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My partner just pointed out that Liz Truss is the first Prime Minster since Anthony Eden who has never had an episode of Doctor Who premier during their tenure.

OH MY GOD INCREDIBLE

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those anti-oil environmental protestors throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting instead of growing some balls and assassinating an oil baron or ransacking a pipeline construction site at the very least. we need 1970s environmental activism back.

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A list of all Charles' abuses of power as Prince of Wales.

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The other day, I went down the rabbit hole of “cute donkeys” and came up with my head full of things I didn’t know about mules (the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey), and why they were once so coveted as work animals.

Brace for info dump, while enjoying this lovely photo of a trio of draft mules.

The explanation is hybrid vigour, when hybrid offspring have enhanced traits compared to its parents:

Mules are stronger, hardier, healthier, have better enduranve, harder hooves, sturdier skin and can handle extreme weather better than horses or donkeys. They are also more patient, more intelligent, and easier to handle than either of their parent species. Horses may be faster, but that’s about the single thing they’re better at than a mule of the same size.

So mules, being all around nicer to work with and getting you more work for the same amount of feed, and with less hassle, were preferred for just about every job purpose.

Habby du Magnou, a Poitevin Mulassier mare, and her daughter Lady du Magnou, a rare Poitevin mule

ALT

But since horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, mules end up with 63 chromosomes, which means they are almost invariably sterile. That’s because biology gets very confused when trying to split an uneven number of chromosomes neatly in half to create germ cells. There are a few documented exceptions of fertile mule mares (never stallions), but they are very, very rare. So you have to keep crossbreeding the two parent species to produce them, usually by breeding a donkey sire (jack) to a horse dam (mare). This is because it’s easier for a 32 chromosome egg to incorporate a 31 chromosome sperm into a viable zygote (fertilised egg) than vice versa.

Because of this, there was (and still is) in France a breed of absolutely massive draft horses, the Poitevin Mulassier, and a breed of big-ass donkeys (pun intended, but honestly, it’s arguably the largest donkey in the world, and it’s shaggy like Highland cattle), the Baudet du Pitou, two breeds whose main purpose was to breed the enormous and super-strong Poitevin mule.

The Poitevin mule

This absolute unit was the must-have work-animal for all kinds of farm and industrial work for centuries, and a significant French export, until mechanisation made these magnificent creatures obsolete.

With no demand for the Poitevin mule , its parent breeds dwindled, almost to the brink of extinction. Determined conservation efforts during the last few decades are slowly bringing their numbers back up, but they’re very far from their heyday, when some 20,000 Poitevin mules were born annually.

The Poitevin Mulassier

Both the parent breeds are still endangered, which means most of the current effort is directed into bringing up the numbers of Poitevin horses and Pitou donkeys. This means breeding horses to horses and donkeys to donkeys, with very few breeding opportunities allowed to produce the Poitevin mule. Only about 20 of those are born each year.

The Baudet du Pitou

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IF YOURE IN THE UK PLEASE READ THIS

Many of you may know how fucked up the PIP application process is. If you don't, I can firsthand attest to this. I know they didn't even read my evidence, as they told me in my refusal that I have "no problems" with walking, despite multiple pieces of evidence, including a letter from my GP, regarding my use of a wheelchair. They expect us to jump through impossible hoops to prove our disability. My grandma who has had polio since she was a child and cant leave the house on her own due to this had to apply SEVEN times. It's ridiculous and dehumanising.

If you are disabled or care about disabled people, I'm sure you agree with me that it needs to change. If you do, please have a look at this petition. It's a step in the right direction to at least get Parliament to talk about it and hold this review- but we need to get it off the ground. Share it with friends and family and anyone who will listen. Don't let noise around this die down. We need this!

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/620962

IF YOU'RE NOT A UK RESIDENT PLEASE DONT TRY AND SIGN THIS! Even one false signature, if proven, can void the whole thing.

What can you do to help? Spread awareness among anyone you may know who is resident in the UK, and ask others to do the same. The more traction this gets the better!

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HOLD UP HOW WAS I NOT AWARE OF THIS

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$50,000 immediately dropped into my bank account wouldn't improve EVERYTHING but boy it sure would be a grand, sexy little start to a good, happy life path, don't you think

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so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

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Our third national lockdown.

Our THIRD.

It's not easy to summarise, or even really comprehend, how atrocious the UK government has been. We were late to go into the initial lockdown in March, despite witnessing the horrific effect Covid was having in Europe. The prime minister informed us that many of our loved ones would sadly die. Our health experts said that we were braced for a worst case scenario of 20,000 people dying of Covid — and it would be considered a 'good' result if we could somehow stay below that number.

We passed the death toll of 20,000 on the 25th of April. As of the 4th of January 2021, over 75,000 people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test. That figure doesn't include excess deaths. Currently, more than 50,000 people are testing positive for Covid every single day.

We were promised that life would be normal by the summer, that we would get on top of the virus through implementing a sophisticated test and trace system. For weeks and weeks, the government refused to offer people Covid tests, instead instructing them to self-isolate and to only contact the medical helpline (111) if it was absolutely necessary. The government failed to stock adequate Covid tests — again, all while seeing what was happening in neighbouring countries. Despite the fact that a drill in 2016 called Operation Cygnus identified that the UK was woefully ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic, the government did nothing. Frontline workers in our National Health Service and in other care settings made do with paltry PPE supplies. To give the impression that we were ordering tons of PPE, the government counted pairs of gloves as two separate pieces of equipment.

Scores of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals died of Covid, many of them from BAME backgrounds.

Scandal after scandal. The government ministers have been offering lucrative contracts to their family members, friends and donors, spending millions of the public's money. PPE contracts were given to newly-formed companies that had no background in creating or supplying PPE. The government somehow failed to approach existing UK suppliers, who ended up sending stock to other countries instead. The government wasted £250 million on face masks that had to be scrapped because they weren't safe.

Even with all these accusations of cronyism, the government continues to shamelessly show favour to its supporters.

In May, it emerged that one of the prime minister's special advisors — a man who's held an unusual amount of political sway for many years now — flouted lockdown rules and took his wife and four-year-old child halfway across the country when the couple started experiencing coronavirus symptoms and feared that they were going to become ill with Covid. He wanted to be near family in case he and his wife could not look after their son. At the time, the British public were not allowed to take their children to family members for help. People were largely compliant with the lockdown rules, even when that meant forcing their loved ones to die alone, without company.

Conservative MPs spent a day howling that the claims were false, rallying around the special advisor. The next day, another news story broke that the advisor had broken the lockdown rules while he was on the aforementioned trip, this time to take his wife and son to see a castle.

Instead of apologising to the public — instead of being reprimanded for deeply damaging and undermining the government's strict 'Stay at Home' messaging — the special advisor was given his own televised press conference, where he explained that he'd driven to the castle as his eyes were tired and he wanted to see if he was capable of driving all the way to London. The fact that the day of the castle trip was near his wife's birthday was immaterial. Once again, the Tory MPs rallied around the SPAD, saying that he'd acted as a father and that any parent would have done the same.

People were crushed. The implication that following the rules meant that you were an idiot for not putting your family first cut deeply. Across the country, people wrote enraged and heartbroken letters to their MPs.

The prime minister, however, considered the matter closed. The SPAD did not apologise for his actions. The PM did not apologise on his behalf. Behavioural scientists told the government that it was making a terrible mistake and that, by giving the SPAD special treatment, the public's willingness to accept the lockdown would fall.

We were offered a free tracing system, which the UK government turned down. We were told that we would have our very own 'world-beating' app. The cost of the test and trace system was stated to be in the region of £22 billion. The app itself was reliant on Microsoft Excel and had only made one contact a full two weeks after being rolled out.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the test and trace system was able to pinpoint the very bin lid that was carrying Covid particles.

After the lockdown ended, the government opened up the economy by introducing a new scheme for the summer: Eat Out to Help Out, where people would pay only half of their usual bill at restaurants. Feeling relaxed, people participated in the scheme. Later in the year, when infection rates started rising, the government refused to acknowledge that the crammed restaurants had contributed to the increased number of Covid cases, instead blaming young people and saying that they did not adhere to social distancing guidelines.

We were told that things would be normal by Christmas.

This isn't everything. Not even close.

Elderly people were sent back to care homes from hospitals without being tested for Covid, which led to coronavirus ripping through care home settings. The government made it schools' legal responsibility to provide opportunities for remote learning, then dramatically slashed the budgets for new laptops and technology a few days later — one of my local schools went from being able to afford 130 new laptops to just 30 new laptops. After exams were cancelled, students were thrown into disarray when a shoddy algorithm predicted that those from poorer areas would not have achieved the grades they needed to go their desired universities. For weeks, teachers had been insisting that the algorithm was unfair and that it would affect disadvantaged students the most; teachers pushed for centre-assessed grades, which the government refused on the basis of a lack of standardisation. Students were terribly anxious and some lost out on university places.

A few days later, the government performed a U-turn, accepting that teacher assessments were the way to go instead.

There have been so many government U-turns on so many issues that it's become a popular joke: if a senior Conservative MP emphatically insists that something will or won't happen, you can safely assume that the opposite will become true in a few days' or weeks' time. At one point, the government insisted that it did not need to provide children with free school meals over the holidays, stating that enough welfare support was already available (commenters touted that the government had adopted a new slogan: 'Starve a kid to save a quid'). After an impassioned campaign from footballer Marcus Rashford, the government reversed its decision. The week before Christmas, following the end of a second national lockdown in November, the PM held that it would be 'inhumane' to reverse its position on Christmas mixing rules, where the original plan was that people could form bubbles of three households over a period of five days. Three days later, the PM informed the nation that the five days were being reduced to a single day and that 20 million people in the worst-affected areas of the country were no longer allowed to mix with anyone outside of their household.

During the November lockdown — the lockdown we were promised wouldn't need to happen — schools and colleges remained open. The virus continued to spread, complicated by the new coronavirus variant. The government claimed that schools were safe. Exams would still take place in England, they said (I should add that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are devolved nations and have their own governments — all three of the other countries cancelled exams a while ago). Yesterday, on Sunday, the PM went on TV and said that although the country needed tougher coronavirus measures, schools would remain open and people ought to send their children to school. As a result, many people sent their children to school today.

This evening, the PM announced that there'll be alternative arrangements for exams and that schools will be closed until mid-February.

Hundreds of people are dying every day. The NHS are treating more coronavirus patients than they were during the first peak. We are a tired, tired nation.

And the Conservatives are still ahead in the polls.

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Reblog the 500,000 dollar written check from Seto Kaiba and money will come your way.

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Look at this beautiful washi tape!! Charlottes sister bought it for me for Christmas. I’ll definitely be using it soon when I help pack orders. ~Tam #AngelsCave #TheAdventuresOfTam #Hamster #Bat #Plushies #PlushiesOfInstergram #AmuseJapan #WashiTape https://www.instagram.com/p/CJbmoFxji5l/?igshid=6feq5wkuviab

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“My name is Brianna Meeks, and I have an offbeat but clear-headed dream. It has been on my mind since the death of my beloved grandfather in 2007. After thirteen years of wishing, I have the chance to make it come true.

My grandparents were named Arthur and Annie Stone, and they were the children of sharecroppers. They too were sharecroppers until the 1960s, when they were able to purchase their farm outright. They raised three daughters there, including my mama.

When Papa died, Nanny could not run the farm on her own, and my mom and her sisters made the choice to sell it. I was 17 at the time, and the longing for that farmhouse with the dark green shutters has stayed on my shoulders all these years since.

Simply put: I am going to try to buy it back. Miraculously, the current owner is looking to sell it.

This is the one chance I’ll ever have to do this.

For me, the story begins in 1995, the first of countless times I remember piling in the car with my siblings and parents, driving the three and a half hours from Atlanta, GA, to Nanny and Papa’s house in Petersburg, TN. This farmhouse was where we spent countless happy Thanksgivings, Christmases, and summer holidays.

But for Arthur and Annie stone, the story starts 150 years before that. To the period just after the American Civil War called Reconstruction.

Quick history lesson if you need one: Agriculture was the economic force of the Southern United States, and the enslavement of people descended from stolen Africans kept the economy afloat. After the enslaved became freedmen, General Sherman proposed that the land seized from former Confederates should be divided among the freedmen, as repayment for their treatment.

This is commonly referred to as Forty Acres and a Mule, and it was a promise that wasn’t kept. Instead, the land was returned to the former Confederates who previously owned it.

The land needed to be worked. And there was an entire population -- only recently considered citizens in their own right -- who needed work and food and security. Enter: sharecropping.

Sharecropping was an exploitative model. It worked like this: a tenant would live on and work a portion of a landowner’s plantation, farm, or land. In exchange, that tenant kept a (usually small) portion of the crop come harvest time. Sharecroppers had very little agency. They didn’t own their own equipment, they were forced to accept the prices the landowners were willing to pay, and if they stuck up for themselves they risked their livelihood and family home.

In the last years of her life, Nanny told me that she had taken to being pen pals with the son of the landowner she sharecropped for. He apologized for the ways he and his family had wronged my grandparents. It is no small feat that these people -- my people -- born not even 60 years after the dissolution of slavery, broke the mold of their families and somehow overcame admitted wrongdoing. That feels like another miracle.

If all I ever accomplished in my life was buying back my grandparents’ farm and restoring it to something they would be proud of, that would be enough. I want to live a life where my siblings and our children can go back there for holidays. I want my mama to spend more Thanksgivings or Christmases there in her life.

So I am asking you to please help me get my ancestral home back. I would appreciate anything you can contribute. And if you are not in a position to donate, all I ask is that you share the link to this campaign with everyone you can think of.

Nanny and Papa spent their entire lives in the picturesque state of Tennessee; living through the roaring twenties, the great depression, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and so much more.

Their lives make up the history of that land. It’s now on me to determine the future of it.”

HELP BRIANNA MEEKS BUY BACK AND RENOVATE HER ANCESTRAL FARM!!!

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Artwork in Bristol by Lanie Rose (link to her instagram in source)

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Take this with you