Oh my god, laughed so hard at this! 😂
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Thomas Mair, killer of MP Jo Cox, is a long-standing supporter of neo-Nazi groups. Let's not forget this when we hear politicians on the right work hard to characterise him as a "loner" with "mental health issues". On the basis of what we know so far, this looks like a political assassination, and should be treated as such.
Thanks to James Mackenzie, who has been tweeting on this
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Horrible :(
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A report about the absolutely horrifying conditions prevailing in the offshore immigration centres maintained by Australia on Manus Island and Nauru. It's very clear that this system is utterly contradictory to the protection of basic human rights
[CW: self-harm, detention]
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"When consumed, those old-school hallucinogens could cause assorted unpleasantnesses—including nausea, vomiting, and skin irritation. What people realized, though, was that absorbing them through the skin could lead to hallucinations that arrived without the unsavory side effects. And the most receptive areas of the body for that absorption were the sweat glands of the armpits ... and the mucus membranes of the genitals." Atlantic
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George Monbiot is really good on this - 'agricultural' subsidies are enormously wasteful, regressive and environmental destructive. They're probably the single worst thing the EU does. And yet the Leave camp is at great pains to assure votes that they will be retained in the event of an Out vote!
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I just thought of this again, and thought I should share it... I think e-cigarettes are, on the whole, an excellent harm-reduction measure and probably a much better way to consume nicotine than inhaling tobacco smoke. *However*, there is good reason to think that the flavouring in many brands can cause significant lung damage.
Rather stick to unflavoured nicotine juice!
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"the oldest evidence of domesticated rice has just been found in China, and it’s about 9,000 years old" U Toronto
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What a great article - starting with the fad of watching TV shows at higher-than-normal speed, somehow seguing into the innovation of silent reading during the Middle Ages (and its implications for free thought in Europe), before returning to neurology and then Game of Thrones.
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Review of a major US establishment figure's book on nuclear weapons policy. Lots of interesting tidbits, but this jumped out at me:
"Then as now, Perry writes, he believed that America would possess all the deterrence it needs with just one leg of the so-called triad: the Trident submarine. It is very difficult for armies to track and destroy it, and it contains more than enough firepower to act as a deterrent. The bombers provide only an insurance policy for the unlikely contingency of a temporary problem with the Trident force, and also have a dual role in strengthening our conventional forces. Our ICBM force is in his mind redundant. Indeed the danger of starting an accidental nuclear war as a result of a false alarm outweighs its deterrent value."
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"33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviours are likely to have evolved independently in the different families." Science Daily
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"[Vote Leave] responded to all who predicted the chaos now engulfing us like an unscrupulous pundit who knows that his living depends on shutting up the experts who gainsay him. For why put the pundit on air, why pay him a penny, if experts can show that everything he says is windy nonsense? The worst journalists, editors and broadcasters know their audiences want entertainment, not expertise." Guardian
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Saw this being shared around earlier. What do people think?
"The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice."
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LOL, strangely happy to see that South Africa is not alone in experiencing credit rating downgrades :P
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So good and important. Go to the end and watch the video in full
"...we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we’re going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours."
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Just a quick reminder that Ruhama, Irelands premier anti-sex work organisation is (a) funded by the Irish state and (b) was set up and continues to be directed by nuns from the same orders who ran the Magdalene laundries. These orders have the frankly Orwellian chutzpah to describe themselves as having “a long history of involvement with marginalised women, including those involved with prostitution”. Their involvement mainly consisted of illegally detaining and torturing those women as a means of forcing them to work without payment but, you know, it's still "involvement".
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Here's some very good news!
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"Based on evidence it received from Just Fair and other civil society groups, the [UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] concludes that austerity measures and social security reform breach the UK’s international human rights obligations." Centre for Welfare Reform
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Ha!
"One argument against Brexit, and in favor of a literal conservatism in many spheres of life, is simply that big changes can induce a lot of stupidity from the other players in the system... For many international policy issues, it is worth asking the simple question: “which action or inaction of mine is likely to induce the smallest number of stupid actions in response?” That won’t always give you the right answer, but often it is a good place to start."
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Amazing! The Home Affairs Select Committee has - rather surprisingly, given its initial terms of reference - recommended the decriminalisation of sex workers in England and Wales! It's not perfect, but it's a big step forward. Well done to everyone to who submitted evidence :)
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Great piece on the opium poppy, the disinformation deliberately spread about it - that it is an unusual type of poppy, that it only grows well in certain (faraway) climes, that it is difficult to extract opium from it, and so on - and the vagaries and illogic of the "war on drugs".
"It is said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished “women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was laudanum—opium. Such was the order of things less than a century ago."
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Oh god, now we're going to have to be on tenterhooks about this AGAIN! What is up with this last week in politics, seriously?
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This is quite useful and important - the EU has been implementing austerity polices for the last few years, policies which have largely been set by the centre right parties currently dominating the European Parliament. But where is the European centre left?
"Right now, elected social democratic governments in places like France and Italy find themselves implementing a slight variant of the same agenda of austerity and deregulation that their opponents on the right favor — given the structure of EU policy, they have no choice. In country after country this means bleeding supporters to further-left populist movements. And the example of Greece’s Syriza suggests that even if these parties gain power they’ll simply be in the same trap."
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"Gero says that Caribbean sperm whales spend most of their time in families of 5-7 animals rather than multi-family groups. Within these families, it's possible to observe friendships forming between individuals who spend more time together than with other family members. Caribbean whales also form friendships at the family level; often the same two families will swim together over the years while others basically ignore each other. In the Pacific, by contrast, scientists have never observed friendships between individuals. No two adult whales are ever spotted together more than once. That said, clans in the Pacific are much more tightly knit. Pacific sperm whales who speak the same dialect will form groups without any apparent preferences for certain families or individuals. Though these are clan differences, there are cultural differences at the family level too. In some families, calves are nursed by multiple females, while in others the calf nurses only from its biological mother." Ars Technica
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