The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam

One Way Street

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Harriet Williamson @harriepw]

Didn't take long. This is why anon briefing needs to be taken with a big handful of salt

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

@RodneyMarshall1 Samuel Beckett as Number40

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

Lonsdale Square. I lived there 1996-99

[createstreets @createstreets]

Bricks are best but…

[bat020 @bat020]

33 months since the genocide started and I'm still seeing kids freshly dismembered by Israel on my TL every single day. this is not going to go away. this is never going to go away.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Use of the word "genocide" in first 30 days of conflict on CNN and MSNBC, Ukraine vs. Gaza.

[Zugasti @irezugasti]

CINCO MILLONES de euros es lo que va a donar Europa a Venezuela tras el terremoto.

Es el equivalente a medio tanque Leopard de los que se envían a Ucrania.

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

@batcountry1980 @ShempMeister Good stuff on this in Barry Miles' Many years from now'

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

@batcountry1980 Amen

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity.

[Idrees Ali @idreesali114]

GENEVA, June 23 (Reuters) - Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting ​in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, an independent U.N. inquiry said ‌on Tuesday.

[Stephen Smith @SteveNickSmith]

Thing is, he is getting this coronation because everyone with genuine power knows he’ll be continuity Starmer with some actual politician skills. If there was any danger of him being any good such as introducing genuinely progressive policy, all hell would be breaking loose now

[DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine]

Danny Glover on the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène:

"Ousmane Sembène was one of the world’s most passionate filmmakers, and the novelist who perhaps best captured the turmoil of modern West Africa. He was a staunchly political figure who, in an era of violent power plays, used storytelling as a means of leverage. He was a visionary who understood the power of imagination as a form of resistance against the colonizer, and as a means of cultivating awareness, integrity, and compassion for a better future. He was a leader who helped create a filmmaking labor union, a film festival, and a literary magazine. He was, in sum, one of Africa’s most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. And to me, he was both a hero and a friend.

I remember when I first saw 'Black Girl' in the 1960s, when I was a student and at the same time reading Frantz Fanon’s 'Wretched of the Earth'. That mask! The way Sembène’s ever-observant yet mysteriously unobtrusive camera captured the slow emptying of soul that was Diouana’s death. Our relationship began there, though he couldn’t know that until we actually met in August of 1988 at his home in Dakar. I had come specifically to Senegal to meet Sembène. I remember him serving the Senegalese dish called yassa over a grain that was grown precolonialism called funio, and explaining the origins of the grain. So in that small way Sembène was teaching, giving voice to the past and history.

Yes, Sembène was an African storyteller, but it wasn’t the color of his characters’ skin that resonated with me (though it remains true, nearly 50 years after Sembène first picked up a camera, that those of us with dark skin are still fighting to overcome racism in the global movie-making system). Sembène’s movies were not solely about race. He told the stories neglected by the international media, stories of people living and loving, through tragedy and triumph, on the margins of society. More consistently than any artist I know, Sembène gave voice and agency to everyday people coping with and battling against everyday injustices—allowing us to anoint our own heroes and simultaneously revealing the mechanics of the systems responsible for those injustices. Systems that encourage cruelty, not compassion, and narrow-mindedness instead of imagination. Sembène’s films and novels suggest a better way."

(Foreword to "Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist", Samba Gadjigo, 2010)

Clip from:

Black Girl (1966)
Director: Ousmane Sembène

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

https://t.co/rgwTOFnoXv
42 years ago. So Good.
All the same warning signs. Back then series editors could commission humanist strands like Forty Minutes, and political journalism was a challenge to power rather than career path for sycophantic , piss weak Oxbridge PPE grads

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

More than 30 UK charities are found to have funnelled millions to illegal Israeli settlements. ‘Labour’s Melanie Ward said that if gift aid were claimed against the donations in the usual way, it would mean taxpayers had subsidised illegal settlements to the tune of £5.6m, a situation she described as deplorable’ - @guardian @melanie_ward

[FilmoteCanet Cinema @CanetCinema]

Andrei Tarkovsky directing Stalker (1979). Behind-the-scenes footage recorded by the crew of Mosfilm, the historic Soviet studio responsible for the film's production.

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

Random example of a page from the Mandelson files. How enlightening 🙄

With this much redacted, who is satisfied this is transparency?

[Volodymyr Ishchenko @Volod_Ishchenko]

If you wonder why Zelensky bothered with the reburial and glorification of Andrii Melnyk, the leader of the more Nazi‑collaborationist wing of the OUN, to the right of Bandera's wing – a seemingly unnecessary symbolic move, predictably harmful for Ukraine’s fading international sympathies and already provoking scandal with Poland and Israel – here's the answer. When the majority does not want to fight, you have to sustain the mobilized minority, who must be constantly reassured that they are fighting not just for this corrupt government.

Delivering something substantial on integration into EU and other Western transnational structures is much harder, often impossible, and cuts against powerful vested interests in Ukraine, as the permanent conflicts around IMF and EU requirements show. Delivering to ethnonationalists and the far right is much easier: glorify collaborationists, eradicate everything Russian and Soviet from public space, rewrite history, rename streets, dismantle the remaining monuments. This does not necessarily respond to direct pressure or concrete demands. In a situation where the majority will not fight even for higher pay (this is not Russia), there is a need to reassure – and to keep raising the stakes for – those who are ready to fight that their sacrifices are not in vain, but for “the Ukraine of their dreams.”

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

@DM_Deluca @LandingMark Ashton clearly uncomfortable with Maidan.
Left post with agreement of Omerta and fade to grey

[East German Visuals @GDRvisuals]

Young East Berliners socialising in Prenzlauer Berg, 1989.

[The Rubaiyat of Victor Kiam @grantby]

@bbcstever_not How Peasant.

Laugh with me at their silly natural remedies haha.