Blogs

Just what we needed:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/06/northern-irish-dissident-republi...

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.

I could say I told you so; but I don’t feel like it.

This will be a heading for a series:

Number 1. Norton Motorcycles. (Say it ain't so - I still want a '61 Commando in good shape - nevertheless...)

www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/norton-motorcycles-goes-into-admini...
The sins of hubris will return to haunt us all in the coming years. Me too, no doubt.

Reminder: as good as German social and liberal capitalism is for workers in comparison to the rest of the world, it is still a capitalist state.

Workers have gone on strike demanding fair wages. But their employer is having none of it, and sacked 14 of those workers without warning. The employer then threatened to lay-off 800 more workers if the strike continues.

So far, that sounds like a lot of campaigns we've run in the past.

Except that this time, the workers are in Germany.

Germany has one of the oldest and strongest trade union movements in the world.

...By the mendacious, deluded, confused, and opportunistic.

All but the most hardened Brexiter must wonder if this leap into the unknown is a good thing; "It's divorce Jim, but not as we know it."

Let's hope we can keep it amicable. But know now that some part of this grey and windswept nation will miss the rest of Europe; but if the rest of the family, including the deluded grandparental generation, demand we move house or change churches or sack the servants, that is what happens.

So I pen an apology to Europe, from the 48%.

In the last day or two, major media outlets have run two stories, one on Biden allegedly refusing to commit to support Sanders as the nominee and one on Feinstein allegedly leaning towards acquitting Trump, which had to be corrected because they weren't actually accurate. In both cases, the person's comments were available to the news organization, but were misinterpreted. In both cases, the news organization corrected the headlines in the actual article, but let the old inflammatory headlines continue to appear in Facebook posts.

Hungary has released its equivalent to a Green New Deal, and it's surprisingly ambitious, considering Hungary's historic hostility to climate goals and emissions reductions. It calls for reducing emissions by 40% by 2030 and getting to net zero by 2050. The 2030 goal is relative to 1990 levels, so I'm guessing it's roughly in line with the ~50% reductions relative to 2010 levels called for in the IPCC report. It calls for spending about 120% of its GDP over the next three decades, which is the equivalent of about $23 trillion for the US.

It would a fascinating proposition of the democratic left; left liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, mutualists, ancoms, etc realised that the populist and establishment right were the bigger enemy. Well, a genuine attempt has started,Progressives Unite 2020, to bring to gether the competing Sanders and Warren camps for the US Democrats. But disagreements are deep even when appeals to unity are made; as one Facebook interlocutor put it:

Suspended union president Sithar Chhim has been reinstated at her job following a strike by union members at the Naga World Hotel Casino in Phnom Penh launched on January 9.

Stefan Molyneaux has recently made a plea for help. I'm not even going to link it, because he doesn't deserve the views. But the essence of his problem is that if he does make enough money from various social media supporters, he would not be able to find a normal job in mainstream society because One search and it would be functionally impossible. Yes, apparently Stefan is upset that his own words, his racism, his conspiracy theories, etc might reduce his job prospects. Apparently the free-market capitalism which Stefan so readily advocates has spoken.

Life of the project: 60 years

Area of project: 447km2

Estimated water usage: 12.5 billion litres per year

Amount of water Adani must return in the first 5 years: 6%

Number of bird species supported by wetlands around Abbot Point terminal: 154

Amount by which Adani have exceeded their pollution discharge limit at Abbot point to date: 800%

Volume of Great Barrier Reef seabed dredged around Abbot Point: 10,000m3

Estimated production: 2.6 billion tonnes of (mainly low grade, high ash) coal