“Your future’s gone. How old are you?”

Members of Extinction Rebellion block a bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A lively discussion ensues.

Also, open thread.

Via Mr Muldoon, a peek into the comment pages of the Guardian, where Ms Ngaree Blow attempts to sell the merits of prehistoric healing:

Healthcare systems in Australia that are considered “mainstream” are fundamentally colonial organisations: designed, established and informed by Western paradigms and biomedical models of care.

Going with what works and works reliably. How very dare those damned colonials. With their Western paradigms.

At present, the norm is those who will fit within the constraints of the Western worldview of health… Ultimately, this results in a health system which is not fit for purpose,

The term fit for purpose is one to keep in mind. But first, some self-flattery – the urge to self-inflate being a Guardian staple:

First Peoples are the antithesis of colonial; we are inherently disruptive to how the healthcare system (and many other systems in fact) operate in Australia… As a doctor, I have embraced disruption and have chosen to reject conventional medical training pathways.

How terribly daring. With other people’s wellbeing.

Our disruption has historically been, and continues to be, rejected by the mainstream.

Intimations of victimhood being another Guardian staple. Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.”

Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior, as evidenced by a lack of traditional practices in these services.

Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.

As I’m still sniffling and wheezing, you’re getting a chance to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with something that cats don’t do; a bacon-fat ratio of note; news from Katmai National Park’s Fat Bear Week; via Fnord, a chap doing this better than you do; some hatchlings of note; and a film about Nepal’s psychotropic honey hunters.

Oh, and a miracle breakthrough in grease-avoidance technology.

I have a cold and am feeling less than my usual scintillating self. I am therefore declaring an open thread. You know the drill. Share links and bicker. And send biscuits.

The reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.

Fearless masked heroes harass and berate the elderly and disabled.

For “social justice,” no doubt.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” shrieks the masked young woman, flanked by her masked comrades for intimidation purposes, and while jabbing her finger in the face of a random man and preventing his elderly, disabled mother from crossing the road.

Update, via the comments:

A longer video of the scene, featuring more of our bandana-wearing bedlamite, can be found here.

It must be strange to inhabit a social circle in which gratuitously harassing the elderly and disabled, and putting them in some fear for their safety, is regarded as a credential and proof of righteousness. To believe that such behaviour makes you look good and will earn you in-group status. It’s a pretty good measure of just how perverse, and morally demented, the Antifa mindset is.

It reminded me of a telling incident at a conservative convention during the Occupy fad of 2011, in which a mob of Occupiers, largely middle-class Clown Quarter students, amused themselves by trapping a random disabled woman – in a wheelchair and with an assistance dog – jeering at her predicament and telling her, “This is what democracy looks like.” Because nothing screams radical piety like preventing a disabled woman from getting home. And then assaulting her, while trying to steal her assistance dog. Sadly, video of the incident – complete with grinning faces – seems to have been purged from YouTube.

Update 2: