, and unaffordable rent, is far more salient to citizens who see the carnage in downtown every day."

Meme - "I'm putting a candy vending machine in my yard this Halloween! Sorry kids, but I have bills to pay."

Boston neighbors raised $20K after officials shut down boy’s ice cream stand - "Bored and looking for something to do this summer, Danny Doherty hatched a plan to raise money for his brother’s hockey team by selling homemade ice cream.  But a few days after setting up a stand and serving up vanilla, shaved chocolate and fluffernutter to about 20 people, Danny’s family received a letter from the Norwood Board of Health ordering it shut down. Town officials had received a complaint and said that the 12-year-old’s scheme violated the Massachusetts Food Code, a state regulation. “I was surprised and upset,” he said of the letter that came Aug. 5. “I don’t understand because there are so many lemonade stands and they don’t get shut down.”  Danny’s mom, Nancy Doherty, who had encouraged her son to start the stand as long as he donated half of the proceeds to charity, also was taken aback.  “Somebody complained. That was the most disappointing part for us was that somebody thought it necessary to complain about a child’s stand,” she said. “It seemed a little, you know, crazy if you ask me.”... Massachusetts law allows for things like lemonade stands and bakes sales but not homemade ice cream. Mazzucco also said there was a “legitimate health concern” since homemade ice cream can be contaminated with listeria monocytogenes or other bacteria.  Danny’s situation is not altogether unusual. Youth elsewhere have also seen their lemonade stands or pop-up bake sales shuttered — often for failing to have a business or health permit. Several states have responded by moving to lessen restrictions on such ventures."

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "I mean NATO is pretty obviously a right wing organization."
""left" and "right" only have widely agreed upon meanings in very specific contexts/along specific axes. That isn't one of them."
"Okay well I think hiring Nazis to defeat the spread of communism- pretty obviously makes you a right wing organization. Do you disagree with that?  Besides idk if you know this, but NATO is the US Govs international money-making baby. The US government is pretty obviously right-wing (I would know, I live here)"
These are the people who claim the US has no left wing party

Thread by @AGHamilton29 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " Funniest thing going on today is Nick Fuentes is mad at Candace Owens because her antisemitic conspiracies have included so many obvious factual errors that he says it’s making the other people who hate Jews look bad…  I’m not even joking. 😂😂😂 “You can’t really go hard like that and stake the reputation of you and everyone else, and then get it wrong.. really severely.. over and over” Jokes aside, part of what is going on here is fear of audience capture and who antisemites follow/believe:
There are different sub-groups of antisemites (Neo-Nazis, Islamists, Lefitsts). Most of them all end up agreeing on a conspiracy about a secret cabal of Jews that is responsible for every single bad thing that happens in the world, but they all cite different types of evidence and underlying conspiracies to justify the claim. That’s where they end up clashing.  So for example, some Neo-Nazi “intellectuals” came up with this theory that the elites are all part of this small 18th century religious cult called Frankists (which actually died out). That those cult members replaced real Jews. That’s what Candace Owens has been actively promoting. But the thing is that the Frankists openly rejected Jewish texts like The Talmud (most of them also eventually converted to Christianity). Meanwhile, a different group of antisemites (mix of Islamists and other Neo-Nazis) like to claim that there is a secret cabal of Jews that does bad things but it’s motivated by The Talmud (they don’t actually understand what The Talmud is and instead quote out of context arguments within it and distort them to show those as evidence).  These two conspiracies can’t co-exist. The Frankists explicitly rejected the Talmud. So if they are the secret cabal, they can’t be motivated by it. So someone like Fuentes understands that by popularizing conspiracy 1, Owens is undermining conspiracy 2. And thus also driving away the audience from those who promote conspiracy 1."

wanye on X - "At risk of hyperbole, all this stuff around pets and, “emotional support animals” makes me feel as disconnected from the direction of the culture as almost anything. “The role of the government is to force your landlord to let you have a puppy” is so spiritually and philosophically offputting to me that it genuinely causes me some level of despair."

Meme - "WHEN DORA EXPLORED TOO FAR *Isabela Merced as Dora the Explorer*
*Isabela Merced as Kay in Alien: Romulus with blood*

i/o on X - "I only knew one guy who drove an ice cream truck. Here's my story about him.  During the housing crash in 2011, I bought I foreclosed house for next to nothing, lived in it for two years, then sold it tax-free at a decent profit.  It was located in a nice tree-lined middle-class neighborhood, filled mostly with old white people and a few young white progressive couples. Two houses away from mine — the only rental on the street — was the only non-white family: A black guy who dressed like he was from the Punjab and two huge black women in black burqas. I assumed he was bigamous because I never saw another man go inside the house.  A beat-up ice cream truck was parked in the driveway. Driving this truck seemed to be his only job.   They had about eight kids, only one of whom was over the age of seven or eight , and the toddlers often wandered around alone in the neighborhood (sometimes in the middle of the street) naked. They seemed entirely unsupervised. Only the oldest, a teenager, appeared to attend school.  My reaction was: "WTF is this?" But my neighbors didn't want to talk about it. The smiling progressive wives tried to engage the burqa wives in conversation, but were met with silence and looks of contempt.  One day, after a particularly bad day at the office, I came home, pulled my car into the driveway, and saw the oldest of their kids, a boy of about 14 years of age, riding his bike all over my lawn, doing wheelies. I glanced at him, and he sneered back at me with one of those "well what are you going to do about it?" looks.   I got out of my car and started walking toward him. I didn't say a word, I just kept quietly walking toward him with an absolutely even emotionless expression on my face. He took off and I never saw him on my lawn again.   The family installed a large shed in their driveway. I called the city and they told me they'd have some people come by to tell them to remove it. But when the officials knocked on their door a few days later, the man refused to let them in and screamed at them.  A few weeks after that I saw him disassembling the shed. I took a chair, placed at the edge of my lawn facing his driveway, and sat in it looking directly at him while he took apart the shed, while I calmly sipped a drink. I wanted him to know that I was the one who called the city, and that I was enjoying his defeat.  A few months after I sold the house and bought another, I was looking at the local real estate listings on Zillow and saw that the house the ice cream truck guy had been living in was on the market "as-is." The photos showed that it had been utterly wrecked on the inside, and was being sold at about half the price you'd expect. It stayed on the market for over a year before an out-of-state company bought it.  I talked to one of my former neighbors later and he told me that the house had been made mostly uninhabitable, and that, for example, the smell of urine was so bad that not only did the carpets have to be torn up but the floors had to be treated and then entirely refinished.    In the summer, I still see the ice cream truck guy from time to time because he drives his truck through my neighborhood. Whenever I see him I imitate a Muslim call to prayer from my window and watch him glare back at me in response."

International students ‘cannot speak enough English to follow courses’ - "A significant number of international students do not speak good enough English to follow a course but are graduating with master’s degrees, academics claim. They say the “crisis” runs through all types of universities including those in the Russell Group of selective institutions... They wrote: “Master’s-level teaching used to be rich, challenging and enjoyable. But now, a master’s seminar in the disciplines that we both teach typically involves a cohort in which three quarters of the students (and often more) are from a single country, a few are international students from elsewhere and one or two are home students. “On the master’s programmes in our departments, only a very small number of students typically have the English language skills necessary for engaging in meaningful seminar discussions. Increasing numbers of students are not engaged at all in the learning process.” Classes no longer used high levels of interaction or challenge, they said. “Material must be delivered in a lecture style, and preferably as a written document so that it can be translated using one of the many translation apps (of variable quality) to provide real-time translation of any spoken content. “Open questions to the whole class are often met with silence, while group tasks are typically conducted using translation apps, before usually the same student from each group is tasked with reading out the answers. “This can be an extremely stressful and challenging environment for these students, and we try really hard to support them, often by rapidly changing the content and pace of classes.” The academics said that one-to-one supervision and feedback meetings were “particularly excruciating”, with some students unable to understand simple questions. Universities have taken much higher numbers of international students in the past decade. They have been heavily reliant on Chinese students and while these numbers are still high, they are being overtaken by those from India. More Nigerian students applied in the past few years but many have been put off this year by tighter visa restrictions on dependants and are also struggling to afford fees because of a currency crisis... The domestic tuition fee that UK universities can charge domestic students has been frozen at £9,250 since 2017 and was £9,000 for five years before that. The Office for Students, which regulates universities in England, predicted that about 40 per cent will run budget deficits this year... Another on social media said students who could barely speak in English in class were turning in sophisticated essays or AI-generated jargon, such as referring to the United Kingdom as the “Unified Realm”."

City of Surprise under scrutiny for arresting woman during council meeting - "A heated exchange during a Surprise City Council meeting ended with a West Valley mom in handcuffs.  Mayor Skip Hall said she violated a city rule that bans complaints about city workers during public comment.  Arizona’s Family spoke with some experts who argued the city violated her First Amendment rights.  “I think that she may have a case against the City of Surprise,” said constitutional law attorney Robert McWhirter.  Activist Rebekah Massie went to the podium during public comment on Tuesday and criticized how much money the city attorney makes.  The mayor cut her off and pointed to the city’s rule: “Oral communications during the City Council meeting may not be used to lodge charges or complaints against any employee of the City or members of the body...”  It led to a tense confrontation between the two. Massie was later removed by a police officer in front of her 10-year-old daughter and arrested for trespassing. She is facing an additional charge for resisting arrest."

Princess Märtha Louise of Norway Marries Self-Described “Shaman” Durek Verrett | Vanity Fair
Durek Verrett - Wikipedia - "Durek Verrett (born November 17, 1974, as Derek David Verrett) is an American conspiracy theorist, alternative therapist, self-professed shaman and author. He has been widely described by media and other observers as a conman and conspiracy theorist, and has served time in prison and been arrested and charged with various crimes... Their relationship has been heavily scrutinized, with many Norwegians voicing their disapproval and calling Verrett a "charlatan." He has been characterized by Norwegian media and other critics as a conman and a conspiracy theorist, and his statements on various topics have been widely criticized and ridiculed in Norway. The former Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg described Verrett's views as "very strange" and "not based on facts," and said that "the ideas that he promotes is something that we combat as conspiracy theories." Solberg further said the criticism of Verrett is reasonable. State Secretary of the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services, Ole Henrik Krat Bjørkholt, described Verrett as "an unscrupulous and dangerous charlatan" who engages in fraud. In 2023, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre strongly condemned Verrett, calling his statements on child rearing "dangerous." In 2019, on his podcast "Ancient Wisdom Today," Verrett openly discussed his and his girlfriend's sex life and his techniques for controlling his orgasm to maximize partner satisfaction. He also offered sex advice in a webinar titled "Soul Sexual Webinar." In 2019, Verrett and Märtha Louise co-organised seminars titled "The Princess and the Shaman," which were widely criticised for the claims made by Verrett about healing cancer and for exploiting Märtha Louise's constitutional role as princess for a private business venture. The newspaper iTromsø noted that Märtha Louise has faced extensive criticism for associating with a conspiracy theorist and over her "commercialization and abuse of the title 'princess'"...   Both Verrett and Märtha Louise have complained about the negative reception of Verrett in Norway, and Verrett claimed he was criticized because "people don't want a black man in the royal family." Verrett said, "I have never experienced so much racism as when I came to Norway.""
Clearly, the Norwegians are all toxic and racist and she needs to cut them off

glamorous reptile on X - "person: I’m sad
doctor: here are pills that make it impossible to cum or lose weight
person: perfect"

Meme - *Busty woman with man with T-shirt with 2 shocked black men on sofa bending to one side*

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I know just one person over 100 with an actual birth certificate.  Across U.S. states, the total and per capita numbers of supercentenarians dramatically decline right after the introduction of birth certificates (blue line).  The reason? Most such cases are fake. Also, have you ever noticed that supercentenarians are more common in areas with more crime, more poverty, and lower average life expectancies?  Here's data for England:
The same pattern of supercentenarian numbers being correlated with poverty holds in (A, D) England, (B, E) France, and (C, F) Japan. Across countries, you just see the same things over and over, from age heaping to weird correlations, so the conclusion is clear:  Supercentenarian numbers are driven less by regionally exceptional longevity and more by people defrauding pension systems and making up their ages. Oh, and if you wanted to learn how to live a long life from the "blue zones" in Sardinia, Okinawa, and Icaria, good luck. Those places have low life expectancies and literacy levels, high crime, and lots of poverty.  Their long-lived people are not able to validate their ages. This also applies to Loma Linda (not all that exceptional of a place).  In fact, across the whole U.S., at least 17% of centenarians were found to be non-centenarians in 2019 when someone just read through two plain-text files and found dates didn't match. And this also applies to Nicoya, which is riddled with fraudulent ages:
If someone says they know someone super old, ask them: Where were they born? If it's in some place that was poor in the not-too-distant past, then they probably have the wrong age."
Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud

The Blue Zone Distraction - "If you want to succeed at giving humans longer lives, we must obtain better data. Places like the blue zones don’t have an especial relevance to longevity, and focusing on them will tend to be a waste of time that distracts from other, more important work. The faultiness of the data from these and other places will also tend to make the search for longevity secrets all the more difficult because, for example, due to this sort of error, we don’t really know the shape of late-life mortality, and we certainly don’t have great ideas about the sorts of health behaviors that sustain the longest possible human lives.  If you are interested in discovering what really makes people live longer lives, cast aside the lessons of frauds and capitalization on correlations, and focus on doing the basic science that will finally, ultimately banish death. If we fail to do that, then death will surely come for you."

Meme - "BRO! I GOT LUCKY LAST NIGHT AND HOOKED UP WITH A PERFECT TEN! BUT SHE LOOKED EIGHTEEN"
"HELLO, POLICE?"

Meme - The Libertarian Trap @LibertarianTrap: "After countless hours of research, have come to the sad conclusion for men who like women. You're gay. Here is proof of fact. You can't unsee it now. *EPCM woman with head, neck and breasts forming penis and testicles/cock and balls*"

Meme - Tinder: "***. 45 miles away
Have you ever said "Fuck the police"? Well now's your chance."

Sticking up for the CRA is getting harder and harder as ‘bad’ experiences proliferate - "When I attend social events and introduce myself as a tax professional, the conversation often turns to the Canada Revenue Agency . When asked about it, I like to explain that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) simply administers the laws that politicians and the Department of Finance draft and ultimately bring to Parliament to enact. It performs a critically important function, since without it the laws would be meaningless and there would be no funds to ensure that various levels of government can carry out their duties... Over my 30-year career as a tax advisor, I have seen both the good and the bad. On the “good” side, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the most talented and dedicated public servants who truly care about Canada. They make a difference. Often the “good” involves getting to an answer quickly, courteously and efficiently with the CRA’s help. An audit that is done efficiently and effectively is also “good.” The “bad” involves stories of public servants who are poorly trained, use their “power” to purposely intimidate taxpayers, conduct very poor audits and form conclusions that are laughable, forcing the affected taxpayers to spend time and money challenging the decisions... Lately, however, the “bad” experiences are starting to become much more common than the “good.” In chats with my colleagues across Canada, many are in agreement. This shifting attitude comes despite the CRA’s headcount growing from 40,059 people in 2015 to 59,155 people this year — an  increase of 47.6 per cent. Every time I review those figures, I shake my head at such massive increases. Although it is a simplistic comparative, the U.S. equivalent to the CRA, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), had 82,990 employees as of 2023."
Clearly they need even more staff

Fen Osler Hampson and Tim Sargent: Canada’s government is way, way too big. Here are five ways to rightsize the federal public service - "There is no question that the federal public service has become too big, bloated, and unaffordable. Rightsizing government should be a critical priority for this and any future government. Given the significant reductions required to put the federal public service on the right path, and the disruption this can create, governments will need to carefully consider the best way to address this challenge. There is a right and wrong way to go about it.  First, the facts. Rapid public service growth under the Trudeau government has accompanied a massive increase in overall government spending. In Fiscal Year 2015-16, which covers the last year of the Harper government, federal government spending was 13 percent of GDP. In FY 2022-23, the most recent year for which data is available, government spending had risen to 15.6 percent of GDP.  This has resulted in a fundamental imbalance in the government’s books, with a structural deficit of 1.4 percent of GDP, because spending has outpaced revenues.   One of the main drivers of program spending is public service growth.  At the beginning of 2016, there were 259,000 federal public servants. By 2023, there were 357,000—a whopping 38 percent increase.  In comparison, employment in the overall economy grew by only 13 percent from 2016 to 2023. As a result, growth in federal public service has been three times faster than the general workforce over this period...   The federal government’s use of labour and capital removes resources from the private sector and stifles productivity. With the exception of recessionary periods, bigger government makes hiring workers and investing harder for the private sector. When unemployment is as low as it is now, the federal government should be leaving space for the private sector to do its thing. Now is the time that the federal government should be running a surplus to reduce the federal debt (now 69.7 percent of GDP).

How US Financial Literacy Rates Compare Internationally - "That survey finds that only 33% of adults around the world are financially literate, and that 57% of adults in the U.S. are financially literate. While the U.S. does outdo the worldwide average, it lags behind several other OECD countries, too... The countries that led the world per the S&P financial literacy survey were as follows: Denmark Norway Sweden Canada Israel The U.K. Germany The Netherlands Australia Finland
While the U.S. got a score of 57%, the scores of the countries above ranged from 63% (Finland) to 71% (a tie between Norway and Sweden)."
People are not as enlightened as elites like to think, which is why things like basic income don't work

Elias Muhanna on X - "Burglars in medieval Cairo would sometimes send a turtle with a lit candle on its shell into the house they were planning to rob. If someone was home, they'd cry out in amazement when they saw the turtle, scaring off the burglars. Otherwise, the robbery could go ahead.""

Meme - Blue poking rock: "Come on boy do your business...no need to be shy"
Yellow: "Ha Ha Check out this freak with his pet ROCK."
Blue: "BAD ROCK!!" *bashes yellow's brains out with rock*

San Gregorio della Divina Pietà - Wikipedia - "Until 1870, the pope required the Jews living in the nearby ghetto to attend compulsory sermons (Italian: prediche coatte) every sabbath in front of the church, which faced two gates of the Jewish quarter, but they avoided hearing them by putting wax in their ears. Because of this, during a restoration in 1858, a bilingual (Hebrew and Latin) inscription with a passage from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah (Isaiah 65:2–3), in which the Lord complains about the obstinacy of the Jews, was put on the facade"

Does hunger influence judgments of female physical attractiveness? - "To account for male preferences for female body weight following a consistent socio-economic pattern, Nelson and Morrison (2005) proposed a social-cognitive model based on the individual experience of resource scarcity. We replicated their studies showing that calorific dissatisfaction can influence preference for female body weight using a different dependent variable, namely photographic stimuli of women with known body weight and shape. Using this revised methodology, we found that operationalized intra-individual resource scarcity affects preferences for body weight: 30 hungry male participants preferred figures with a higher body weight and rated as more attractive heavier figures than 31 satiated male participants. Hungrier men were also less likely to be influenced by cues for body shape, supporting extant cross-cultural studies on female physical attractiveness. These findings corroborate those of Nelson and Morrison (2005) and are discussed in terms of how cultural contexts shape individual psychological experience as predicted by the theory of mutual constitution."

Meme - "Disney. All he wants is human flesh. *Pinocchio*"

Cool Evolution Trick: Platinum Turns Baby Snails Into Slugs | WIRED - "Evidence suggests that transitions from snails to slugs — or rather, from having a concrete outer shell to a greatly reduced internal one — have happened numerous times in evolution. Such losses or gains occurred repeatedly within the Mollusca, an enormous group that includes clams, oysters, squid, octopuses and of course the gastropods —snails and slugs. The internal flat bone of cuttlefish and squid, for example, is thought to be a pared-down version of an ancestral outer molluscan shell. And the shell game continued within the gastropods. Within the marine gastropods known as sea butterflies and sea hares, for example, there are both shelled and shell-less species."

Research Shows That Anyone Could Forget a Kid in a Hot Car - "If parents believe they would never forget their child in a hot car, they should think again. It can happen to anyone.  Since 1998, about 969 children have died in hot cars and more than half of them were left behind unknowingly by their caregiver, according to NoHeatStroke.org.  A leading expert in cognitive neuroscience who has studied the role of memory in such tragedies has found that the stresses parents face in everyday life can make these memory lapses more likely.   Forgetting a child is not a negligence problem but a memory problem, says David Diamond, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa.  “The most common response is that only bad or negligent parents forget kids in cars,” Diamond says. “It’s a matter of circumstances. It can happen to everyone.” During the summer, many families change their daily routines for vacations or other reasons, and that disruption is a common factor in these tragic incidents... caregivers involved in these incidents come from many walks of life. They include teachers, dentists, social workers, law enforcement officers, nurses, clergymen, military officers, and even a rocket scientist. These tragic cases can happen to anyone, regardless of their education or socioeconomic status...   Many times, when a child died, there had been a change in the day’s routine, Diamond says. For example, a parent who wouldn’t normally be responsible for day-care drop-off might have been given that task that day. Because our brains recognize a pattern for the day, this parent would drive to work as usual, even though the baby was along for the ride. And unless there was an external cue, such as seeing the diaper bag or hearing the baby, the parent’s brain would continue on autopilot and could even create a false memory that the child is safely at day care, Diamond found. Sleep deprivation and stress can also increase the potential for a working-memory failure."
Of course, it is easier to demonise parents who do this as bad people

Monday, October 14, 2024

Links - 14th October 2024 (2 - Keir Starmer)

Thread by @SteveDavies365 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🧵 I have the increasing reeling that UK politics is in a holding mode with lots of people desperately trying to keep the circling plane flying.
1. The Starmer government is best understood as representing the technocratic consensus that emerged after 1990 and consolidated under Blair/Brown. Almost certainly the last stand of the conventional wisdom de jours. Will it succeed? Not impossible but unlikely because.
2. We are facing intensifying crisis on a number of fronts, public finance, public services, community relations, state capacity&effectiveness international relations. Not to mention climate change, increasingly severe malthusian constraints and (crucially) a lack of innovation. All this requires some radical measures and departure from the kind of policies and governance we have had since the early 1990s but see 1.
3. Starmer and Reeves are clearly betting the farm on reviving growth but what if that doesn't happen (right now I would bet against it)?
4. In terms of politics there has been a realignment in terms of the views and divisions among voters, with the emergence and crystallising of a national collectivist politics of the kind seen in several other places. However our political system and class means it has not found electoral expression yet (same is true for other emergent political identities). The result is it is going to be much more radically anti-systemic and plebeian when it does burst out.
5. What none of our political class and very few voters are prepared to even consider is the prospect that meaningful growth will be near impossible to achieve in the near to medium future. As I have said, the likely result will be an era of disillusionment as one kind of politics after another is tried, none brings growth and consequently the various crises get more acute. It's a challenge for all kinds of politics to think about this. End"

Cabinet has accepted more than £800,000 in donations and freebies this year - "The Cabinet has accepted more than £800,000 in donations and freebies this year, a Telegraph analysis has revealed.  David Lammy, the Foreign Secetary, has received the most since the beginning of 2024, having accepted more than £150,000 worth. This included £2,500 worth of tickets to see Tottenham Hotspur, with the use of a hospitality box.  The largest sum donated to him was from Labour Together, a Starmerite think tank, which donated £40,440 for the “provision of research and writing services”.  Labour Cabinet ministers have accepted £753,017 in donations and £90,853 in gifts since the beginning of the year, according to the analysis of the members’ register of interests.   Mr Lammy is followed by Wes Streeting, who received £117,000 in donations and gifts, among them four tickets and hospitality to see Taylor Swift at Wembley costing £1,160.  The Health Secretary’s biggest donation was valued at £48,000 in four instalments from OPD Group Ltd, a company controlled by Peter Hearn, a recruitment mogul and one of Labour’s biggest donors.  He also accepted £13,000 “towards staffing costs” while Labour was in opposition, declared in April, from Kevin Craig, a businessman who later stood to become the Labour MP in Suffolk Coastal.  Mr Craig was later forced to stand down after it emerged he placed a bet on his constituency outcome in the general election, betting that the Tories would win. Mr Streeting returned his donation from Mr Craig.  Among Angela Rayner’s £104,000 in gifts and donations since the start of the year was £2,230 for clothing from ME+EM, a British luxury fashion brand.  Donations and gifts to politicians have come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after Sir Keir Starmer became embroiled in a row over funding clothes donated to him and his wife by Lord Alli. The backlash led to the Prime Minister promising that he would stop taking donations for clothing, a pledge matched by Ms Rayner and Rachel Reeves.  Other revelations included Lady Starmer accepting two tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, worth hundreds of pounds each. Bridget Phillipson, Darren Jones and Mr Streeting also accepted tickets to the tour... Labour MPs have called on Sir Keir to stop taking all “freebies” following the uproar over the Lord Alli donations, with one telling The Telegraph that several colleagues were “livid”.  “This is what hypocrisy looks like – and most of us have been fighting the ‘they’re all the same’ rhetoric for our whole careers,” said the MP. “Keir’s double standards just prove it’s entirely accurate.”"

ripx4nutmeg on X - "Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who's been an MP since 2015, says that she had to accept donations of expensive clothing from a wealthy party donor because "I was from a very working class background" #bbclaurak"
mirax on X - "These same "working class" heroes bitched endlessly about Sunak's wealth- at least he had enough dignity to buy his own clothes and pay for his own holidays."

Thread by @CharlotteCGill on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Keir Starmer:  "There’s a budget coming in October.  and it’s going to be painful.  We have no other choice given the situation that we’re in".  Really?  Here are 10 things that taxpayers have been charged for...
1) £185,627: Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism
2) £840k: The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000
3) £1,717,340 *in government grants since 2019: Tamasha Theatre Company - “a home for emerging and established artists from the global majority”
4) £810,703: Study of ‘sustainable’ Romani Gypsy lifestyle
5) £1.5m: Research project that aims to “decolonise” folk singing and investigate its "white-centricity"
6) £805,769: Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse)
7) £805,745: on a study that says "The disproportionate representation of William Shakespeare in scholarship and performance has aligned early modern drama in the public mind with white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives"
8) Sadiq Khan's unelected czars  £148k pa: Justine Simons £148k pa: Mete Coban £110k+ pa: Will Norman £132,846 pa: Amy Lame
9) £113,220 in government grants - The Vagina Museum
10) £243,360: Buzzers for Bedwetters: Incontinence and the Urinary Body in Britain, 1870-1970
Btw I always get people saying "that's hardly anything" when I post these things. Well, it's a SAMPLE!  I am tracking all the spending on @WokeWaste and bear in mind I'm a one-woman team:
Some of my most popular pieces: Mete Coban MBE: Sadiq Khan's new high-flying eco adviser (on £148k per year)
Over £1m taxpayer-funding - to the professor specialising in gay "pig" masculinities"
Clearly, if you cut "research" funding, you're short sighted, a philistine and hate learning

Keir Starmer 'doesn't want to tell people how to live their lives' - "Sir Keir Starmer tried to claim he does not want to tell people how to live their lives - despite preparing a series of new nanny state interventions. The Prime Minister refused to say if he thought Britons should have more children after an alarming report by the Office for Budget Responsibility warned the country's population could soon start to go into decline. And he insisted there was no need for the Government to intervene with a plan to boost the dwindling birth rate, even though some commentators say the economy will be damaged as the workforce ages... asked if Britons should have more children, he insisted: 'I've spent my whole time saying I'm not going to tell people how to live their lives - I'm not going to start by dictating whether they should or shouldn't have children.' His comments, however, came just days after he vowed to bring in a series of public health measures to combat childhood obesity. 'I know some prevention measures will be controversial but I'm prepared to be bold, even in the face of loud opposition,' Sir Keir said on Thursday as he announced a ban on television adverts for junk food before the 9pm watershed. He also wants to bring in supervised toothbrushing for young children and ban energy drinks for under-16s. The Government is also planning to ban outdoor smoking and may try to outlaw disposable vapes... 'If the Prime Minister wants growth, he should follow the example of increasing numbers of Western leaders in urgently looking for ways to increase the birthrate.' Former Cabinet minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has six children, said: 'Starmer seems incapable of telling the truth. He spends his whole time telling people how to live their lives with smoking bans, advertising bans and potentially sugar and salt taxes. 'No one is asking him to tell people how many children to have, all that is being suggested is that he should say having children is a good thing but the old lawyer never wants to give a straight answer.'"
Encouraging people to have more children is the same as dictating that they have children.

What is 'working class' Keir Starmer's net worth? - "Since launching his push to run the country, Sir Keir Starmer has been at pains to play down his privilege and play up his working-class roots. But 20 years as a lawyer before his move into politics has put him comfortably into the country's top 1 per cent of earners. His property dealings and gold-plated pension pot alone place his worth at around £3 million. During the 2020 Labour leadership contest, Sir Keir – who was paid up to £400 an hour during his two decades as a senior lawyer – played down his wealth. 'I'm not a millionaire,' he said, even though he conceded his north London townhouse might, then, be worth £1 million... Before entering politics, Sir Keir earned £1 million as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) between 2008 and 2013. He also amassed a £700,000 pension which – on top of his MP's retirement allowance – is expected to give him a publicly funded pot worth about £1 million. In common with his predecessors as DPP, Sir Keir's pension is exempt from tax rules that he has said should apply to other workers who save more than £1 million."

GMB viewers hit out at ‘useless’ Ed Balls hours after wife Yvette Cooper voted to cut winter fuel payments - "Labour’s own research had suggested thousands of pensioners could die if the government proceeds with its plan to cut winter fuel payments for those not on benefits. Analysis published in 2017, when Sir Keir Starmer was in the Shadow Cabinet, warned that Conservative plans to cut the fuel allowance for ten million pensioners would increase excess deaths by 3,850 that winter. The proposal, put forward by Theresa May’s government, was dubbed the “single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation in our country”."
Clearly, if Labour is the one cutting the winter fuel payment, people won't die

Treasury is landed with a £10BILLION windfall - "Labour MP Rachael Maskell blasted slashing winter fuel payments as she said they would raise only a 'tiny proportion' of the £10billion funding the Chancellor has now been given - saying Reeves should 'absolutely' reconsider it now... Keir Starmer admitted that the upcoming Budget will be 'painful' - as he defended handing out billions to end strikes by militant unions."

How Labour could take away your state pension - "With Labour promising not to increase taxes for “working people”, it is feared that Britain’s 12 million pensioners could be at the sharp end of Rachel Reeves’s “painful” October Budget.  The Chancellor says she has a £22bn “black hole” to plug, and experts say decisions need to be made to cut the nation’s ballooning multi-billion pound state pension bill.  The universal entitlement pays £11,502 a year to everyone aged at least 66 who retired since 2016, as long as they have 35 years of National Insurance (NI) contributions. The state pension provides a financial safety net for pensioners with no other income. It is also expensive, costing the Treasury over £100bn annually – a figure expected to keep on rising."
Labour 'retirement tax' to hit 300,000 more pensioners - "The news comes as the Government continues to battle criticism of its decision to means-test winter fuel payments.  In July, Ms Reeves said winter fuel payments would be restricted to just those on pension credit from this winter in an attempt to raise £1.5bn to fix the nation’s finances. Previously, it was available to anyone receiving the state pension.  As a result, pensioners now face their “worst winter on record” with their bills expected to jump by almost £500 compared to last year."
Of course, the Guardian is not getting super upset, since this all these changes targeting pensioners and old people are by a Labour government. If it were the Tories, it would be an outrage because promises are being broken, old people are poor and destitute, the government is literally killing people etc (see also inheritance changes)

Keir Starmer's approval rating plunges by 14 points in a month - "Keir Starmer's approval rating has plunged amid the winter fuel allowance raid and looming tax hikes, according to a poll. Research by Ipsos found the proportion who viewed the PM favourably tumbled from 38 per cent in August to 32 per cent this month. Meanwhile, those who had a negative impression spiked by eight points to 46 per cent - giving a net score of minus 14... The proportion of people who view the Labour Party favourably has fallen by four points to 36 per cent, while unfavourability has increased by eight points to 45 per cent."

Starmer justifying £100k of gifts makes things worse says Baroness - "Baroness Harman became the first senior party figure to publicly criticise the Prime Minister in the growing storm over his acceptance of more than £100,000 worth of gifts and hospitality in the past five years. The former Cabinet minister – given a peerage earlier this year by Sir Keir – said the Labour leader was 'doubling down' and trying to justify a donor paying for thousands of pounds' worth of clothes for himself and his wife. Yet last night he again insisted he had done nothing wrong – and claimed a corporate box he has been gifted to watch his beloved Arsenal from was in fact saving taxpayers money, rather than sitting in the stands surrounded by security... The storm began last month when it emerged that Labour peer and fundraising chief Lord Alli had been handed an access-all-areas security pass to Downing Street in the wake of the election victory, having given Sir Keir £16,200 for 'work clothing' followed by £2,485 for 'multiple pairs of glasses'. It then emerged last weekend that Lord Alli, a former boss of online fashion retailer Asos, had also given thousands of pounds' worth of clothes to the PM's wife Lady Starmer, while new calculations showed that Sir Keir had received more freebies than any other MP, receiving £107,145 in gifts, benefits and hospitality since December 2019. Speaking on a Sky News podcast, Lady Harman said: 'You can either double down on it and try and justify it or you can just say 'it was probably a misstep, if I had my time again I wouldn't do it and therefore I'm going to auction for charity or something'. 'It was just a misstep, it's not a hanging offence, but I think doubling down and trying to justify it is making things worse... However, Sir Keir showed no signs of backing down, particularly when it comes to watching his favourite football team play. He has long been a season ticket holder at Arsenal but has in recent seasons accepted invitations to watch matches from corporate hospitality boxes rather than from the stands"

Labour’s moral posturing has backfired spectacularly - "The scandal which has taken hold at the heart of the new Labour government – primarily associated with party donor Lord Alli – exposes the party’s two-tier approach to parliamentary standards and ethics. As Leader of the Opposition, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer promised “change” – a politics of service, decency, and accountability. This would mean conducting politics in a different way, providing a sharp contrast from the moral indecency and lack of ethics at the heart of Tory-led government. Taking aim at former PM Boris Johnson, Starmer – setting out his “contract” with the British people – said he did not believe that politics is a branch of the entertainment industry. Branding himself as a paragon of piety, Starmer was photographed shopping for wallpaper in John Lewis – poking fun at Johnson’s eye-watering Number 10 refurbishment costs (with much of this funded by British entrepreneur Lord Brownlow). Now, a few months into his tenure as Prime Minister, “Mr Rules” now has two unflattering and somewhat related nicknames: “two-tier Keir” and “free-gear Keir”. Starmer has received substantially more freebies than any other MP since becoming Labour leader. Excluding legal fees, the MP for Holborn & St Pancras has received more than £107,000 worth of gifts – comfortably ahead than the runner-up, fellow Labour politician and current Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, who took in just over £40,000... there has been little in the way of a proper apology, suggesting the party suffers from a fundamental lack of remorse and humility. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson had a smile on her face as Sir Trevor Phillips informed the audience that she had taken a £14,000 donation from Lord Alli to throw a birthday bash, bizarrely seeking to justify it on the grounds of the party supposedly being a work-related event involving journalists, trade unionists, and those in the education sector. In a separate occasion, Phillipson was gifted Taylor Swift tickets declared at £522 – saying that it was a “hard one to turn down” and that one of her children was keen to attend the global music icon’s show. A car-crash interview of epic proportions. Why are these leading Labour politicians so blind to their own breathtaking hypocrisy, having a history of condemning Tory opponents for the very kinds of donor-connected indiscretions they are guilty of? Traditionally identifying with the Left and being a member of a trade union, I believe that it boils down to those involved in Labour politics believing they are entitled to indulge in such unethical behaviour because they have convinced themselves that they are morally decent overall. Being on the supposedly “virtuous” side on matters of social justice and committing to the “progressive” holy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion, means that all these covered-for treats are richly deserved – like luxury clothing, overseas stays in elite apartments, and expensive birthday parties: the perks of fighting the good fight. In their eyes, the “nasty” Tories are morally indecent on the whole – so when they indulge in similarly unethical forms of behaviour, it is completely unacceptable. They are not deserving of such treats and must be hounded. This is a shamelessly two-tier approach to parliamentary standards and ethics which undermines the very concept of good governance in modern Britain... Labour have burned through whatever political capital it had after it was elected on a low turnout and underwhelming share of the vote. This is not the duty-oriented politics of change – this is business as usual at the heart of Westminster politics, and it stinks."

Mediocre Britain deserves this grim government - "Labour has already failed, not because of “donor-gate” or the unedifying squabbles between Starmer’s special advisers, but because it has no clue how to run a country. It spent two months maniacally talking down Britain – with Reeves reportedly considering it a golden opportunity to “bury the Tories”, as though she were a far-Left social-justice activist rather than our Chancellor of the Exchequer – only to be pushed into a humiliating retreat after business and consumer confidence plummeted. Without the optimism to spend, hire, and invest, it’s near-impossible for our economy to expand. Their multi-billion pound bung to the public sector has not, as Starmer claimed in August, ended industrial strife – as the decision by the Royal College of Nursing to reject a pay uplift of 5.5 per cent makes awkwardly apparent. The issue, presumably, is not the above-inflation offer, but that Labour has already given 15 per cent over three years to better-paid train drivers and offered 22 per cent over two years to junior doctors. The bright sparks in government, apparently, could not see this coming. Whether Labour has a plan it daren’t reveal, or was so unprepared for office it never bothered to devise one is almost beside the point. It’s the naivety and hubris, with or without an agenda, that’s so troubling. The belief that, because it would be in charge rather than the grubby, venal, morally inferior Tories, it would succeed. That’s why it makes such absurd proclamations as “scrapping the universal winter fuel allowance would avoid a run on the pound”. It’s perhaps why our Business Secretary seems to believe he knows more about employee productivity at Amazon than its senior executives. The Government talks of growth as though it can be achieved through osmosis, yet takes decisions that will stymie it. It speaks as though there is no problem that cannot be solved with a bigger state, yet the public sector has scarcely ever been so bloated and ineffective. The Prime Minister told conference delegates that he would put “country first, party second” – but studies have suggested a 10 percentage point increase in the tax or government spending burden is associated with a roughly 1 per cent fall in the growth rate in the long-term. Were he truly committed to our national interest, he wouldn’t be bringing railways into public ownership, or handing workers a raft of new entitlements, or creating state-owned energy companies. Even parts of the economy seemingly distant from the locus of government are now subject to state meddling – thanks to legislation like the Equality Act, which Labour wants to expand even further. Ministers are musing on potential investigations into the price of holiday flights and Oasis tickets. Britain might not have voted for a government that presents itself as a paragon of moral probity while its politicians accept freebies from millionaires, but the nation has little appetite for lower taxes, or personal responsibility, or a smaller state. A poll by Global Counsel in December revealed people wanted spare government money to go on spending increases rather than tax cuts. Heaven forbid others be allowed to keep more of their own hard-earned cash... just 18 per cent of Brits are against the VAT raid on private school fees. Britain may not consciously have voted for a charmless, mithering administration, but we are an increasingly mean-spirited, priggish nation more interested in depriving others of pleasure than finding our own sources of enjoyment."

Environment Secretary accepted 'donation' from company linked to water pollution - "Environment Secretary Steve Reed is the latest to become embroiled in Labour’s cronyism scandal after accepting football tickets worth nearly £2000 from a company with links to water pollution."

Keir’s joyless government has found another thing to ruin - "Another day, another Labour Party donor caught running his mouth about the money he’s dropped. “I am hoping to have a conversation with the new government to encourage them to change the law”, Vince told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference, referring to the legal requirement for schools to serve meat to kids. Vince, you see, is a vegan warrior – one who wants to bring more of his company’s vegan meals to school kids, and less sausage and mash. The reason this is awkward news for the Labour Party is that Vince is a donor – to the tune of £5 million. Indeed, he boasted at conference that his company, Devil’s Kitchen, “already supplies vegan food to one in four primary schools”. Decrying the evils of meat and dairy, Vince demanded that “we shouldn’t be forcing these unhealthy products on to our kids”, which most people would think is a bit of an extreme way to talk about a lunchtime yoghurt. But this is the new reality for Labour. Fringe millionaires with fringe views seem to have bought access to the party in ways that Boris Johnson’s decorators could only have dreamed of. Better still, none of them seem to have any shame about it. The problem for Keir Starmer is not that business leaders want to use their cash to spend on the party, it’s that he has set himself up as Mr Squeaky Clean... What rankles isn’t the handouts, but the arrogance in which Labour politicians seem affronted when quizzed about it. It’s not that we care that Bridget Phillipson took her kids to see the queen of pop on a freebie, it’s that she blamed her children for her decision. Just take the ongoing row over Lord Alli’s influence in Labour decision making. For those living under a rock, Alli is the Labour peer who bought Starmer’s wife a new wardrobe, put Angela Rayner up in New York with two grand’s worth of spends and forked out for Phillipson’s work-related 40th birthday celebrations – all for nothing “in return”, he assures us. Except, we now know that Alli’s influence isn’t just on Labour’s fashion sense. Not only was he given a security pass to number ten – granting him access to the prime minister that the staff of lowly elected politicians don’t have – but we also know that a member of his staff was seconded and put in charge of selecting Labour MPs for this year’s General Election. "But what about the Tories?” The Labour lackeys cry... As such, Starmer seems just as happy as Johnson was to be swayed by the last person to whisper in his ear and drop a new pair of glasses in his pocket. Why else would Vince feel confident enough to boast on a public stage his ability to potentially change the diets of the nation’s children – something the vast majority of the country’s voters would oppose? The real problem isn’t money men throwing their weight around, it’s the ease with which Starmer seems to have filled his government with people who hold political power despite being unelected. When asked at conference about the reasons why Sue Gray was allegedly paid more than the prime minister, Labour MP Emily Thornberry scoffed that she thought it was wonderful that Starmer, a bloke, was paying a woman member of staff more than him... In her defence, it’s hard to listen to those pesky constituents with their annoying concerns when you’ve got a job to do making sure your family members are elected to parliament. Even Starmer’s appointees – James TImpson, Sir Patrick Vallance, Richard Hermer KC – though interesting, were, again, not tested at the ballot box. “But he’s a Labour peer”, cry Lord Alli’s defenders, arguing that there’s nothing to see here because his rosette is the right colour, forgetting that peers of the realm are, you guessed it, unelected by the people who should be in control of political power. It’s not Vince’s plans to replace our children’s bacon with beansprouts that stinks, it’s the contempt with which this government seems to treat democracy. And from shrinking pints to shutting pubs, banning smoking to repeating Thatcher’s milk snatching ways in the name of the environment, they seem to be hellbent on doing it in the most joyless way possible."

Starmer faces first Labour defection amid "cruelty" and "hypocrisy" criticisms - "Rosie Duffield bid farewell with a harsh letter condemning "corruption, nepotism, and large-scale greed" demonstrated by the Starmer team in just ninety days in power."

Keir Starmer has a problem with women, says MP who has quit Labour - "The former Labour MP Rosie Duffield has said Keir Starmer has “a problem with women” and that the government is “more interested in greed and power” than making changes to the country. In a broadside at Starmer’s leadership, Duffield told the BBC she was Labour “in my heart and soul” but said the scandal over senior party figures’ acceptance of donations and gifts including clothes was indefensible given the party was keeping the two-child benefit cap and had cut the winter fuel allowance for all but the poorest pensioners... Duffield has also been a high-profile gender-critical voice in the party which has put her at odds with trans rights activists. She has described receiving threats over her stance and receiving little support from the party leadership... Referencing the controversial donations to Starmer from Lord Alli, Duffield wrote in her resignation letter published on Sunday: “Someone with far-above-average wealth choosing to keep the Conservatives’ two-child limit to benefit payments which entrenches children in poverty, while inexplicably accepting expensive personal gifts of designer suits and glasses costing more than most of those people can grasp – this is entirely undeserving of holding the title of Labour prime minister.” She said Starmer “never regularly engaged” with backbench MPs and lacked “basic politics and political instincts”. She also criticised the promotion of new MPs with “no proven political skills and no previous parliamentary experience” and said Starmer himself had been “elevated immediately to a shadow cabinet position without following the usual path of honing your political skills on the backbenches”."

Sunak's government more popular than Labour, poll reveals | The Spectator - "more people prefer Sunak’s government to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot, according to polling by More in Common. In yet another blow for Starmer, the survey found the new government was less popular than Sunak’s by two points, with the current Prime Minister not yet being three months into the job. It’s hardly the best start… More in Common quizzed 2,080 people on their thoughts on the governments of late. 31 per cent preferred Sunak’s boys in blue, with 29 per cent logging their support for Sir Keir. It follows Starmer’s rather bumpy ride in the top job, with his time as PM marred by accusations of cronyism, a freebie fiasco with considerable questions remaining about Labour donor Lord Alli, and backlash to unpopular policies like imposing VAT on private schools and cutting the winter fuel payment. In more bad news for Starmer, his personal approval rating has fallen, More in Common finds, by 38 points since his party won the election – down to -27 per cent. While the Prime Minister hasn’t even enjoyed his first 100 days in power, already barely a fifth of voters believe his party can win the next national poll, with a third of Labour voters lamenting their support for the Starmtroopers."

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