DessertStorms

400 Years Ago a Prudish Aristocrat Censored This Artemisia Gentileschi Nude. Using Tech, an Italian Museum Has Revealed the Stunning Original Work

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/censored-artemisia-gentileschi-female-nude-revealed-2375778

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_Inclination

Her other work is also well worth a look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi

Such a chill little trip

I shine to make you smile, I try to save you one more time, for your lonely place, you need a friendly face, when your option's low, I lift you from below

I’m a little emotional, gotta be rational, being ok is optional, I’m in a phase, ani mevushal...

Ani mevushal = I'm baked (literally - cooked)
Ani metugan = I'm fried
Ani meturlal = I'm crazed
Ani mechushmal = I'm electrified
Mechin megulgal, ve tas lachalal = I roll one up, and fly to space

One of my favourite ever albums, never fails to get some rage out of the system

The Intruder (1962) full movie. AKA "Shame" is a low budget Roger Corman film that deals with early integration in the south. William shatner portrays a carpet bagger from the North? Who just shows up to cause trouble. The film is way ahead of its time when you consider the strife we are encountering in 2020. Watch it! - Broken Trout -

NEW analysis has found that over £23 billion worth of welfare benefits went unclaimed in the last year.

The report, by Policy in Practice, found that the number had risen from £19bn the year before and that figures could be closer to £30bn if it were to analyse disability benefits and discretionary support.

Universal credit is the most unclaimed benefit at £8.3bn, with an estimated 1.4 million missing out on this type of support.

This is followed by carer’s allowance (£2.3bn), pension credit (£2.2 bn) and child benefit (£1.7 bn).

The analysis said that most claimants are simply unaware that certain benefits exist and cited navigating complex criteria as a serious barrier.

The report comes as household debt rises to £8.8bn a year.

Policy in Practice managing director Jade Alsop said: "Our findings show that as a society, we can’t afford not to consider these measures to prevent further costs to our health, education and social care services.

“It is estimated that, by improving pension credit take-up alone, the cost of social care will decrease by £4bn a year.”

Claire Atchia McMaster, director of income and external affairs at anti-poverty charity Turn2Us, said that feedback they receive indicates that accessing benefits is “complicated, inaccessible and emotionally draining.”

She said: “This complexity prevents millions from claiming vital support, exacerbating financial insecurity and impacting wellbeing.”

Ms McMaster called for clearer action from the government to ensure support reaches everyone who needs it.

Benefit calculators can be accessed on the Turn2Us and Policy in Practice websites.

Demand for private treatment booms as NHS waiting lists remain long, while more people also sign up for dental cover

Britain’s health cover market has grown by £385m in a year as the NHS crisis prompted more people to seek out private medical treatment and demand for dental insurance increased, according to a report.

The total health cover market, including medical and dental insurance and cash plans, grew 6.1% to £6.7bn in 2022, the latest year for which figures are available, according to the health data provider LaingBuisson.

About 4.2 million people were subscribed to medical cover schemes. Including dependants on the policies, 7.3 million people were covered – the highest number since 2008.

Since the market’s Covid-driven drop in 2020, when it declined by 2.2%, it has grown considerably faster than historical norms. Average annual growth was 6.1% between 2020 and 2022, compared with 1.7% between 2008 and 2019.

The NHS waiting list in England continued to lengthen, to a peak of nearly 7.8m last September. In February, it was still 7.5m and half of the patients had been waiting for 18 weeks or longer.

Private medical insurance, the largest part of the health cover market, grew by 6% year on year in 2022 to £5.3bn, more than triple the average annual growth rate of 1.8% between 2008 and 2019. After a decade of decline until 2018, more people signed up, particularly in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic which led to a backlog of major procedures such as hip and knee replacements.

Tim Read, author of the report, said: “Demand began to increase in 2018, as the NHS waiting list began to rise out of control. A new Labour government is likely to aim to tackle it but will have limited fiscal headroom to make substantial progress.

“With people still struggling to access NHS services and the waiting list remaining stubbornly high, there is little likelihood that demand for health insurance is going to fall any time soon.”

Read added: “Growth is led by company-backed schemes, which may suggest an increased awareness of the impact of employee ill-health on a business – and possibly frustration at the impact that an inaccessible NHS is having on productivity.”

Growing numbers of people are also paying out of their own pockets for medical treatment, despite the high cost of some procedures, such as knee operations which typically cost between £12,000 and £15,000.

Dental insurance and capitation plans (fixed monthly payments) have shown the highest growth of the market, up 9.7% year on year in 2022. However, most people who see a dentist privately pay for treatment without any cover.

The emergence of “dental deserts” – swathes of the UK where NHS dentists are not taking on new patients – means hundreds of thousands of people have turned up in hospitals or at GPs with severe tooth decay.

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The average health insurance premium went up to £1,225 in 2022 from £1,203 in 2021, according to LaingBuisson. Premiums on work policies went up to £975, while individual premiums rose to £2,252.

Insurers have flagged premium rises of more than 10%, with one placing them as high as 40% this year and possibly beyond. This reflects a rise in claims and higher medical costs. Some people who could not get what would have been a cheaper treatment option during the pandemic are now suffering from more expensive conditions to treat, Read said.

The UK health insurance market is dominated by Bupa, France’s Axa Health, Aviva and Vitality Health, which is owned by South Africa’s Discovery.

In dental insurance, the main players are Bupa, Simply Health and Unum, after Cigna left the UK market.

Read said: “I don’t think that the NHS is going to fall apart overnight or that the private sector is going to run rampant overnight. But I do think as people as customers, rather than people as taxpayers, are beginning to reconceptualise the value of paying additionally for healthcare entitlements, which technically they should get on the NHS.”

One of those tracks where Duvdev's background in rock really shines through. Great mood boost.

There were 830,000 unwanted moves in England over the past 12 months, meaning 40% have been forced to relocate

Unwanted home moves cost renters more than half a billion pounds a year, with tenants coughing up an average of £669 every time they are forced by landlords to leave their home, a survey has revealed.

Analysis by the homelessness charity Shelter estimated that there had been 830,000 unwanted moves in England over the past 12 months, meaning 40% of renters who move house are doing so because they have been compelled to look for other accommodation.

An unwanted move is defined as a fixed-term tenancy coming to an end, or tenants being priced out by a rent increase, being served an eviction notice or being informally asked to leave by the landlord.

Renters collectively spend £550m a year on moving costs, often paying rent and bills on two properties during the moving period, along with hiring removal vans, paying for stopgap storage and buying new furniture, Shelter estimates.

Natalie, 47, has moved 12 times in the past 21 years, and has been served with two no-fault evictions in the past 18 months. Although she has been in her new home for seven months, she still cannot relax and feels traumatised by her moving experiences. “I haven’t even unpacked properly,” she said. “I’m worried that as soon as I do, I’m going to have to move again.

“I’ve downsized to a studio. Most of my stuff is stored in a garage nearby that I’m renting for £75 and I had to shell out £750 on removal van hire alone. It took me 18 months just to pay back all the debts accrued from the last move, and then it happened all over again.

“There is nothing worse than being forced to move home,” she added. “Without a stable foundation, how can you lead a fruitful life?”

“This is money that renters will never see again,” said Tarun Bhakta, policy manager for Shelter. “It’s not a deposit that you may or may not get back at the end of your tenancy, it’s not money for your rental, it’s simply costs down the drain. Money for a removal van, for packing boxes, for new furniture; these are avoidable expenses that tenants are having to make against their will.

“Because of an abnormally and unreasonably unstable rental system, tenants are having to cough up millions and millions of pounds each year in moves that could otherwise be avoided, if the government had a backbone and delivered a strong, watertight renters’ reform bill.”

In April, the government signalled that it would make amendments to the long awaited bill, delaying the ban on section 21 evictions – the two-month notice, “no fault” compulsory orders to leave the property – and reneging on the promise to overhaul fixed-term tenancies.

New figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that average rents have increased by £107 a month nationally, and by £207 a month in London over the past year.

Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, said: “Tenants are coughing up millions in unwanted and unwarranted moves, while the government runs scared of a minority of its own MPs. Instead of striking dodgy deals with backbenchers to strangle the renters’ reform bill, ministers should defend renters’ best hope of a stable home.

“With protections from eviction so weak and rents so high, we constantly hear from people forced out of their homes and communities at huge personal cost. It’s impossible for renters to put down roots knowing a no-fault eviction could plunge them back into chaos at any moment.”

A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson said: “The renters (reform) bill will deliver the manifesto commitment to abolish section 21 evictions. It will be returning to the House of Commons shortly.”

Officials at Department for Work and Pensions accused of ‘threatening and cruel’ tactics over repayment orders

Government officials have been accused of using “threatening and cruel” tactics towards unpaid carers by saying they could face even greater financial penalties if they appeal against “vindictive” benefit fines.

This month a Guardian investigation revealed that thousands of people who look after disabled, frail or ill relatives have been forced to pay back huge sums after being chased by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over “honest mistakes” that officials could have spotted years earlier.

Dozens of unpaid carers have said they feel powerless to challenge the penalties, which often run into many thousands of pounds, even when the government is at fault.

Now the Guardian has learned that the DWP is warning carers that their fine may increase if they appeal against a repayment order.

In one letter in June 2023, the government department said that if the unpaid carer challenged the order “the entire claim from the date it started will be looked at, which could potentially result in the overpayment increasing, if there are more periods where your earnings exceeded the allowable limits”.

This carer, whose husband has dementia and Parkinson’s, had been ordered to repay nearly £4,000 for unwittingly exceeding the weekly earnings threshold of £151 by calculating her zero-hours job on a monthly basis – as she believed the rules required – rather than on a four-weekly basis.

The former council worker said the penalty had “destroyed” her confidence and left her feeling unable to challenge the DWP. “I can’t afford this bill but I can’t afford to argue with them because if I do I’ve made these mistakes already, chances are I’ve made other mistakes,” she said.

Cristina Odone, head of family policy at the centre-right thinktank the Centre for Social Justice, described the DWP tactic as “threatening and incredibly cruel”.

She said: “Again and again, if you talk to ordinary people, the DWP raises their hackles and their fears because it is the state possibly coming to claw back benefits.

“It is the most hostile bit of the state for so many people. This just confirms their wariness of the DWP as the bit of government that is the least sympathetic, most faceless and most heartless.”

Unpaid carers are entitled to a carer’s allowance of £81.90 a week – the smallest benefit of its kind – providing they care for someone for at least 35 hours a week. They are allowed to work but must not make more than £151 a week after tax and expenses.

People who make more than the £151 weekly limit, even as little as 1p more, must pay back the entire week’s carer’s allowance for the whole period in which they were in breach of the rules, in what has been described as a “cliff edge” approach.

Tens of thousands of carers have unwittingly fallen foul of this rule and have not been alerted by the DWP until years later, even though the government has real-time technology that means it can spot and stop these infractions much sooner.

Carers have been plunged into debt, forced to sell their homes and given criminal records over what they say were “honest mistakes” that should have been spotted much sooner by the DWP.

Three former work and pensions secretaries, including Iain Duncan Smith, have called on the government to pause investigations into unpaid carers and launch a review of its failings. Debbie Abrahams, a Labour MP on the Commons work and pensions committee, has called the DWP’s approach “simply vindictive”.

Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, a campaign group supporting unpaid carers, said the DWP’s attempt to dissuade people against appealing was “quite troubling and quite unsavoury”.

Maugham said: “Parliament has set up an appellant system to enable appeals against demands that people repay carer’s allowance. For the DWP to take steps to discourage people from using this very important safeguard is itself quite troubling.”

Emily Holzhausen, director of policy at Carers UK, said unpaid carers feel “stuck in a place where they feel unable to challenge decisions – even though they have a legal right to do so”.

The DWP said: “Carers across the UK are unsung heroes who make a huge difference to someone else’s life and we have increased carer’s allowance by almost £1,500 since 2010.

“We have safeguards in place for managing repayments, that’s why visiting officers are available to provide support and assistance to customers when attending their homes, particularly for those deemed vulnerable.

“Claimants have a responsibility to inform DWP of any changes in their circumstances that could impact their award, and it is right that we recover taxpayers’ money when this has not occurred.”

Amy Westervelt and Kyle Pope have covered climate disinformation for a combined 20-plus years – here’s their guide on how to decode it

Increasingly sophisticated and better-funded disinformation is making climate coverage trickier both for journalists to produce and for the public to fully understand and trust.

But telling the story, and understanding it, has never been more urgent with half of Earth’s population eligible to vote in elections that could decisively impact the world’s ability to act in time to stave off the worst of the climate crisis.

Swayed for 30 years by fossil fuel industry propaganda, the media has been as likely to unknowingly amplify falsehoods as they were to bat them down. It’s only in recent years that more journalists started to shy away from “both-sides-ing” the climate crisis – decades after scientists reached an overwhelming consensus on the scope of the problem and its causes.

The good news is that while the fossil fuel industry’s PR tactics have shifted, the stories they’re telling don’t change much from year to year, they are just adapted depending on what’s happening in the world.

When politicians talk about how much it will cost to act on climate change, for example, they almost always refer to economic models commissioned by the fossil fuel industry, which leave out the cost of inaction, which rises with every passing year. When politicians say that climate policies will increase the cost of gas or energy, they count on reporters having no idea how gas or energy pricing works, or how much fossil fuel companies’ production decisions, not to mention lobbying for particular fossil fuel subsidies or against policies that support renewable energy, impact those prices.

1. Energy security

From fueling wars to preserving national security, the fossil fuel industry loves to trumpet its role in keeping the world safe, even when it is engaging in geopolitical brinksmanship that makes everyone decidedly less so. In the context of national security, it’s worth noting that the US military started funding net-zero programs back in 2012 and listing climate change as a threat multiplier in its Quadrennial Defense Review a decade ago. But oil companies and their trade groups ignore that reality and instead insist the threat is in reducing fossil fuel dependence.

We’ve seen this recently in the industry’s messaging around the Russia-Ukraine war, when it mobilized even before Putin to push the idea that a global liquified natural gas (LNG) boom was a fix to short-term energy shortages in Europe. The industry has been noticeably quiet on the Israel-Palestine war, but is pushing general “we keep you safe” messaging that emphasizes global instability. In the US, energy security narratives often have nationalistic undertones, with messages pushing the global environmental and security benefits of US fossil fuel over that from countries like Qatar or Russia.

It is true that energy self-sufficiency contributes to any nation’s stability, but there’s no rule that says energy has to come from hydrocarbons. In fact, it’s well-documented that depending on an energy source vulnerable to the whims of world commodity markets and global conflicts is a recipe for volatility.

2. The economy v the environment

In 1944, when it looked like the second world war would end soon, PR guru Earl Newsom pulled together his corporate clients–including Standard Oil of New Jersey (ExxonMobil today), Ford, GM and Procter & Gamble – and crafted a top secret post-war strategy to keep the US public convinced of the “worth of the free enterprise system”.

From school curricula to Hollywood-crafted animated shorts to industry presentations to media interviews, the fossil fuel industry has hammered these themes repeatedly for decades. And, in a classic move, industry spokespeople point to studies that industry groups, like the American Petroleum Institute, commission as proof that taking care of the environment is bad for the economy.

In 2021, a peer-reviewed paper entitled “Weaponizing Economics” tracked the activity of a group of economic consultants who were hired by the petroleum industry for decades. “They produced analyses that were then used by both companies and politicians … to tell the public that it would just be way too expensive to act on climate, and that in any case, climate change was not going to be a big deal, so the best thing to do would be to do nothing,” the paper’s co-author Ben Franta, head of the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University, said.

These tactics also show up in ads that remind us to balance a desire for reduced emissions with the need to keep the economy going. One BP ad recently running on NPR, New York Times and Washington Post podcasts states that oil and gas equals jobs and argues for adding renewables, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

3. ‘We make your life work’

The fossil fuel industry loves to argue that it makes the world work – from keeping the lights on to keeping us riveted by smart phones and TV, and clothed in fast fashion. It’s genius: create a product, create demand for the product, and then shift the blame to consumers not just for buying it but also for its associated impacts.

“Basically it’s a propaganda campaign,” said Brown University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle. “And you don’t have to use the words ‘climate change’. What they’re doing is they’re seeding in the collective unconscious the idea that fossil fuels equals progress and the good life.”

Advertisements like Energy Transfer Partners’ “Our Lives Are Petroleum” campaign, which has been running since 2021, also serve the purpose of shaming people into keeping quiet on climate unless they have successfully rid their own lives of hydrocarbons. The logic goes: if you use a phone or drive a car, or really, if you live in the modern world at all, you’re the problem. Not the companies that have worked for decades to make their products seem indispensable and block any alternatives to them.

4. ‘We’re part of the solution’

Nothing keeps away regulation like promises of voluntary solutions that make it seem like the fossil fuel industry is really trying. In a 2020 exposé, Greenpeace’s investigative newsroom, Unearthed, caught an Exxon lobbyist on camera explaining this tactic had worked with a carbon tax to head off emissions regulations and how the company was pursuing the same strategy with plastic. Working with the American Chemistry Council to roll out voluntary measures like “advanced recycling”, the lobbyist, Keith McCoy, said the goal was to “get ahead of government intervention”.

As with climate change, McCoy explained, if the industry can make it seem as though it was working on solutions, it could keep outright bans on single-use plastics at bay. Today, this narrative shows up in the industry’s push for carbon capture, biofuels, and methane-based hydrogen solutions like blue, purple, and turquoise hydrogen. We also see it in the industry’s embrace of the term “low carbon” to describe not only fossil fuel–enabling solutions like carbon capture, but also “natural gas”, which industry lobbyists are successfully selling to politicians as a climate solution.

5. ‘The world’s greatest neighbor’

Just in case people still aren’t accepting of dirty air, dirty water and climate change, the fossil fuel industry funds museums, sports, aquariums, and schools, serving the dual purpose of cleaning up its image and making communities feel dependent on the industry and thus less likely to criticize it.

Both journalists and their audiences have more power to combat climate disinformation than it might feel when they’re awash in it. Understanding the industry’s classic narratives is a good starting point.

Debunking false claims is a critical next step.

• Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative climate journalist, founder of Critical Frequency, and executive editor of Drilled Media

• Kyle Pope is executive director of strategic initiatives and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, and a former editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review