In the news

Drugs, kids should do drugs.

My personal experience with martial arts is that with regular training you feel slightly more grounded in a situation that can escalate to violence. That means you are more likely to have a calm and steady manner when things get tense, improving your chances of resolving things by words only. There is always the chance that when stressed or anxious, people can misread you as aggressive.

EDIT: Not saying it could have made a difference to that girl in Cornwall.

Preach.

What's going on in Poland is awful--the government trying to effectively destroy the judiciary. It's very worrying where this could lead.

Yeah Poland government has gone totally nuts, first they want to completely ban abortion, now go against judiciary.

All again thanks to a vote for "traditional values" and "no refugees". Those two things seem to correlate highly with suppression of human rights.

Sad to see this happening, Poland has had enough troubles as it is. An acquaintance of mine voted for the ruling party and she said she feels really ashamed about it now :(

I find 'Notes from Poland' is a really good source of condensed news in english that are covering this quite well - https://www.facebook.com/notesfrompoland/

some of the tangental changes from PiS are equally depressing - removing opposing voices from the state-owned media channels (both staff and commentary).

for example, in relation to peaceful protests outside parliament on saturday (completely peaceful, i was there with my partner and baby): 'The opposition tries to organise a coup against the democratically elected government' was one of the headlines on the news ticker on TVP (equivalent-ish of BBC). this when PiS are quite literally breaking/trying to break the constitution...

Bikes, kids should ride bikes.

Ftfy. When'dya last see kids on bikes fighting eh?

wac etc.

mansplaining world champion piers "may you get torn to bits by angry she-bears" morgan.

When'dya last see kids on bikes fighting eh?

He'd know, he is one...

Hah.

Here's a headline I never expected to see.

Dem's big kids!

He was there for 3 days apparently

Taking a fucking selfie!
I don't suppose he suffered from dehydration though.

I don't suppose he suffered from dehydration though.

Ha!

Interesting insight in to Mrs Thatcher's views on crime.

She insisted that the Moors murderers should never be released:
“I do not think that either of these prisoners should ever be released from custody. Their crime was the most hideous and cruel in modern times,” she wrote on Brittan’s proposal.

but wrote to Brezhnev in 1982 about Rudolph Hess:
“There is to my mind no justification for keeping Hess in prison any longer. He is 88. He has been in prison for 40 years. He has been without the company of other prisoners for over 16 years. Humanitarian reasons demand that no one should be treated this way,”

To be fair to her the US and France took the same view of Hess.

She probably felt kinship with Hess.

Interesting insight in to Mrs Thatcher's views on crime.

What is the insight?

That she was a Nazi who kept Hindley and Brady behind bars in order to cover up her own involvement in their crimes. Obviously.

The Moors murderers personally and directly attacked their victims.

Hess may have directed violence but would not personally be a threat, especially beyond 70 after decades of incarceration.

Not defending Hess - he was, after all, a war criminal - but it's worth remembering that he had flown to Scotland in May 1941, just before Barbarossa started in June that year, to try to open peace negotiations with Britain, and spent the rest of the war as a POW. (His reasons weren't altrusitic - he didn't think Germany could survive a battle on two fronts).

The Jews were having a pretty shitty time of it already, but systematic mass shootings started after Barbarossa started later in 1941, and the 'final solution' was formulated in January 1942.

So conceivably the reason the UK, the US and France were all in favour of his release is because they didn't hold him responsible for the Holocaust.

Both are cases of a special kind of evil. It's possible to argue that Thatcher is showing some kind of inconsistency by viewing and acting on the two remarkable cases differently. Personally I'm not sure, but it would take a whole lot of digging in to some pretty murky stuff to come to a well founded conclusion.