Censorship of the internet inside China has apparently become more aggressive and more effective recently
"On a multiweek visit to China early last year, I switched among three VPNs and was able to reach most international sites using my hotel-room Wi-Fi. On a several-day visit last December, the hassle of making connections was not worth it, and I just did without Western news sources."
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Both horrifying and somehow utterly predictable :( :(
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"[internet connection records] will be made available to a wide range of government bodies. Those include expected law enforcement organisations such as the police, the military and the secret service, but also includes bodies such as the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, councils and the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust." Independent
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Just a reminder that the *vast majority* of refugees from conflict or environmental disaster are internally displaced or flee to neighbouring countries (which also tend to be poor). People who have almost nothing themselves are stepping up every day to help those in need, while rich country governments continually step up their anti-refugee rhetoric.
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"...since privilege is structural and not individual, it has nothing to do with goodness or badness. It’s plainly a factual reality about life. The key is to focus on two distinctions: systems as distinct from individuals, and having privilege as independent of choosing how to engage with it. Since both of these distinctions tend to be obscured, I have found that people often find relief in teasing apart these two aspects of privilege." Fearless Heart
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This is good
"As a black person, I don’t feel comfortable in a lot of psychedelic spaces if no one’s talking about the racism inherent to the war on drugs. In the psychedelic community, people will talk about the unfairness of the drug war and how it violates people's autonomy, but they refuse to name racism - ignoring the biggest elephant in the room. By failing to make the implicit explicit, the psychedelic movement excludes people of color, especially black people, from having their voices heard."
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"An increasing number of African elephants are now born tuskless because poachers have consistently targetted animals with the best ivory over decades, fundamentally altering the gene pool.
In some areas 98 per cent of female elephants now have no tusks, researchers have said, compared to between two and six per cent born tuskless on average in the past."
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"As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people." Guardian
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"After three doses of MDMA administered under a psychiatrist’s guidance, the patients reported a 56 percent decrease of severity of symptoms on average, one study found. By the end of the study, two-thirds no longer met the criteria for having PTSD. Follow-up examinations found that improvements lasted more than a year after therapy...
The researchers are so optimistic that they have applied for so-called breakthrough therapy status with the Food and Drug Administration, which would speed the approval process. If approved, the drug could be available by 2021." NY Times
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Happy holiday season, everyone!
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Sometimes I think these things go beyond honest policy differences and speak to personal character. To whit, it seems pretty obvious to me that the current prime minister is basically just a petty, mean-spirited person.
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I missed this, somehow
"The British Medical Journal has called for the legalisation of illicit drugs for the first time."
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Gosh, evidence of some quite sophisticated hacking techniques used against Standing Rock protesters. (I know it's Cracked.com - any thoughts on reliability/plausibility?)
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Many of the 'missing girls' in China may actually be alive and well, and just not officially registered to avoid legal problems.
"the researchers ... examined Chinese population data by cohort, and they compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. In that cohort, they discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men."
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TL;DR - Facebook's operating in China would probably be terrible from an ethics point of view, and not really commercially tenable either. Also this:
"Chinese SIMs are subjected to Chinese censorship, whether the user is in Dalian or Dusseldorf. (This is why Chinese mobile plans have such advantageous international rates; cheap roaming means users often don’t bother to get local SIM cards, allowing censorship to follow them worldwide.)"
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