Blethering Skite

In Orkney, out of all those aged 16+ years (18,448), 11,268 people are economically active - this number excludes students who may also be in employment. The information from Scotland's Census 2022 also records that 6,840 people are economically inactive. This means that they are not in paid employment. Of those who have retired, there are 5,001 who are economically inactive. ​

OP : @primonatura@mstdn.social

The oil and gas industry has been using the basin as a free disposal site for decades.

Working at that time for the environmental group Greenpeace, Marco Kaltofen was racing after a stunning realisation: that in many offshore oil and gas settings, oilfield waste is simply being dumped right into the ocean.

Fast-forward almost four decades, and an analysis by DeSmog shows that companies have been legally dumping toxic and radioactive oilfield waste into the North Sea — Europe’s arm of the North Atlantic — for decades, with largely unknown consequences for a sensitive and beloved marine environment. 

Modern oil and gas development involves the use of many toxic and potentially toxic chemicals: biocides and scale inhibitors, meant to kill bacteria and other lifeforms that can clog a well; corrosion inhibitors, which keep oilfield pipes from corroding; and a class of chemicals known as emulsion breakers or demulsifiers, whose purpose is often to break apart mineral material and lubricate fluids to keep product flowing through the piping of an oil or gas well.

Drilling also creates a particular type of toxic waste: produced water,  a naturally salty fluid laden with carcinogens, heavy metals, and naturally occurring radioactive elements, that surges to the surface during drilling. (Many wells generate more produced water than they do oil or gas).

A Stunning Amount of Waste

In 2022, the last year for which reporting is complete, oil and gas companies operating in the territorial waters of Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and the UK have dumped 244.4 million cubic metres of produced water into the North Sea —  discharged from just over 200 of the region’s 614 oil and gas installations. That’s enough to fill the Roman Colosseum 185 times over with oilfield waste, or flood the entire city of Amsterdam waist-high each year.

The juxtaposition between Labour’s bid to ‘crack down’ on benefit cheats and the new revelations that Sir Keir Starmer accepted accommodation worth £20,000 to help his 16-year-old son study for his GCSE exams, is brutal....

Dr Jay Watts commented: “The idea that we should be suspicious of benefits claimants for ‘fleecing the system’ has been erroneously sold as fact for the past decades, with devastating effects on hearts, bodies, and minds. Ideas of moral worth get inside us. Starmer’s words are violent and dangerous.”

She’s absolutely right. Starmer has commandeered the narrative of the tabloid right.

Britain has become a country with such a narrow bandwidth of politics that the main political parties are virtually indistinguishable in policy terms and the public discourse of social policy is simply grotesque, shaped as it has been for decades by the right-wing press to the extent that this has been inculcated and normalised for millions of people.

The silence from Labour on the rise of fascism in the summer and the misdirection about the way to make real savings and strengthen the economy is a giveaway about a party hollowed-out, purged and totally captivated by their wealthy corporate supporters. Labour is as far away from its roots and origins as its ever been.

Conclusion: towards a history of the multilingual city

Early modern London was multilingual. In fact, it was much more multilingual than this article has been able to show. Not far from where Philipine Seneschal and her mother-in-law insulted each other in French and English, two men named Manteo and Wanchese were teaching their Algonquian language to Thomas Hariot. 

London's migrants spoke Welsh and Scots and Portuguese as well as French and Dutch.

One commentator described the city as England's ‘third universitie’, where you could learn Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic, as well as Polish, Persian and Russian, among ‘divers other Languages fit for Embassadors and Orators, and Agents for Marchants, and for Travaylors, and necessarie for all Commerce or Negotiation whatsoever’.

The stranger churches’ records testify to the presence in London of Turks and Swedes, Spaniards, Germans and Greeks. The voices of the city's small but growing African population no doubt brought new languages to London's streets, even if we lack the detailed and linguistically rich archives of their experiences which we are lucky to have for other groups of strangers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/migrant-voices-in-multilingual-london-15601600/FD8DBD9E4236084E7386FF9A7124CF47

An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.

To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d'état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.

In Scotland, the government distinguishes between "accessible-rural" and "remote-rural" regions, the latter being considerably more isolated from urban hubs. This distinction is more than theoretical—it has implications for infrastructure, most notably transport, food availability, and now, broadband connectivity, which remains alarmingly inadequate in many remote-rural areas.

The research highlights that over 80% of businesses in Scotland's remote regions are small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), many of which cannot operate effectively nor efficiently because they lack access to basic services those in urban regions take for granted.

In this study, the team urges policymakers to adopt a more nuanced understanding of remote-rural areas when considering infrastructure investments. By addressing the challenges faced by such communities, governments might create conditions that enable businesses not just to survive, but to thrive, and so preclude the exodus of SMEs to the cities.

"The feeling of being strapped to a political entity in permanent decline is amplified when you realise that in 'defeating the Tories' you've replaced Sunak's economics with Osborne's. Labour is a replicant of the Conservative Party circa 2010"

We are stuck in a place that looks and feels utterly different from 2014, yet is still mired in the same issues and questions. While the Unionist camp is in gleeful mode after the last general election, you are also struck by the extent to which little has changed. Writing in The Scotsman Joyce McMillan notes (‘Why cock-a-hoop Scottish unionists are actually LOSING the argument‘) : “…what is striking about the Scottish unionist cause, as it marks the tenth anniversary of its victory, is how little it has moved on, in these ten years, from the wholly negative “project fear” approach that delivered that result, but also drove much larger numbers than ever before into the independence camp. There is, after all, something profoundly wrong and reactionary about a Union which can only survive by constantly telling the people of Scotland how broken and dependent on handouts the place is, how useless they and their elected government are, and what fools they were ever to vote for it.”

On 22nd of September 1692 the last eight people were hanged for witchcraft in the US. Nineteen were hanged overall, with six other deaths during the Salem witch trials.

Between February 1692 and May 1693 more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft in  colonial Massachusetts . Thirty were found guilty.

The last person in Scotland  to be tried and executed for witchcraft was Janet Horne. In 1727 she and her daughter were arrested and jailed in Dornoch.

The stone that marks the site of Janet Horne’s burning can still be seen in Littletown, although the date on the stone — 1722 — is wrong, it should read 1727. Nine years after her death the Witchcraft Acts were repealed in Scotland and England and it became unlawful to execute anyone for alleged witchcraft.

Craigmillar Castle lies just three miles south-east of the centre of Edinburgh. Yet while the city features in the distant views from the castle's walls, step inside them and you could be in a different time and place. Craigmillar Castle is simply one of the most completely preserved medieval castles in Scotland.

Craigmillar began life as the tower house that still forms the core of the castle. This was constructed around 1400, probably by Sir George Preston, one of a line of Prestons who played a large part in civic life in Edinburgh over several hundred years.

What makes Craigmillar special is the extent to which its underlying structure survives. The inner courtyard may now be home to two very impressive trees that were certainly not there in the Prestons' time in the castle. But the walls of almost all the structures of the castle survive, together with all the vaulted floors. This means access is possible up to roof level in the tower house and first floor level in large parts of the rest of the building. There is also a complete wall walk around two sides of the curtain wall.

The 19,001 pensioners across the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire will be among 58,817 in the north of Scotland to lose the winter fuel payment this year – a drop of 88 per cent.

Numbers from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) reveal the scale of the problem for many – In the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat of 21,123 pensioners just 2,122 now qualify while 19,001 lose out.

In Caithness Sutherland and Easter Ross all 20,320 pensioners will lose the winter fuel payment, just 2,616 on pension credit now qualify. And Finally in Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey 19,496 people will lose the benefit and just 2,034 will get it.

At the end of July Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced only those on pension credit would receive the payment, the Scottish Government followed suit saying it had no other choice amid an estimated loss of £160 million.

Politicians from across the political divide have been almost unanimous in warning that the loss of the Pension Age Winter Heating Payment in the north will be felt more deeply because fuel poverty rates are already higher than the rest of the UK.

The home of two of Scotland's most important artists has been reassembled in the Hunterian Art Gallery. 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald were both members of The Four, a quartet from Glasgow that included Margaret’s sister Frances and her husband James Herbert MacNair. The Four met at the Glasgow School of Art when they studied there at the end of the 19th century. The men were architecture students who incorporated Art Nouveau into their designs, leading to a distinctive Glasgow Style. The Mackintoshes lived in a house at 6 Florentine Terrace, in the Hillhead neighborhood, close to the current location of the Hunterian Art Gallery.

Ironically, many buildings including the Mackintosh home were demolished to make way for new buildings of the University of Glasgow, which runs the Hunterian. When 6 Florentine Terrace was demolished in the 1960s, the legacy of the late Mackintoshes was already well-established, so it was decided that the furnishings of most of the house would be preserved and documented as best as possible.

In truth Better Together of 2014 was more of a jump scare than a referendum campaign. My favourite piece of Unionist propaganda was when Defence Secretary Philip Hammond suggested that Scotland would be more vulnerable to attack by aliens if we were to become independent.

The No campaign veered between love bombing from Trinny and Susannah to routine threats of harm. As many noted, it was like being in a coercive relationship.

As I wrote last month – the attacks on devolution – Labour’s proposed direct rule means that “Labour are abandoning the institution they created, an institution that was supported by 74% of Scots who voted for a devolved parliament to take control of Scottish affairs. They are breaking the Sewell Convention, The Smith Commission, and the Scotland Act of 2012.”

The challenges and context of 2014 is completely different to what we face today. England, Britain, Europe and global geopolitics have morphed into new and darker forms.

Yes needs massively updated, overthrown, re-imagined and re-conceived.

The litany of lies and broken promises by Better Together can laid out before us like a shroud. But the Yes movement needs an overhaul that’s more radical than anyone is talking about (yet).

New research exploring the effects of the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) in Glasgow has found that while traffic flow has remained largely unchanged since the Zone was enforced, air quality has improved.

The study found a statistically significant reduction in traffic flow on High Street during weekdays resulting in notable decreases in normalized NO2 levels of between 25% and 27% on weekdays. A 35% drop of NO2 on weekends was also observed.

In contrast, traffic patterns on Hope Street remained stable, yet statistically significant decreases in NO2 levels of between 9% and 13% on weekdays were still observed, suggesting the establishment of the LEZ discourages high emission vehicles in the city center and helps improve air quality.

Study Results:-

https://findingspress.org/article/123382-did-the-implementation-of-low-emission-zone-in-glasgow-change-the-traffic-flow-and-air-quality

It is against this backdrop that Cold War Scotland explores the stories of Scots at the centre of this global conflict. The National Museum of Scotland exhibition showcases how the impact of that war still lingers in Scottish politics, culture and memory.

The exhibition starts with a series of short films depicting how Scotland became a cold war battleground. The geographic position of Scotland between the US and the USSR, and direct access to the Atlantic meant Scotland would play a vital role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (Nato) defences. Faslane, on the banks of Gare Loch, is the site of the UK’s only nuclear submarine base. The show demonstrates how nuclear power and nuclear weapons came to dominate peoples’ minds – and how Scottish communities were explicitly told they were nuclear targets.

Cold war on display

There are dozens of objects on display to “trigger” the sensitive gen Xer’s consciousness, including secret intelligence documents and a map of central Scotland marked to highlight targets under threat of nuclear attack.

The giant twin steel-making boilers of Ravenscraig in Motherwell were always visible from my bedroom in Hamilton. Our neighbour worked there. “That’s the first place The Russians will hit around here son,” he told me, muscly iron ore arms folded. He was right. It is on the map. As is Faslane, close to where I currently live.

OP : @scotlit@mastodon.scot

ROBIN AND BEN: OR, THE PIRATE AND THE APOTHECARY

: Robert Louis Stevenson’s other pirate tale

Come, lend me an attentive ear

A startling moral tale to hear,

Of Pirate Rob and Chemist Ben,

And different destinies of men…...

His clinging breeks, his tarry hat,

The way he swore, the way he spat,

A certain quality of manner,

Alarming like the pirate’s banner—

Something that did not seem to suit all—

Something, O call it bluff, not brutal—

Something at least, howe’er it’s called,

Made Robin generally black-balled......

‘Battle and blood, death and disease,

Upon the tainted Tropic seas—

The attendant sharks that chew the cud—

The abhorred scuppers spouting blood—

The untended dead, the Tropic sun—

The thunder of the murderous gun—

The cut-throat crew—the Captain’s curse—

The tempest blustering worse and worse—

These have I known and these can stand,

But you—I settle out of hand!’

Out flashed the cutlass, down went Ben

Dead and rotten, there and then.

SCOTTISH nuclear bases are supported by 1990s-style pagers such as the ones targeted in a mass attack on Lebanon this week, The National can reveal.

National security concerns have been raised about the use of the antiquated technology in sites where nuclear weapons are stored and maintained.

Two sources have confirmed to this paper that the use of pagers, which appear to have been tampered with to cause explosions across Lebanon in attacks which have injured thousands, remains common at bases in Coulport and Faslane.

Chris McEleny, who previously worked at Royal Naval Armaments Depot Coulport where nuclear warheads are stored, told The National “people will be astounded that the safety of the UK’s nuclear deterrent is still supported by a network of 1980s and 1990s-style handheld pagers”.

The revelation will add to fears about the state of Britain’s nuclear fleet, which is believed to be “rotting”.

Former Tory special adviser Dominic Cummings last year lifted the lid on what he said was the “nightmare” issue of Trident.

He wrote that nuclear weapons infrastructure was “a dangerous disaster and a budget nightmare of hard-to-believe and highly classified proportions”.

Keith Brown told an audience at The National’s Indyref @ 10 event that independence campaigners have “got to accept” Scotland will never be granted another referendum through requesting one and Yes supporters must take the matter “into our own hands”.

He insisted the movement must stop playing by Westminster’s “rules” and work to build an “unanswerable” case of self-determination, which he suggested can be achieved by means of a constitutional convention. ​

Is it really ten years? Doesn't a decade fly when you're having fun? When you're subjected to grinding austerity? When you're pulled out of the EU against your will? When your parliament's powers are weakened so a government you didn't vote for can play culture war politics? When pensioners shiver in unheated houses in one of the most energy-rich countries in the world?

I mean, phew, think what would have happened if Scotland had voted for independence and the No campaign's dire warnings had come true. We might have had years of grinding austerity or been dumped out of the EU or had pensioners shivering in unheated houses …

But we'd never again have had governments we didn't vote for. Or a House of Lords. Or Boris Johnson and Liz Truss ruining our country while they handed out billions of pounds of contracts to their political connections. Or, ach weel, we are where we are.

It's easy to be down-heartened. It's been a decade that's really rammed home Mark Renton's contemplation on the nature of Scottishness. Brexit, the buffoonery of BoJo, Covid cronyism, and the endless march of wealth inequality hand-in-hand with total failure to deal with the fact the climate is on fire. 

Friends, we have had an object lesson in why you shouldn't put your future in someone else's hands.

SCOTS believe that becoming independent and joining the EU would be better for the country than remaining in the UK, a major new study has found.

Attitudes towards Brexit have become deeply entwined with opinions about Scotland’s place in the Union, according to analysis by the Scottish Centre for Social Research and polling experts at What Scotland Thinks.

In a development which piles pressure on those arguing to remain part of the Union, researchers found that Brexit has had an “adverse impact on support for remaining in the UK”.

They found that Scots believed remaining in the UK and outside of the EU would be worse for the country than becoming independent and joining the trading bloc.

The study showed just 18% of Scots thought that staying in the UK was good for trade, compared with 53% who thought an independent Scotland within the EU would be better.

They said that between 1999 and 2014, support for independence fluctuated between 23% and 35%. Since 2019, it has “consistently” sat at around 50%, the study found.

Sometime around the 13th century, two masons taking a break from working on Arbroath Abbey might have sat down to a game of Merelles. A large building stone sat between them, crudely carved into a gaming board.

Each man had a set of 9 counters – small stones, wooden beads or pieces of bone maybe. They took it in turns to place or move their set of counters, trying to create a row of three of their own.

Centuries later, in the 1920s, a post-reformation wall was taken down at Arbroath Abbey. It had been built using much older stones and among them, waiting to be discovered, was the masons’ Merelles board.

On Wednesday it will be the tenth anniversary of the independence referendum......

Brains don’t recover but the good news is that political parties do recover from their electoral reverses, sometimes surprisingly quickly, and also that support for independence appears to be unaffected by the travails – which are all too often own goals – of the SNP.

The SNP will eventually get its act together, the sooner the better. It will be aided by the rapidly growing disaffection with the Labour party, which won 37 Westminster seats in Scotland in the recent general election. However Labour’s recovery in Scotland has very shallow roots. Labour piled up seats due to the vagaries and unfairness of the first past the post system so beloved of Westminster but did so while winning just 36% of votes cast.

The SNP will not achieve independence by itself but rather as a core component of a broad based independence movement which is centred on the grass roots. The party is needed to create a political presence for independence, and it’s needed as a placeholder for independence votes, which, being denied access to a straight referendum by a Westminster which is terrified of the independence question, is how that wider movement will express majority support for independence.

The question of independence has been politically normalised in Scotland. In the interminable and often bitter debates about process which have occupied the independence movement over the past ten years we sometimes forget just what a monumental achievement that is. Labour politicians and their allies in the Scottish media might like to tell themselves and us that an electoral defeat for the SNP means a permanent defeat for the cause of independence, but they are delusional.

Labour’s electoral honeymoon is already over. Starmer’s promise of change is already revealed as being as hollow as the fine promises made by the Better Together campaign in that referendum campaign ten years ago.

Cornerstone of physics

Thomson was professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow University for 53 years, making revolutionary contributions to physics, mathematics and engineering that still resonate today.

He is probably best known for his work on energy and the laws of thermodynamics, the science of heat and work, which are often hailed as the most unbreakable laws of nature.

Perhaps Thomson’s most well known discovery is the concept of absolute zero on the temperature scale, which is named Kelvin in honour of the title he would receive in 1892. 

Thomson’s lifelong talent for inventing ingenious scientific instruments secured him 70 patents, enabled dozens of scientific breakthroughs and made him a highly successful entrepreneur.

Third, there was Thomson’s outstanding ability to think “out of the box”, to look at a problem in a completely novel way. For me, there is no better example of that visionary thinking than Thomson’s work on laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19866037

Findings from the Office for National Statistics found that 168,000 people had long COVID as of March 2024.

Long Covid can be a debilitating condition that causes fatigue, brain fog and breathing problems.

Prevalence was highest among those aged 50 to 69, those living in the most deprived areas, and those whose daily activity is limited by pre-existing health conditions.

The study found that long Covid cases were disproportionately common among people who were age 50-69, whose daily activity was limited by pre-existing health conditions, and who were living in the most deprived areas.

Of those who were in hospital when their symptoms began, the most common symptoms reported were weakness or tiredness (78%), 57% had difficulty concentrating, and 54% were struggling with muscle aches.

The study also found that of those in Scotland with self-reported long Covid, around two-thirds had the virus at least one year previously, and one-third at least two years previously.

Children’s lives in the UK are changing.

They are becoming shorter in height. More of them are going hungry than they were a few years ago. Recently, more have died each year than they did a few years ago. Increased poverty, more destitution and the effects of ongoing austerity are the clear culprits.

But why did this happen to our children? This rise in child poverty is a change that has not been found to have occurred to the same extent anywhere else in the world, among all the places that the United Nations measures in the same way.

In future, almost all our children will tell their stories of growing up in the UK of the 2020s and – hopefully – what changed to make things better. It is hard to imagine them becoming much worse.

SCOTLAND is home to plenty of historical buildings dating back hundreds of years with many of these being taverns, churches and, of course, houses.

Few homes date back more than a couple of hundred years, making those that have stood the test of time all the more fascinating.

If you've ever wondered what Scotland's oldest inhabited home is, look no further.

Traquair in Peebleshire is Scotland's oldest inhabited home, dating back to at least 1107 and has been lived in by the Stewart family since 1491.

According to the property's official website, the name Traquair comes from the word 'tret' or 'tre' - meaning 'dwelling' or 'hamlet' as well as the word 'quair' - meaning 'stream with a winding course'.

While the exact year the foundations of the house were laid is unknown, a substantial structure must have existed at this site by 1107.

Monarchs like Alexander I and William the Lion have come to this site to sign royal charters over the years with the latter establishing the burgh that would later become Glasgow.