I tell ya, hand them sandwiches!
WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?
Those around them should do what they can to keep them away, even lock them in their rooms if necessary.
The riots in 2011 didn’t surprise me as tension had been brewing for a long time, but they were far more spontaneous, and initially sparked by the police killing a black man.
For the record, Portsmouth remained quiet back then too. (Police officers were exhausted, though. All had been recalled.)
This, this seems to be very different beast. Or is that just my impression and incorrect?
Last time, I don’t think that politicians were whipping up division and the Conservatives hadn’t been in charge for over a decade yet.
Apparently, there was a lot of rioting about people like me again in the UK. While there’s definitely a particularly strong resistance against people of color and people who appear but don’t even need to be Muslims, the main sentiment behind this shit is anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner. It’s part of the cultural makeup.
I decided to treat myself to a walk this afternoon, which turned out to be a wonderful idea.
As I was shooting a video, a bird called out in a panic, possibly a crested grebe whose peace I had briefly disturbed.
Next, I encountered a basket with a sign “Free bay leaves” at a houseboat (which happens to be for sale).
Then I caught a great blue heron admiring itself in a glass facade (but my phone had run out of space).
And after that, I observed a young man on a moped, with a black helmet and dressed in black protective clothing (in case of a fall) yet… singing. In hot weather.
I received this in my inbox from the IAPG, a few days ago.
Link to the IAPG post: https://www.geoethics.org/post/a-wider-perspective-on-chemistry-and-sustainability-by-enrico-cameron
Link to the original article: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2024/sc/d4sc00099d
Violent clashes… but none in Portsmouth https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/03/government-warns-that-rioters-will-pay-the-price-as-wave-of-violence-sweeps-uk
😊
There was a very small police presence only, in Portsmouth. There were verbal exchanges, and some apparently were ugly, but there was nothing else. Fairly peaceful, all in all.
7 August 2024: Oh! Looks like the current city council leader and I appear to be on the same page! (Or have I been led onto another goddamn a fake page on another goddamn mirror on that Portsmouth-based hacker’s computer once again?)
What happened in Southport is like what happened on a tram in Utrecht, the Netherlands, a few years ago. At the time, the BBC – regrettably – was quick to write about links to islamic terrorism but there were none. This was like a guy shouting that he wanted to defend the planet against unicorns from Mars while unfortunately shooting people at the same time.
Continue readingI just went to see if I could find an extra (used) VGA cable. Instead, I found three books (in English), to my delight, two of which are related to bioethics. One involves infertility and a sperm donor and the other one a couple who are trying to avoid a serious genetic disorder and end up at a veritable “designer” of babies.
Interesting coincidence.
The third one is a detective (Adam Stubo).
The rest on the shelf was non-fiction.
As of the previous weekend, so since about ten days ago, there’s been quite a lot of it again. So annoying!
There is no point in talking about it with anyone. People – most of them, not all of them – keep responding with their insistence that the earth is flat. What can I say? Let them believe what they want to believe. I am not going to tell them that it isn’t. No point.
(It’s not a perfect ball either, of course. But it’s not flat. You don’t fall off its edges. Even if your map makes it look that way.)
Some years ago, Dutch political party D66 raised the worrisome idea of euthanasia for people who are old and fed up.
It infuriates me because the feeling that life is no longer worth living is too often the direct result of being treated as if your life is no longer worth living and you no longer hold any value.
Wijngaarden, Els van, Leget, Carlo and Goossensen, Anne (2015) Ready to give up on life: The lived experience of elderly people who feel life is completed and no longer worth living. Social Science & Medicine 138, 257-264. Available at https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0277953615002889/1-s2.0-S0277953615002889-main.pdf?_tid=80f432e0-edcd-11e7-993c-00000aab0f26&acdnat=1514685434_0b38f23b28ec70c2cd53776218c61c43
I’ve said that a few times before. It’s even truer than I thought. Yesterday, someone sent me the following.
Today, three kinds of elephants walk the Earth. But hundreds of thousands of years ago, they had many kin. Nearly 200 species in the order Proboscidea, including mastodons and mammoths, have been described. Paleontologists have long wondered why so few of these usually massive mammals are still around. Now, a reexamination of fossil data suggests another group of mammals played a major role in dooming elephants’ relatives to extinction: humans.
With a little help from AI, researchers explored possible explanations for changing speciation and extinction rates of proboscideans over the past 35 million years, as estimated from fossil data. While their analyses, which leveraged neural networks to rank possible factors, identified connections to major environmental changes, the effects of humans were enormous. Extinction rates jumped five-fold when early humans emerged some 1.8 million years ago and climbed even more sharply—17-fold—when our species started spreading around the world roughly 129,000 years ago.
“The primary driver of proboscidean extinction was inferred to be the overlap with the human lineage, aligning with the growing body of evidence indicating humans’ severe impact on recent extinctions and on megafauna in particular,” the team concluded. “If early humans had not appeared, the number of species would probably still be increasing,” first author Torsten Hauffe told New Scientist.
It’s ten years old. Besides that some things in it are hogwash, other things are totally out of date. But if you watch the first 10 minutes or so, probably much less, you get a pretty good idea of some (most) of the things that I have been dealing with in the past 16 years. And what kind of person.
This one is relevant too: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3173594/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2819894
I lean toward applauding any move that seeks to address ableism. Biases – with regard to any property, whether it is a physical difference, poverty, age, skin or hair color or anything else – do so much damage.
Partly at work is the focusing illusion:
And so on and so forth.
All other aspects of someone’s life and personality are casually dismissed, usually not even looked at.
Continue reading
Whether you agree with their approach or not, our future on the planet is very uncertain and these are the kinds of protests that I’ve heard about since my teenage years.
Back then, it was mostly missiles (and apartheid) that people in my native country were protesting against, I remember, and back then… because of the OPEC Oil Crisis, we actually had Sundays with complete DRIVING BANS! Emergency services excepted.
Rollerskating and cycling in the streets was so much fun on those days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car-free_days
Isn’t it crazy that we insist on ruining our own future on the planet for the sake of making money?
No, I am not planning any protests, no worries. But I often shake my head at the foolhardy stupidity of humankind and am also astonished to have to admit that I didn’t used to see either that the way in which we are living and behaving in the west is pretty crazy.
It’s not just about oil. It’s just about everything.
| In my inbox today |
| “Yesterday, the new Government announced their plans for the year in the King’s Speech. We are pleased to hear they plan to finally go ahead with reforms to the Mental Health Act. This inclusion is an opportunity to change the law so autism is no longer defined as a ‘mental disorder’ and autistic people will not be detained in mental health hospitals just for being autistic. Last year, over 18,000 of you signed an open letter to Rishi Sunak saying its #TimeToAct on the Mental Health Bill but despite this huge demand for action, it was shelved. We’ve been campaigning on this for years and we want to take the time to celebrate this success with everyone who has campaigned to end the human rights scandal of autistic people being stuck in mental health hospitals. We will work with this parliament to strengthen the Mental Health Bill before it is passed into law to make sure we have better mental health and social services in the community to prevent autistic people from reaching crisis point in the first place. The Government also announced plans for a new Education Bill which will include a focus on teacher recruitment. Only 26% of autistic pupils say they feel happy at school, so it is vital that this comes with proper training on autism for both school and council staff so they can fully meet the needs of autistic children being let down by insufficient support.” |
Install Pushbullet on your Androids and iPhones and install the Pushbullet extension in your browser. It works well in Chrome and I assume that it works equally well in other browsers.
I’ve used it in the past to receive text messages on my computer, but its greatest advantage may be easy file transfer.
Today, someone called me rather late in the day. I had to dig up my phone as it was plugged into my computer. Awkward. Then I had to unplug it because I wanted to talk to the person who called. Also awkward.
This was someone who wanted to meet. But the way she formulated the suggested time was rather odd. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it made me want to choose a different time. Because the time she mentioned confused me.
Funny how such things influence us.
She formulated the suggested time in a way that took up more words than necessary. It made me think “eh, what time?”.
Now I wonder if it may be something new or something regional. Time to Google it.
Did that. Yes, apparently, it’s regional.
Only now I also realize that the way she phrased the time really confused me. I thought that the new time she mentioned was only 20 minutes later. It’s not at all only 20 minutes later.
I somehow connected it to an odd English way of phrasing certain times that some people use. Half 10, that’s 10:30, for example. Half 10 is 9:30 in Dutch.
https://www.newforestnpa.gov.uk/jobs/volunteer-and-accessibility-co-ordinator/
Closing date: 24 July 2024
I’ll dig it up. Gimme a sec.
Here it is.
I just spotted an article in the Dutch news about groups of people who want to overthrow the government or whatever – called “soevereinen”. In the article, “common law” is described as jargon exclusive to these Dutch circles.
That’s incorrect.
This is a potentially dangerous mistake by this journalist, in my view.
You can for example be someone’s common law wife and that has nothing to do with wishing to overthrow the government.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2528098-aivd-waarschuwde-om-twee-verdachten-in-soevereinenzaak-langer-vast
I notice that I have a tendency to mix up AIVD and IND. Probably a good thing.
There appears to be a voice growing louder that says that she may very well be.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question
