After the Second World War, with the demise of Nazi Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) occupied most of eastern Europe, and in most of these countries they…
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Some days ago, one of the asylum-seekers released by the decision of the High Court after what has been called the NZYQ ruling, one Majid Jamshidi Doukoshkan, 43, was one…
One Matt Walsh, an idiot right-wing nutjob from the US, posted something on Twitter (or X as it has now been renamed by its idiot owner): “Remember when they spent…
On April 27th, South Africa celebrated the 30th anniversary of the end of apartheid, as it is 30 years since the beginning of the first democratic elections in which all South…
Last month, I wrote a piece about doing geological fieldwork along the southern Tasmanian coast, which is only accessible by boat, floatplane, helicopter or a two day walk along the…
Trump exploited low and middle-income white people's anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health. His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/abstract]
As readers of this blog may know, we are downsizing from a house to a unit, as in the former, we only use about half the space. Going through a…
The job of downsizing is an onerous one, and in our case has consisted of seven carloads of books to Lifeline, a charity which provides crisis support, suicide prevention services…