Les Liens du Samedi!

[highlyeccentric]

Because I am still reading The Entire Internet at a great rate.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• The Queerness reviews London club night Butch, Please, which sounds fun enough, but really remarkable in that apparently there are people there as soon as doors open, and you don't have to wait around until midnight for anything interesting to happen.
  
• Scott Morrison among the highest-paid politicians in the world
  
• So, a town in Ohio woke up last week to purple water and a reassurance from water authorities that it's not dangerous 'once diluted' (with what, exactly? All the water is purple! More sound versions of the advice were to run your taps until the colour was not visible.).
  Twitter user L Ron Mexico brought a really interesting explanation of the uses and hazards of permangenate in water treatment:
  

  Ugh I’m bored and I know what happened here probably. They are using permanganate (either potassium or sodium) and overfed this shit. Thread, I guess https://t.co/puZOCMmoon

  — L Ron Mexico (@LRonMexico) June 8, 2019

  
  
  
• Sagrada Familia has finally gained council planning approval and paid a hefty backdated fine for failing to obtain it, 137 years ago.
  
• Blue Mountains World Heritage status on notice and the UN questions the plan to expand Warragambah Dam. Ugh. This is such a tangle - lord knows Warragambah is not big enough, but I am far from convinced that expanding it is a wise move. For one thing, I thought the rainfall patterns had changed such that Warragambah is no longer optimally located?
  
• America has got its long-term wish, and European NATO partners are investing in military infrastructure. Now the Trump administration is threatening the alliance because they're pissed that the europeans are building their OWN weapons instead of buying US-made.
  
• Botswana legalises homosexual sex acts in a win for lgbtq rights in Africa.
  
• In NSW, Children refused bail, held in prison for months, then found not guilty. The number of people overall held without bail and later found not guilty has risen by 30% since 2014.
  
• In the UK, NSPCC staff condemn decision to cut ties with trans activist Monroe Bergdorf.
  
• In Victoria (Australia), a report commissioned by Minus18 says LGBTQ+ inclusive sex education is a major priority for young people.
  
• Adani updates: on Wed the Federal government lost a court appeal and will have to re-assess the groundwater management program. They appear to have done so in a record 48 >hours, because as of Friday Adani has all the environmental approvals it needs. Still doesn't have a license to build a private railway, though, which you'd think would have been a high priority. Links below for a broader overview.
  

Good News:

• La Trobe valley workers' co-op opens own factory. This is a town that was gutted by privatisation of coal-fired power plants in the 90s. A bunch of environmentally-minded locals in the Earthworker Cooperative have, since the closure of the Hazelwood plant in 2016, been working on setting up a factory manufacturing solar power hot water systems. They currently employ five people but have plans to expand, and with other power plants in the area due to close they're hoping to eventually open further factories. No, it's not currently enough to employ all those who used to work in coal power, but it's something.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Sarah Dean (CNN), Britain's mixed-race GI babies want to know why they were given away. Interesting in its own right, and made me realise I've heard relatively often about the black GI's in the UK, but never in Aus. I've got links to chase on that now.
  
• Ethan Siegel (Forbes), Humanity is thoughtlessly wasting an essential, non-renewable resource: helium. Helium balloons are unconscionable in the light of global helium depletion. We need that shit to run MRI machines.
  
• Michael Flood (xyonline, an anti-domestic violence site; 2009), Claims about husband battering. Systematically works through the problems with the Conflict Tactics Scale and the findings, using it, that women are as likely to be violent toward their male partners as vice-verse. Vis, the CTS measures 'what violence did you use', not who started it or why or how did you feel. So if a man threatens to hit a woman and the woman threatens him with a knife to get him to back off, they both come out with marks on the CTS scale, and hers is higher because she had a weapon. (The same would work in reverse, too, but the point is that with the CTS scale you can't tell anything about context, and all *other* studies suggest the reverse is uncommon.)
  
• William Dodson (ADDitude magazine), 3 defining features of ADHD that everyone overlooks.
  
• Lee Yaron (Haaretz), In court Israel defends ban on relationships between foreign workers. "Population authority speaks of migrants’ ‘family unit’ like they mean ‘terror cell’"
  
• Joshua Badge (The Guardian), Australia's decision not to ban poppers is a win for sensible drug policy but the stigma remains. Also, several currently-common varieties have been banned, and the variety recommended to be most easily available in future is old-fashioned and less popular. So if you happen to have some, you may be in breach if you consume them without obtaining a prescription for the drug you already own.
  
• Emma Garman (The Paris Review), Feminise your canon: Catherine Carswell. A fascinating bio piece come book rec piece.
  
• Julia Serano, Rethinking LGBTQ visibility.
  

  Sometimes being more visible simply makes you an easier target for discrimination. And the veneer of visibility may lull those who don’t personally face that discrimination into a false sense of progress.
  This is not the first time that a period of increased LGBTQ+ visibility was immediately followed by intense backlash. Similar backlashes were evident in the homophobic reactions to the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, and the flurry of same-sex marriage bans during the 2000s. Indeed, the idea that we are “everywhere” can seem quite scary to people who view us as alien or abominations.
  This is why calls for visibility almost always occur in conjunction with appeals to normalcy. The argument goes something like this: “It’s okay that we are everywhere, because we are just like you, except for our sexual orientation (or some other difference).” The problem is, this strategy only works for LGBTQ+ people who come across as “normal” in most other respects.

  
  
• Russel Marks (The Satuday Paper), George Pell's Days of Reckoning.
  
• Pyschology Today, Successful women MBA grads have networks that look different from those of successful male MBA grads. Not... exactly... surprising, but surely applies to many fields other than MBA grads.
  
• Alan Morris and Andrea Verdasco (ABC news syndicating The Conversation), Not all older people are lonely and the type of tenancy arrangement they're in is a key factor. TL,DR, older people in social housing are less lonely than older people on similar incomes in private tenancy.
  
• Owen Jones (Guardian UK), Pride isn't a party, it's a time for queer people to fight again for their rights.
  
• Jeff Goddell (Rolling Stone), World's Most Insane Energy Project Moves Ahead. Ableist language aside, this is a pretty damning assessment of the Adani mine.
  

  The biggest myth associated with the Adani mine may be that continuing to mine and export coal is somehow vital to the Australian economy. It is not. As James Bradley points out, although coal accounts for almost 15 per cent of Australia’s exports, it contributes less than 1 percent of the Commonwealth government’s total revenue. And it’s not like the industry creates a lot of jobs, either. In 2018, it employed slightly fewer than 50,000 people. That’s less than 0.4 per cent of Australia’s total workforce, and, more importantly, it’s less that the 65,000 jobs created by tourism at the Great Barrier Reef.
  Nor does the coal industry funnel much money back into the local economy. A 2017 study found 86 percent of the Australian mining industry is foreign owned, so any profits flow offshore and help billionaires like Adani pay for more lobbyists who perpetuate the myth that coal has a future.

  
  
• Luke Henriques-Gomes (Guardian Aus), Social housing landlords use domestic violence as reason to evict victims. In some cases the tribunal has no discretion, because social housing tenants are bound not to permit illegal activity on the premises, even by visitors.
  

Art:

• Spoon & Tamago, Tokyo in the 1970s, revisited by photographer Greg Girard

Comments policy: Everything I said in the caveats to this post applies. I teach critical thinking for a living, but I'm not *your* teacher, and this blog is not a classroom. That means I don't have to abide by the fallacy of 'there's no such thing as a bad contribution to discussion'.