love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Luckily I've never knowingly listened to the cunt's melt-tastic music

Corbyn fans out there saying maybe it would be an idea to stop gaslighting Black and Muslim people who want overeager policing and structural discrimination towards them acknowledged by the leadership?

I've heard MT is the musical equivalent of a Dunty barbershop quartet covering Belle & Sebastien. Never heard either tbh!

I'd never tell anyone not to vote for Labour, and some smug prick telling you it's practically your duty to vote for them really gets my blood up.

scientists have been warning us for years about tundra melt

lol!

I am low-key Twitter pals with the great man but I certainly don't engage him on politics, lol (and not because I completely agree!)

So basically an semi-informed semi-celebrity called Max is going to indulge in a bit of vote-shaming every Thursday from now on?

Meanwhile, schools basically back to normal in September with all the difficult stuff left to headteachers to decide.

imo we should all hold hands and forgive the melt friends we all have, they know not what they do

alternative point of view: execute the fuckers, they will never be of any worth

my son is going back tomorrow. they've closed the dinner hall and food is brought to the classroom, they have a serious social distancing regime as much as is possible for an autism school. They have fucked off local authority transport and doing in-house transport. He is only going one day a week to acclimatise him to the new regime. Barnsley where about three quarters of the staff come from is a Rona hotspot, so I'm slightly nervous about all this still.

i know how important respite can be for everybody involved, best to hold onto that thought and trust the teachers to do their best

not had a day off for 5 months and I'm running out of t shirts and on the verge of becoming a f/t smoker again so a day is needed!

it's nice to know that Tundra sometimes takes a break from venturing on a Fantastic Voyage up his own arsehole to do smalltalk and make great music, what a relief!

obv also Alex is missing the fuck out of school!

meanwhile, what? the? fuck? does? this? mean???

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eb6dWfIWoAE23g-?format=jpg&name=900x900

"i encourage the Prime Minister to go for it, but also i am putting you on notice that i will say 'i told you so' when this thing i'm encouraging you to do goes tits up"

must be a lawyer ting

Johnson has worked out how to play that one back at him now, I'm surprised they're still going with it.

good news chaps

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2020/07/01/boris-new-deal-creates-a-loophole-for-developers-to-ignore-biodiversity/

'terminus house' the most appropriately-named building in a while

when he isn't being Schrödinger's Melt he's saying he supports what the tory govt are doing but he's morally superior to them, because he feels bad for how many needless deaths their bungling inaction is causing?

what i will say for sir kier is that he is playing a bad hand badly

good luck with the school thing calz

cheers

as a fifty push-up real man he Starmzy doesn't wanna stop the lads going dahn the boozah to catch the ronah

He's following the polling there, definitely. The majority of the country agrees, dunno if that's lockdown fatigue, worry over livelihoods or that people have absorbed the government messaging that really everything is going to be fine now.

Be interesting to see how that breaks down according to region, though.

i opened that biodiversity report btw, with one part particularly in mind

In the recent past the GB has intercepted two species (Asian hornet Vespa velutina
and raccoon Procyon lotor), eradicated three species (African clawed toad Xenopus
laevis, fathead minnow Pimephales promelas and black bullhead Ameiurus melas)
and eradication is underway for a further four (water primrose Ludwigia grandiflora,
topmouth gudgeon Pseudorasorba parva, monk parakeet Myiopsitta monachus,
American bullfrog Lithobates catesbeianus).
GB’s first contingency plan for an INNS, the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) has been
adopted and measures implemented, leading to the destruction of two confirmed nests
in England since 2016 so far preventing their spread into the UK (Defra 2017).
On a larger-scale, the GB Ruddy Duck Eradication Programme, which began in 2005,
is almost complete. The population has been reduced from 4,400 to around 20-25
birds. Control is ongoing.

tf is wrong with monk parakeets and ruddy ducks u fucking loons

also raccoons! altho i can see why they'd be disruptive. but raccoons!

xp combo of lockdown fatigue and the government somehow conveying the impression that they've got covid done and wow a thousand deaths a week became background noise even quicker than I predicted

there is wild colony of parakeets in my locality, they've been there decades apparently and it was nothing to do with jimi hendrix. What a beautiful sight they are.

I don't know what Greenpeace's endgame is imago, roll back to a pre-Norman ecosystem? Pre-Roman? Pre the last ice age land bridge?

If they go after the wallabies in the peak district I'm gonna form an armed militia to shoot on sight tho

What a beautiful sight they are.

Noisy fuckers tho

the parakeets you usually see are ring-necked, and the bat is def out of the bag there

monk parakeets are smaller and newer. absolutely no idea why they need eradicating. i suspect they don't

*cat, even

Monk parakeets don't seem to be much of a threat to 'native' wildlife but apparently they build large communal nests that can disrupt electricity supplies

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/24/monk-parakeets-culled-dangers-species

The key problem is the huge communal nests built by the monk parakeets as these can cause blackouts when built on pylons and then drenched by rain. The US has already spent millions of dollars removing nests for this reason. The nests have also been linked to fires.

I assume this isn't all parakeets - our living room is at treetop level and we've had a couple of parakeets hanging out there for much of lockdown and no one is fucking with them at this point.

https://www.windycityparrot.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Monk-parakeets-nest-transformer-blog-2.jpg https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/04/17/nyregion/12Journal.600.jpg

What's wrong with Ruddy Ducks?

Those don't look especially safe, give them time and the monk parakeet will probably end up eradicating itself.

otm

The majority of the country agrees, dunno if that's lockdown fatigue, worry over livelihoods or that people have absorbed the government messaging that really everything is going to be fine now.

About half the population round here is milling around as usual, no masks and no distancing and bleak looks for anyone who tries to scramble out of a 1m radius, so definitely seems to me like both #1 and #3 are happening.

Re Tundra, I grimaced at that tweet and its replies, but as with another Jewish friend of mine who used to be v v Labour but hates Corbyn - I don't believe JC was antisemitic and think the claims against him were almost entirely made in horribly bad faith, but I also don't want to skate too close to implying to Jewish people that their concerns were made up by saying anything even least-worst-option about Corbyn, so... time to shrug and leave the room when these topics come up, I guess?

sorry, this post is v boring and parakeets are much better, more parakeets please

Ruddy Duck is even more sinister tbh - it's to prevent it interbreeding with the v similar White-Headed Duck in Spain. basically it's eugenics

let the birds breed however they want, your priority is protecting the fucking ecosystems u fucking racists

I wdn't throw shade on any Jewish person hating Corbyn for antisemitism, fairly or not, but the tweet upthread was pure melt realism re: how to win an election by promising not to change anything

white-headed duck are a protected species in spain and if they disappear, the ecological protections afforded to their habitat will be eroded - it is about protecting the ecosystems xp

environmentalists in having a weird platonic notion of speciation shocker

basing protection of ecosystems on the genetic preservation of a single species is absolute madness, i will not budge on this

are you seriously telling me that if we end up with ruddy/white headed miscegenated superspecies then the Spanish government will wave in the fucking bulldozers

afaict if two species can interbreed to produce fertile offspring then really are they even two species anyway