Tomorrow is the general election in the UK where the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn have been subject to a massive smear campaign. Not being British, my views count for little but here is a cartoon by another non-Britisher, an Australian cartoonist who goes under the pen-name ‘first dog on the moon’, that quite nicely sums up my feelings.
As the cartoonist rightly points out, “You know you’re not legally required to like Jeremy Corbyn in order to vote for him right?”
The scandal surrounding Prince Andrew and his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and the allegation made by Virginia Giuffre that when she was just 17 she was forced by Epstein and his cronies to have sex with Andrew has put the spotlight on the British Royal family in ways that they would rather have avoided.
In particular, this article by Clive Irving, based on a book What the Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know…And What Do You Do? by Norman Baker, a former government minister and long-time Member of Parliament, looks at the lavish lifestyle of ‘The Firm” as they are called and how they hide it, finance it, and avoid taxes, headed by Prince Charles and his own fortune building empire. This may explain why Charles was so quick to put wraps around Andrew and whisk him away from the public eye for fear that the other shenanigans might also come out. What the article reveals is secret indulgence on a massive scale.
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This was announced by Miriam-Webster today.
Merriam-Webster has named “they” its word of the year.
The US dictionary also recently added a new definition of “they”, reflecting its use as a singular personal pronoun for non-binary people.
Searches for “they” on Merriam-Webster’s website were 313% higher this year than they were in 2018.
…Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, told the Associated Press news agency that searches shot up when Oslo Grace was rising to prominence, when Sam Smith came out, and when US congresswoman Pramila Jayapal spoke about her gender-nonconforming child while arguing for LGBTQ rights legislation in April.
“It reflects a surprising fact: even a basic term – a personal pronoun – can rise to the top of our data,” the dictionary said in a statement.
“Although our look-ups are often driven by events in the news, the dictionary is also a primary resource for information about language itself, and the shifting use of ‘they’ has been the subject of increasing study and commentary in recent years.
“English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘someone’, and as a consequence ‘they’ has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.”
In addition to being respectful towards the gender non-binary community, it also immensely simplifies things when trying to write in the third person.
They all quickly agree that it’s too damn cold to be outside. If only humans could come to a sensible consensus as quickly.
Lee Fang of The Intercept writes that US health industry lobbyists are just waiting for a Conservative victory on Thursday to shred British consumer safeguards and raise drug prices as part of their demands in the trade deal that the US will agree upon with a Conservative government following Brexit.
Departing the EU could mean that British consumers would no longer be protected by broad EU-wide regulations on chemicals, food, and cosmetics, among other products. Several international corporate groups have pushed to ensure that in the event of Brexit, such safeguards are abandoned in exchange for a regulatory standard that conforms to the norms of the U.S.
Consultants working directly on the Brexit deal in London and in Washington, D.C., have asked to limit the ability of British regulators to set the price for pharmaceutical drugs, lift safety restrictions on pesticides and agricultural products, and constrain the ability for the U.K. to enact its own data privacy laws.
…Dean Baker, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted in an email to The Intercept that such regulatory demands by industry are “always part of trade deals.” Baker said that U.S. trade to the U.K. is relatively trivial, at around 2.5 percent of GDP, making incentives for rushing a trade agreement relatively small.
“On the other hand,” Baker wrote, “paying higher prices for drugs and being unable to regulate the Internet is likely to impose very substantial costs.”
“A government weighing these factors carefully would almost certainly refuse a deal, but a Johnson government that made Brexit front and center is likely to feel strong political pressure to have a deal with the hope few people will pay much attention to the content,” Baker noted. “Johnson could tout the deal as a big success. People would only see the negative effects years down the road.”
The Washington Post has obtained, under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, an internal report produced by an obscure government agency known as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that consists of interviews with people intimately involved with the US war in that country. It shows that the American public has been lied to constantly about the progress of the war, given a rosy picture when those on the inside knew that the war was lost almost from the very start.
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Have you heard of Nicolas Bourbaki? I hadn’t but David Gunderman writes that “he made fundamental contributions to important mathematical fields such as set theory and functional analysis.” But the problem is that he never existed. So what happened?
He first appeared in 1934 in Paris.
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A Methodist church in California has set up an outdoor nativity scene for Christmas that has the potential to make xenophobic Trump supporters apoplectic.
One of the features of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US is the panic that it has induced among the ruling classes and all the organizations that they use to maintain their grip on power. Normally these groups could exercise their power discreetly in the shadows and let the electoral game play out, knowing that whoever wins will be subservient to their interests. But Corbyn and Sanders are too great a threat to the power structure to ignore or take likely and the rulers have been forced to become more overtly involved in the process in order to stop them.
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He made the following remarks at a fundraiser last evening.
US President Donald Trump told a pro-Israel conference Saturday night that some American Jews don’t love Israel enough. He also noting that he did not have to worry about getting his audience’s votes, because they would cast ballots with business interests in mind.
Those comments, to the Israeli American Council advocacy group in Florida, drew quick criticism from opponents and were derided as anti-Semitic.
In his 45-minute speech to an audience of over 4,300, the president criticized American Jews who, he said, were not sufficiently supportive of the Jewish state.
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