December 3, 2023

Icehouse - No Promises (The Wonderful Extended Version) 1986

Label: Chrysalis – CHS 12 2978
Format: Vinyl, 12", 45 RPM, Single
Country: UK
Released: 1986
Genre: Electronic
Style: Synth-pop

December 3, 2023

Pret Christmas sandwich review: 'It just reminds me of sadness'

Pret’s Christmas sandwich offers Charlotte Ivers small crumbs of comfort

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pret-a-manger-review-now-it-just-reminds-me-of-sadness-6k5t2t0bt

https://archive.is/BccHw



Can you find me a Christmassy restaurant?” says the editor. Hmm. Tricky. Christmas isn’t really about restaurants. It’s about putting the roast potatoes in the oven and pretending you can’t hear the in-laws questioning your crisping technique. If you’re in a restaurant at Christmas something has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong. December 2013, or thereabouts. Birmingham New Street station. The trains are late again — of course they are. Or maybe they don’t exist. I can’t remember. I’m miserable, for reasons I can’t entirely remember either, but were probably largely related to the general horror that is being a teenager. I can’t get home to my mum’s. Insult to injury: I’m in Pret A Manger.

Still, the light shineth in the darkness. So begins one of the great enduring love stories of my life. Roasted carrots, rocket, pecan nuts, crispy onion bits. The vegetarian Pret Christmas sandwich. In my memory there were chestnuts, but I’m not sure I trust that. What I do recall is that the sandwich was perfect. It tasted like the Christmas I was at risk of missing due to the enduring and inevitable incompetence of Network Rail.



Now it’s 2023. The trains are still a mess. Some things never change. The Pret Christmas sandwich has. I picked one up for lunch today, squirrelled it back to my desk. Squash instead of carrots. No doubt some highly paid suit, in a glass-fronted office somewhere, held several focus groups about this, at great expense. I like to imagine him, Mad Men-style, bellowing at an assistant: “Carrots are over, goddamit. Get me squash!” That or I’m misremembering the carrots too. If there were chestnuts, they are gone as well. It’s not what it was. The rocket is a bit wilted. Isn’t it always, in these preprepared sandwiches? The bread is wilted too. God, when did I get so snobby? I’m sure I didn’t used to care about this type of thing. Undeterred, I go back the next day. A friend has described the Pret Christmas range as “Frankensteinian”. Maybe I’ve not been adventurous enough. Bingo. Ham Hock & Festive Sprouts Macaroni Cheese. “New”, the package boasts. “I’ve made it through the auditions.” That must be the focus groups. It’s lukewarm. The crispy top isn’t crispy. It’s weirdly sweet. Weirdly … weird. I mean, I say “weirdly” but they’ve put sprouts in macaroni cheese.



I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. Like returning to your childhood home, there’s nothing like Christmas to make you realise how much you have changed. I devoured the Pret Christmas sandwich in my youth, looking forward to its arrival like a new album release. This year I had to drag myself to Pret. I ate there every day a few years ago: repeating the same sad office lunch in a job I hated, at a time when my personal life felt in a constant state of freefall. It was miserable, but I didn’t have the energy to go elsewhere. Now Pret just reminds me of sadness.

snip

December 2, 2023

BREAKING: George Santos goes NUCLEAR and says he will release evidence of wrongdoing by a list of REPUBLICAN members

https://twitter.com/CalltoActivism/status/1730989834578337801
https://twitter.com/CalltoActivism/status/1730990473093718518
🚨🚨🚨MAJOR BREAKING: George Santos goes NUCLEAR and says he will release evidence of wrongdoing by a list of REPUBLICAN members of Congress who may have broken the law.

Here are his full accusations. 🍿

According to Santos, on Monday he’ll file an official complaint with the Office of congressional Ethics against Malliotakis “regarding her questionable stock trading since joining the Ways and Means committee this Congress.”

Santos said he will file an Ethics complaint against Republican Rep. Mike Lawler “for questionable campaign finance violations.”

Santos says “Congressman Lawler owns portion of Checkmate Strategies and he uses the same firm that he is a beneficiary of to pay for services related to his campaign.”

“Is Mr Lawler engaging in laundering money…from his campaign to his firm then to his own pocket?” Santos asked.

Finally, Santos says his third ethics report will concern Republican Rep. Nick LaLotta
who he accused of attending school while he was on the clock at a government job.

“Did Rep Lalota no-show to his tax pay funded job while going to school and if so he can potential have stolen public funds from the tax payers of NY?” Santos asked.

If history has shown us anything, hell hath no fury like a lying conman scorned.

What are your thoughts about Santos spilling tea about his former colleagues?

🚨🚨🚨UPDATE: Santos tweeted this to New York Republican Nicole Maliotakis:

“
@NMalliotakis
the difference between you and I is that I don’t live in denial, I’m a PROUD GAY man and I’m not afraid to say it. 😉”

What did he mean by that? 🤔

CALL TO ACTIVISM
@CalltoActivism
🚨🚨🚨UPDATE: According to reports, Nicole Malliotakis allegedly bought New York Community Bancorp stock on March 17.

Less than 24 hours later, the bank announced that they were buying out Signature Bank.

It shot the stock up 40% that day.

December 2, 2023

Vice President Harris says 'too many innocent Palestinians have been killed' as fighting picks up in southern Gaza

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/02/israel-bombards-southern-gaza-as-residents-fear-new-ground-offensive.html



U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said too many innocent Palestinians had been killed in Gaza as Israeli war planes and artillery bombarded the enclave on Saturday following the collapse of a truce
with Hamas militants.

Residents feared the barrages were a prelude to an Israeli ground operation in the south of the Palestinian territory that would pen them into a shrinking area and possibly try to push them across into Egypt. The Gaza health ministry said at least 193 Palestinians had been killed and 650 wounded since the truce ended on Friday morning - adding to the more than 15,000 Palestinian dead since the start of the war.

Speaking in Dubai, Harris said Israel had a right to defend itself, but international and humanitarian law must be respected and “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”. “Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza, are devastating,” Harris told reporters.

She also sketched out a U.S. vision for post-conflict Gaza, saying the international community must support recovery and Palestinian security forces must be strengthened. “We want to see a unified Gaza and West Bank under the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian voices and aspirations must be at the center of this work,” she said, adding that Hamas must no longer run Gaza.

snip



Netanyahu and his band of ultra RW supporters are perhaps going to try and drive them into Egypt, which would be textbook ethnic cleansing.

December 2, 2023

Geert Wilders and Dutch coalition prospects

The election victory in the Netherlands for the Party for Freedom fits into a wider picture of European radical-right populism.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/geert-wilders-and-dutch-coalition-prospects



The results of the Dutch election, in which Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom emerged as victors, have sent shockwaves through the political establishment. For the first time in Dutch history, a party of the extreme right is the largest in the national parliament. Wilders is an eccentric politician, known for his inflammatory rhetoric. He advocates the Netherlands leaving the European Union and has called Islam a ‘fascist’ religion. In a 2016 trial, he was found guilty of inciting discrimination (but received no penalty for the crime).

Partners needed

While polling leading up to the election had suggested that the Party for Freedom could become the largest, it had appeared to be running practically neck and neck with the parties of the mainstream left and right. But the polls were wide of the mark and Wilders ended up taking the most seats by a comfortable margin, even if he will need to seek coalition partners to form a government. The right-wing newcomers of the New Social Contract also did very well. Like the Party for Freedom, this party sees immigration as one of the reasons for problems such as the Netherlands’ stressed public services and lack of affordable housing.

However, Pieter Omtzigt, the New Social Contract’s leader (and a former member of parliament for the more centre-right Christian Democratic Party), is critical of some of Wilders’ more inflammatory rhetoric. Omtzigt would nevertheless seem the most likely candidate to form a coalition with Wilders, together with the former party of the now-departed prime minister, Mark Rutte [its new leader has ruled this out]. But it will be some time before it is clear if such a partnership is achievable. Coalition in the Netherlands is the work of months rather than weeks. These talks will be all the more complex thanks to Wilders’ personal profile. He may hold the greatest number of seats, but the controversy that has surrounded him for so many years may yet rule him out of the role of prime minister, even were he to be part of a governing coalition.

Should a coalition be formed, questions about the Netherlands’ place in the EU will inevitably come to the fore. Wilders wants a Brexit-style referendum and, even if this doesn’t materialise, we can expect him to bring a more Eurosceptic stance to any government in which he participates. This could have considerable consequences for the EU. Even when extreme-right parties in Europe differ on the question of exit, they agree on transforming the EU into a more intergovernmental body, taking power away from Brussels.

Example from Italy.................................

snip

December 2, 2023

Minor glitch since the new patch: When I get a reply and my Posts button turns yellow, so does my Inbox button

That happens every time despite no new inbox messges.

December 2, 2023

Why is the mainstream media peddling the gun lobby's fake stats on Black gun ownership?

https://prospect.org/power/2023-11-24-guns-race-stats-three-deadliest-weapons/



For nearly three years, headlines have warned that, as The Hill put it, “Gun Ownership Among Black Americans Is Soaring,” up 58.2 percent. At least 20 of America’s most popular news outlets, including eight of its ten most trusted, have reported this statistic. Appearing in outlets like The Wall Street Journal as far back as August 2020, this so-called “research” has continued to be cited by outlets like Bloomberg as recently as October 2023. And all of these articles conclude that, in the words of Time magazine, “Racial Tensions in the U.S. Are Helping to Fuel a Rise in Black Gun Ownership.”

As it turns out, the dozens of articles implying that “Black Americans Flock to Gun Stores and Clubs” can be traced back to a gun lobbying group’s demonstrably meaningless promotional materials. In other words, the widely reported “58 percent” statistic is a sham—but its impact is real. The false narrative it props up will lead to more gun purchases by anti-Black racists, more accidental and self-inflicted gun deaths in Black communities, and more unjustified fears of Black Americans. All of the articles I found either imply or conclude that Black people in particular began buying far more guns than usual in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

They all also suggest that scientific evidence supports this story. I was skeptical of both claims, so as an anti-racist data scientist, I decided to investigate their statistical basis. What I found was disconcerting. In July 2020, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) released an infographic based on a survey it conducted on some of its members. (It didn’t release any data or survey text from the study, just the infographic.) The NSSF is a trade association that, according to its most recent public tax records, spends about ten times as much as the NRA on gun lobbying efforts. Its tax registration as a business league means that, according to the IRS, “its purpose must be to promote this common business interest”: to sell guns.



This may explain why the NSSF didn’t ask thousands of Americans whether they owned a gun, as reputable research organizations sometimes do. Using this approach, Pew Research found no change in Black gun ownership rates from 2017 (24 percent) to 2021 (24 percent). Similarly, peer-reviewed research published by members of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found no change in gun ownership among Black Americans across 2019 (21 percent), 2020 (21 percent), and 2021 (21 percent). But instead of taking the approach used by Pew and Harvard, the NSSF simply asked about 100 of its own member gun dealers to estimate how their overall customer base may have changed. And even those retrospective guesses—which do not, on their own, tell us anything about gun ownership—were reported deceptively.

snip

December 2, 2023

Euthanize This (Merger)

https://prospect.org/health/2023-12-01-euthanize-this-merger/



Earlier this year, a federal judge in Washington state unsealed a whistleblower lawsuit I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. The plaintiff was a nurse practitioner named Maxwell Ollivant who worked from 2019 to 2020 for Optum, the physician services subsidiary of the health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, as a primary care practitioner. Ollivant’s patients were nursing home residents insured by a UnitedHealth Medicare Advantage plan. In theory, his job was to monitor their symptoms proactively enough to keep them from being admitted to the hospital unnecessarily. In practice, many of his patients desperately needed hospitalization: One had a stroke and later gastrointestinal bleeding; another needed a blood transfusion. But Optum bosses, according to the lawsuit, did everything in their power to stop Ollivant and his colleagues from hospitalizing patients suffering from obvious, emergent life-threatening conditions, instead directing its employed nurse practitioners to see their “mission” as convincing patients to essentially waive their rights to medical treatment by signing do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders or “comfort care” agreements.

On Tuesday, the former Cigna executive turned health care whistleblower Wendell Potter broke the news that his former employer was planning a merger with HMO giant Humana, which would create an insurance behemoth, with nearly $300 billion in revenue in 2023. Both Cigna and Humana have been under fire recently for alleged efforts to deny reimbursement claims for routine and often urgent medical care. A ProPublica/Capitol Forum investigation earlier this year revealed Cigna was using an algorithm called PXDX to illegally issue blanket denials on hundreds of thousands of claims that would have previously been reviewed by physicians (and in all likelihood, approved). Similarly, Humana has been under congressional scrutiny over its massive “prior authorization” bureaucracy, which requires doctors to obtain up-front permission to treat its Medicare Advantage customers at a rate of 2.8 times per patient per year, the second-highest in the business.



At UnitedHealth, which employs or contracts exclusively with 90,000 physicians and untold thousands of physician assistants and nurse practitioners like Ollivant, bosses can skirt the messiness of prior authorization and denial, and the attendant litigation and regulatory scrutiny involved, by simply pressuring its clinical workforce to deny care out of the gate. Such are the perks of “vertical integration,” through which the country’s largest insurer has turned itself into a one-stop walled garden for health care, and increasingly for its denial.

https://twitter.com/bobjherman/status/1729856562829590546
It’s a brilliant business model. UnitedHealth is now the fifth-biggest company in America by revenue, with operating income approaching $25 billion and a market capitalization of a half-trillion dollars, largely on the strong growth of its Optum medical empire and the one-stop shop for Medicare Advantage patients they serve. And it’s also pretty obviously what Cigna and Humana are hoping to replicate with their merger, so long as antitrust authorities don’t get in the way. The two companies are likely betting that whatever resistance Biden’s DOJ exercises to the deal will be undone by a future Trump administration.

snip

December 1, 2023

Posh English types ordering their eggs 'over easy' - no wonder Americans love 'Saltburn'

UK film critics have shown antipathy towards this loose Brideshead reboot, but here in the US, many are besotted

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/30/posh-english-types-eggs-over-easy-americans-love-saltburn



I had been quite looking forward to hating Saltburn, the loose Brideshead Revisited reboot and second movie by Emerald Fennell that has been exciting wild animosity online. In the US, where the movie has been more generously received, the English national sport of automatically loathing something from a class to which one doesn’t belong is baffling. But in England, people have been going bananas. To credit the film-maker with an intention she almost certainly didn’t have, one might almost say this was a clever part of the film’s mission.

If you go looking for problems with this movie, of course you will find them. But the first half of the film, set in mid-2000s Oxford, is funny and well-observed, motored by a nostalgia for college that I found largely spot on. OK, it behaves as if, in 2006, people from “Merseyside” would have been received by the elite as visiting aliens, a theme returned to in the drawing room of Saltburn – the eponymous stately pile to which the young protagonists retreat – when the wacky concept of “Liverpool” is raised. Scenes like these, ostensibly poking fun at the posh people, perhaps reveal more about the narrowness of the film-maker’s own lane. Still, I laughed a lot.

And in the first hour, there is a lot to praise. The setup of a beautiful rich student – played by Jacob Elordi – obsessively courted by a poor, rough one (Barry Keoghan) is an archetype for good reason: it works. Around the edges of that central relationship there are some astute observations. The depiction of friendless people banding together for want of other options but secretly hating each other is on the money. Rosamund Pike as lady of the manor and Carey Mulligan as the addled houseguest who won’t leave are both fine comic renderings. In this half of the film, Saltburn sits comfortably alongside Gosford Park as a decent addition to the category Posh People Say the Funniest Things.

This is how many of the American critics have received the film – as a “provocative and fun thriller,” to quote NPR, or an “aristo-gothic sexy thriller” as the Washington Post put it – namely a silly enterprise with some good laughs and nothing whatsoever to say about the world. That Saltburn was very obviously made for the American market (at one point, a British person orders his eggs “over easy”) perhaps explains some of its broadness and its power to irritate viewers at home. The New Statesman hammered Fennell for being too nostalgic about her upper-class world, which I thought unfair; people are allowed to be affectionate about their own experience and those scenes were very well done. Elsewhere, however, she founders.

snip

December 1, 2023

Project 2025: A Threat to Global Democracies

https://www.europeaninterest.eu/project-2025-a-threat-to-global-democracies/



The United States, once called the ‘beacon of democracy’ is facing a new and dangerous threat of authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism. And, if some of the groups behind this far-right movement have their way, European democracies would be next. The far-right Heritage Foundation, with the support of more than 80 influential organizations — many well-known for their extreme positions and pushing hate — earlier this year published their Presidential Transition Project, otherwise known as Project 2025, intended for the “next conservative president.” Project 2025, self-described as “building now for a conservative victory through policy, personnel, and training,” is nothing less than a blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S. Our organization, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, has done a deep-dive analysis into Project 2025 and identified how the plan threatens Americans’ civil and human rights, and is an attack on its very democracy.

The plan, under the guise of religious freedom, would impose on all Americans extreme policies pushed by Christian Nationalists, including draconian and reactionary measures when it comes to sexual health and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ equality, racial equity, public education, the climate, and would preference an exclusionary interpretation of Christianity, stripping rights from other communities. More than 80 groups, many with global influence and programs, are supporting this plan to dismantle a thriving, inclusive democracy, including the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), where the new U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson cut his teeth on using the courts to marginalize women, LGBTQ+ people, and others and impose his version of Christianity onto all. ADF was instrumental in recent U.S. court cases that denied women a right to their own bodies and secured the right to discriminate based on one’s religion. One of their clients even denied adoption to a couple because they were Jewish. Many other Project 2025 supporters are also well-known for their extreme positions and for pushing hate and Christian Nationalism.

This plan would also dangerously expand the executive branch’s powers including stripping the independence of the Department of Justice and FBI and politicizing their investigations by placing them in the hands of the president. This is a staggering threat as illustrated by Trump’s Nazi-inspired words, “we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.” This authoritarian plan should concern those outside the US as well. Extremist, far-right movements — from hardcore racist groups to more “mainstream” political movements — are increasingly transnational. For example, CPAC events, a U.S.-based organization of which many of Project 2025’s supporters are sponsors, are well-known gatherings of global far-right players who push anti-LGBTQ+, anti-woman, and anti-immigrant agendas. Another example is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni who said, “The U.S. is of course a point of reference for our alliances…We have networks connecting us, our think tanks work with the International Republican Institute, with the Heritage Foundation, we do cultural exchanges.”

Project 2025 supporter ADF and its global arm, Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI), has strong international ties and is well known for exporting their anti-reproductive freedom and anti-LGBTQ+ equality agenda from the U.S. to countries across Europe and using the courts to push its agenda. Despite its hateful platforms, ADFI is accredited and uses its collective influence at the UN, EU, Council of Europe, OSCE, European Court of Human Rights, and other international bodies. Another supporter of Project 2025, Family Research Council, has resources for “international religious freedom,” on their website. And the Institute for Women’s Health is committed to the global promotion of the anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ+ Geneva Consensus Declaration introduced by the Trump administration and forged between primarily authoritarian states that seek to undermine sexual and reproductive health and rights. The Geneva Consensus is not legally binding, and the U.S. and others have since withdrawn, however Project 2025 would see a return to the Trump administration’s focus on forging consensus “among like-minded countries in support of human life, women’s health, support of the family as the basic unit of human society, and defense of national sovereignty.”

snip