The Reparations Bill Appears Ever So Slightly Biased
Of course, we all know that committees to study something aren’t set up in order to study something. Even so, this seems more than a little blatant: Briefly, what’s in HR 40, the House’s bill to study reparations If passed, HR 40 would establish a “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” composed…
Entirely So, We Must, Entirely, Stop This Civil Servants Working For Private Organisations Thing
It is entirely reasonable logic to insist that the one person cannot serve the two masters. Conflicts of interest are going to happen if they try – and we’d prefer not to have such conflicts in the manner we are governed. The thing is this civil servant who worked both for Greensill and also in a part of the Cabinet Office…
Reasons Not To Use PayPal 1)
I was wary about getting involved with PayPal to start as i’ve heard about them terminating accounts, but… Over the weekend PayPal informed us that they would no longer be willing to process payments for us due to “inappropriate content”. What this actually means is “we dont believe in your political…
Betting on London
From our Swindon correspondent: Another example of the religious cult of London:- “Seething, international, colourful.” “The epitome of modernity.” The source of an “inner freedom that I’ve kept to this day”. Even without context, Ursula von der Leyen’s odes to London, where the European Commission president studied for a year, have always…
Seriously Folks, At Least Try To Get Evolution Right
Quite what we should expect from an environment correspondent trying to do actual science I’m not sure but we could hope for better than this at least: Foxgloves brought to the Americas 200 years ago have evolved to be bigger to allow pollination by hummingbirds, researchers have found, as a new study concludes flowers can rapidly…
Philippos Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glucksburg
No comment: A story about Prince Philip, who died today at 99. The weekend of the Kennedy assassination, he flew to Washington for the funeral. At the White House on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy was looking for John Jr. and opened the door to his playroom. There she found (more) — West Wing Reports (edited by Paul Brandus)…
You’re Right, George Monbiot Is Horrendously Confused
To be in favour of more care for the environment is just fine. It’s even defensible – even if misanthropic – to prefer the environment to human beings. It’s just a value judgement and as with fundaments we’ve all got one of those. Where George Monbiot goes wrong is in not understanding the details of what…
The Amazon Union
From our Swindon Correspondent: From the BBC Amazon has defeated activists hoping to establish the company’s first unionised warehouse in the US. Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said. That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key…
Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Nowedontsaythatwordanymores
The joys of second hand bookshops and charity shops. A couple of days back I picked up a copy of Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Nowedontsaythatwordanymores” just because the full title would cause shrieks of horror in the modern. Does cause shrieks of horror in fact. So, not having read it I wondered whether it was like…
Dear God How Can Anyone Be This Stupid About Race?
A young lady complaining about changing standards of beauty. She entirely and wholly missing the point: Everything about me – specifically my racialised features as a Black mixed woman – felt “too much”. I remember the distinct feeling of wanting to shrink myself, melt myself down into something neater, smaller, sleeker – which is how I saw…
The Awful Fate Of The Disappearing Middle Aged Woman
It is possible to take the same facts in use here and come to an entirely different conclusion: This may be bound up with hormonal changes, but is certainly connected with another shift, as one woman told me: “You get to your 50s, the male gaze is no longer turned on you and you realise how awful it was to live under it, how liberating to…
Sexism Certainly Exists. But…
From our Swindon Correspondent: From the Toronto Star The most recent 2020 survey by Wikimedia — the site’s parent organization — found that 87 per cent of its editors are men. The survey did not ask about race, but almost half live in Europe and one fifth in North America. Sarah Severson, a librarian at the University of Alberta and a…