(2) Unwelcome personal contact, or Those Crazy Yanks (II). "When Alyssa Navarrette, a third-year student who is studying anthropology and art, came home for her first visit after starting college, she was taken by surprise when her mother hugged her. “If you don’t want to be touched and your mom wants to hug you, you should be allowed to say no,” Ms. Navarrette said. “It’s about having autonomy over your own body.”" Yes. But, um, your own mother? "“I’m also looking for it to help people get justice or get acknowledgments at least for microaggression,” said Mx. Janecko, currently on co-op in San Francisco, working at a mime theater." I'm fairly certain that this is not a parody, but the mime theatre made me pause. A cracking good read either way here.
(3) Gay Hitler. That really was someone's name.
(4) Hominids were in Crete much earlier than in Africa? Not a welcome theory in the scientific community.
(5) Have you heard about the "Holocaust survivor who dies and goes to heaven. On arrival he tells God a Holocaust joke. And God says: “that isn’t funny”. The survivor replies: “Oh well, you had to be there”." From David Baddiel on Jewish humour here, although note that the rest of the article has nowhere near the punch of that joke.
(7) Marion Maréchal-Le Pen made a speech to conservatives in the US. That sounds interesting, doesn't it? So I wanted to read more. One thing she said was this: "France is in process of passing from the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church to the little niece of Islam ...". And here is where I read that:
I don't know how internet adverts get chosen. I mean, I think alms-giving is a good idea but I'm not a Muslim so there's no zakat in my browsing history to prompt this ad to pop up. I'd like to think it is brilliant marketing by Muslim Aid (this is what we do - this is who our opponents are), rather as the Mormons have used The Book of Mormon to push the Book of Mormon. Or at least epic trolling. Follow the link and see what adverts you get.
(8) EU law in England: “The flowing tide of Community law is coming in fast. It has not stopped at high-water mark. It has broken the dykes and the banks. It has submerged the surrounding land. So much so that we have to learn to become amphibious if we wish to keep our heads above water." So said Lord Denning. The article is a good insight for the layman into how English lawyers often think about European law: "Lord Neuberger, a few weeks after the referendum, saw the influence of EU law as perhaps no more than a 50-year “blip” in the life of the centuries-old common law." We'll see. I wish I could find the exact quote now, but Tony Weir wrote, long before "Brexit" was even a word, that the Europeans are people to whom our laws are strange, and who are making them strange even to us.
(9) Fake news, fake love: "perhaps the defenders of porn should consider that the common purveyors and sharers of fake news across social media are also engaged in a form of self-abuse, combined with titillation, and fantasy life. They no more believe that Barack Obama is running guns to ISIS than that the surgically enhanced 30-year-old woman in a plaid skirt is a very bad Catholic-school girl. It’s just a reality they prefer to envision. One where they can gaze into a backlit screen, click around, and imagine they aren’t wasting their lives clicking around on a backlit screen."
(10) Serial killers (down) and mass shooters (up) - they're just different kinds of people.
(11) Those Russian bots could learn a thing or two from a 68 year old blind guy in a basement.
(12) All is not well in South Africa: it is "not obvious that the median wage has increased since the fall of apartheid".
(13) Finally, a But. Perhaps unwelcome inconvenience should be welcomed, or even sought out?
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