franking privilege

A leading pro-BREXIT campaigner chided Royal Mail for issuing a set of commemorative stamps celebrating the career of Pink Floyd, as Kottke informs, whilst refusing to do the same to mark the occasion of the UK’s departure from the European Union. The internet quickly obliged to fulfil that glaring philatelic niche.

℞

Fed up with exponentially increasing prices for staple medication due to the popularity of the rentier business model and supply-chain disruptions that lead to shortages—exacerbating the pricing regime even more—a group of US hospitals and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs have banded together to fight Big Pharma by having their own dispensaries and making their own generic drugs. We applaud them for standing up to heartless greed and doing something to redress the broken healthcare system besides just offering more concessions to drug companies and make the bill the scariest part of any medical diagnosis, but we fully too expect them to be in for a truly heroic battle since they won’t relinquish their monopoly eagerly.

clapback or twitstorm

Not to minimise what’s genuinely really awful and tone-deaf things that are hurtful and reinforce negative stereotypes and worthy of outrage, these twenty-nine stages of an unfolding tweetstorm (via Waxy) by Tom Phillips is really a fine and biting piece of satire that perfectly captures the vicious and lurid landscape we’re capable of creating if we’re not careful. Of course social media is heavily tilted towards manufacturing such tantrums but it’s important to appreciate that its isn’t only Trump (who jumps on this bandwagon at stage twenty-one) or other polemists who are conducted into a fugue state and any one of us can be easily baited. Rehashing—hook, line and sinker—eventually passes over as the next paroxysm displaces it but surely not without causing damage that’s more enduring and deleterious than the aforementioned slight.  Do check out the whole unravelling on BuzzFeed at the link above.

duck and cover

Despite the status accorded them as nostalgic, pervasive cultural anchors, the fallout shelter it seems has been magnified by the popular imagination and just over one percent of US households (as opposed to civil and governmental constructions) in the early 1960s had such emergency accommodations.
Paleofuture presents a rather interesting survey that polled people’s attitudes at the height of the Cold War, speaking to collected fears and wafts of the toxic masculinity and the paternalistic patriotism that not a statistically insignificant amount of respondents invoked as reasons to not construct a bunker or otherwise prepare for a nuclear disaster. Contrary arguments included what the neighbours might think of their architectural folly, that only a coward would try to hide from an atomic blast or perhaps most disturbingly that to do so would somehow contravene the will of God and Country, undermining faith in the nation and that it was not within man’s power to destroy himself or the world. The majority took a more philosophic tact, questioning the ability to withstand an attack or whether they would want to be heir to the aftermath.  Imagine there was a time when only the dissolute polluters and climate-change deniers needed to be disabused and the preppers weren’t playing the long game.