It seems different species of mammal are able to recognise that another animal is a baby/very young one, and react accordingly. We've seen exactly this from our cats when we had our first baby just over a year ago. We bred cats before hand so we're very accustomed to how cats react to their kittens, and they reacted in exactly the same way to our newborn's cries.

It's probably fair to say that the horse understands that the goat is young and playing and responds to that, rather than thinking it's being attacked. There's such a huge size difference that the horse wouldn't be feeling threatened or anything anyway. Animals like this do play. Horses like company and are social animals, as are goats. It's no surprise they'll play together when they can :0)

As I'm reading today's articles about the situation in Greece/Europe, Keynes' "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" came to mind:

We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.

The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life- will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

The star powers are all explained here (linked from the FAQ).

I like your avatar, too, and recognise both Chris Barrie as Arnold J. Rimmer and Mr. Flibble Quarantine was one of the best episodes ever.

What slayer track is that? I don't recognise it.

also, that's a way better tone than I'd have expected from a "tiny pink guitar"!

Huzzah, it's wonderful that people are being recognised for knowledge!

Congratulations Sir Martyn!

Idk, I think it starts off life as an ironic exclamation and sort of slips into your vocab. Personally I prefer to spell it out - "el oh el". As lol is an acronym I believe this is probably a more proper pronunciation, but it also sounds more deliberate, and therefore ironic.

But yes. It is exactly replacing that faked laugh that we produce both as a sort of social courtesy to others who made an effort to make us smile, or to communicate that we recognise a humourous situation. Why use it? Well, why use any colloquialism/slang?

Frankly I'd rather be the dickhead that uses it than the dickhead that thinks adding "Selfie" to the dictionary represents an erosion of the language. I really have no patience for those that seem to think we should enclose our language in a glass case and play with it delicately lest we damage the exhibit.

In my opinion - and i think Brand's too, though i don't want to put words in his mouth - the motivation to act based upon nothing but profit is the largest and most significant drain on happiness and especially the advancement of us as a people. We need a revolution of principle, a revolution of the mind, we cannot keep on doing what we are doing when it is so clearly not working.

We have been pouring the results of our productivity into bank balances for so long now. If our productivity was represented by food instead of money, we would have been putting corn into a hole in the ground for 30 years and wondering why people are hungry. In a system based on corn, prosperity of a nation is based upon the free and active flow of corn.

I ask this question of you, because i don't know the answer. Do you think that we can continue pouring our productivity into big holes that other people sit on for "whenever they might need it?" Is it reasonable to build a system based on flow, but let huge clumps of it gather and expect everything to keep running quickly and without turbulence?

It just doesn't work anymore. The very rich don't realise it yet because they can afford to pay to avoid it, the quite rich notice it when they sit in traffic for example, but eventually things will become so clogged up that they will have no choice but to notice that there are no quality schools, hospitals, roads, airports, shops nor people to do their shopping, cleaning, cooking and driving. We all benefit, including the rich, if money is put into improving our infrastructure and facilities. We all benefit when productivity is flowing freely and quickly through the system. The opposite of that is called a depression, and it's when people don't have confidence in spending their money... we know that, we accept it, people were repeating it during the recession. How come we can't recognise the polar opposite? We're in a semi-permanent state of inverse depression, where those at the top don't have the means to spend their money, so it doesn't move.

This is an idea that needs to come from grassroots, everyone needs to come together somehow and unify over this idea. Because you can't blame any one individual for taking advantage of their fortunate position on the uneven playing field, or for fighting for a better position on the field. We all need to agree that the playing field has to be even, otherwise eventually the playing field will not be worth using.

I cannot stand this poisonous idea that you cannot ask a company for tax and here's my argument against that:
A lot of people live in the UK and a lot of people want to buy coffee and other assorted goods (starbucks, amazon). Even including tax, there is a lot of money to be made selling to these people. Let's say there is 2 billion pounds in profit available to be made by someone. That's still profit to be made by someone, and whoever offers that service to them under the correct rules makes that money.

The problem is that there's 4 billion to be made without tax, and it's cheaper to buy the politician for a billion to ensure you get the tax breaks. That is the poisoned system that psycho-capitalism has eventually produced... And it's so naive to think otherwise... so naive to think that those with billions of pounds wouldn't buy economists and lawyers, tout the favourable theories, generally spend top money on creating the right environment to make more money. Whether you think more or less tax is a good idea, surely have to agree that whatever the rules are, we adhere to them, or the system that we so carefully designed it around will fail.

Why are people so reticent to believe that we're being duped? No, surely not, it's the government, they can't possibly be lying to us. They stood in front of us, bare-faced, and told us they weren't torturing people, they had intelligence about WMDs, they weren't spying on us all. They prove themselves to be deceitful but like toddlers we trust the adult.

My hope is that this will take the form of progressive revolutions. When the food and energy start to become scarce people might start to recognise that the ONLY people who can get us out of this mess are engineers, inventors and scientists.

Maybe we will even be smart enough to put them in charge and ditch the whole idea of politics for the sake of politics all together.

A man can hope anyway. The alternative seems to be extreme left and right wing movements fighting over metaphorical ash and bones.

Co2, methane and other undesirables in the atmosphere could probably be shifted if there was a concerted global effort, doubly so if we factor in 50-100 years of technological advancement. I'm sure the task would be herculean but it would probably also be the greatest thing we ever achieved as a species! ("screw your ancient wonders, we built an air scrubber the size of Missouri!")

I used to think like this, but then I finished high school.

Seriously, anarchy is a lovely ideal. Everyone lives in peace and harmony and no-one is tramping anyone elses rights. When a job needs doing, we find someone willing to do it and compensate them (preferably with a barter system or something).

One minor problem though..

IT

DOESN'T

FUCKING

WORK.

We don't live in some kind of post-scarcity utopia. I wish we did, but that is simply not the reality of human society or history. Anarchists and libertarians seem to think that anyone who disagrees with them loves government and simply can't wait to pour their hard earned money in a military industrial complex.

I don't know anyone like that. I don't like my government, and I sure as hell don't like yours. I don't mind paying for hospitals and roads and welfare (and yeah, I don't even really give a fuck about "welfare queens" or "dole bludgers" or other mythical right wing beasties), but I fucking hate the idea that my money goes to fund the pointless "war on drugs" or on mass surveillance.

But I recognise that for all its ills, the system (for the most part) works. People today have a higher standard of living, live longer, and have more rights than at any other time in history. Some of that is down to science; some of it is because of private innovation and some of it is simply that we have changed the way our societies run through elections, etc.

What I do know is that when government becomes beholden to private interests (lobbyists in the USA) shit goes bad. But the solution to that is not to allow powerful people even more leeway to fuck over the weak.

Don't confuse disdain for lack of understanding. I understand it perfectly well, and because of this I can recognise it as nonsense.

Nevertheless, have a good Christian appropriation of the solstice

Many many moons ago when I was seventeen we started doing life drawing at my school. there were a few models they used but the most common two were a lady about thirty, nice looking, slightly plump but attractive and Alan. Alan was a thirtyish year old gay guy who was just very average looking. Physique wise he was 5' 10" or so, maybe just under 200lbs, slightly balding, wore glasses. Nothing offensive but as a seventeen year old lad I obviously started off preferring drawing boobies to schlong.

Thing is, I always drew better when drawing Alan because I just wasn't as distracted I suppose. He was a really nice guy and we got to know him pretty well over the year or so we did the class. I'd grown up doing a lot of sailing at a club with communal showers for the men so naked guys were no mystery to me. I wasn't offended by him and he certainly never did any poses like the guy in this video.

Fast forward ten years and I'm at a friend's house party. I know about half the people there and there's a lot of people from her work that I don't know. She worked at a medieval castle as a wench for their banquets and a lot of her actor colleagues were there. I kept catching the eye of this guy, forty years or so old, 5' 10" and just over 200lbs, pretty bald. You know when you get that feeling that you know someone? The face is familiar but you can't for the life of you remember where you've seen him before. Worse was the feeling that it was someone I knew quite well, not just someone I'd bumped into in the supermarket or something like that.

He looked puzzled by me too and we eventually got talking in the kitchen about where we knew each other from. We went through everything, from what we did for a job, where we'd worked, where we lived and drew blanks every time.

We went further and further back in time until he stopped, grinned and said 'you didn't go to Woodland's school did you?'

In that instant I knew exactly who he was, laughed and completely without thinking blurted 'Alan! I didn't recognise you with your clothes on!'

Of course it went quiet and I had to explain to my wife why I didn't recognise the gay guy with his clothes on (not helped by the fact that it was an all boys school). I still have paintings and drawings of him in my attic somewhere, which my wife was 'thrilled' to be shown!

Life drawing is great, and you don't need a 'fit' or attractive model. Anyone will do, in fact the more normal the better I think. It helps you look at what's there rather than any sort of ideal you might have in your head.

I will defend to the death your right to say that, but you're dead wrong. This is a comments thread, comments are welcome. I am interested in why people lost interest in 2 minutes, i want to know if their reasons were the same as mine.

I managed to sit through it, i recognise the juxtapositions and such, but it seems a laboured point. I didn't have to sit through hours of this kind of stuff, i don't associate the stereotypes with anything but stereotypes so perhaps dag (above) might be onto something.

These two ideas go hand-in-hand. It's very nice for us to sit around and swap stories of our experiences with psychedelics, but we have to recognise that we have enemies who want to steal these experiences from us. You can't on the one hand believe that drugs are fine and people should take them if they want to and on the other say, "oh hey, here's this guy who thinks everyone who uses drugs should be kidnapped and locked in a box for years; that cool - live and let live." Is that thinking really something we can even recognise as human? I don't, and we have a right to defend ourselves from it, by say, stringing its advocates up from the nearest tree. So what do we call something subhuman that deserves to be lynched?

You're notice I'm not so much of a one for universal love and brotherhood.

Have you ever heard of Anton Wilhelm Amo? No? Me neither, until last week.

I only bring this up, because he seems to have been a hell of a human being. Let me just mention some bullet points:
- enslaved as a child by the Dutch West India Company
- handed over to the Duke of Brunswick as a present
- freed, baptised and educated by the Duke
- first black man ever at a European university (Halle, later Wittenberg)
- acquired Magister degrees in philosphy and natural sciences
- fluent in six languages
- went back to Ghana after his patron died and the overall climate in Germany become considerably more reactionary than before
- died in a Dutch slave camp in Ghana

Amo was mentioned in a French documentary about the history of capitalism. Apparently, he was (one of) the first to publicly recognise the dangers of separating the economic logic from the reality of a society and human behaviour.

The fact that I had never heard his name even once prior to this documentary frustrates me to no end. The major consensus narrative all but erased him from history...

Drop the passive aggressive tone. It's not intellectual dishonesty to recognise that not all situations are the same.

Texas doesn't have a right to secede. There is no legal framework for it to do so under US law. That has nothing to do with my opinion, that is reality.

Scotland, OTOH, did have a right to secede based on the Edinburgh Agreement.

Whether they should secede is a different argument, and one of sufficient complexity that I don't feel a blanket yes or no could cover all cases.

I see no reason for Texas to secede, so I don't believe it's warranted.

I sorta wanted Scotland to secede, partly out of interest, partly because of my aforementioned dislike for monarchy, but even then I wasn't sure it was in Scotlands best interests. Since I don't live there, my interest really didn't go much beyond Groundskeeper Willie and John Oliver.


As for whether the US can learn lessons from monarchical governments, of course it can. Just because you shouldn't adopt their system of a head of state, doesn't mean there aren't aspects of their government/society that aren't vastly superior to your own (arguably broken) democracy.

To claim otherwise would be hubris.