Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.
The Editor doesn’t moderate this blog, 3 volunteers do, they are very lenient to provide you a free speech space but if it’s just deranged abuse or putting words in bloggers mouths to have a pointless argument, we don’t bother publishing.
All in all, TDB gives punters a very, very, very wide space to comment in but we won’t bother with out right lies or gleeful malice. We leave that to the Herald comment section.
EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist abuse, homophobic abuse, racist abuse, anti-muslim abuse, transphobic abuse, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, Qanon lunacy, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics, 5G conspiracy theories, the virus is a bioweapon, some weird Bullshit about the UN taking over the world and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.
Happy New Year Julian Assange. Keep your chin up.
Assange’s lawyer Barry Pollack to fight Maduro’s US …
RNZ
https://www.rnz.co.nz › news › top › assange-s-lawyer-…
5 days ago — Barry Pollack, the Washington lawyer who represented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, will defend toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
*******
Assange files complaint against Nobel Foundation over …
France 24
https://www.france24.com › Home › Live news
18 Dec 2025 — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has filed a criminal complaint in Sweden against the Nobel Foundation after Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina …
*******
(This sounds like the truth of the matter.)
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/julian-assange-film-wikileaks-united-states-b2882424.html
First, a confession: I did not want to make a film about Julian Assange. I had already made several about the demise of American democracy under the crushing weight of American capitalism, imperialism, racism, and militarism. I had dreams of becoming a painter, learning the zen of trying to perfect a single picture rather than the neurotic work of trying to perfect the 129,600 individual frames that constitute a 90-minute film. I had dreams of living in Italy, far from the hectic pace of New York, London, and LA…
But then something happened. It was one of those rare moments when a plain brown envelope shows up on your doorstep. Secret, never-before-seen evidence was leaked to me about the Assange case, particularly about the lengths to which the United States had gone to destroy Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks. It was harrowing stuff….
…Like many people, I had thought Mr. Assange had been accused of rape by two women in Stockholm in 2010. Rather, we learned that the women have never called what they experienced rape and at the time only asked police to compel Mr. Assange to take an HIV-test after they’d had consensual sex with him and found him reluctant to get tested. …
A bit from George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London.
This is human work and I think would be preferred to the cold-blooded conditions creeping in today, which may not employ half the people and in which the workers would not have the same interaction and community.
…The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder during the rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is not particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized….
…The result is that at mealtimes everyone is doing two men’s work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel except foutre. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say ‘cursing like a scullion’? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.) But we are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours’ work into two hours.
What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him out, and conspire against him to get him sacked. Cooks, waiters and plongeurs differ greatly in outlook, but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.
Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the cooks. They do not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their employment steadier. The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called ‘un ouvrier’ which a waiter never is. He knows his power—knows that he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and makes it a point of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine artistic pride in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the doing everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the Hôtel X would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at different times; he cooked few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspected them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind, and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out, ‘Faites marcher une côtelette de veau’ (or whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable bully, but he was also an artist…
What do economists, financial advisors, politicians, the middle class to mega wealthy, know or understand about work and even the drudgery which can seem worthwhile?