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Going private? My reply to a job offer from a private health company « MUCK. What the heck is this? I’ve been trying and failing to stop the government from privatising the National Health Service for years, and now a private healthcare company has contacted me about a job! The email from Care UK says they are “seeking a Media Relations Executive for our Head Office based in Colchester and your skills and experience appear to be a good match.” Huh? They are offering a “competitive salary, 25 days holiday and corporate discounts.” Here’s what I have replied: Dear Laura, Thank you for your unexpected email about the Media Relations Executive job with Care UK. As you can imagine, I am brimming with ideas. I believe a key talent for any disrespecting Media Relations Executive is the ability to turn a negative in to something offensive.

Similarly, you got some bad press when it was revealed that the wife of your former chairman John Nash gave £21,000 to Andrew Lansley’s office before the last election, when Lansley was shadow health secretary. Be bold. Yours sincerely, The Watson Institute presents Mark Blyth on Austerity. The Man Booker Prize & 44 Years Of Institutionalised Anti-Scottish Racism « As the Man Booker Prize longlist is announced Kevin Williamson asks a question that seems to have eluded the mainstream media: Is the most influential prize in literature tainted with an institutionalised anti-Scottish bias that borders on racism?

Kevin Williamson also throws down a challenge to Peter Stothard, chair of the Man Booker Prize judges, and editor of the Times Literary Supplement, to come to Scotland and publicly debate the stench of prejudice that could yet engulf this year’s award ceremony. When the Man Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday squeals of excitement could be heard all across England. The Man Booker is big business. The £50,000 prize money to the winning author is small potatoes compared to an exponential increase in sales, as well as serialisation, radio adaptations, TV appearances, etc. A veritable windfall also awaits the publishers of the winning novel.

But it wasn’t to be. Consider the facts: What should we make of this. Over to you, Peter. Like this: Among the Many Astonishments « blog.saltpublishing.com. This your website's holding page. Please refer to your welcome email to start building your site and setting up your new email accounts. This welcome page is named index.html and is located in your public_html folder. Once you create or upload a new index page, it will replace this one.

Support If you require assistance, please email support@lunarpages.com or call our technical support team at 877-586-2772, option 1. Cloud Hosting Lunarpages now offers Cloud Hosting plans that allow customers to control their resources, and pay based on what they use. Affiliate Program Lunarpages offers an exciting opportunity to our existing customers who sign up for our unique Affiliate program. Johngapper : Barclay's new marketing ca... A makeup tutorial gone wrong… A makeup tutorial gone wrong… A makeup tutorial gone wrong… This video is quite amazing and disturbing, I never expected that! I suggest you to look at the entire video and I say no more to not spoil the surprise… Antynwa : David Cameron Corrupt and... Welcome to the 1% Recovery » New Deal 2.0. As the 1% reap 93 percent of the income gains from the recovery, we're rapidly returning to pre-New Deal levels of inequality.

There was a brief debate focused on the following question: would the gains of the economy continue to accrue to the top 1% once the recovery started, or would they have a weak post-recession showing in terms of raw income growth as well as income share of the economy? The top 1% had a rough Great Recession. They absorbed 50 percent of the income losses, and their share of income dropped from 23.5 percent to 18.1 percent. Was this a new state of affairs, or would the 1% bounce back in 2010? We finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez’s updated "Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States" (as well as the excel spreadsheet on his webpage). First off, let’s get some absolute numbers here. Clarkson’s a prize prat, but Ofcom’s come to the right decision | The thoughts of Billy Gotta-Job: some new, some old, none borrowed, and mostly not at all blue.

On November 30th last year, thousands of public sector workers went on a one-day strike to protest about reductions in their pension entitlements, and the increasing contributions they are having to make to earn those reduced benefits. This post isn’t about the rights and wrongs of the pensions arguments, but rather about Jeremy Clarkson’s contribution to The One Show on that day. In parenthesis one might note that Clarkson’s most damaging contribution consisted not in what he said, but rather that pretty much the only thing that was talked about on the day, or that anyone can now remember about it, was Jeremy Clarkson rather than public sector pensions.

But let that pass. The furore was all about Mr Clarkson’s suggestion that the strikers should be “taken out and shot in front of their families”. This tells us a lot about Mr Clarkson’s sense of humour, about his lack of any sense of proportion, about his pretension to be an iconoclast, about his self-importance, and much else besides. Google, what were you thinking? ← Mocality Kenya. Mocality has achieved some incredible things over the last four years, and has touched the lives of many people in Africa, but alas, all good things must come to an end.

All of the Mocality Kenya and Mocality Nigeria operations will be closed as of 28 February 2013. If you would like to add your business or product you can now do it on OLX , its FREE. Looking for a Business, Service or Product let OLX help you find it. We would like to thank all of our Customers and Business owners for your patronage and support over this time. We would also like to thank all of our Agents, Suppliers, Staff and die hard Fans for your enthusiasm, drive and dedication that made Mocality into what it was. Ian Fraser: The Economist Loses the Plot With This Shallow, Pro-City Propaganda. By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser. I was surprised and disappointed when I opened my copy of The Economist on Friday morning. The magazine is running a feebly-argued propaganda piece headlined “Save the City” as its cover story.

The piece vaunts the “skills” that are to be found in the City of London and seeks to persuade us that having a powerful financial sector is critical to the future health of the UK economy and that the “Square Mile” must therefore be cherished and preserved at all costs. The cover image harps back to the Blitz, as if Hitler’s Lufwaffe is once again poised to carpet bomb a key part of our heritage. Outside PR puff sheets like HBOS’s absurd “Deal Leaders” of 2005-08 and the Pravda-style advertorials inserted into newspapers and magazines to launder the images of evil dictatorships, I’ve rarely read such a farcical or misleading article. Who wrote this garbage I wonder? Hyperoglyphics:- ZUBq9o3Lo5. Fast Food - Ads vs. Reality. Barclays stockpiles 'losses' to soften tax obligations. Seth's Blog. An Education in Debt. My name is Lily , I’m fifteen and science is my thing. I really enjoy chemistry, physics and maths and I’ve always thought I would go to university and study something science based when I leave school.

If you asked me today what that would be, I would say medicine. Now, the Government say to have the country in debt is a bad thing, and that it reflects negatively upon the nation to be in this position. And yet it seems they want ME to get into HUGE debt. How does that work? It doesn’t seem fair. Because of cuts to their funding, universities will charge up to £9000 per year for tuition from September 2012. If I take a 3 year course, I will be in debt of about £43,000. Surely it is wrong to start our working lives with such a huge amount of debt? Perhaps some of the politicians would like to know how this feels and repay their university fees? So should I still even consider university? I imagine there are some families where parents can pay for everything, making it an easy choice. Willard Foxton: Why Teachers Are Right To Strike - And Why That Should Be The Tory Point Of View.

The Government is trying to save money in the public sector; that's fine - indeed, that's a big part of what I voted for. However, I'm not in favor of unfair, symbolic, ideological cuts. Why are cuts to teacher's pensions unfair, ideological & symbolic? Simple: The Teachers Pension Scheme is not making a loss. In 2006 the Teacher Pension Scheme was costing the public money and it shouldn't be funded by other taxpayers, of course. That's the crucial point. Teachers are not the RMT, striking because two louts have been fired for putting public safety at risk. Too many ministers and commentators act as if the Teacher's pension was a welfare benefit. The money is transferred directly from the teachers; it isn't "taxpayers money" in any but the most Stalinist hypothecated definition of the public finances. To make teachers pay £1800 a year more for a pension which is £1800 a year less, when teachers are not actually costing the public finances anything to begin with... that's outrageous.

Some Truths | Osborne ushers in post-human politics. Not a good time to be a Chancellor George Osborne has delivered the Brown and red budget: Brown in recognition of the micro-adjustments and slippery attention to detail demonstrated by the last Prime Minister during his days at the Treasury. And red because it is clear that balancing Britain's books is more distant than anyone expected, with the OBR cutting growth forecasts alarmingly. As if in keeping with the bad news he had to transmit, the Chancellor gave his speech in a breathless croak that suggested he had been punched in the solar plexus by Ed Balls.

Instead this was a treat in waiting. Mr Balls is not the greatest orator in modern politics, but his bravura demolition of the mini-Budget was worthy of a Shakespearian demagogue or a starving carnivore filmed in mid-snack by David Attenborough. Take your pick between them. The Chancellor stuck to his guns, despite the worsening financial position. George Osborne's every blow falls on those with less not more | Polly Toynbee. Class war, generation war, war against women, war between the regions: George Osborne's autumn statement blatantly declares itself for the few against the many. Gloves are off and gauntlets down, and the nasty party bares its teeth. Here is the re-toxified Tory party, the final curtain on David Cameron's electoral charade. No more crocodile tears for the poor, no more cant about social mobility or "the most family-friendly government" or "we're all in this together".

Forget "vote blue go green", with this mockery of husky-hugging. Let the planet fry. Exposed was the extent of pain for no gain, exactly as Keynesian economists predicted, a textbook case. What was missing from his list? Worse still, two-thirds of properties worth over £1m now change hands while avoiding all their 5% stamp duty, by using offshore company accounts. Instead came the great attack on public sector employees on the eve of the biggest strike in memory.

But the direct assault on the poor is almost beyond belief. We can’t go on like this. I’m cutting the NHS, not the deficit. Blog Enlarge image » At the last election, David Cameron promised he would "cut the deficit, not the NHS". Yesterday's autumn statement showed the opposite is true. As a result of lower growth and higher unemployment, the government will be forced to borrow £158bn more than forecast a year ago.

The New Statesman points out that this is more than Labour was projected to borrow at the last election – an amount that Conservatives then claimed would take Britain to the "brink of bankruptcy". Meanwhile the NHS cuts continue, as revealed by recent Royal College of Nursing research and catalogued in a series of posts on False Economy: Prime Minister, we can't go on like this. Man-made super-flu could kill half humanity. Global Rich List. Is pizza a vegetable? Well, Congress says so | Lizz Winstead. Hey, America! The GOP is, yet again, looking out for you. This week, Congress took a break from voting to make sure none of your tax dollars will go to all those abortion clinics NPR wants to open in our national parks, to pass a federal law that only the nation that invented Febreze would tolerate.

They have affirmed that pizza is a vegetable. Yes, the tomato sauce on pizza is enough for American politicians to define it and allow it to be served as a vegetable in school lunch programs across the US. Never mind that tomatoes are a fruit, and commercial tomato sauce has so much sugar in it that not only is it not a vegetable, but it should be classified as a dessert. In fact, it takes a big set of balls to even call school lunch pizza, um, pizza. And poor Michelle Obama.

And it's not just vegetables. See? And in case you were wondering, yes, Axe Body spray is now considered a bath. • This article was commissioned following a suggestion made by EllsBells. Who Are The 1%? Vote on it now. Bauman on inequality and the logic of capital. {*style:<b> </b>*} I’m going to present this without comment. It’s from Zygmunt Bauman’s recent interview that I quoted in a previous post .

And what do you make of the recent surge in interest in inequality, and the economic and environmental crises, that proposes de-growth, sustainable economies, post-capitalism or the continuing salience of communism as solutions to these problems? Poignantly and succinctly, the great Jose Saramago has already answered your question, pointing out that ‘people do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions government to bring the people within its control’ (2010). Investing in infrastructure: does it work? Building a better future (despite the 1%) Zygmunt Bauman on Liquidity vs.

We need to open our eyes to systemic injustice. My Ed.D. thesis proposal: What does it mean to be ‘digitally literate’? The problems with Human Rights legislation Changing thinking vs. Beyond academic journals? Scottish Unique ID for all citizens #EDUScotICT. Nation's Students To Give American Education System Yet Another Chance. Executive greed is still a besetting sin | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer.

Executive pay soars while the young poor face freefall. Where is Labour? | Polly Toynbee. Cameron seeks independence referendum clarity. Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation | Epicenter  Think it's #timeforplanb ? Rt this pic. Nicolas Sarkozy tells David Cameron: shut up over the euro | World news. Densely-linked cluster of 147 companies control 40% of world’s total wealth.