Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@qoto.org
Retired software engineer & woodworker.
Anglo-francophone.
Detest tories. Subscribe to green, leftish radical politics but not to any particular political party!.
Love the EU and all it stands for, moreover, I spent the last 10 years of my career working at an EU agency.
Enthusiastic photographer, especially wildlife and most especially butterflies.
Slightly knowledgeable gardener.
Atheist; loathe almost all religions and pity the people deluded enough to follow them. I make exceptions for Buddhism as it isn't really a religion in the strictest sense of the word as it doesn't postulate the existence of any god, and Jainism which is the epitome of peace.
For anyone who is interested, my header photo is of the most stupendous sunset I have ever seen. On the right is the waterfront of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the left is Thailand and in the middle, acting as the border between the two countries is the mighty Mekong river.
Joined Nov 2022
Paul Brownjohn
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We simply should not let people become so rich that their personal issues become society's problems.
More useful would be a proposal to make all tax returns public as they are in Norway
Paul Brownjohn
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Oh this is great!
The #ProudBoys owed $1 million to Metropolitan African #Methodist Episcopal Church in #WashingtonDC after the #bigot #fascists attacked the #historic #Black #church in 2020
They didn't pay
So the #courts just ruled that the church now *owns* their #trademark
An #AME church legally owns the term "Proud Boys" and all of their #merchandizing!
Couldn't have happened to a nicer #gang of #violent #racist assholes
https://www.washingtonian.com/2025/02/04/a-historic-dc-black-church-now-owns-the-proud-boys-name/
Paul Brownjohn
boosted
I want to see Musk bankrupted, his fortune smashed, and him begging for food and clothing on the street. See how he likes it.
Paul Brownjohn
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The deputy chairman of the Swedish Dockworkers' Union has been fired from his job because his union has decided to block Israeli arms in Swedish ports. The employer calls Erik Helgeson a threat to Swedish national security and accuses him of disloyalty to the company in a context of national security.
This employer is going to lose in court and have to pay Helgeson major damages. And also the entire Swedish union apparatus will hit them.
https://www.arbetsvarlden.se/hamnfackets-vice-ordforande-far-sparken-hanvisar-till-rikets-sakerhet/
Paul Brownjohn
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In honor of Black History Month, I am posting my personal gratitude for Frederick Douglass.
Before July 2022, I mostly knew FD as an abolitionist whose name graced 8th Avenue in Manhattan (north of Central Park):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass
Separately, as a climate scientist, I was so intrigued to learn about a WOMAN being one of the first people in the world to realize how important greenhouse gases like CO2 are in modulating our earth’s temperature. Eunice Foote was this amazing woman who figured out that CO2 was THE molecule that could increase earth’s temperature through the greenhouse effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote
AND THUS
A couple years ago, I biked the Erie Canal path through Seneca Falls — eagerly anticipating walking the streets where I knew the originator woman scientist EN had ALSO been an active suffragette.
And, to my surprise, on researching my trip, I learned that the famous abolishionist FREDERICK DOUGLASS was himself also an ACTIVE supporter of women’s suffrage.
The life I live today as a mother and scientist and VOTER was enabled by solidarity amongst all people as PEOPLE to be treated as PEOPLE.
Paul Brownjohn
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Paul Brownjohn
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CDC orders mass retraction and revision of submitted research across all science and medicine journals. Banned terms must be scrubbed.
The scientific censorship extends to any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely the CDC's own periodicals. Banned terms include all the ones enabling clinicians to talk about trans people and their care.
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction
Paul Brownjohn
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Anyone who's read a Phillip K Dick novel, or seen a film adaptation will have likely recently wondered whether we are heading towards a world that looks like Bladerunner or perhaps an empire like that in Man in the High Castle, or any other of Dick's various dystopias.
Henry Farrell explores this issue in a blog from last year concluding Dick's vision of a world where reality is breaking down & information is often fake no longer feels like fiction....
#SciFi #politics
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-pkd-dystopia?utm_source=publication-search
Paul Brownjohn
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Book burning?
If everything was digital in Hitler's 1930s Germany, this is what his book burning would have looked like: deletion of data, removal of websites, retraction of scientific studies, censorship of words like "equity," "diversity," "climate change."
As a sometime pilot of such machinery, do you have any potential explanation for this crash?
It's almost a surprise that the orange shit-gibbon hasn't come up with a legal twist that makes homosexuality both between males and between females unlawful and punishable by death!
Who'd have ever thought that 'merica would start apeing the USSR and start creating 'Gulags' were people can be killed without documentation or fuss.
@ike @Nigel_Purchase
When I was living in Thailand, I got chatting to an American would be retiree to Thailand in a bar.
One of the first things that came up in our conversation was guns. He asked me if I knew whether you needed a permit for a firearm in Thailand and if so how to go about getting a permit for a concealed carry handgun.
When I informed him that you did indeed need a permit to own and carry a firearm, and that as a foreigner, he didn't stand a cat in Hell's chance of ever getting one, He looked distinctly crestfallen, dare I say grief stricken, even. Our conversation ended shortly after that and I heard from other people who lived in the same hotel as he had booked when he arrived that he had decided that Thailand was not for him and had left the country altogether.
I'm not sure whether to find it amusing or sad that an American thinks that things are going to be exactly the same in other countries as they are in the United States or that the inability to own and carry firearms was a deal breaker for his retirement plans.
Can we dare to earnestly hope that the fascist shit-rag Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday will soon disappear forever from the news-stands along with its fascist brother in arms the Express!
"Merde à la puissance treize" used to be an expression when I first lived in France in the 1970s, mainly used by students, but is apparently not used these days.
One of my former girlfriends a native English speaker, spoke pretty fluent Parisian slang which she had learned whilst living there in the early 1970s. She was surprised to find that very few people had the first idea what she was talking about when we visited the Nord - Pas de Calais 15 years later!
In France, in every area I have lived in, it is 100% normal to say 'bonjour' to everyone in any shop one visits. Often it is abbreviated to a barely audible "(bonjour) messieurs-dames" but it is always said. To do less would be downright rude.
Yeah, at age 19, I was given a 7.5 ton truck towing a compresser to drive. I drove it for about 12 months before someone realized that I was not legally entitled to drive that combination and thus that it was uninsured. The 7.5 ton truck was OK with the standard car license (that I had just passed the test for) but towing a trailer (in the shape of a diesel compresser) Was not permitted until you reached 21 YOA!
Remind me to avoid substack based on that!
Retired software engineer & woodworker.
Anglo-francophone.
Detest tories. Subscribe to green, leftish radical politics but not to any particular political party!.
Love the EU and all it stands for, moreover, I spent the last 10 years of my career working at an EU agency.
Enthusiastic photographer, especially wildlife and most especially butterflies.
Slightly knowledgeable gardener.
Atheist; loathe almost all religions and pity the people deluded enough to follow them. I make exceptions for Buddhism as it isn't really a religion in the strictest sense of the word as it doesn't postulate the existence of any god, and Jainism which is the epitome of peace.
For anyone who is interested, my header photo is of the most stupendous sunset I have ever seen. On the right is the waterfront of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the left is Thailand and in the middle, acting as the border between the two countries is the mighty Mekong river.
Joined Nov 2022
