If leaks to Dr Eoin Clarke’s website prove correct,

That’s really not a source I would use myself. Trust me on this one.

More than £50m of World Food Programme aid to feed the starving has ended up in the hands of a London-listed commodities trader run by billionaires, despite a pledge by the United Nations agency to buy food from “very poor farmers”.

Glencore International, which buys up supplies from farmers and sells them on at a profit, was the biggest single supplier of wheat to the WFP over the last eight months, the Guardian can reveal.

It’s a terrible and shocking indictment of contemporary capitalism, isn’t it? That people who want to buy wheat buy it from people who sell wheat.

Just can’t think what came over anyone myself.

But now the annual slaughter, begun in 1967 after a local boy was bitten by an Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake (he survived), is to become “a humane event that celebrates these great native animals”. Snakes are to be borrowed from zoos, instead of hunted down, and, say organisers, the celebration will focus on “educating people about wildlife” and conserving it.

One reason for the change of heart is that the snakes have become increasingly rare, through losing their habitat, getting run over – and being rounded up for the festivals. So great has been the threat from hunting that non-rattling rattlers have been evolving, because they are less likely to be noticed.

Non-rattling rattlers existed before the festival, before the slaughter. So they have not evolved in response to said festival.

There might though be more of them as a portion of the local rattler population, this is true. But this is not evolution, this is selection. The winnowing of evolved forms through the various pressures upon such evolved forms.

The festival has not changed evolution, it has changed the pressures of natural selection.

The remarkable thing about the silk cape on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum from tomorrow is not that it took 80 people five years to make, or even that it is woven from the gossamer of 1.2 million golden orb spiders, which produce undyed silk of a golden hue. No, the remarkable thing is that the spiders were let loose afterwards to skip happily through the undergrowth of their native Madagascar not a whit the worse for contributing to this work of art. Their web is deftly extracted by trained handlers.

Britain once had a silk industry, with weavers under broad windows busy making brocades, lustrings, paduasoys and suchlike rich textiles. If golden orb spiders were farmed like silkworms, the industry might thrive again, in Sunderland or Hull. To spin gold has a fairy-tale ring to it. These obliging spiders could be the Rumpelstiltskins of a start-up enterprise.

Facepalm.

Let us, for a change, get the labour theory of value the right way around. The labour which goes into the production of something cannot be paid more than that thing is valued at.

Here we have 400 man years of labour going into the production of a cape. That labour cannot be paid more per year than one four hundredth of the value of the cape.

Let’s put the cost of minimum wage labour at £20 k a year. Including overheads etc. So our cape must be valued at £8 million. Very limited marketplace for that. The occasional trophy third wife of a billionaire maybe.

To produce an industry we’d need to get that price down…..which means the wages have to come down, doesn’t it?

It’s just not something to base an industry on so what are these people talking about?

Let’s say £500,000 a year, a figure that includes bonuses, share options, pensions and benefits.

Silly but brave, given that both his editor and his editor’s boss at GMG would take a pay cut under this scheme.

Some on the left inhabit a fantasy utopia.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

Now THAT’S a concealed weapon! Inmate ‘hides ten-inch revolver in rectum’… but at least it was unloaded

‘I’ll sue Church of England if it bars me from being bishop,’ says gay dean

The Very Rev Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, has instructed an eminent employment lawyer to complain after being rejected for the role of Bishop of Southwark.

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Or buying a cup of tea at a motorway service station. (Unit price, what? Maybe 2p? Sale price? £2.75. I’m a rubbish capitalist and can’t do the sums but isn’t that something like about 20,000% profit?)

No, that’s not profit, no.

There’s this little thing called “overheads” that have to be paid. You know, trivial things, like the building, the furniture, the equipment to make the tea. Heck if it takes 1 minute of labour to make a cup of tea then that’s 10 pence of minimum wage labour right there.

Consider, for example, newspapers. This morning’s Observer weighs what, 100 grammes (sorry, many years since I actually knew the weight of newspapers)? And at €500 per tonne newsprint that’s 5 cent’s worth of paper. We’ll give you another 5 cents for the ink shall we?

The paper sells for £2 I think? So, why aren’t you making a £1.9something profit on every copy? What’s that? You’re losing £30 million a year because there are more expenses to pay than just the paper and ink was it?

Yes love, you really are rubbish at not just this capitalism thing but basic numbers too.

Hands off British film, Mr Cameron

A Guardian headline I thoroughly agree with.

Of course the Prime Minister should have nothing to do with film.

No politician should have anything to do with it. Which of course means that there will be no taxpayers’ money either.

Sink or swim on your own luvvies. And the very best of British luck to you as well.

One diplomat told The Daily Telegraph: “The BBC has to make amends, particularly to assuage the hurt sentiment of a very large number of people.

“We understand the free press – they are welcome to explain and to challenge as long as it is fair and above the belt. Can this pass as acceptable journalism? The BBC has a global reputation. We expect the BBC to make amends.”

No, there’s nothing in the “free press” bit that says it has to be fair and or above the belt. For the perfectly logical reason that what is fair, what is above the belt, is manipulable. So we don’t restrict the press in that manner for fear of who will manipulate those meanings into the non-reporting of what they don’t want reported and the reporting only of what they do.

Now, as to the reputation thing, that’s fine. Perhaps the BBC’s reputation is to be built on being above the belt and fair. Unlike, say, mine, which is to be vile and kick for the grollies. Or Socialist Worker which is to believe in the magic money tree. Or the well known liberalism of The Reactionary and Feudal Herald.

That is, the freedom of the press does indeed allow you to use fairness and above the beltness as a positioning exercise, sure, but it doesn’t in fact require you to do so. Which is rather the point of that “free” bit in there, d’ye see?

In the normally staid British world, where all players on all sides are likely to have attended the same schools, the same universities, and at times shared bodily fluids, there are certain rules about how columnists should approach politics.

These rules have now been ripped up in one of the most egregious and unusual political outbursts of modern times.

Ed Miliband is right: fairness in capitalism matters

The entire political and media world is in turmoil at the excetionally strong stance being taken here. Polly Toynbee? Agreeing with a current Labour leader?

What is the world coming to all are asking?

This week Byrne was gifted the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report, a hard-headed impact assessment of tax and benefit changes that found children hit hardest and non-working lone parents losing £2,000 a year. Half a million families with children under 5 will fall into absolute (not relative) poverty, despite all Cameron’s mendacious “social mobility” cant.

Really? Absolute poverty means less than $1.25 a day on a PPP basis according to the World Bank.

I sorta tend to doubt that’s really going to happen.

But there is another meaning of absolute poverty. Relative poverty is less than 60% of median earnings adjusted for household size. Absolute poverty is less than 50%.

So, absolute poverty is still relative, d’ye see?

Amazing what you can manage if you’re allowed to define the meanings of words.

6 Jan 2012:Editorial: Despite these straitened times an Oxford-based campaign wants volunteers to donate 10% of their earnings

And what earnings do volunteers have pray?

David Hockney appointed Order of Merit member
David Hockney, John Howard, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Tom Stoppard among new memebers to be appointed by the Queen, Buckingham Palace announced today.

Err, no.

The article itself has it right.

Over the decades he has cemented his position as an important artistic figure and extended his talents to work as a photographer, draughtsman, printmaker and stage designer.

Former Australian prime minister John Howard, who served in office from 1996 to 2007, has also been appointed a member of the Order of Merit.

The honour is a special award presented to individuals of great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature, science and other areas like public service.

Whale sperm is not the cause of the sea’s saltiness, despite what you may have heard.

Army foils coup attempt on tiny island of Guinea-Bissau

Err, Guinea-Bissau ain’t an island folks.

Given recent history a failed coup there is hardly news (umm, well, maybe it’s the failure that makes it so?) but to call it an island is pure ignorance.

Sure, it has islands as part of it, true, but then so do both France and Italy and we don’t call them islands.

The actual article is OK, it’s a wire report. Pretty much only the headline came from the Telegraph and that’s the only part that is wrong.

Ho hum. The reactionary conservatives of the Telegraph of old may not have held particularly appealing attitudes towards the various flavours of BongoBongo land but they did at least know about them.

You know, Sao Tome and Principe, Africa, islands, used to be Portuguese, Cape Verde, Africa, islands, used to be P, Guinea Bissau, Africa, mainland, used to be P?

Richard Gott*, writing in the Guardian this week, accepted that socilaism is a “source of systemic instability, unfettered misery and industrial-scale oppression” but blamed the problem on a small number of rogue leaders. The task, it seems, is to find the few rotten apples that somehow manage to bring an entire system into disrepute. The reliance on a minority scapegoat in order to cover over much wider spread illegality, immorality and abuse of power is a particularly favoured tacticamong socialists. Rogue leaders such as Joseph Stalin and the more recent Maoist renegade Pol Pot along with rogue communists like Enver Hoxa and Fidel Castro are, we are told, the fly in the otherwise uncontaminated ointment of socialism leading to true communism.

The figure of the rogue is an interesting one. It implies both a destructive and unpredictable tendency as well as a mischievous but likeable trait. We all know someone who is “a bit of a rogue”. In recent years the rogue has become associated with the “rogue states” of North Korea, Iraq and Iran: cut off from the herd they are prone, we are told, to wild, unpredictable destruction. But despite the appalling suffering endured by the people of North Korea, the late Kim Jong-il, enjoyed somewhat “roguish”, laughable status in the west. The rogue is at once likeable, forgivable, mischievous, dangerous, destructive and unpredictable. The ability to evoke this sense of the simultaneously forgivable and the dangerous is perhaps why the term has been so widely used of late. The mischievous goings-on of a few bad apples in the tabloid press that were easily forgiven at the time; those impish rogue states that won’t let the weapons inspectors in; the pesky few leaders that make the odd error on the road to socialism.

In every case, the figure of the rogue is evoked to apportion blame and ask for forgiveness. It’s always just one or two rogue individuals, states or institutions that emerge as the unique source of blame for an entire system’s failure. The rogue is blamed but ultimately the system that produces it is forgiven.

When the figure of the rogue is evoked, it stops us asking more challenging questions. What if North Korea, Castro and Ceausescu were simply the product of decades of failed diplomacy and geopolitical negotiations that are more intent on the empire building of the US and the security of Europe than anything else? What if the rogueleaders in hte socialist states that caused the misery and oppression are simply the best, and most effective, examples of everything that is wrong with the left today; merely the product of a system that rewards greed and exploitation?

Let’s hope that the rogue institutions of the left are not allowed to fulfil the promise of their epithet – for their transgressions to be forgiven and ignored. These rogues are products of greater forces at work. Let’s stop treating them like inexplicable anomalies and start to understand the conditions that make them and their misdemeanours possible. Then, perhaps, we can do away with the figure of the mischievous but forgivable soclaist leader rogue altogether.

* Seumas Milne if it makes you feel better.

To reinforce British diplomats’ wilful blindness, the Foreign Office has closed half a dozen embassies in Latin America in recent years, to minimise the danger of receiving subversive opinions from foreign capitals. All part of Britain’s national decline.

Erm, isn’t that in fact the flip side of the European Diplomatic Service?

Replacement of individual country embassies with EU ones?