Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Links - 21st October 2020 (2)

FDNY official defends excluding famed 9/11 officer from procession - "A top FDNY official says it’s “most definitely” acceptable to exclude a white firefighter from a ceremonial unit based solely on his skin color... Cecilia Loving, the department’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, is defending a decision to kick Lt. Daniel McWilliams — one of three firefighters in the iconic 9/11 Ground Zero flag-raising photo — off a color-guard procession so it would be all-black.Loving testified at a state Divsion of Human Rights trial on McWilliam’s complaint that he was the victim of racial bias... “So, a request for an all-black color guard is not discriminatory?” McWilliam’s lawyer, Keith Sullivan, asked in the trial.“No, it isn’t,” Loving replied.Asked if it’s acceptable to request an all-black color guard, she said, “Most definitely.”Loving said it’s okay to replace a white member with an African-American to “uplift our identities and our separate ethnicities in order to instill a sense of pride and community and support for one another.”"

California’s Century Of Change | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "Many people’s view was that the next hundred years are not gonna be anywhere near as easy as the last 100 years. Because it's, California cannot continue exploiting its landscape in the same way that it has over the last hundred years in the view of, you know, many of the people that I spoke to. One of the things that California has been built on is migration. Migration from elsewhere in the United States, but also migration from elsewhere in the world. And the fact is now more people are leaving California than are settling there. And so for a country that is, for state that is built on migration, I think that poses an existential question."

A New View Of Africa’s Past | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘History ultimately emerged, you know, in as a academic subject in the 18th century as a kind of, as a well known, as an early form of national, nation building. Nationalism, it was a kind of nation, national myth was being created to replace the religious myths which people didn't any longer believe in so much in the era of the Enlightenment, and that national process in this country, for example, and in most of Europe and went with the rise of colonialism, and so went with a certain perception of other parts of the world, which didn't fit with an idea of actually quite thriving dynamic areas of the world with their own independent histories of global interactions and so on. So that element of the past is something which doesn't cohere with the way in which history is a subject has evolved over the last two hundred years. So clearly, that's a tough nut to crack. And a very interesting thing about the African past as well, the way in which the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States has fundamentally changed the way in which that was addressed. So the rise of African History as a discipline coincided with the Civil Rights era in the States in the 60s, with the rise of black studies, as an academic subject, and, and, and the appropriation of certain aspects of the past by important figures in the African American community. And that's changed the way in which Africa and the African past is addressed, and the nature of African Studies and African history as a discipline. So that has changed the way in which I think from, starting in America and then percolating through to the rest of the Western Academy, certainly the English speaking Academy, the way in which Africa is viewed has been viewed. But history itself as a subjects is still, has been a little quite impervious to that, although, although there are, of course, very good historians of Africa in many, in many countries in the West, but they're often they're often still slightly sidelined from the main, the mainstream of the field’...
‘Islam is, you know, clearly one of the major regions or if not the major religion in West Africa, and it was, and its power grew through this period of time, which is quite significant. It was important in the 15th century, but it was largely a religion, a religion for political and trading elites, and it wasn't a popular religion at that time. There, you know, there, there were, there weren't large numbers of Muslims in West Africa, but it certainly grew a lot over this period of time. One of the reasons for that was that it offered, and in a sense it offered, if people converted to Islam, it offered a sort of protection from sla-, from slavery, because Muslims couldn't enslave other Muslims. It also, and it also offerED an opportunity for revenge. And this was something very important by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where in northern Nigeria, for example, a lot of people converted to Islam and then having been slaves were able to attack the land of the people who had been the slaveowners within, in that, in that part of Africa. So Islam offers an opportunity. It offers a form of protection, and it also offered I think, another important part of the point is they offered a connect, a global connection which didn't come through the Atlantic trade. It offered this connection to North Africa, to Mecca, to Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. And given the disruption, as I've said, which was coming through the Atlantic trade, I think that was also important’"
Where religion retreats, secular religion advances

Phillipe Sands On The Ratline, A Nazi Mystery | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘In 1936, he has fled to Berlin because he has been involved in the killing of the Austrian Chancellor... She eventually turns up in Berlin to discover that he is having an affair with a young German lady called Traute. A few months later, she falls pregnant. They have a child, a daughter, and she says to him, you know what? I'm going to call her Traute in honour of you and your affair’"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Has Zimbabwe lost its way? - "Zimbabwe has lost its way. Our broken nation has moved beyond rage and despair and the occasional fleeting moment of hope. Remember those cheers when Robert Mugabe was finally pushed out, and has now reached the far shore, a place of cynicism and its ugly twin apathy. It wasn't supposed to be like this, of course. Post coup, post Mugabe, Zimbabwe was, we were assured, on the mend. Open for business was the government's smiling new mantra. But today as I write this, eight and a half million people, half the entire population are struggling to feed themselves. Corruption is as bad as ever. We've lost all sense of shame now... there's no grand plan here, just chaos and total impunity"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Al-Shabab's Defectors - "Cleanliness and capitalism. Two reasons that you don't often see ashtrays in Eastern European hotels anymore. The few that do remain in guestrooms and lobbies no longer have microphones hidden in them. 30 years ago, if you were a guest at Hotel Viru, an imposing Soviet built skyscraper puts up during the height of the Cold War in the center of Talinn, then there's a good chance that the receptacle for your cigarette ash really did have a sinister dual function. But it wasn't just wired up ashtrays that were listening in on the conversations taking place among Estonian and foreign hotel guests in the days of the USSR. My guide Marta holds a cheap looking white plate up to me and the dozen or so other mostly elderly Estonians who've crammed into the tiny room. So many secrets, she exclaims in a melancholic tone. Plates like this one, bouquets of flowers, the sauna, the TVs, and obviously the phones. All were bugged. In Soviet times, having sophisticated surveillance systems in the solitary hotel in most Eastern Bloc cities where the tiny trickle of visiting foreigners were permitted to stay was absolutely the norm. Nowhere however, did the authorities leave as many of their secrets behind as at Hotel Viru. Now it's a mid range, somewhat dated hotel. But when it was built, the Viru was the fanciest place in Estonia. Guests could visit the inhouse nightclub and use the well stocked bar, both rare luxuries in the Soviet Union. The one place they couldn't go was the 23rd floor. And why would you want to? The lift didn't stop at this floor and still doesn't, attests Marta. Employees and guests were told it was just full of technical rooms for the ventilation systems. And just in case anyone did get too curious, in a presumably unintentional homage to Rene Magritte, a sign was posted on one door. In both Russian and Estonian it read, there is nothing here. Almost incredibly, it seems that for decades, this was enough to stop hotel staff and visitors, who included Neil Armstrong and the Shah of Iran, from asking any awkward questions. If any of them had pushed the door open, however, they would have found a fully functioning KGB spy station. When the collapse of the Soviet Union came in 1991, the KGB operatives didn't have time to drag all their bulky equipment back to Moscow. They simply fled, trashing the three rooms they occupied, which I am now standing in. It's now open to the public for guided tours. We're looking at the ruined remains of 1980s spying equipments, in a room that still has that uniquely Cold War era aroma of cigarettes, cabbage, old washing and damp."

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, New protests in Hong Kong - "In 1847, he got a position at the obstetrics department at Vienna's venerable General Hospital. He was responsible for two maternity wards. The first was staffed by doctors and medical students, and the other was staffed by midwives. Dr. Semmelweis noticed a strange and deeply troubling phenomenon. More mothers were dying in the first ward where the doctors worked than in the second. Women admitted to hospital would beg not to be put into the notorious first clinic. Child bed fever, what we would call sepsis killed up to 18% of women who’d had their babies delivered by doctors and just 2% of the women delivered by midwives... his breakthrough came when one of his fellow physicians died after cutting himself with a scalpel used in a post mortem on a woman who'd had child bed fever. Midwives, Dr Semmelweis realised, didn't do post mortems. The doctors and their students did. If they went straight from handling dead bodies to delivering a baby were they perhaps carrying some decaying matter from the corpses and infecting the mothers? Dr. Semmelweis began insisting that his team of doctors and students wash their hands in a solution of chloride of lime before they dealt with women in labour, especially if they’d just touched the corpse. The effects were dramatic. Within months, the mortality rates in the first clinic dropped to around 2%. And when Dr. Semmelweis started washing medical instruments, the death rate dropped further. Simple hygiene had helped to conquer child bed fever. But while younger doctors recognised the importance of Dr. Semmelweis’s discovery, senior staff did not. Partly because the science of bacteria was not yet fully developed or understood. At the time, many physicians believed disease was spread by bad smells… his book was criticized for being unfocused and badly written. He then had a breakdown. In 1865, he was admitted to a Vienna asylum, where, in a cruel irony, he died of sepsis after a wound on his hand became infected"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, New Orleans - From Katrina to Corona - "In another echo of the post Katrina moment, there has been a certain amount of victim blaming. Some observers from outside are saying the city became a virus hotspot because of the authorities’ failure to cancel Mardi Gras. In fact, Fat Tuesday occurred three weeks before President Trump declared a national emergency. The city cherishes its otherness, its cultural difference from the rest of the country. And the city pays for it"
Amazing how 'victim blaming' has now crossed over into describing a defiance of Mother Nature. Apparently it's not just BLM riots that are exempt from covid lockdowns
Liberal logic: Trump was irresponsible for not declaring a national emergency even though it was obvious he should have. But at the same time if others (including other politicians) ignored the threat (or even told people to go to Chinatown, or assured them taking the subway was riskless), they have no culpability

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Sri Lanka After the Bombings - "While the government has introduced unprecedented measures, including closing down the capital Tbilisi and three other cities, the doors of every church in the country remain open. For several weeks now, the Orthodox Church has defiantly refused to comply with a state of emergency introduced at the end of March. First, the authorities banned public gatherings of more than 10 people. The following day, thousands attended Sunday services. TV channels broadcast Holy Communion. TV channels broadcast Holy Communion from Tbilisi's main cathedral, worshippers lining up to receive the body and the blood of Christ. Bread soaked in wine taken with a shared spoon… Instead of supporting the government's drive to get people to stay home and recognizing the severity of the disease, the church has peddled its own theories about Coronavirus. The same Sunday service that would broadcast included a sermon from one of the church’s most senior clerics. Bishop Schiele Moojiri [sp?] suggested that the virus was punishment from God for worldly sins, such as abortion and sodomy. The Church has vehemently defended the practice of Holy Communion using a shared spoon. One priest said that the wine is in fact an antiseptic and that it purifies the spoon. If it was chacha, the local vodka, he might have had a point. But since most wine is less than 15% proof, he's on scientifically shaky ground"

Observations - 21st October 2020

"None of what you just said is accurate" followed by a block seems to be code for "I can't refute any of what you said so I shall eliminate this cognitive dissonance" 

If you tell people they're wrong, they get annoyed
But if you show people they're wrong, they get really pissed off 

So people don't like it when you analyse their Facebook posts and show them that they've been predominantly posting about a topic and so are verifiably obsessed about it
 

"Looking for hotels in India is the first time I've ever sorted price from high to low." 

"typical Asian parents
Not saying parents like that don't exist in most angmoh countries
They do exist, but in these angmoh countries they are known as "controlling" and "narcissists"
In Asian countries they are just normal parents" 

It seems that "mental health" has metastasised to the point that anything one doesn't like hurts one's "mental health"

Shouldn't those against fluoridated (or even lithium-ed) water be against chlorinated water too?

Wondering if people who demand that employers accept that most jobs can be done from home realise that jobs that can be done from home can also be done abroad in a third world country. So they're asking for their jobs to be offshored

 

One of the few advantages about the coronavirus hysteria (with people fantasising about a >20% fatality rate and stocking up 4-6 months of supplies) was that people have (mostly) stopped hyperventilating about how climate change will kill us all. Of course there's always the next moral panic (or going back to old ones)...

One climate change hystericist claimed to me that we should ignore economics in the quest to end climate change because profit considerations meant business had been ignoring the environment. Besides echoing the perversity here of refusing the most effective way of solving the putative problem, it was also incoherent (since the relationship is tenuous at best)

 
"Pedos" are to the right what "bigots" are to the left - an excuse for virtue signalling

The same people who want to abolish the electoral college in the US proclaiming that "land doesn't vote" also think that Brexit was an outrage because England voted leave against the wishes of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Addendum: They also claim that referenda are the tools of dictators and rail againt "populism", all while asserting that all votes need to have equal power. Principles don't matter. Only power

Amused that the same people who mock businesses for not having 6 months of cash flow in cash seem to be the same ones who condemn cash hoarding. Also they assume (re)starting a business is as easy as finding a new job. Doubtless they have never tried the former

Links - 21st October 2020 (1)

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Turkey Opens Border with Europe - "[On ‘refugees’ trying to get to Greece] On a road near a border crossing, we came across three men, one from Senegal, and two from Afghanistan. They were walking together, but they shared no common language, only the goal. Europe... I asked her why, given that they were safe in Turkey, they were trying to get to Europe. Of course, someone who sits in comfort doesn't realize how big our crisis is, she said from beneath a niqab that covered all but her eyes. Turkey is a safe place, but we are living like the dead. She returned to the village and the following night messaged us to say the Turks had presented them yet again with a boat to cross. When they declined, their hosts clearly lost patience. Jawad, Abdul Majeed and the other 12 children were put on a bus with their mums and dads, driven out of the village and away from the river and dumped on a petrol station forecourt... Turkish bullies have thrown us here she says...
Dark for three months a year, Svalbard is a far fetched haven. By rights, man should have left this inhospitable tract [sp?] to the island. But it has exerted a magnetic pull on outsiders since its 17th century whaling heyday. *Thai name* has not read the Svalbard treaty, 100 years old this February, but without it he wouldn't be here. First mapped in 1596, Spitsbergen as it was known, was a no man's land until the early 20th century and the onset of coal mining. The treaty gave Norway sovereignty over the archipelago, but declared it a visa free zone, where companies and nationals from signatory countries had equal rights to natives. In practice, this has been extended to non signatories like Thailand too. The Thai migration wave began after Longyearbyen airport opened in 1975, with Norwegian miners returning from their holidays with suntans and wives. Since then, men and women of all ages have moved here. High salaries and low taxes are the draw. But Social Security is minimal and outside of job contracts, housing rare and ruinously expensive, most Thais begin as cleaners… years of limbo have won him no rights to permanent residence. It's possible to secure citizenship after eight years on Svalbard and one on the mainland, but few ever apply... For most Thais, the dream is to save enough money to go into business back home"
Since Turkey is not a safe country even for foreigners, the whole 83 million population of Turkey should be able to claim asylum in Western/Northern Europe

Trump: 'If I lose, I don’t think you will ever see me again' - "I'm not sure you're ever going to see me there. I don't think I'm going to lose, but if I do, I don't think you're ever going to see me again, folks. I think I'll go to Turnberry and play golf or something" (2016)
Trump: I will leave the White House peacefully if I lose to Joe Biden - "Trump brushed aside fears he might not leave office willingly, telling anchor Harris Faulkner: "Certainly, if I don't win, I don't win." The president added he would "go on, do other things."His comments come after Joe Biden told Trevor Noah on "The Daily Show" on Thursday that he had considered the possibility of Trump refusing to leave his post if he lost the election, CNN reported." (2020)
Of course, the people with Trump Derangement Syndrome interpret this as his saying that he won't leave if he loses. If Biden says something bad about Trump, it must be true

M&M’s Were Originally Created To Allow Easy Transport Of Chocolate To The Military

Free cocaine and opiates being handed out in Vancouver - "The Drug User Liberation Front announces that it will hand out a safer supply of opiates and cocaine in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to people who use drugs."

Far-Right Extremist Suggests Treating People Of All Races Equally | The Babylon Bee - "The hateful bigot has been canceled for his controversial comments that people should be treated with respect no matter their skin color."I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," said the dangerous, alt-right extremist, according to sources. "I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”"

'Love Trumps Hate!' Screams Protester While Beating Republican To Death With A Shovel | The Babylon Bee - "At publishing time, the progressive had begun screaming, “WHEN THEY GO LOW, WE GO HIGH!” while leaping out a second-story window to elbow-drop another hapless conservative bystander."

sofie halili on Twitter - "men sexualize pole dancing because they think everything is meant to please them pole dancing is DANCING and an art form. it is not inherently sexual. but what is inherently sexual is my nudes! visit http://onlyfans.com/literallysofie for some top tier (well, top 3%) trans girl content"

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum: EP11 Toronto Redux - "I can remember my mom saying to me once, never make fun of anyone who mispronounces a word, because that means they learned it from a book and didn't just hear it. And we should be encouraging more people to read"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "It's one of those interesting things that somehow people imagine that humans will be really good at reacting to a situation they've never seen before. But models won’t. The reality is the most important thing to being able to look after your client capital and make some money through all of this was the ability to stay calm and rational and to recognize what was going on in market prices  and to adapt to it. As opposed to letting the emotion of both everything on the news every five minutes and what was going on in your own family get one to act irrationally and the models do it actually very well at adapting to all of this and recognizing what it was, you know, emotions are, are the enemy of good decision making under pressure. And actually that's a time when computers come into their own"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "Netflix now has a biggest stock market valuation than Exxon America's biggest oil company. 190 billion dollars, versus Exxon's 173 billion...
[On BA] Initially, we were able to request a refund online, but they've actually now removed that option and the only way to get a cash refund is to call up British Airways on their phone line. And when you call up you get played a automated message and instead of being put through into a holding queue, it just plays, plays a message and cuts you off. It's been really, really difficult to get through to a human being. And after about two weeks of trying, I did manage to speak to someone who said they'd refund all three of my bookings, but I've only had a refund for two of them so far."

Galactic War Report – Episode 202: TheUncannyMrH and the Struggle Supreme – Radio Free Tatooine - "‘The last round, my opponent did not attack. And his, his defenses were so odd.’
‘They weren't auto set though?’ ‘No, they were not. They were clearly intentional and, you know, bless this guy's heart for doing what he did. Let's see. What. okay, here we go. So he had, Mandalorian paired with Jawa and Ugnaught’
‘What?’
‘It's like Quill, the Ugnaught. The jawas… he had a team of three Chewbaccas... A team of three reliced jawas, he had Stormtrooper Han, Stormtrooper, First Order Stormtrooper... this guy lives his life by a, by a different code.’
‘I love this person.’
‘He had one team that was Lobot - lead, with Jolee and Mace Windu’
‘Just all, bald people?’
‘Bald people. His Lobot is relic seven’
‘I want, I want this person to be my friend’...
'He had one that was Qui-Gon, General Kenobi and Jedi Knight Anakin... He also had, and this is, this is, this is not just like, meta. This is him visioning the game as it should be, not as it is. So there's one team that is 2 Ewoks being led by C-3PO, which makes sense. Now C-3PO is not a leader, but it doesn't matter… I tore him apart of course. This guy obviously does not care.’"

2804 – The ubiquity of the Cretan archer in ancient warfare | The History Network - "‘Another such commander is named by Polyxenidas. There he records a ruse against Seleucus his generals, Achillus [sp?] and Andromicus [sp?] where a Cretan officer Philatirus [sp?] was sent to negotiate for the body of Antiochus. Antiochus had spread a rumor that he had been killed. But when men came to take the surrender of Antiochus’s forces, his troops attacked them. This seems the kind of ruse ideal for a commander of light armed or missile troops. So Philatirus may well have been a commander of the archers’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Covenanters - "‘There's the business of kneeling, which seems to figure largely in the notes. Why is that so important?’
‘Because it’s viewed as a Catholic practice. There is a sense that if you kneel in front of the sacrament, that you're ascertaining a presence in the sacrament that Presbyterians don't think is there. Presbyterians think there's no presence of Christ in the bread. Instead they'll sit at a table. They'll break the bread, they'll share it. So it's a community like the Last Supper, an act of community. Something important does happen. Drawing on Calvin's theology, they think that Christ is present but they think that the people are lifted mystically into the presence of Christ, but Christ is not present in the elements so therefore do not kneel to the elements’"

Anne de Courcy On Chanel & The Riviera | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Chanel was certainly anti semitic. But one must not forget, this is not a defense, but it's a bit of an explanation. One must not forget that there was a deep vein of anti semitism in France. And that Petain, after all, who ran the hole of unoccupied France, introduced anti semitic laws that were just as stringent as the Germans without even being made to, just voluntary, and a lot of French people turned in their neighbors who were Jewish and people were deported. And this was done by the Germans of course in occupied France, but in unoccupied France, it was done a lot by other Frenchmen... most of them were [anti-Semitic]’"

Mostly Colin - "your abs are supposed to be covered with a healthy, protective layer of fat. The shape Jason Momoa is in during his movies is achieved by a diet designed to lower his body fat to unhealthy numbers, dehydrating him and enhancing his abs with make up. This is what ripped, muscular, healthy person looks like on their off time. If you think this is a dad bod, for the love of everything that is holy, shut up and absolutely never comment on a man’s body ever again. I mean hell, you can still see his damn v-line, what fucking dad bod has that?!Don’t believe me? Google some bodybuilders who are off their contest diet. The men who literally make a living for having defined muscles. For 360 days a year, they do not look like the way you think they do. During a bodybuilding contest, these men’s body fat is under 7%, they’re dehydeated and covered in fake tan that helps the muscles show up. And it’s literally only for that day, because it’s extremely unhealthy. Same goes for actors who are known for being ripped - they’re at their worst when they’re filming. This exact same shit happened with Vin Diesel few years ago with people getting a paparazzi shot of his “beer belly” and I’m genuinely worried of the young men who grow up in this society thinking being muscular means having defined abs 24/7."

GitHub - iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome: Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Sarah Tang - "It was brought to my attention that we appeared on The Straits Times today about the elections again, and the article is extremely puzzling to me. Some background info, we were approached by MP Cheryl Chan from Fengshan to design some print collaterals before she ran for the elections in 2015. It was a simple job. She engaged our services, we designed and delivered – end of story. I don’t see how this process is interesting in any way. In fact, when we were approached through email for this interview, my first response was ‘We're not sure what we can offer for your article – the job that we did was pretty straightforward.’ We were under the impression that this article was going to be centred on ‘interesting publicity materials’, NOT how money was being spent on the elections. We even made it clear in the second question that we were uncomfortable that a previous reporter revealed the pricing of our quote in a 2015 article... I’m not sure how ‘𝗪𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗮 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲…’ could be translated to an image caption that reads ‘…𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗼 𝗦𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗯𝘀’. This is not even a gross misquote, but the complete opposite of what was answered. On top of that, the only other time we are mentioned in the article is the sentence ‘And firms that design name cards and campaign material, like graphic design studio Sarah and Schooling, are also still needed.’...  Please do not use the business that I struggle to keep afloat as part of your agenda to push propaganda. What you’re essentially doing is making my clients think that I am doing so very well, when the fact is I had to beg my clients to support me by giving me jobs and early deposit payments because we were not applicable to any grants available when covid hit.Oh, the irony of the headline 'As battle shifts online,...'We will no longer be responding to any Straits Times reporters asking us anything in relation to this job again.#noblankcheque"
The Straits Times just may be the biggest purveyor of fake news in Singapore

Google Is No Longer the Greatest Search Engine on the Internet - "The Simpsons may be both the most quotable television show of all time and the one with the m0st creative life on the World Wide Web... all of this love and energy and reappropriation has reached what appears to be its logical, glorious conclusion: a brilliantly designed and mind-blowingly comprehensive search engine that allows fans to pair any line from the show's first 15 seasons with its corresponding still (all 3 million of them). It's called Frinkiac—after the show's bumbling mad scientist, Professor Frink—and it may be the greatest feat of Internet engineering we've ever seen"

About | International Read Naked Day - "Reading is a sensual, ritual experience – or at least it should be.  We should set aside time, set the stage, treat books like lovers… That’s why we, the international literary salon Naked Girls Reading, have decide to make July 5th READ NAKED DAY  Join us in removing the obstacles that hinder your freedom to read as a ritual.  Doff your clothing on July 5th and get in touch with one of the most powerful forces in history – the reading of the written word. We invite you to take part by simply reading naked.  That’s it.  If you’d like to be even more involved in bringing focus back to the ritual of reading BECOME A READ WARRIOR and help us get the word out.  Start a naked book club.  Get your local books stores involved.  Because if there’s one thing we at Naked Girls Reading know for sure:
You can’t spell “literature” without T&A!"