Consequences Of Neoliberalism

Max and Stacy ask why it takes a British worker five days to produce the same economic value as a French worker produces in just four. Productivity has collapsed in the UK to the lowest since 1794. In the second half, Max interviews Scottish businessman, Neil Mitchell, about his many years long battle for justice for UK victims of RBS, the taxpayer owned bank that was found to have forced viable businesses into bankruptcy. Mitchell suspects the bank may have also practiced such tactics in America and is taking his case across the Atlantic.

Palmy Men Versus Balmy Women

By Doug Mortimer: I went to a boys prep school back in a day when exclusivity – not inclusivity – was a virtue. Consequently, my teenage years were very different from those of my public school peers. To this day, I have a hard time watching movies about high school life. It’s almost like watching a science fiction movie about a parallel universe. One film that I could relate to was Dead Poets Society, a 1989 release starring the late Robin Williams as a teacher at a New England prep school. Aside from the fact that the film took place at a boarding school and I went to a day school, the secondary education depicted was a close match to my own. The film took place in 1959, just a few years before my experience began. Williams is very good (Oscar nomination for Best Actor) as an alumnus who has returned to the school as an English teacher. As it turns out, he is a very good teacher – too good. He encourages the boys in poetry and drama and they respond enthusiastically – too enthusiastically. Without going any deeper into the plot, let’s just say it all ends badly. I don’t recall any inspirational teachers, but I do recall that the general cultural level of the teachers and the student body at my school was much higher than at the public school I transferred from. A passing knowledge of poetry, art, languages, and music (let’s call it PALM) could be dismissed as mere dilettantism. On the other hand, if you want to move up socially, you have to move up culturally lest you be dismissed as a philistine or exposed as a parvenu. But there’s much more at stake than social climbing.

MGM Male Infant Ritual Genital Mutilation Is A Contributor To SIDS 'Sudden Infant Death Syndrome' AKA 'Cot Death'

J4MB: Our thanks to Dr Eran Elhaik, a lecturer at Sheffield University, for pointing us to his recently-published paper, Adversarial childhood events are associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS): an ecological study.
The full Abstract:

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is the most common cause of postneonatal infant death. The allostatic load hypothesis posits that SIDS is the result of perinatal cumulative painful, stressful, or traumatic exposures that tax neonatal regulatory systems. To test it, we explored the relationships between SIDS and two common stressors, male neonatal circumcision (MNC) and prematurity, using latitudinal data from 15 countries and over 40 US states during the years 1999-2016. We used linear regression analyses and likelihood ratio tests to calculate the association between SIDS and the stressors. SIDS prevalence was significantly and positively correlated with MNC and prematurity rates. MNC explained 14.2% of the variability of SIDS’s male bias in the US, reminiscent of the Jewish myth of Lilith, the killer of infant males.