We usually go to a small holiday home my dad owns for a week or two in summer - we need to book that early in the year.

Then we do maybe one or two long shorter train trips to other European cities. More often than not that’s to see a musical theatre production, so we book those when they are announced, maybe half a year in advance. Otherwise it could be just days or weeks out!

I wouldn’t mind it for that reason. The Red Cross do good work that need to be financed.

Here in the Netherlands they do that by contracting out volunteers for first aid services to events like fairs and runs. The volunteer donates their time, gets trained for free, the Red Cross gets paid by the organiser and makes money for their mission and an small army of experienced first aid people and EMTs to help out when disaster strikes.

I’m such a volunteer and it’s a great distraction from my normal job. I also get to use my skills outside of the Red Cross, e.g. as an action medic at protests.

Cool sidenote: there’s this network any CPR certified person can join to get alerted by emergency dispatch when CPR is needed close to your home or work. This has helped massively to get CPR started within 6 minutes mostly anywhere in the country, even when ambulances can’t get there that quickly.

“U bent verkeerd verbonden” (for calls)

“U heeft het verkeerde nummer” (generic)

I donate plasma regularly - at least once per month. It’s illegal to pay people for blood or plasma here in the Netherlands so I’m just in it for the good feels. I also like the downtime and relaxed chatting and joking with the people who work there.

Why do they have one at all if they’re going to blatantly not comply

“Genocide is not about numbers, it requires genocidal intent”, I’ve been told by genocide deniers. Well, here it is. Again.

D E A T H
S T R A N D I N G

“So!”

Okami! Please, more!

tl;dr: things are bad, things will get worse, be angry at the criminals, not those sounding the alarm

We’ve known what we’re in for for half a century, meanwhile governments have kept catering to fossil industries. What’s being destroyed by governmental inaction dwarfs that what you accuse these groups of (art has not been destroyed) and at this point I’m not surprised that people are looking to more disruptive and direct action.

We’ve had scientists do the researching and informing, public interest groups do litigation, NGOs trying what they can themselves, etc, yet we’re still headed to a degree of climate destabilization where large ecosystem tipping points may well launch us into uncharted territory - and even if not, we’re already past the point of ‘dangerous’ climate change and that’s something we’ll have to bear the human, societal and economic costs for.