Lions and donkeys

There were “275,000 casualties lost overall to the armies under British command at Passchendaele. The Germans suffered another 220,000 killed and wounded. At the end, the point of it all was unclear. In 1918, all the ground gained there by the Allies was evacuated in the face of a looming German assault.

“A century later, the Battle of Passchendaele is remembered as a symbol of the worst horrors of the First World War, the sheer futility of much of the fighting, and the reckless disregard by some of the war’s senior leaders [read Butcher Haig] for the lives of the men under their command.”

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/battle-of-passchendaele/

Macbook Pro A1278

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-core-2-duo-2.4-aluminum-13-mid-2010-unibody-specs.html

 

Rise of the Planet of the Plant Eaters

A Harvard Magazine piece on research being conducted by PhD Candidate Nina Gheihman, who is looking at the rise of veganism in France and Israel. Her website is here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/ninagheihman.

Knowing animals

A podcast blog by Siobhan O’Sullivan‏ featuring interviews with academics and animal advocates.

Leaping frog by Doc Hackenbush (https://twitter.com/DocHackenbush/status/727085994227408896)

Still accurate even after the NBN!

Opening a Gmail account in beta

Gmail is different. Here’s what you need to know.

1/09/2004 5:04 pm

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.

So what else is new?

Gmail has many other special features that will become apparent as you use your account. To help you get started, we encourage you to visit our Help Center, there you can browse frequently asked questions, read our Getting Started guide, or contact the Gmail User Support Team. You’ll also find information in the Help Center on such topics as:

• Importing your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and others to Gmail
• Using address auto-complete
• Setting up filters for incoming mail
• Using advanced search options

You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They’re placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you’ll find them relevant and useful.

We’re working hard during our limited test to improve Gmail and make it the best webmail service around. Thanks for taking the plunge with us. We hope you’ll enjoy Google’s approach to email.
Thanks,

The Gmail Team

P.S. You can sign in to your account any time by visiting http://gmail.google.com

Human health = planetary health

David Jenkins, creator of glycemic index: “Human health must be linked to planetary health, and how we feed ourselves has a major impact on the planet …”

Full article: https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/the-not-so-simple-reasons-for-becoming-vegan/article23123391/

 

Peripatetic purpose

Stumbled upon an interesting article by researcher Glenn Morrison that touches on differences between the European custom of walking for wonder and adventure and the Aboriginal custom of walking as duty and ceremony.

Excerpt:

“Last week I spoke to Shaun Angeles, a northern Arrernte man from Ayampe who is working at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs.

Shaun is a researcher with the Indigenous Repatriation Program and elaborated on the walking tradition in Central Australia.

“Families will always walk within their tribal boundaries; it was their obligation and responsibility,” he said.

“We were always surrounded by Ancestral spirits, whether it be the spirits that first created the country, or the irrernte-arenye (from the cold) spirits of our human kin that had passed.

“We would never walk without a purpose: We walked with our songs, always teaching our young and always in a state of worship and respect of spirits imbued in the landscape.

“To walk softly with intent, was always our obligation to the law and land.”

The article also refers to a book of essays which goes on the wish list: Making Connections: A journey along Central Australian Aboriginal trading routes, eds Valerie Donovan and Colleen Wall.

Neo-nazi revisionism in Hungary

Some anti-Semite got Budapest city council to remove a park statue of Georg Lukacs – under the pretense of anti-communism. Another sickening sign of the radical right-wing resurgence currently infecting Europe.

“The idea of its removal came from a young nationalist, Marcell Tokody, a neo-Nazi Jobbik party councilor of Budapest.”

http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/02/16/hungary-is-removing-statue-of-philosopher-gyorgy-georg-lukacs-he-was-marxist-and-jewish/

A short list of works:

• Tactics and Ethics
• The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg
• Class Consciousness
• Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalismin the Imperialist Period

A junk food tax that excludes meat?

A new study proposes a tax on unhealthy foods that would exclude meats and many dairy products. If the point is to try to take cost pressure off public health, I would have thought a tax on meat and dairy would be a priority.

Article: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/15/australia-would-save-34bn-if-junk-food-taxed-and-fresh-food-subsidised-says-study

Study: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002232#sec008