Happy Friday! 

This week I have not been following the news much (it’s all Brexit shenanigans here and I’ve been tired and distracting myself with puzzles. Here’s what I’ve cobbled together!

No lie, Knickers the big cow is actually quite large

30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis

Harry Leslie Smith obituary. Rest in Peace and Rise in Glory

Bloodthirsty, Thrilling, and Desperate: An ode to Uno Oh yes, especially when you’re playing with ‘ the fastest animal in the jungle’ the cheaters known as my brother and his wife…

Our 11-Year-Old Neighbor Is Mean—but She Also Needs Our Help. While I don’t always agree with all of the advice, the first two absolutely hit it out of the park in terms of how we should handle behaviour in children. Just so good…

This for dealing with difficult behaviour in children that aren’t ours

the thing that has become the most obvious to me is that every kid, no matter who they are or how badly they’ve behaved, truly deserves someone to who expects good things from them.

And this for how we handle children prone to tantrums

My big “don’t” is: Don’t take his emotional breakdown too seriously. He responds to noncrisis situations with crisis-size emotions, and that’s very stressful for people who love him. But you can’t go down Crisis Boulevard with him every time. He needs an adult to remain an adult while he’s falling apart. When he’s really suffering you can simply say, “I can see that you’re really upset by the situation, and that makes sense because things didn’t go the way you wanted them to. But let me know once you’re done crying it out and we can continue.” Then you can hug him, let him know that you love him, and let him go. It’s OK to take space, it’s OK to not to match his intensity, and it’s OK to not be able to fix it for him.

‘White supremacy’ is really about ‘white degeneracy’ I’m not sure about this, to be honest I have pondered why the people who vote this way do, they surely can’t think that the politicians they follow care about them? But it’s worth reading and thinking about a bit more. Also this is the best description of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage I’ve read

Degeneracy is not confined to the openly racist far right – it is a theme that runs through the populist right more generally, even when racism is absent or not emphasised. One of the key features of the populist wave is a certain proud incompetence. There are of course still competent rightwing populists around, but it is frequently the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or Matteo Salvini who prevail. They are uninterested and incapable of conducting policymaking and government in a systematic, productive way. They make a virtue of their lack of understanding; they cause chaos and delight in destruction

The lesson from this missionary’s death? Leave the Sentinelese alone I read about this last week and was pretty horrified. Not by the ‘missionary’ being killed but by his attitude. ‘Satan’s last stronghold’. Grow up. Honestly, I’m not keen on this sort of missionary or honestly, missionaries generally. As a Christian, I’m happy to talk about my faith and what I believe if that and the example of how I live, inspires someone to seek Christ, good but you don’t make converts by badgering them or feeding them, not good ones anyway. You help people in need because it’s the right thing to do, not to get them to Jesus. These people don’t need saving, but that ‘missionary’ wasn’t’ about serving God but he doing it for his glory, which is another thing that makes for bad converts.