Notices by Will Tuladhar-Douglas (yetiinabox@todon.nl), page 2

Just so folks outside the UK understand: the fascists are rioting in England and Northern Ireland. There are no riots in Scotland.

#NewScots #RefugeesWelcomeHere #Scotland

@CloudyMrs

They don't. They're incompetent. The actual target was Stonehaven. No idea why, though.

Deleted my FB account. Meta will not feed their LLMs with my words.

I loathe emails and websites that address me as "Hey".

Friends use "Hey", if they are actually *talking* to me and I've got my nose in a book/hands in the dirt/eyes on a screen.

No business is my friend. Demanding my attention by insinuating familiarity simply provokes disgust and repulsion. It's not a person, it's not my friend.

End of grump.

We often complain that the future we have is not what we imagined.

I definitely did not imagine handheld "aurora enhance and share with folk worldwide" devices.

Much better than flying cars.

Thanks all. You and this place are indeed beautiful.

We'll all keep struggling to save it then, shall we?

#aurora

Twelve hours yesterday hanging wallpaper in a room with all the challenges - old plaster walls that I had patched and primed, complex ceiling angles, almost nothing true or square, random electrical fixtures. Weirdly, the indicator of success at the end is a total *lack* of salient features; all the wobbles and skew lines vanish in an anodyne haze of textured wallpaper blandness.

It's some sort of anti-Daoist triumph: enormous effort, no natural quirks remain. I would far rather live among the roots and branches of a vast, gnarled tree on a sunny mountain, but Northeast Scotland is too harsh for such impractical thoughts, and the sun is too weak to sustain them.

Ever since Xi consolidated his power, the Chinese Communist Party has been relentless in its efforts to suppress any criticism of the PRC outside China, especially around universities and the Confucius Institutes. There are student associations, supported by diplomats, who enforce the party line - and it isn't just students from the PRC, but also students from client states elsewhere. It's much worse inside PRC universities, sadly; a flourishing academic culture that developed after Deng has been crushed.

In any case, I am glad to see that at least in one egregious case a court in the USA has responded. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/25/chinese-student-jailed-in-us-for-threatening-to-cut-off-hands-of-activist

If UK universities were not dependent on PRC money, perhaps they too could actually protect their students and staff!

TZAG all.

In case you are doomscrolling:

An Italian court has rejected charges that Mediterranean refugee rescue NGOs were encouraging "illegal migration".

Automobile factory workers in Tennessee have voted overwhelmingly to create a union.

And I am out to weed and prune, now that the early morning shift of rock doves, stock doves, sparrows, rooks, jackdaws, starlings, blackbirds, magpies, dunnocks, robins, and who knows who else have been fed on too-old leftovers, peanuts, and seeds.

If, in these awful times, you wanted to do a PhD on religions and peace, here's a chance: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DGN788/research-fellow

Local question for #Scotland - in the past two months I've seen the wooden handles come off two valued hand-tools, a left-handed Japanese hand-hoe and an old weeding fork. Is there anyone about who could fit new handles to old steel hand-tools? I don't have even the rudiments of the skills needed to turn new hardwood handles and fit them.

I want an e-paper grayscale book reader that lets me take notes. Ideally, it would connect to Zotero. Do I have to roll my own, or is there something out there that does not require a mortgage?

Stop destroying forests and viral spillover pandemics will stop. Simple. We've been saying this for decades. Here's another paper which uses Australian data on eucalyptus blooms, flying foxes, and Hendra to say the same thing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/03/26/1240779167/how-do-we-halt-the-next-pandemic-be-kind-to-critters-like-bats-says-a-new-paper

As someone who ran the only other #ethnobotany programme in the UK (Aberdeen, which was closed more than 10 years ago), and who taught #ethnobiology at the Edinburgh Botanics for many years, I believe I am qualified to say that the closure of ethnobotany, ethnobiology, and anthropology at Kent is appalling cultural vandalism.

Dark times are upon us, and the custodians of the lineages of wisdom must be careful now.

@pvonhellermannn

There is no legal framework for an environmental refugee. Why not?

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/2/protecting-climate-refugees-requires-a-legal-definition

Cristina-Ioanna Dragomir assesses the obstacles and argues that we must update existing international refugee law.

So I handed over my Samsung A72 to a child, and replaced it with a used Pixel 7a . I thought it would be smaller (I am tired of large phones!) and run better software.

It's an awful phone. No ANT support, no SD card, aggressive Google stuff everywhere, confusing and fiddly interface, and my plan to use #GrapheneOS has apparently been thwarted because bank apps now use Google, not Android, calls to check that they are on a secure phone.

#fediscience folks: who (else) is working on biodiversity and (human) migration?

Last Sunday pancakes of the year.

#COP28 No appeasement for petrostates.

The second, "compromise" text is what the fossil fuel industries and their client governments are hoping for. No agreement woukd be better than appeasement. I hope AOSIS and others have the strength to walk away unless there is binding language that includes phase out of production and consumption of fossil fuels.

"The UN climate change conference is failing humanity and Mother Earth. We are seeing firsthand the fossil fuel polluters and wealthy governments manipulating developing countries to undermine real action on climate change. " --Tom Goldtooth, quoted in the Guardian. <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2023/dec/13/cop28-live-updates-news-agreement-outcomes-draft-text-fossil-fuels>

I am reading _ Eichman in Jerusalem_ , and this time through, as an older person confronted by the systematic failure of ordinary people to recognise or act against the environmental crisis, for decades, it has un-wished-for explanatory force.

My children don't understand why anyone would use a car, all those cars driving by every day, or buy water in a plastic bottle, why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are used as examples of "good" entrepreneurs in their curriculum. I can see the corrupt business practices that meant we were offered a new gas boiler rather than a ground source heat pump in the government-backed scheme...but I don't understand it.

#Arendt did. She understood evil. What a terrible gift.

Pungent argument: the hope that benevolent superordinate institutions will allow us to change bad processes is a vulnerability that malevolent elites exploit over and over again. The capture of code repositories and coding tools by a multinational, and the capture of the IPCC COP meetings by petro-oligarchs (to pick two examples) are so similar that we should seek to find and fix the social flaw that causes good people to squander their political movements. Unfortunately, it's an attitude that is overtly taught in schools: trust the state, admire the wealthy, compete against each other to find true merit. We need #anarchist teaching across our homes and families to immunize children against this vulnerability.
This is a separate question, though related, to the objectification of non-human life and capitalist extractivism, which also needs to be called out and neutralised in the education system.
Home schooling is not the answer, because in the long run solidarity across communities is essential for long-term transformation, and that solidarity is learned in school. But as families who care about the future, we must transform how young people engage with teachers and curricula, from the very first moment of nursery.