Two Years

Frightened enough yet ?

So, we're just one week into the Trump presidency, and any remaining doubt is gone (Forget punching Nazis, next arsehole to suggest we should give him a chance, gets it): America has elected an utterly insane, emotionally unstable narcissistic child & Fascist as President.  USA! USA! USA!

I tweeted out recently a prediction that the Congressional GOP would never impeach Trump, which might seem a tad premature for just days into his presidency, what with all the rumours swirling about GOP concerns for his mental health, and others predicting impeachment, whether within a six-month timeframe, immediately after the midterms, or whenever.

I can't predict the future, obviously.  No-one can.  But nonetheless, I feel compelled to give my best guess as to how things play out from here, based upon my read of Trump, Dem. & GOP politicians, and the American public.  And while I hope I'm wrong, I very much believe that we are drifting into a Turkish or Russian style pseudo-democratic Authoritarian state, a 'strong man'-led defacto dictatorship.

Right now, we still have a nominal semi-democratic republic in the United States.  We still have, in theory, rule of law, and a written constitution with guaranteed rights & protections for ordinary citizens & residents. In theory, even as Trump and some around him (Can you say 'emoluments' ?) may be in violation of certain provisions thereof already.

But I don't think this transitional period will last long, and given Trump's rhetoric & executive actions, given that dressing-down of the media by Spicer and thinly veiled threats by Bannon, I don't think it's long before the crackdown on the media & on dissent generally kicks into high gear.  It's going to be an aggressive push to dismantle the norms. and the protections of American democracy, and I don't think either the media or general public are remotely ready for what is coming.

Personally, I think it all plays out over the next two years...before the midterms.  If change is to come, in whatever form, be that impeachment by the Republicans, a mass popular uprising, military coup, some sort or foreign intervention, or hell, while we're clutching at straws, act of G-d, I feel it comes in the next two years or not at all.  My prediction (and by all means call me out if I'm wrong), is that, if Trump survives to the midterms, the only way he leaves the White House, is in a wooden box.

And no, I still don't think the Republicans will impeach him.  My read of the greedy cowards & bullies in Congress is that a) they are almost to a man, in awe of the greater bully in Trump, and constitutionally disinclined to take him on, and b) that they see allowing a crazy person to sit in the White House as the price they have to pay for maintaining power, and a price they are more than willing to pay.

The GOP stood on the precipice of being wiped out prior to the last election.  Ideologically, politically the country is becoming more & more progressive over time, as also demographically the population becomes less & less white, and their most loyal voters (the Fox News demographic of largely older white males) die off.  This election was characterised by many, and I'd say accurately, as the last stand of the conservative white male, and having not only held on to power, but expanded it, with control of all three branches of the federal government, and a majority of governorships & statehouses, why the hell would the GOP ever risk giving it up again...possibly forever ?

In two years time, perhaps the Democrats run on opposition to Trump, on impeachment even. Perhaps there is a groundswell of popular support for this.  Meanwhile, where will the tattered remnants of the Voting Rights Act be, under Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions & a hard-right dominated Supreme Court ?  What will have happened to (the, if any) investigation into Crosscheck, and the irregularities of the last election, into the widespread attempts at voter-suppression ?  What will have happened to the already heavily gerrymandered districts, to the easily manipulable electronic voting-machines dotting the country ?  Don't be surprised if that groundswell of public support for the Democrats somehow translates into the Republicans massively outperforming expectations.  And don't expect any other elections, or other than sham affairs after that.

I say you have two years, America/Americans.  Two years in which anything could happen.  What you do, what you could do in that time, I don't know.  Maybe you find a way to fight back against creeping fascism, maybe you just learn to adapt...maybe you leave.  But I think your window to avoid an Erdoğan- or Putin-style autocracy is much smaller than you think.  I give it two years.

Sky News on our (absurdly hopeful) 2° Future

Just in time for the talks in Paris* and as the last hopes of our keeping temperature-increase under 2 degrees Celsius evaporate, here's a nice video from Sky News illustrating what, at this point, our most optimistic future might look like due to our greedy shortsighted stupidity.

This video, released in the last 24 hours or so, on our 2° future was accompanied by scarier videos illustrating 3° & 4° respectively.  For some reason, Sky has since chosen to set the accompanying videos to 'Private' status on YouTube.

To be generous to Sky, maybe these videos were just released prematurely by accident, and will be re-released shortly.  Maybe.**

The remaining video is instructive.****  But we're missing the progression that the video-makers clearly intended with just the one.  Also, each video ended with an encouragement to share said content via social media.  Kinda hard to do that Sky when you disappear the videos with no warning, and no explanation.



* Which due to our ever currently convenient obsession with 'The War on Terror'*** are to occur under a 'State of Emergency' with protests conveniently banned.

** That, or representatives of Murdoch's buddies in the fossil-fuel-industries got wind of what one of his media-outlets was putting out, and convinced Sky of the benefits of a little self-censorship ?

*** Many of the roots of which can be directly tied back to our dependence upon fossil-fuels, and support of the backwards regimes who control much of the supply thereof.

**** Myself, I think there's an argument that some of the millennials and younger may have an excuse (living under Western corporate media & the likes of GOP-compromised educational systems) for not understanding just how dire the threat is.  But, really, if you're over thirty or so and need any further convincing, then at this point I can't put it down to any better than, at most generous, wilful ignorance.


Update: This vid. on 5° change may be a replacement for the other two videos I mentioned.

The Fall: Middle Mass

Interesting Times

Anyone else feel like we are sleepwalking off a precipice ?  And that our governments are utterly unprepared for the next shoe to drop, having exhausted all the tools in their toolbox during the last crisis ?*


Meanwhile, apparently this is a thing:

People's poorly remembered experiences with an unusually titled series of childrens' books**, from their childhood, at a time when they were just barely learning to read, as evidence of alternate dimensions/parallel universes, rewritten history, interference by aliens, time-travel, or the like...

As a lifelong fan of escapism (hey, I still watch Doctor Who, though I'm not sure Moffat appreciates the escapist element fully), I can't blame people for wanting to escape from reality.  Certainly not in times like these.  The present sucks, and the future looks bleak indeed.  But meanwhile our overlords in government and in the business-classes are continuing to pursue policies that are destroying our planet, and planning for the future when then need to pull up the ladders behind them, as they batten the hatches, and leave us to drown, safely ensconced (they hope) in their fortified private compounds.***  And ninety-plus percent of us aren't paying any attention whatsoever.

Aw, what the hell ?  No-one cares.  Interview with a/the Vampire, Fruit/Froot Loops, Nelson Mandela dying in prison, Sex in/and the City, 52 states in the US, New Zealand changing location, Henry VIII with a turkey-leg in his hand****, Magic mirror on the wall...have at it.

We're all gonna die !  Possibly imminently if the conflict with Russia goes nuclear.  But...isn't this just the cutest likkle doggie you ever did see ?!!

* Mixing metaphors all over the place.  And no, I don't fully understand the significance in the drop-off of the PRC and others purchasing US debt.  Nor am I sure I want to...

** Always thought the spelling was weird; Never imagined it would be inspiring conspiracy-theories in multiple generations of adults.

*** Mixing metaphors with abandon now.  Whee !

**** Wouldn't chicken be more likely ?

Link Dump (Columbus Day Edition*)

Jeremy Corbyn stripped of 'Right Honourable' title after his 'snub' of the Privy Council.  He's devastated, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, here's some less humorous 'news' from the Telegraph regarding Corbyn and the IRA.

SF Weekly: Local Journalist Could Face 25 Year Prison Sentence for Defacing LA Times Website.  'Cos in today's world, if you fuck with corporations, you're a 'terrorist', and we have to make an example of you.

Politifact: Were more preschoolers shot and killed in 2013 than police officers?  Do you really need to ask ?

Guardian: Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax despite £35m staff bonuses.

EFF: The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared.  Basically, good news for multinational corporations, bad news for everyone else.  But, hey we dodged that 120-year copyright...

Huffington Post: New Blood Test Helps ER Docs Rule Out A Heart Attack.

Daily Mail: Megyn Kelly's bloody tampon, a 'sexy Ebola victim' and a marijuana suit for your BABY: Femail reveals the most offensive costumes set to give you the creeps this Halloween.  No costume involving Syrian migrants though ?  Really ?  Well, there is always this tastelessness...

Mindblowing...New York Times: 2 Outside Reviews Say Cleveland Officer Acted Reasonably in Shooting Tamir Rice, 12.  Zooming right up to the kid and shooting him dead two seconds later, yeah, that's reasonable alright...

Related ?  Raw Story: Perception of time slows down for some white people when viewing a black face, study finds.

Meanwhile...in Florida...Orlando Weekly: Florida could pay you $200,000 for shooting someone and claiming self-defense.  So, the prosecution would have the burden of proof that you weren't threatened if you murder someone, and if they can't do so, they may have to cough up on your behalf big time.  Who's betting this bill won't pass in the legislature ?

Politico: Gallup gives up the horse race.  Might be a tad obvious, but kudos for the headline regardless.

RT: Micro-satellite to inspect if Americans did land on Moon.  Want to answer the debate once and for all, apparently.**  Umm, they could've just asked Mitchell and Webb...

Speaking of conspiracy-theories...Politico: Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up.

The new Cold War marches on apace: Michael Fallon: UK to send troops to Baltic region.

Gizmodo: A Massive Bleaching Event is Threatening the World’s Coral Reefs.  World: <shrug>.

Of course we shrug off this much like we shrug off shooting-deaths in America, out of a sense of futility, of impotence.  Would that we'd known about climate-change earlier, huh ?

Oh, yeah: Exxon’s Own Scientists Confirmed Climate Change—In the 70s.  Nineteen-fuckin'-seventy-seven...

BBC: Manchester raids see more than a million cigarettes seized.  People buying and selling cigarettes illegally, huh ?

BBC: Tobacco tax increase urged by parliamentary group.  No comment.

The Dems' sure are having some fun with the Repubs' difficulty finding a Speaker to replace John Boehner:

New Scientist: Drug could kill harmful bacteria but leave benign ones untouched.  Genetically engineered phage viruses, specifically.

Scientific American: First Ancient African Genome Reveals Vast Eurasian Migration.

BBC: The creature with the key to immortality?  It's sea-anemones.


Oh yeah, and 'Spongebrain'*** Ben Carson said a whole bunch of stupid things regarding guns, victim-blaming, Popeyes, and the Holocaust.  Anything I link to here today will be outdone by whatever he says tomorrow.

Hell, let's end on a lighter note with a 'toon instead...So, here's humanity's future courtesy Arend van Dam:

* Or 'Indigenous Persons' Day', or what have you...

** As if any evidence would dissuade the conspiracy-theorists...

*** http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ben-carson-sponge-brain.  Far as I'm concerned, that's his new nickname going forward.

QOTD

Larry Summers:

For reasons rooted in technological and demographic change...the global economy has difficulty generating demand for all that can be produced.

Emmanuel Goldstein had a solution for that if I recall correctly...

Oh wait, we already tried that ?  Shit !


Via Kevin Drum

The Indy on the Madness that is TTIP

Not that it seems any amount of warning will interest or engage our citizenry over the outrageous extra-judicial anti-democractic monstrosities that are TTIP & TPP, and their related cohorts.  But, one can but try, futile as it may be.

Corporate vampires have tried to suck $4 billion out of Romania, and with TTIP the UK could be next

TTIP's opponents may be accused of speculation, but the impact of similar trade deals abroad is terrifyingly real

When it dared to halt the production of a gold mine, the government of Romania found itself facing a massive lawsuit from a corporate mining giant in a secret "court". There's nothing about the case that makes any sense – the corporation has said it may seek up to $4 billion in "compensation", which is half of Romania’s annual public healthcare budget.

How awful for Romania to be subject to such a corporate assault, you may think. However, under a controversial trade deal between the UK and America known as TTIP, such cases could become common in Britain. So why is our government one of the biggest cheerleaders of these "corporate courts"?*

What's happening in Romania is a terrifying sign of what could happen if TTIP is passed. The corporate vampires are out for blood, and won't rest until they've drained a sovereign state of its money, and destroyed large parts of its land. The mining giant Gabriel Resources originally wanted to develop an enormous gold mine that would involve flattening four mountain tops. There were fears that this would would leave behind a behind a toxic waste lake containing dammed water and cyanide. But in 2014 a critical environmental document that was required for the project to go-ahead was annulled in a Romanian court. In the face of mass protests inside and outside the country, Romania’s parliament decided not to push through a law that would have allowed the project to continue.

Gabriel Resources has recently admitted that they've lost hope of ever building their mine. But at the same time they submitted a request for arbitration at the World Bank, demanding compensation for all the gold and silver that they were unable to extract. The company is using a Jersey subsidiary to bring the case, so it can make use of a UK-Romania investment deal, even though it's based in Canada. The company claims they have spent nearly $500 million on the project, yet in an interview the company’s CEO claimed he was seeking up to $4 billion in "compensation".

This is exactly the kind of case which that TTIP would promote throughout Europe. Through something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, foreign corporations get access to a secret arbitration system to sue governments for "damaging" their profits. These cases are taking place with an alarming frequency using a variety of existing trade deals, but TTIP would massively expand the possibility of this taking place. It would do this by allowing all US corporations to sue EU member states and all EU corporations to sue the US government.

...

Yet despite all of this, the British government is fully signed up to the corporate courts. Last year it signed a letter that made clear that the secret court system shouldn’t be removed from the trade deal under any circumstances.

Sovereignty, who needs it ?  Says a 'Conservative' government that rants and raves about the European Union, and, to a lesser degree, the UN, but is more than happy to put unaccountable multi-national corporations above the law or oversight of any government, itself very much included.  Are the UN-'New World Order' nuts paying attention ?


* As with the question of why Osborne is selling off the taxpayers' stake in RBS at a loss, the answer is simple.  Whether you are naïve enough to think otherwise, or even stupid enough to vote for the bastards (not that the same couldn't be said about many Labour-supporters), the fact is, they don't work for you.  If they ever did, they certainly haven't for the last few decades.  And the longer it takes for the general public to wake up to that fact, the less likely it is that our circumstances will ever change.

You...No...You Didn't....But...No...

And there I was thinking the shit with Darth Lord Walker's bald spot was over-hyped...

Really ?  Seriously ?

The Duchess of Cambridge is famed for her glossy, lustrous locks.

But she has been offered some sage advice by celebrity hairdresser Nicky Clarke, who fears she faces potential "disaster" by letting them go grey.

The Duchess, 33, has occasionally revealed a small patch of silver, most recently in February when she was six months pregnant with Princess Charlotte.

But Clarke has urged her never to do so again.

"Kate needs to get rid of her grey hair — it's not a good look," he told the Daily Mail.

"She does have amazing things done to her hair and it can look great, but unfortunately it's the case for women — all women — that until you're really old, you can't be seen to have any grey hairs."

Clarke, 57, who has styled Princess Diana and the Duchess of York, claimed grey hair would be "disastrous" for the Duchess.

He added: "It's different for men. Men can go grey in their mid-50s and still be considered attractive. It's the whole silver fox thing. But it's not the same for women. Kate is such a style icon that even a few strands of grey would be a disaster, so I highly recommend that she cover it up. I hate grey hair."

If I could actually resign from humanity, and there were anywhere else the fuck to actually go...I'd do it.  And don't doubt it for one moment.


*I'm almost tempted to unleash even more ABBA on the world -- Come on, when was any problem not solved with the application of more Swedish pop from the seventies & eighties ?

Speaking of our Future Semi-Benevolent Dictator

Here's Hillary's super-duper Reality-driven plan for dealing with climate-change: More solar panels** and wind-turbines to power US homes.

That's it apparently.*  No mention of the need for more nuclear in the short term at least.  No mention of industry.  No mention of our destructive economic system that is inherently dependent on infinite growth in a world of finite resources.  No mention of globalisation & trade.  No mention of population-growth.  No mention of China, Russia, Canada, Brasil, Australia, etc., and that fact that nothing the US does will make a damn bit of difference without some sort of global agreement on action.

Just put a solar panel on your house, drive a Prius, and bye-bye climate-change.  And everybody gets a magical pony to boot.


This folksy aw-shucks shit made me want to vomit:

I'm just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain.

Uh, you're a Yale-educated lawyer, a millionaire, a former board-member of Walmart, the highly influential wife of a two-term president of the United States (who amongst other things did much to undermine existing efforts on climate change by outsourcing much of US industry to the far east and México), a former Senator of the United States, and a former Secretary of State.  This lil' ole' Gran'ma me shit is starting to grate.


* There is a line in the video that hints at a coming 'comprehensive agenda', but hey, I'm not the one who released this publicly as 'Hillary's plan to curb climate change'.  And if you seriously believe Hillary will take any bolder action than this, then I've got a bridge for sale.

** Just thought, hang on a minute, where are all these solar panels coming from, given that the PRC-subsidised manufacturers in China already put most US manufacturers out of business ?  On a heavily polluting container-ship over the Pacific Ocean ?

Guardian: In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood

The brave and resourceful small girl in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons, is called Titty. But not, we learn, in the new film version being made by the BBC. There she will be renamed Tatty, to avoid “too many sniggers”.

It’s not the first time this indignity has befallen Titty, who was named after the traditional English fairytale, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, in a more innocent age. (According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word “tits” only started being associated with breasts in about 1928.) She was rechristened Kitty when the story was televised by the BBC in 1963, though she re-emerged with her original name in the 1974 film adaptation, and in a later radio broadcast in 2012.

Names have long been a hazard in children’s literature. ...

“Ejaculate”, another potentially troublesome word, was at one time popular with authors as an alternative to “exclaimed”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – not quite a children’s author but always loved by young readers – used it 23 times in his Sherlock Holmes stories, most arrestingly in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), when Watson, after dozing off in the great detective’s study, reports that “a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up”.

As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified. More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.

“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.

Something similar, again involving a cockerell-shaped fairground attraction, takes place in Angela Thirkell’s 1939 novel The Brandons. This example of light fiction was aimed not at children but at a largely female, middle-class audience whose ultra-respectability amounted to another form of assumed literary innocence.

...

Today, double entendres are the regular stuff of comedy, even when writing for children. When AA Milne referred to Pooh “poohing in the sun” in a poem in The House at Pooh Corner, he unleashed decades of quiet merriment among parents and grandparents aware of how the meaning had changed since they were six. But perhaps the most devoted Milne fans reading to children now would draw the line at two American spin-offs, both picture books: Marlene Brown’s Cooking with Pooh (1995) and Isabel Gaines’s Pooh Gets Stuck (1998). Those earlier, unconscious verbal slips were so much funnier.

Ugh...

And from the earlier, related story:

This is not the first time the character’s name has been modified to avoid smirks: in a 1963 film adaptation, she became Kitty. And book publishers have made similar adjustments to children’s books in recent years: Fanny in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree is now Frannie, and cousin Dick is now cousin Rick, while Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan is now Ned.

Maybe, just maybe, authors wrote in the past using perfectly normal English words and perfectly normal names, and readers read their works without breaking out into fits of giggles every five seconds because...they weren't sex-obsessed potty-brained idiots.

Personally I'm against censorship of any kind of past works, without the author's own explicit permission, which if they're dead, they obviously can't now give, but some reasons make more sense than others.

Image: http://tygertale.com/2014/02/11/the-black-dossier-return-of-the-golliwogg/

The removal of the golliwogs from Blyton for example, is understandable insofar as they were based upon traditional racist stereotypes.  The offence there makes sense.  But Dick ?  Dick is only offensive if we choose to make it offensive.  And just what are we telling children by stripping this perfectly innocent language from their literature ?  And most of these usages historically were innocent, whatever the Guardian's writer may want to infer.

Just grow the fuck up people, and stop destroying our language.

Fair Observer* on Ukraine's Financial Difficulties

Ukraine on Brink of Financial Collapse

Will Europe allow a bankrupt Ukraine to fall back under Russian domination?

Ukraine is lost either way.  It's become an expendable pawn in the new Cold War.  Sorry.

Ukraine is on the brink of financial collapse. The country is unable to meet interest payments. Its gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 6.8% in 2014 and is expected to fall by an even greater extent this year. Meanwhile, it has to defend itself against a neighbor that guaranteed its borders as recently as 1994.

That sucks.

Instead of stepping forward to help Ukraine financially, the European Union (EU) and the United States are both leaving the job to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

I'm shocked.

The IMF is offering Ukraine $40 billion, whereas the EU says it can only manage $2 billion.

No !  Not the IMF !  Never !

The European Union has already extended 40 times as much credit to Greece as it has given to Ukraine, whose population is four times that of Greece. If this ratio reflects the EU’s real priority, it is unbalanced. GDP per head in Greece is about three times that of Ukraine.

Did I not mention already that the West doesn't give a shit about the people of Ukraine ?

Like Greece, Ukraine has a lot to do in order to create a functioning and efficient legal and administrative system, stamp out corruption and collect taxes fully and fairly. But Ukraine has to do this while recovering from the effects of a communist system that was imposed on it from outside since 1919, whereas Greece has been the democratic shaper of its own policies for many years.

Fuck you.

Of course, Greece is in the EU and the euro and Ukraine is not, but both countries are in Europe and aspire to a democratic European future.

Aspire away, do...for so long as the Union lasts anyways.

Furthermore Ukraine had it borders guaranteed in the Budapest Declaration of 1994 by EU countries, Russia and the US, in return for giving up nuclear weapons.

Ukraine trusted the West to come through on its promises ?  Bless.

Despite this, Ukraine was invaded and a portion of its territory was annexed in 2014 by Russia, because Kiev wanted to make a modest cooperation agreement with the EU.

That's what happened alright.

Notwithstanding this, the EU is now being stingy in helping Ukraine manage its financial crisis, while instead being fixated on the drama in Athens.

Urm, it was stingy, then.  No, 'stingy' doesn't do it justice.  They were willing to let Ukraine crash and burn rather than work with Yanukovych on any kind of open terms.  They willingly let Putin hold the country's economy hostage.

Ukrainians believe they have a European destiny and are prepared to die for it.

Are they really ?

The Russian leadership, on the other hand, believes that Ukraine, with its Russian-speaking minority, is in their sphere of influence. Moscow sees a link up of Ukraine with the European Union as a form of foreign interference in its own backyard.

Yup.  That's exactly right.  And they made that 100% clear from the beginning.

One would have to respond that this view is not in accordance with Russia’s guarantee to Ukraine in 1994, nor with international law.

Nuclear weapons trump international law every time.  Nations seek them for a reason.  The established powers want to maintain a monopoly on them for a reason.  Oh, and the Russians lied.

The entire post-World War II European security order rests on acceptance of international law. Similarly, any prospect of voluntary nuclear disarmament in the future depends on solemn obligations—like the 1994 Budapest Declaration—being honored.

Clearly, we're fucked.


*  No, I'd never heard of them before either.

No Shit, Sherlock

Erm, I knew this when I was young enough to count my age on my fucking fingers...  But now, you come out with this, and...won't act on it in my lifetime, should I live a century longer.

Chemicals deemed safe to humans may blend lethally together inside the human body to cause cancer, a report says.

Researchers, including New Zealand scientist Dr Linda Gulliver, have released findings into possible links between common chemicals and the development of cancer.

Their results, published in the journal Carcinogenesis, show mixtures of chemicals used in our environment may be acting in concert with each other inside the body to trigger the disease.

Gulliver, from Otago University’s faculty of medicine, says on the back of the findings of the Halifax Project, “considerable attention” needs to be given to investigating the concerning links.

A high-profile taskforce was formed in 2013 by the international organisation Getting to Know Cancer, which was concerned that cancer research was focused primarily on the role of heritable and lifestyle factors as triggers.

This is despite evidence that as many as one in five cancers may be caused by chemical exposures in the environment that are not related to personal lifestyle choices.

Chemicals are tested for carcinogenic links, but only one at a time, leaving questions around the possibility that a fusion of these chemicals may instead be causing cancer.

Bloody bollocking hell !

For no reason whatsoever, here's a cute bunny-rabbit off the Internetz...

Blondfire: Where The Kids Are

Oh God, help us all...


Millennials Will Overtake Baby Boomers to Become America’s Biggest Generation

There’s a lot of them: 75 million total, in fact.

Millennials, or individuals born between 1981 and 1997, are set to become the most populous generation in the U.S. this year, eclipsing the baby boomer generation, according to newly-released data from the U.S. Census Bureau cited in a Pew Research Center report.

Baby boomers, or those born from 1946 to 1964, will drop into second place and then third place by 2028, when Generation X (those born between 1965 to 1980) will beat out baby boomers.

The 74.9 million people born as a result of a post-World War II population boom — hence the name baby boomers — are seeing their numbers decline through increasing mortality rates, while millennials are seeing an upsurge in their population from immigration, the Pew findings show.