Lauren M

"Everything is politics...You don't get to make art in a fascist state"

CMAT delivering, mar is gnách. 👏

(Same goes for sport btw)

#Speirgorm

There's something especially heartbreaking about children being harmed or killed at school.

Schools should be havens of opportunities and hope.

Children deserve to be safe. And any politician with any moral compass should be able to say that much

I'd be pissed at their stupidity if I didn't believe that it was absolutely corruption and therefore a deliberate choice instead

Uh someone might need to redo the numbers on our new LPG terminal

Elon Musk given the USAID cancellations

A female kākāpō looking out of a nest, with one small chick showing. Credit: Andrew Digby

Female #kakapo Kohengi on her nest with a newly-hatched chick and an egg (unseen). We removed the egg from underneath her and gave it to another female (Phoenix) who had infertile eggs. We're trying to ensure each female on Anchor Island has 1-2 fertile eggs to hatch. #kakapo2026 #conservation

I feel like being taught that doing evil things had consequences was the biggest joke but 'Work hard and you'll be fairly compensated and get a decent life' is definitely up there

He's a piece of shit. Absolutely everything he does and says should be assumed to be in the worst faith possible

Boomers lived the best version of the American dream and never let anyone have it again

Hung out with some 'normie' friends tonight and it really hits home that there must have been vast swathes of people just none the wiser during history's most turbulent times. And honestly, maybe that's part of how humanity gets through it? The oblivious, keeping things ticking over

Yeah if they come in and just do a UK Labour then it's paving the road for something even more awful so we both need them to gain power and do meaningful things with it

Once you truly realise the elites are happy for you and most of humanity to die, everything gets clearer. The more people who realise this the better

We hate kids. Like SO MUCH. We vote for the guns. We vote for the bombs. We protect the rapists. We have LEOs physically restraining parents from trying to save their children in Uvalde. We just blew up a school in Iran. We love Jeffrey Epstein and his friends. They run the country.

A stage with a large tree next to it. There is a crowd in front of the stage

Lovely night at Don McGlashan in Kirikiriroa this evening. Doing stuff and bonding with other humans feels frivolous in some ways but it's so so important and we all need to give ourselves permission to do it because it's part of how we get through this together

RNZ now basically yassifying Trump alongside their promotion via headline of his strongman PR

WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE?

I know it's tough but you'll be glad, I promise!

In a world that's destabilising in the way it currently is, we can't be sure there won't be more and bigger disruptions to supply chains and therefore things like medicines and surgical supplies. I'd be getting anything done that you need, just in case shit does hit fans.

'As has been demonstrated time and time and time and time again throughout history, any progressive reforms within a liberal democracy will be reversed with time because they constitute an existential threat to the capitalist class’s ability to maximize profit and hoard wealth.'

Yep, and people will normalise it with 'Oh well, it's just the world we live in now, SOMEONE might as well get something good out of it!'

Absolutely nothing good comes from thinking like that.

The public and commentators need to stop thinking about "wars for oil" as about securing oil for the U.S., it's been decades since that was a motivator. "Wars for oil" are instead about securing oil for oil companies, securing a fossil fueled global economy, and denying oil's wealth to "enemies."

Profitable

bsky.app/profile/bloo...

Be nice if this made it into public discourse, ever. Instead it's New Zealand exceptionalism all the way baby! Nothing can ever go wrong in our Special Little Country so keep pretending it's 1992 forever guys

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Yep, it's utterly telling that the public support for this mostly sits with our supposedly moderate centrist elites.

I think a lot about the skeet that said (basically) 'If people had social media during WW2 no-one would have coped' and yeah, while staying informed is good, it's important to remember that the soc-med firehose of trauma is a pretty new thing

Surviving on Trump's Dangerous Planet

Yet another war, and yet another argument for an end to oil

@billmckibben.bsky.social

There are really no distractions, just a whole lot of connections: rape culture, fossil fuel extraction, racism, eugenics, patriarchy. It’s all incredibly pro-death and focused on control over whatever remains.

The rich have seized power and turned government and politicians into mere branch managers. Given the dire trajectory of fossil fuelled fascism and global heating, it's now us or them. Centrism is half the problem.

Tbh I am disconcerted by this meeting so far. The US’s violation of the charter is red letter, blazing, clear as day. Many of the US’s allies are mentioning it in passing. I suspect they wont like what follows from signaling they are less committed to the UN charter than they are to countering Iran

A scorching summer has left Australian wildlife on the brink, but it doesn’t have to be this way | Euan Ritchie and Jess Harwood Unsettling predictions are now our catastrophic reality, but a brighter future is still within reach if our political leaders change course

Our first collaboration and joint publication in @australia.theguardian.com!

@jessharwoodart.bsky.social and I describe some of the recent impacts of climate change, extreme weather events, and other threats, on wildlife and ecosystems across southern Australia www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...