Bird Pictures and Other Stuff

Sharing some of the best recent finds from the internet, and also some of my own photographs.

INTRODUCTION

I have some bird pictures to show you from earlier today, and also a lot of fabulous pieces I want to share with you. I will start with the sharing and finish with the pictures.

NET NUGGETS

I start with a gem from whyevolutionistrue, titled “An open letter to Charlotte Allen, an ignorant, evolution-dissing writer“, which takes the person it is addressed to to task for a poorly written, ill-informed (indeed virtually uninformed) article.

All the rest of the pieces I am sharing with you have to do with…

AUTISM

I start with a piece from a blog which is new to me, anotherspectrum, and a piece title “I am atheism“. The piece tackles a particularly vile commercial put out by anti-autistic hate group masquerading as autism charity Autism Speaks, the title of which was “I am Autism”.

Another new find is Discovering My Authentic Self, and I point you to “Autism Resources“, which is precisely what you might expect from the title.

My third autism related share comes with a challenge attached. It is Autism Mom’s piece “THE CONFUSION OVER THE LITTLE WHEELCHAIR” which tackles a problem that the recognised symbol for disability reinforces – the assumption that disability always means physcial disability. The challenge is this: can you come up with a replacement symbol for disability that acknowledges the full range of disabilities? If you create a post about your idea, linking back to this post, and I am impressed by it, I will reblog you.

I end this section with a reference to The Autistic Bill of Rights. The success of the original post on this theme from stimtheline has resulted in a shareable image from the same source (I printed one out at the library today), reproduced below:

Please follow my example in sharing this as widely as you can!

INFOGRAPHICS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

For the first time in its 154 year history Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack has a woman on it’s front cover. Anya Shrubsole who bowled England to victory in the 2017 World Cup is the woman thus honoured:

Identifor produced this gem earlier today

Finally we come to my photographs…

Autism, Disability, Mathematics, Religion, Politics

Various links as indicated by the title of this post, the solution to one problem and a new problem. All topped off with the some photographs.

INTRODUCTION

This post features links, puzzles and pictures. The title refers to the subjects officiallly covered within the post.

A NEW AUTISM RESOURCE

The Neurodivergent Rebel has produced a post that could become a goldmine. Titled “Web Resources” she describes it as a growing list and ends the post with this:

This is a growing list. Please send suggestions to NeurodivergentRebel@gmail.com

If you can think of anything to help the Neurodivergent Rebel expand this list please use the quote out above, which if you click on it will open up an email message addressed to her which you can then complete.

DISABLED PEOPLE ON BUSES

I have two links in this section. Firstly to a piece from Transport For All about Transport for London’s rExcl: proof faithless council, not union, to blame for Birmingham bin strike Excl: proof faithless council, not union, to blame for Birmingham bin strikeesponse to the Supreme Court’s ruling on wheelchair priority spaces on buses. This piece is titled “First steps from TfL in response to Supreme Court’s ruling over the Wheelchair priority space on buses”

Secondly, from Buzzfeed, comes this piece with the self explanatory title “Disabled People Say They Are Still Being Denied Priority Spaces On Buses Despite A High Court Ruling”.

TWO FROM THE SKWAWKBOX

The Skwawkbox is a regular source of excellent material, and these two pieces are no exception:

BHAM COUNCIL MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO SCAPEGOAT CLANCY TO RENEGE ON BIN DEAL – A follow up to the story that I reblogged from this site recently about a dispute in Birmingham.
The second piece concerns the make up of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee – the detail contained in the title “EXCL: PRO-CORBYN ASLEF, FBU TO TAKE NEC SEATS” means that at least for the present, and for the very first time, the NEC will have a pro-Corbyn majority. Here is an ASLEF related picture:

SWETA OJHA ON RELIGION

Sweta has produced an excellent poem titled “If Religion Schools You To War” and from it I quote the all-important final verse:

And if –
Religion still schools you to war
I, an atheist deserve an applaud.

MATHEMATICS

This section will include two links, the solution to one puzzle and a second puzzle. Both the links come from the Robert Loves Pi blog, and they are:

A Zonohedron with 7802 Faces – another of his remarkable constructions using Stella 4D: Polyhedron Navigator.
A Four-Color Flag – exactly what the title suggests, and here is said flag:

PUZZLES

On Thursday in a post titled “Links, Pics and Puzzles” I included this puzzle:

The solution is 96% + 96% of 4%. 96% of 4 is (4 x 96)/100 = 3.84. 96 + 3.84 = 99.84, os the answer is that if the death rate in surviving species had been the same as the overall extinction rate then 99.84% of all living things would have died in that event.

For my next puzzle I turn once again to Brilliant and offer up the following:

I will probably provide a solution on Wednesday.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Nar Valley Park – this development is now approaching completion.

Town Hall — The next four pictures were taken on Thursday night – I had been acting as stand-in host on my aunt;s behalf, welcoming an airbnb guest to her house, and it was getting dark as I returned.

Science and Nature (and other stuff)

Some recent internet finds and some of my own photographs.

INTRODUCTION

This post features links to some recent internet finds and some of my own photographs.

SOME SCIENCE AND NATURE LINKS

I start with a piece from mongabay which argues that “The Sixth Great Extinction” is actually “The First Biotacide“. Below is a picture from this article:

Steller’s Sea Cow holds the the world record for rapidity of extinction. Illustration from “Extinct monsters,” London: Chapman & Hall, 1896. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The second piece in this section comes from thewildlifeplanet and is titled “Italian Super-Volcano Approaches Eruption“

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

I have five links to share in this section:

vlogexpedition have a piece about the world’s longest railway journey – that along the Trans-Siberian railway.
My next piece comes from Vox Political, who got direct from the person whose story it is, Paula Peters. The title of the piece “Bus driver subjects disability activist to humiliating discrimination” gives you a good idea of the nature of the story. British law on this matter is unequivocal – the bus driver is legally obliged to give wheelchair users priority over mothers with buggies (this courtesy of a court ruling in January). Given the completeness of the information Paula provides, the bus company in question have only one option open to them both legally and morally – they must sack the offending driver and must make sure that all their drivers are aware of their responsibilities to disabled passengers.
I am treating my last three pieces in this section together, as all are connected with London Underground, all come from indy100.com and all have been pressed on to my London transport themed website. They are respectively:
“This is Officially the best Tube line”
“Quiz: Can you name the London Underground line by its colour?“
“This gif exposes the lies the London Tube map is telling you”

FAB FOUR FINAL LINKS

First in this section comes a link to RobertLovesPi’s Blog for this piece titled “A Twisted Expansion of the Truncated Octahedron“, which features a very cool graphic.

The Skwawkbox have produced an excellent piece titled “ATTACKS ON PIDCOCK SHOW MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF RIGHT – IN OR OUT OF LABOUR” Laura Pidcock is the recently elected MP for Northwest Durham and she has been making waves for her unashamed hostility to Tories and her criticisms of the cosiness and clubbiness of the House of Commons.

I started this post with a couple of science and nature related links, and now as we approach my photographs we are finishing where we started with stuff about nature, first of all Cindy Knoke with a wonderful post about a castle that has been dedicated to raptors, titled “Castle Rapture“.

With the last word before my photographs is Anna, who has recently posted part 13 of her amazing Paradise on Earth series, this time focussing on some of the smaller creatures who live in and around Trosa.

PHOTOGRAPHS

I will start this set of photographs with some of the smaller creatures I have recently captured, before finishing with some general pictures. These pictures were all taken yesterday.

EXCLUSIVE #Disability Discrimination means Son is removed from Home?

This is a story that needs to be read and shared…

jaynelinney

The following true tale is the introduction into what will be a series of posts regarding a seeming miscarriage of justice and potential disability discrimination; names have been changed to protect the identities of these involved. The purpose of this post is to help the family concerned achieve real justice; please share as widely as possible.

Alison is a single parent of14 year old Adam, both live with various diagnosed and pending diagnosis health disorders including Fibromyalgia and Elhers Danos; Alison is also Autistic and symptoms suggest Adam is as well.

Due to Adams health, he found it difficult to cope with school from the beginning and despite special educational needs intervention, including one to one lessons he struggled experiencing bullying which resulted in him developing depression. These experiences became worse during Adams transition from junior to senior school, so much so that in 2015, Alison began to home educate…

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Marxism 2017: Two Meetings About Disability

Continuing my personal account of #Marxism2017 with two disability themed meetings.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to this continuation of my series about Marxism 2017. This post focusses specifically on the two meetings on disability, which took place during the second and fifth slots on the Saturday.

DISABILITY AND RESISTANCE

This meeting was scheduled for room 3E, but when the main lift at Student Central broke down and resisted all efforts to get it working again it was rescheduled for the ground floor. As soon as it was known that the lift was busted the organisers of the festival made it clear that refunds would be available for those who thought they could no longer enjoy the event (there was only one ground floor location remotely suitable for meetings, and three meetings in each session were scheduled for rooms on the 3rd floor, which was inacessible to the physically disabled without the lift working.). Although the ersatz meeting venue was not ideal it was the least bad solution for this meeting.

This meeting was packed full of inspirational stories from various campaigns. As an autistic person I identify particularly strongly with struggles for disability rights. I am a member of group of whom (UK figures – feel free to give me others from elsewhere in the world if you know them) 74% are unemployed, and 85% are under-employed.

Here are some pictures:

Amy advises the panel — Amy, organiser of the festival, speaking to the panel before the meeting started.

HOW CAN DISABLED PEOPLE WIN LIBERATION – RODDY SLORACH

The lift appeared to working again during lunch, but then packed up again and could not be coaxed back to life again, so again we were in the ersatz venue. There was an additional problem this time in that the machines in the cafe outside which we were based were shutting down, creating a lot of background noise. Although 6 hours had elapsed since the end of the panel meeting covered above this meeting felt in many ways like a continuation of the other, with every contribution being inspiring. Although I did not speak myself I was pleased to note that three other autistic people did make contributions. I conclude this post with a few photos:

With two meetings being held facing it I got a good look at this ‘internal mural’.

Marxism 2017 – Day 3: Outline

An outline of day 3 at Marxism 2017, setting the stage for two further posts.

INTRODUCTION

Wel come to this latest post in my series about Marxism 2017. The Saturday at Marxism is always the busiest day of the festival. For this reason I am doing three posts about the day, this one, one that covers the two disability themed meetings I attended and one which will also cover a meeting from Sunday devoted to Ian Angus’ two talks, “Facing the Anthropocene” and “A Redder Shade oif Green”.

THE TIMETABLE

Here to show you the scale of the event is the timetable for thia day:

IS A ROBOT AFTER YOUR JOB? MARTIN UPCHURCH – FRIENDS MEETING HOUSE

For the Saturday we were using venues at three locations, Student Central, The Institute of Education and Friends Meeting House. This meeting took place in the Hilda Clark room, which is on the first floor of Friends Meeting House. The answer to the question in the meeting title is “probably not”. As yet robots still require humans to watch them to ensure gthat they function as they are supposed to, and that is likely to remain the case for some time. Here are some photographs:

It was announced during this meeting that the main lift had failed in Student Central and gthat as yet the engineer had been unable to fix it. Therefore the panel meeting on disability was moved to a ground-floor location because the backup lifts only went up to the first and second floors (duh!). Barring a brief period at lunchtime this main lift did not work again during the rest of the event.

DISABILITY AND RESISTANCE

I will be dealing with this meeting and the last one of the day in a separate post. For the moment here are a picture from the first and a couple of lunchtime pics:

Banner3 — The woman in front of the banner is Paula Peters of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC).

Picnic — The Norwich & East Anglia picnic. A small donation buys you a meal – the guide prices are £3 waged and £1 unwaged, and as someone who is employed part-time I split the difference with £2.

Canary — The canary is the symbol of Norwich City FC, and this specimen can be seen at a fair distance.

HOW THE MEDIA LOST ON JUNE 8TH – IAN TAYLOR (STUDENT CENTRAL)

The mainstream media were virtually unanimous in predicting (and in most cases making it obvious that they wanted) a Tory landslide in the June 8th General Election. The fact that the Tories ended up without a majority at all, and that Labour increased their presence by 30MPs was one in the eye for MSM. Newspapers are losing readers at a vast rate, and readers are increasingly not taking their papers on trust. Since this meeting happened we have seen Theresa May begging for policy ideas (“here is a copy of our manifesto!”), and a Prime Ministers Questions where both leaders were absent, and Emily Thornberry starred for Labour while Damien Green for the Tories managed the less than challenging feat of doing a better job than Theresa would have done. Here are some pictures:

FACING THE ANTHROPOCENE – IAN ANGUS – INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

I am covering this meeting and Ian Angus’ other meeting which took place a day later in a separate post. For the moment here are a few of the pictures from this one:

Geological timescale updated — The first seven pictures in this section provide the facts that show us tgo be in the Anthropocene.

Marx quote — 150 years on this remains an excellent summary of our responsibilities tro our planet – and one that has been neglected shamefully.

HOW CAN DISABLED PEOPLE WIN LIBERATION? – RODDY SLORACH – SC

My final meeting of the day was back at Student Central, and as with the earlier panel meeting had been relocated due to the faulty lift and the fact that the backup only went as far up as the second floor. As I will be covering this meeting in more detail in another post, suffice to say that it was an inspirational end to the day. Here to end this post is the chair advertising Roddy’s book:

Disability groups hail court’s support for wheelchair user on bus : Welfare Weekly.

A victory for disability rights (brought to you by Welfare Weekly and DWP Examination by way of the Guardian)…

Bus drivers must now pressure passengers to make room in ruling described by Doug Paulley as ‘significant cultural change’. This article titled “Disability groups hail court’s support for wheelchai…

Source: Disability groups hail court’s support for wheelchair user on bus : Welfare Weekly.

Southern’s rail plans will breach Equality Act, says disabled access expert | DisabledGo News and Blog

More trouble for #SouthernFail. They should lose their franchise forthwith, either being run direct by the government or being put under the umbrella of TFL…

Plans by an under-fire rail company to change the way it staffs its trains will lead to “unacceptable” and repeated breaches of the Equality Act by denying disabled passengers the support they need to travel, it has been claimed. Southern – which operates train services across parts of south London and southern England – is planning to replace conductors with “on board supervisors” (OBSs), whose job will not include stepping onto the platform at stations. Campaigners fear that introducing these supervisors will mean that disabled passengers who need assistance on platforms at unstaffed stations could be left stranded and unable to board their train. Southern is also planning to allow OBS trains to operate with only a driver in “exceptional circumstances” – which is likely to make travel even harder for disabled people – and has also admitted that two-fifths of its trains are already driver only operated (DOO). Southern is embroiled in a long-running industrial action over its plans to

Source: Southern’s rail plans will breach Equality Act, says disabled access expert | DisabledGo News and Blog

Open letter: Deaf & disabled people 4 #JeremyCorbyn. List of signatures

The full list of signatures and the text of the letter is now available:

Source: Open letter: Deaf & disabled people 4 #JeremyCorbyn. List of signatures

If you scroll far enough down the list of signatures you get to this…

Marxism 4: Sunday

My account of the Sunday at Marxism 2016.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to my fourth post about Marxism 2016 (see here, here and here), focussing on Sunday. Like the previous post, this one will be formatted slightly differently from my usual Marxism posts, again because I wish to focus on two particular meetings.

GETTING THERE AND THE DAY’S PLAN

It being Sunday I was even more generous than usual in allowing for transport problems. In keeping with Sutcliffe’s Second Law of Travelling by Public Transport I therefore had my best journey of the week.

139 — A sculpture outside Euston station.

To help explain both my schedule for the day and the rest of this post here is the timetable for Sunday, with my choices marked…

What I am going to do now is write briefly about meetings 1,2 and 5 before covering the two disability meetings in a bit more detail.

MEETINGS 1, 2 AND 5

My first meeting, Kate Hurford on White supremacy and the creation of “race” – where does racism come from? took place in Clarke Hall, which is on level three of the institute. The speaker was not well but still managed to deliver a very good introduction after which there was a lively debate.

For the second meeting I had chosen Shahrar Ali on How left is green politics? Although I am grateful that both he and Natalie Bennett were speaking at this event, and regret that a timetable clash prevented me from hearing Natalie speak I felt that there were important questions not dealt with, such as the roles of greens in office in various parts of the world (like the Aussie green party doing deals with the Liberal National Party, that country’s equivalent of the Tories). However, this caveat aside I enjoyed this meeting, and have no regrets about attending.

I will be covering meetings 3 and 4 in the next section. Meeting 5, for which I had chosen religion was an interesting meeting.

146 — Kate Hurford and the chair just before the start of their meeting

148 — Shahrar Ali and the chair of his meeting.

152 — Anna Gluckstein (right as you look) and the chair of her meeting on religion.

TWO MEETINGS ABOUT DISABILITY

Both of these two meetings, the first a panel meeting and the second the official launch of Roddy Slorach’s book “A Very Capitalist Condition” were excellent and in their different ways inspiring.

The first meeting started with a number of speakers talking about what they are doing, and about various campaigns before then being opened up for discussion.

Roddy’s meeting (we have previously shared a platform at a public meeting in Norwich) began with him introducing ideas that are contained within his book, which I have since read and enjoyed.

I suffered a double frustration because I had carefully planned contributions for both meetings (there are as yet no meetings at Marxism focussing specifically on autism, although this year the Silberman book was on display – if anyone involved in the organisation the event is reading this please take this as a hint) and did not get to make either although I indicated clearly on both occasions.

AN OUTLINE OF THE UNMADE CONTRIBUTIONS

I had planned two different but linked contributions, each tailored to the specific meeting in question. For the first meeting, which focussed exclusively on campaigns My contribution would have covered the following:

A full introduction mentioning my role at NAS West Norfolk and the fact that I am #actuallyautistic and giving details of this blog
A skate through some of NAS West Norfolk’s activities including a brief mention of the Positive Autism Awareness Conference and the upcoming launch of adult activities and the inaugural Autism Awareness Cup.
Finishing with an account of the campaign around the Fermoy unit and our role in it, emphasisng that the Fermoy remains open.

For Roddy’s meeting I would again have given a full introduction before going on to cover:

The envisaged but not yet fully realized sequence of: Awareness – Understanding – Acceptance.
Emphasised that autism is a condition not a disorder – it is not a malfunctiion, it is a different operating system .
Might have produced the line ‘nothing about us without us’
Planned to finish by emphasising that different is not a synonym for lesser.

I finish this section by re-emphasising that these were two excellent meetings.

THE LAST EVENING

I stayed fairly late after the end of the final meeting, and was delighted to make the acquaintance of several people involved in disability activism during this period.

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