The insect apocalypse is upon us. Last year insect numbers were 64% down compared to 20 years before, this year its 75%. We’re fucking doomed.
The birds aren’t doing too well either.
But billionaires are doing well. In fact, so many millionaires have become billionaires during the so-called cost of living crisis that we should rechristen it the cost of profits crisis. The amount of British billionaires has increased by 20%!
Kennel Club dog show judge illegally bred dogs, ran a puppy farm, and kept animals in poor conditions.
A story about seeing Pele play goes to some unexpected and moving places.
There’s a new variant of Covid that is even more infectious and even more dangerous and its sweeping through New York and New Jersey and coming here soon. Why aren’t our politicians talking about travel restrictions on Americans?
When we visit the Wilder Carna project on Isle of Carna to check on our livestock we always drink from the streams. Within one day the probiotic effects of the water kick in improving sluggish digestion - it’s like a tonic.
But there’s more to wild water than just good bugs and a taste better than the finest claret.
Another benefit of spring water is that it comes up from the earth structure which means the molecules are arranged in cohesive hexagonal form.
Ukraine have learned from Russia.
On the third and final day of the first-ever ceasefire between Afghan government and Taliban forces in June 2018, the main traffic roundabout in Wardak’s capital Maydan Shahr was topped with a white Taliban flag. The ceasefire saw Afghan security forces and Taliban insurgents crossing into territory under the other group’s control and embracing in the streets. Afterward, the war resumed as if it had never stopped.
Christmas and the New Year has swung past and its traditional at this time to talk about all the cultural things you have enjoyed that year. So here we go. The best books I read this year were The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, Broken Angels by Richard Morgan, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven by Uta Ranke-Heinemann, and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. All will reward your time in different ways. The best new records I bought this year that weren’t reissues were Frijazz mot Racisme (various), Wet Leg (everyone’s seventh favourite record this year it seems), Nadya’s Labyrinthine, and my favourite Alison Cotton’s wonderful The Portrait You Painted Of Me. I thought that I tried to avoid reissues this year but actually I bought loads - lots of archival stuff so that’s not so bad. Reissues of the year then, Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, 2manydjs’ This Is Radio Soulwax Pt.2, Edan’s Beauty and the Beat, Refused’s The State of Punk To Come, Dead Skeletons’ Dead Magik, Radiohead’s Kid Amnesiac, and lots of stuff on Death Is Not The End (as usual).