It's worse than you think

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The Labour party's most senior figures, in defiance of their education and intelligence, keep claiming that Osborne's actions are "driven by ideology, rather than necessity". This is absurd. Anyone who argues that rapidly addressing the fiscal catastrophe Labour left behind is anything other than absolutely crucial either knows nothing about global bond markets, or is so blindly ambitious, so determined to close their eyes to the facts, as to be unfit for public office...The UK's fiscal crisis is of monumental historic importance...What is in the balance...is the prosperity of the British people for at least the next few decades and our status as a top-ranking nation.
Over the last 12 months, then, this country's "on-balance-sheet" liabilities have risen by £147bn. That's roughly what we spent on the NHS and defence combined in 2010 – and that was merely, during this last year of "austerity", the incremental increase in what Britain has put "on tick"....What matters to the finances of any household is the size of the outstanding mortgage, the on-going costs of financing that mortgage, and the prospects of paying it off. Only an economically illiterate fool would claim the family finances will soon be "under-control" because sacrifices will be made and lifestyles reined-in to such an extent that, hopefully, if everything goes to plan, having re-mortgaged every year between now and 2015, that family will then enjoy a single year in which it won't need to re-mortgage.

I won't be around "in decades" so I can't afford to wait until things improve. Leaving the UK looks like a more attractive prospect every day.

Botox bollox

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Like other eight-year-old girls, Britney Campbell loves dancing to Lady GaGa, is fond of fashion and enjoys putting on make-up But Britney's beauty regime goes way beyond playing with Mummy's lippy. Once every three months, Britney climbs on a beautician's table and watches as mum Kerry prepares needles of Botox and fillers to be injected into her face.

Beautician Kerry, 34, from Birmingham, buys the substances online and injects them into her daughter's forehead, lips and around her eyes.The beauty-pageant obsessed single mum also takes her to have her body waxed, in a bizarre bid to stop her growing hair when she eventually hits puberty.

Kerry says these shocking and potentially dangerous treatments will guarantee Britney becomes famous as a teenager.
Famous as a teenager?

Maybe. But for what?


Make that a double, old bean

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We don’t need to be saved from the ‘demon drink’
Ours is not the first age when the public has been constantly urged to cut back on the demon drink. But never before has the campaign for public abstinence taken such an elitist and morally vacuous form...

Current responsible-drinking policy is not concerned with self-control, but with official control of people’s behaviour. Public-health officials seem to recognise no limits to their interventions, and indeed I have heard discussions at alcohol-policy conferences about how they might close down drinks-related Facebook groups or prevent parents from leaving their beer in the garage.

Don't panic! Oh, go on then.

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The globalisation of German angst
As Japan struggles with damaged nuclear reactors, the German government has announced that some nuclear power plants in Germany will be taken offline. In her policy speech last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated that the German nuclear power plants were among the world's safest. However, events in Japan had created a new situation in which the seemingly impossible had become possible. It was now necessary, Merkel said, to suspend for three months a previously announced policy to extend the life of some of these power stations.
Yep. Earthquake and tsunami in a country sitting on the worlds greatest fault line leads to a land-locked, earthquake free country in central Europe reconsidering its nuclear policy.  Nuts.

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I prefer consensual M&Ms

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Judge in Craigslist 'sex-slave master' John Hopkins' case says consensual S&M can be criminal
S&M can be criminal even if it’s consensual, a Brooklyn judge said today during the arraignment of a self-described Craigslist sex-slave master.
Erm, no, that's not what the judge said. He said that just because someone agreed to indulge in sado-masochistic activities doesn't mean that nothing that follows can be considered criminal. It's no different from the law regarding "normal" sexual activity. It can start off consensual but become criminal.

Not waving, but drowning

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Japan tsunami and earthquake: Nuclear power plants are dangerous
Yes, nuclear power plants are dangerous. But for Britain, the alternative is to start hoarding candles
It would be easy to just accept that this is just more twaddle from that great Daily Mail tit, Max Hastings but let's just stop and ask ourselves how the fuck that headline got written. As someone pointed out in the comments section of this appallingy piss-poor piece in the Guardian today:
     More people died at Chappaquiddick than at 3 Mile Island.

Dangerous? In the UK alone there have been around 165,000 recorded deaths in the coal mining industry and this is a) an admitted underestimate and b) excludes deaths of miners from lung disease and, more importantly, deaths in the general population by smoke pollution caused by burning coal.  The truth is that so far, as a result of this recent quake,  nobody has died from nuclear radiation in Japan but at least 10,000 are likely to have been killed by, erm, wave power.

Tsunami? Table for two?

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I've stopped watching coverage of the Japan earthquake and tsunami.  Endless reruns of images of destruction interspersed with ignorant, ill-informed and factually incorrect nonsense about nuclear "meltdown". But I have decided to keep an eye out for the first day the disaster fails to be the number one story in the papers and then for the day it fails to feature at all.

Remember the 2004 Indonesian tsunami? The one that killed over a quarter of a million people? Try Googling it. Apart from two Wikipedia entries you'll find that a restaurant in Clapham, south London, named "Tsunami", gets a higher rank than any mention of the 2004 disaster.

And the next big story please.