Are you skinny now?

Eh, not really, I'm just not fat any more.

And sends a junior Treasury minister to answer in his place.

George Osborne has been criticised for skipping a parliamentary question about the unraveling of his Budget – and for putting a junior minister up in his place.

The Government has backpedalled on a number of policies in just days since the Chancellor announced his spending plans for the coming year.

As well as a major U-turn on steep cuts for disability benefits, the Government has said it will not oppose a number of Labour amendments on issues including the so-called Tampon Tax and VAT on solar panels.

Conservative backbenchers have signed some of the Labour amendments – suggesting a rebellion when they come to a vote and a possible defeat for the Government, which only has a very small majority.

John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor has been granted an urgent question to ask about the changes – but the Government has said Mr Osborne will not reply himself.

Treasury minister David Gauke will field the questions from the dispatch box instead and reply for the Government.

With IDS's resignation, the downfall of George Osborne, the recent budget and the virtual implosion of the Tories not a lot of people are talking about IDS's replacement: Stephen Crabb, a Welsh working-class conservative raised by a single mother who went from welfare dependency to independence.

Crabb has said that the planned disability cuts, which ostensibly led to IDS's resignation, will not be going ahead and this was a condition for his accepting the position. That said, he seems like he could be a government mouthpiece, having not rebelled against the government since the last election--plus, he voted for the cuts he claims will not be going ahead now that he has taken over.

He seems like a rising star in the Conservative Party, potentially looking at a leadership position in the future. Hopefully he brings a better style of leadership to the DWP than IDS did, and hopefully he can stand up to Osborne and the Treasury if need be.

Are you saying only ultra-nationalist totalitarians belong near Hitler's point?

No, I'm saying people of that--or similar--descriptions belong towards the top of the authoritarian-libertarian axis.

I'm kind of forced to come to the conclusion that IDS is a better One Nation Tory than Cameron; what I've read suggests IDS was hounded by the Treasury to constantly make cuts.

Especially around election time. We rely on reports, parliamentary voting records, manifestos … and actions that speak much louder than words. It takes us a great deal longer than simply having the politician take the test — but it's also a far more accurate assessment. In our early experience, politicians taking the test often responded in ways that conflicted with their actions but conformed to the prevailing mood of the electorate.

So?

All this tells me is that they have a better methodology for determining positions than simply asking people, what this doesn't entail is that the positioning of any test-taker's point isn't being placed in a way which is basically arbitrary because the creators have given us no word on how placement actually occurs. You could answer every question perfectly and in accordance with your internal preferences, and still get a shit result because the creators are dumb and relying on things like voting records is not going to allow them to place a candidate on a compass with any decent degree of accuracy.

Well, they address that, too.

That doesn't even slightly address my it. . . Obviously its a continuum, the question is why Rubio and Bush are placed literally as authoritarian as Hitler. Not somewhere just in the same quadrant, but literally pretty much the same distance along a specific axis.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on March 19, 2016, 12:20:52 PM

polcom is biased in favour of the Left, and is prone to presenting Left-wing parties and candidates as less Left-wing than they actually are.

No it isn't.

This is a discussion which revolves around where the "centre" of politics lies, and we can disagree about that but nobody with a brain is going to meaningfully believe Sanders is a fucking centrist. Most of his support comes from the fact that he emphatically positions himself as not a centrist. . .

The most recent budget has kind of exploded in Cameron and Osborne's faces. IDS is positioning himself for a Johnson leadership after Cameron resigns.

What sort of hallucinations?

Just booky shit.

I thought my one flatmate's face was a tunnel through my other flatmate's waist--the one being stood behind the former, who was sitting next to me--there were trains with faces like in some kind of Disney movie and I felt like the entire room was the hand of a clock moving through my flatmate's face.

It was weird, man.

I honestly would never try Salvia based on what I've seen on YouTube.

Not from the 1st of April.

Quote from: Yulius Kaisar on March 15, 2016, 09:15:12 PM

lmao

democracy is a great system really guys it sometimes works

It could, if we just implemented instant-runoff voting, thereby eliminating the two-party system.

Except IRV is not proportional, but majoritarian. It would be entirely possible for Party A to get 51pc of the national vote and 100pc of the seats.

The stupidity of your decision gave me stage four ovarian cancer.

Democracy is legitimised by its capacity to offer both governmental and personal security. The first job of any government is to perpetuate itself, once that is accomplished then we have the space to refine our institutions and policies to the betterment of society as a whole. Democracy is good in this because it is an inclusive institution--parliamentary systems are usually better than congressional--and facilitates bloodless changes of government.

Also, pretty much all developed democracies are specifically constitutional and liberal democracies.

World Economic Forum.

We know that global demand for agricultural and forest commodities is soaring. Predictions suggest the world’s population will reach nine billion by 2050, and more people means more mouths to feed.

The sad reality is that over the past decades, meeting the rising demand for food and consumer goods has often come at the expense of forests, making commercial agriculture the main driver of tropical deforestation. Inefficient production schemes, missing or unclear economic and financial incentives for sustainable choices, poor governance structures and complex supply chains have contributed to this outcome. The devastating haze and forest fire crisis in Indonesia is a clear example of this negative cycle.

This cycle has to stop. Halting forest destruction is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to prevent catastrophic climate change. The good news is that the international community is getting serious about the potential to optimise the role of forests in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Following a strong Paris agreement – including much-needed acknowledgment of the critical role that forests play in combatting climate change – there has never been a better time to work together to protect the world’s remaining tropical forests.

We don’t have all the answers and the road ahead will not be easy, but here are five reasons for hope right now.

1. The Amazon has shown us it can be done

Brazil has successfully decoupled agricultural production from deforestation in the Amazon forest – where agriculture output has been growing while deforestation rates have dropped substantially. Since 2005, through a combination of public policy and private sector actions, deforestation has reduced by 70% – keeping about 3.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

2. The Paris agreement sets the foundation for more progress

The Paris agreement sent a strong message to the international community about the importance of forests. All countries agreed on simple but strong language that operationalises forest protection.

The inclusion of REDD+ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation as a standalone piece – Article 5 – in the final Paris agreement sends a clear signal that the period of mass forest destruction is drawing to a close.

3. Momentum has been built for place-based partnerships

The outcome from Paris also gives an excellent basis for public private partnerships to focus on converting entire jurisdictions (geographic areas in a country) to increase production while improving forest protection – what we call ‘production-protection’.

This approach is promising but not without challenges, as the Global Agenda Council paper on Better Growth with Forests highlights, therefore the solution models must be creative and nationally appropriate for transformational outcomes.

The ultimate aim is to create a “triple win”: to deliver rural development and domestic economic growth, while protecting and restoring forests on a large scale.

During the Paris negotiations Marks & Spencer and Unilever announced an intent to prioritise commodity sourcing from areas practicing sustainable agricultural production, forest protection and protection of livelihoods, with support from forest and donor governments and other consumer goods companies. The model provides jurisdictions with the design, technical support and necessary funding to develop implementable plans, while creating a global community of purpose to pilot and create investment-grade replicable partnerships and solutions.

What we now need is for more sub national leaders and consumer goods companies to join the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 (TFA2020). This will allow all parties to come together via large bilateral and multilateral programmes to support jurisdictions (national or subnational governments) in developing and implementing landscape-level plans to reduce deforestation while putting smallholders and communities at the heart of the agenda.

4. Livelihoods depend on our success

More than 1.6 billion people worldwide depend on forests for food, medicines and fuel, as well as their jobs and livelihoods.

A key requisite for the ‘production-protection’ approach, is that jurisdictions have a strategy for how to reduce emissions from forests and other lands whilst increasing agricultural productivity and improving livelihoods.

Increasing agricultural productivity will have a profound effect on smallholder farmers in particular – in their role of producers, custodians of biodiversity and vendors – the more we can help them better manage land and improve their productivity, the more their livelihoods will improve.

In reality, production of the commodities that we all rely on is not possible without protecting the land, forests and communities involved.

5. We are many

The number of people focused on this agenda is growing. The Consumer Goods Forum and Tropical Forest Alliance bring together over 100 actors from business, government, and civil society. And through the New York Declaration on Forests, about 180 nations, companies, indigenous people and other organisations committed to halve deforestation by 2020 and stop it by 2030, while at the same achieving ambitious conservation, reforestation and forest restoration targets.

The critical mass of forest nations, donor governments, global agricultural commodity companies, consumer goods companies and funding partners that are now behind this goal is unprecedented.

We want to be optimistic – and this is indeed the moment in time to be so — but we realise many challenges still lie ahead. 2016 is an opportunity for us all to collaborate and show the world this can be done.

 

Basically the same as last time.

Very slightly right-wing and very slightly libertarian.