An influx of French immigrants to Quebec highlights a cultural shift ... and rift - The Globe and Mail - "In 2009, when the Parisian financier Roland Lescure was preparing to move to Quebec – as tens of thousands of his compatriots have done in the past 20 years – he received a prescient piece of advice. Be careful, Roland, a friend in Toronto said: They’re not French people who live in America. They’re Americans who speak in French... The mother country has sent so many of her sons and daughters to its former colony lately that the Montreal area has become home to the the largest community of French expatriates outside of Europe. One neighbourhood, where the sound of French accents and the smell of French bread waft through streets formerly associated with Québécois joual and baked beans, is now nicknamed La Nouvelle-France. Drawn by a cultural and economic openness they can’t find at home, many young French people have fallen in love with Quebec. While Canadians in the rest of the country tend to see the province as relatively European – with its bike lanes, walk-up apartments and large state – the French see it as almost Californian, a land of swimming pools, friendliness and jobs... Quebeckers eat like Americans, drive like Americans and socialize like Americans, too. If the French have rediscovered Quebec, more than 250 years after the British conquest, it’s a little different than they remembered. The size of the Gallic migration to Quebec has been gathering momentum for years, like a well-launched boule on one of the province’s many pétanque courts. The number of French citizens registered with the country’s consulates in Montreal and Quebec City has nearly doubled since 2005, to more than 75,000. But registration is voluntary, and the true size of the French presence is likely more than double that again, said Sophie Lagoutte, the French consul-general to Montreal... To many young French people, Montreal seems like “an El Dorado,” Prof. Pavot said. The sheer abundance of life in Quebec can look shocking from across the Atlantic. The unemployment rate is consistently a couple of points lower here, and money stretches further compared with impossibly expensive Paris. The province is full of space and domestic water use is cheap, so everyone really does seem to have a swimming pool... Of course, the winters can be a blast of icy disillusionment, but the first word many French immigrants use to describe Quebec is not “cold” but “open.” They mean it in every sense: culturally, economically, temperamentally, geographically. Natives of France are even surprised by the lack of shutters on Montrealers’ windows... People are friendlier and more casual, in contrast to the stereotypical French froideur – less likely to use the formal pronoun “vous” to address strangers and more likely to greet them with genuine warmth... Most importantly, the Quebec economy feels more open, with fewer restrictions on hiring, firing and starting businesses. The French labour market is famously rigid, whereas in Montreal, a philosophy grad can make a living writing video game scripts or baking bread. That can leave French immigrants raving about their new home, like starry-eyed refugees disembarking at Ellis Island. In Quebec, Prof. Robinot said, “everything is possible.”... Quebec has welcomed more French immigrants in the past 20 years – almost 38,000, third most of any country in that span – than it is believed to have done during the entire colonial period. According to numbers from Quebec’s Immigration Ministry, a steady stream of thousands a year in the early 2000s spiked to new heights after the Great Recession, when the province’s economy bounced back faster than France’s. The French may be newly open to Quebec, but that does not mean they necessarily know anything about it. Québécois stars have broken through in the metropole over the years – Félix Leclerc, Celine Dion – but even that success is sometimes tempered by misunderstanding. Montreal filmmaker Xavier Dolan has been a favourite at Cannes, but his films, studded with Quebec slang, often screen there with subtitles. A few years ago, a Leger poll found that when the French were asked what they like about Quebec artists, 56 per cent said “their accents.”... Many of the surprises revolve around how “American” Quebeckers are. They drink more beer than wine, smoke more weed and fewer cigarettes. “The day starts much earlier and ends much earlier,” Ms. Lagoutte said. “When someone invites me for dinner at 6, I don’t eat lunch. ... I couldn’t possibly be hungry at 6.” In the Plateau, baguettes taste Parisian, but elsewhere in the city, Ms. Robinot said, “You don’t find lardons everywhere.” Even Quebec’s car culture and approach to public safety – measures by which the province can seem relatively European to its continental neighbours – strike some French immigrants as borderline Texan. Léo Trespeuch, Ms. Robinot’s husband and a professor of management at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, remembers how taken aback he was at seeing cops speeding after a car and pulling their sidearms on a suspect. “That cowboy side was new to us”... The most “North American” thing about Quebeckers is also the most difficult for French expats: their relationship to friends and family. The Lumineau sisters observe in their guidebook that Quebeckers are like avocados, soft and welcoming on the outside, but with a hard inner core. New French arrivals often find it’s hard to make friends, because Quebec social life seems to take place within tight circles of intimates, around family barbecues or by the side of those swimming pools, not over spontaneous after-work cocktails as in Paris or Marseille... Even the charm of the squirrels wears off eventually. For Old World sophisticates raised on urban wildlife consisting of little more than pigeons, squirrels incarnate the wildness and freedom of the New World. French newcomers can often be seen gawking at them in Montreal parks as if they’ve just seen a zebra on safari."
Moving to a small town for cheaper housing? Prepare to pay more to get around, for insurance and repairs - The Globe and Mail - "Mr. Cable and his girlfriend only needed one vehicle when they lived in Toronto. “Supplement your car with good transit and a bicycle and a walkable neighbourhood, and one is more than enough,” he said... getting the kids to school could also take significantly longer. Leaving the city will also often require more frequent car repairs, longer commuting times and more trips to the pump at a time of soaring gas prices. Vehicle insurance costs and property taxes can also be higher outside of Canada’s urban centres. Daycare costs, meanwhile, are highest in Canada’s biggest cities, but some smaller communities are struggling with rising fees because of a lack of providers. In addition, some of the services city dwellers enjoy might not exist in more rural destinations, while others could come at a steeper price. More significant sticker-shock items can include the higher cost of maintenance, services and repairs of all kinds, specialty food items, even insurance. “The more rural you are, the less organized fire and emergency response service you have, and that’s reflected in insurance costs,” says Sandy Lyons, a licensed insolvency trustee and credit counsellor for Grant Thornton, and a financial literacy volunteer for the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. “In terms of rural repair services, the smaller your population, the smaller the options are, and that can drive up prices.”... “People moving into a very small centre might find themselves not with a sewer system, but with a septic field system, which has its own separate costs”... Other infrastructure costs and inconvenience could include taking trash to a garbage dump or transporting water in locations that don’t have clean drinking water readily available. Furthermore, as workplaces begin to reopen, Mr. Lyons says some of those who left major cities might have to commute back and forth on a regular basis or face penalties for working remotely full time. Moving away from the city could also create a budget crunch on the earnings side of the equation."
German man in hot water for running taps non-stop for a year - "A man in the northern German city of Salzgitter is in hot water after police allege that he left his bath and sink faucets running for at least a year, causing "massive damage" to his apartment building. Salzgitter police said the 31-year-old, who also had his toilet running non-stop, is thought to have used 7 million litres (1.85 million gallons) of water over the past year. Police told the dpa news agency Friday they had been called by the building's management after the man had allegedly plugged the drains recently and the water started leaking through the building. He reportedly fought with police when they arrived Thursday and had to be subdued with pepper spray. Police say he has been taken to a psychiatric hospital for an evaluation."
Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate - "the scene serves to drive home some of the basics of the popular conception of trench warfare in WWI, namely:
The primary obstacle to a successful assault was crossing no man’s land.
The primary obstacle to that was machine-gun fire, such that ‘drawing all of the fire’ would be sufficient to enable an attack.
Reaching and clearly the immediate enemy trench line was sufficient to break a sector’s defense (but attacks cannot accomplish this because of (1) and (2))
Consequently, attacks always fail because attackers are mowed down by machine-gun fire before ever reaching the enemy line; defenders take negligible casualties.
As premises, those conceptions lead to a nearly inevitable conclusion, typically phrased by my students as, ‘why don’t you just go on the defensive and let your opponent attack himself to exhaustion?’ The popular culture history has an answer to that question, of course, and it is that all of the generals in World War I were some mix of idiots or detached, aristocratic psychopaths utterly uncaring about their men. And every part of that, from the premises to the conclusion is some degree of wrong; some of the premises are straight up wrong, others are deceptive half truths and all of the rest of it collapses from the broken foundation. Many World War I generals were incompetent and some were uncaring, but there were also a lot of quite capable, focused and dedicated commanders and they couldn’t break the trench stalemate either. Wonder Woman couldn’t have done it either. But to understand why, we need to understand what creates the trench stalemate, because machine guns aren’t enough."
Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate - " did tanks break the trench stalemate? No... It turns out the fundamental premise of the entire idea of morale bombing – that being bombed will make people want to stop fighting – was flawed. Morale bombing has been, depending on how hard you squint at the US air campaign over Japan in WWII (including the use of nuclear weapons) successful either once (out of many attempts) or never. In most cases, the sustained bombing of civilian centers has been shown to increase a population’s willingness to resist, making the strategy worse than useless. The case for strategic bombing against industrial targets is marginally better, but only marginally. While airpower advocates, particularly in the United States promised throughout WWII that bombing campaigns against German industry could lead to the collapse of the German war machine, in the end many historians posit that the real achievement of the campaign was to lure the Luftwaffe into the air where it could be destroyed, thus denying the German army of air cover and close air support, particularly on the Eastern Front. Some dimunition of German industrial capabilities was accomplished (though it is not clear that this ever approached the vast resources poured into producing the large numbers of extremely expensive bombers used to do it, though the allies had such an industrial advantage over Germany, forcing the Germans to fight in expensive ways in the sky was a winning trade anyway), but the collapse of German industry never happened. As Richard Overy notes, German industrial output continued to rise during strategic bombing and only began to fall as a result of the loss of territory on the ground. Needless to say, ‘strategic bombing can sucker the enemy into wasting their close air support’ was not the result that airpower advocates had promised, nor could it have broken the stalemate... the problem facing generals – German, French, British and later American – on the Western Front (and also Italian and Austrian generals on the Italian front) was effectively unsolvable with the technologies at the time. Methodical Battle probably represented the best that could be done with the technology of the time. The technologies that would have enabled actually breaking the trench stalemate were decades away in their maturity: tanks that could be paired with motorized infantry to create fast moving forces, aircraft that could effectively deliver close air support, cheaper, smaller radios which could coordinate those operations and so on"
When a cobra became a murder weapon in India - "an Indian man was given a rare double-life sentence for killing his wife by making a cobra bite her... 28-year-old Suraj Kumar paid 7,000 rupees ($92; £67) for a spectacled cobra, one of the most venomous snakes in the world. Trade in snakes is illegal in India, so Suraj made the clandestine purchase from a snake catcher, Suresh Kumar, in the southern state of Kerala. Suraj drilled a hole in a plastic container for air to flow in, put the cobra inside, and took it home. Thirteen days later, he put the container in a bag and trudged to his in-laws' home, about 44 km (27 miles) away, where his wife Uthra was recovering from a mysterious snake bite... while Uthra was still recuperating, she accepted a glass of fruit juice from Suraj which was laced with sedatives. When the mixture had put her under, Suraj brought out the container with the cobra, overturned it, and dropped the five-foot-long snake on his sleeping wife. But rather than attack her, the snake slithered away. Suraj picked it up and flung it on Uthra, but again it slithered off. Suraj tried a third time - he held the reptile by its trademark hood and pressed its head near Uthra's left arm. The agitated cobra, using the fangs at the front of the mouth, bit her twice. Then it slinked off to a shelf in the room and stayed there all night. "Cobras don't bite unless you provoke them, Suraj had to catch it by its hood and force it to bite his wife," says Mavish Kumar, a herpetologist... According to investigators, the fatal cobra bite was Suraj's third, not second, attempt to kill his wife in just four months... Suraj reportedly told his friends that his wife was "haunted by the curse of a serpent" in her dreams, in which she was "destined to die of snakebite". In reality, Suraj was determined to kill his wife, steal her money, and marry another woman"
Meme - "Balram Vishwakarma
place One of my teammates was going through a nasty divorce & that was affecting her work so I scheduled a meeting with her to understand what could do. After a brief 2-minute heart-to-heart conversation with her, I figured that she really needed something to divert her mind so I increased her workload by 50% and asked her to mandatorily come to the office on Saturdays as well. (So she can worry less about her 2 years old daughter & a manipulative husband). And guess what happened? She did that for a month and now is one of the star performers of our team! But she has started this funny habit of keeping short lines of icing sugar & rolled up 100 rupee notes on her table all the time. But I am not a micromanager so dont care as long as she gets things done. You dor't give up on your colleagues! Empathy & understanding really goes well, my friends! #Gratitude #TeamSpirit #Empathy #worklifebalance"
Facebook - "Dan terjadi lagi~
Dijadikan soft ice cream dooonnkkk
Dicampur semuanya 😭
Sedih akutu
Uda ga ada identitasnya lagi itu naget, kentang goreng, cola dan saus2an 😭"
Turning the McDonald's BTS meal into soft serve ice cream
Why the Filet-O-Fish Is My Gold Standard for Fast Food - The New York Times - "As McDonald’s only seafood-based option, the Filet-O-Fish’s semblance of relative health appealed to my parents. Luckily it was also McDonald’s most delicious item. It played to my Chinese palate: While other McDonald’s buns were toasted, the Filet-O-Fish’s was steamed, much like the baozi. From its honeyed starch to its tangy tartar and savory fillet, the taste of the Filet-O-Fish carries an ineffable umami-ness. At once sweet and sour, it reminds me of orange-chicken sauce: a plausibly Chinese flavor mass-produced in America. Eating one always felt transportive — the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine for my Chinese diasporic upbringing. The Filet-O-Fish is the gold standard of fast food for many Asian-Americans, as well as other minority American communities... Its appeal is inscrutable, perhaps out of proportion to its paltry constituent parts. Consider the recognizably flaky fish patty, made from the ubiquitous Alaskan pollock. “Pollock is everywhere,” writes the marine fisheries biologist Kevin M. Bailey in the book “Billion-Dollar Fish.” “It is the pure white meat in fish sticks bought at Walmart and Filet-O-Fish burgers ordered in McDonald’s.” But you wouldn’t want the fish to be more interesting. The generic quality of pollock’s fishiness — common enough for various cuisines to lay claim to it — is part of its allure. So maybe what makes the sandwich beloved isn’t its taste at all, but the juxtaposition of its elements: A single fillet of fried fish, topped with a thin slice of American cheese and tartar sauce, all of it cradled in a bun whose impossible roundness suggests the triumph of industrial food production."
Ant mill - Wikipedia - "An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and has been produced in ant colony simulations. The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, which works until something goes wrong, and an ant mill forms"
Photos of strippers on break causes furor - "A group of strippers and their waitress colleagues who met on the roof for their breaks are finding out their hideaway isn't as private as they thought. Women working at the Zanzibar Tavern, a strip club in Toronto, believed no one could see them when they popped out for a cigarette or cellphone call while still in their work attire. But a Ryerson University librarian, Brian Cameron, took photos of the women from his office window... The club's owner, Allen Cooper, says the women feel their privacy has been violated. Many dancers try to keep their occupation under wraps, something they won't be able to do now because the photos show their faces... One of the girls who was photographed is a Ryerson student... In most of the country, "you have no privacy rights when you're in public," says Gil Zvulony, a privacy and copyright lawyer in Toronto. In Quebec, however, photographers cannot publish photos without the subject's consent, unless it's for news or in the public interest. It all comes down to how secluded the rooftop is from onlookers and whether the women had a reasonable expectation of privacy, he said. The club's location makes it hard to argue the roof was hidden"
Is there an expectation of privacy in a public place?
French company makes NOL profitable – less than 1 year after acquiring it from S’pore - "In 1972, Dr Goh Keng Swee, widely recognised as the architect of Singapore’s economic growth, said: “One of the tragic illusions that many countries of the Third World entertain is the notion that politicians and civil servants can successfully perform entrepreneurial functions. It is curious that, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the belief persists.” With that in mind, Reuters reported Friday that French company CMA CGM has done what Neptune Orient Lines (NOL) could not do – make the company profitable. In fact, the French have done it in less than a year after acquiring the former national shipping line... Led by former Lieutenant General and Chief of Armed Forces, Ng Yat Chung, NOL saw losses rising to US$460 million, while its debts grew more than US$4 billion. In an interview last year, Ng, who was at the helm for 5 years, blamed the company’s demise on its inability “to compete on costs.”... “net profit of $26 million for the former NOL business represented a first quarterly net profit for NOL since 2011.”"
How good is “good”? - " Of the 40 words we tested, “abysmal” was seen as the most negative, with an average score of 1.21. Slightly less bad comes the closely clustered “awful” (1.72), “terrible” (1.75) and “very bad” (1.76). At the other end of the scale, “perfect” is the most positively regarded word with an average score of 9.16. Only one other word managed to break the 9.00 barrier, which was “outstanding” on 9.11 (although “excellent” was not far behind at 8.95)... As it turns out, “good” and “bad” are not exactly mirrors of one another on the scale. Bad has an average score of 2.60, meaning its mirror equivalent on the scale ought to score 7.40. “Good”, by contrast, scores a 6.92. This situation remains the case for the other examples where “good” and “bad” are used: “pretty good”, “really good” and “very good” are seen less positively than they should be to truly mirror “pretty bad”, “really bad” and “very bad”... Comparing the results with those of an identical study published by YouGov US reveals that the stereotype of Britons being less enthusiastic generally holds up – except for the very most positive words. For the 31 words that scored below 8/10 in both countries, Britons gave 28 of them a lower average score than Americans did. However, for the nine highest ranked words Britons rated eight of them more positively."
Meme - "My school locks the thermostat. So to warm up the room I put some cold cheese sticks on top of the thermostat. And my students think they will never use thermodynamics in the real world"
XCH WIDDOP Disney DI702 Best Mum Bambi Mug New in Box
Ironic
Why Do We Fight Wars? | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Chimpanzees are indeed prone to violence and organized violence…bonobos live in a peaceful society... one explanation is that the chimpanzees live in a part of Africa where there is a natural predator, they have the enemy of gorillas, and that they have therefore developed ways of fighting and of holding off those they fear. Whereas bonobos have no obvious enemies, they live in a rather peaceable part, and that they have therefore developed over the centuries a more peaceable culture. I think a cultural factor is enormously important in helping to understand why we have war, and why different peoples fight’"
The chimpanzee-bonobo dichotomy coheres with the experiment which found out that when participants were made to imagine they were in a utopia, they became more liberal
Kate Mosse On 'The City Of Tears' | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘You must find some gems that I guess just can't make it into your work however much you would want them to?’ ‘Well, I'm talking to you at the moment. And even though when we're not on camera, my laptop in the microphone is on a two box files, one purple, and one green, good suffragette colors, and they are full, of notes. I mean, hundreds of thousands of words of notes of research. A tiny fraction, an inch worth of it, is probably in the book, because research only matters if it feeds your story. Research matters so that your reader feels that they can relax into your book and trust it, to enjoy the story. So the minute the research is banging you on the head, saying, look at me, look how much research I've done, then you as a novelist have failed’"
The Black Death: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The normal way it's seen as spreading is being bitten by a rat flea, a black rat will be killed by the disease with the, by the fleas infecting it, the fleas will then come onto a human host, and then kill them. It's actually a very mechanical process. And about 20, 20, 25 years ago, possibly 30, 40 years ago, people started to have doubts about whether the Black Death was plague. And it was basically how on earth do you get a death rate as high as that spreading across the whole of Europe, with every individual needing to be bitten by an infected flea? And we know from the records at the time that relatively few people died from pneumonic plague. Or from septicemic plague. They both existed, but they were small. It was basically bubonic plague that was killing them. And how on earth do you get to that level of infections and for a quarter of a century, the view that started to prevail was it had to be a virus. And there were various fanciful suggestions of the virus that might have caused it. All the way through I was objecting to this because of contemporary descriptions. The Black Death, very unusual disease, the swelling of the lymph nodes, the buboes, the process of transmission. So the contemporaries didn't know how it was being caused, but they knew through observing, these were intelligent people just observed the symptoms in the, in the victims. And it, it seemed to some of us that it had to be bubonic plague. We're still puzzling about exactly how it would have spread. And increasingly, the view is that, in addition to rat fleas, it's human fleas. And particularly, I think, which is, is, one of my favorites, in a sense, is lice. Head lice, body lice, who have been found to be able to carry the microorganism, Yersinia pestis, and I think if you, people were full of lice, the clothes were full of lice, had fleas on them as well."
Kathleen Neal On Edward I's Letters | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Letter writing entailed instruction in how to perform them, how to read them aloud. And it's certainly true that Edward’s letters and those of his contemporaries seem to have contained, if you like, stage directions in the form of certain types of punctuation that gave an instance of how, how to breathe, when to breathe, when the dramatic pause should be made, and so forth. And that seems to have been another way of attempting to make sure that one had some control over how the letter is read out, even if it's not your person doing it. And it's clear that these punctuations, for example, these punctuation marks, marks are sometimes rhetorical rather than grammatical signals, because they don't actually make grammatical sense… there is also the way that the king could manipulate which seal is used. For example, he had at least two: the Great and Privy seals, which issued business out of Westminster or wherever the king happened to be. And they were vastly different in size. The Great Seal was many inches across, whereas the Privy seal was only a couple of centimeters across. And there's one example I can think of where, quite unusually, the king chooses to use the Great Seal for what is otherwise a very banal letter of family greetings to his aunt, the queen, the Dowager Queen of France, Marguerite of Provence. And it seems likely, I've argued in an article that's just about to come out in Women's History Review, seems likely that he did this partly to ensure that the letter would be received publicly and opened and read aloud publicly as a way of signaling the resumption of friendly relations between the English and French royal houses after a certain period of crisis. Whereas normally he would have chosen the Privy seal for such a piece of correspondence that would have been, perhaps even secretly conveyed, because it was so small, it could be folded up very tight into a very tiny packet passed over in an unassuming way...
Medieval letters are not intended to be received just by the person who is named as the recipient.That it's almost always the case that at least their most closest advisors or immediate family members, members of their retinue, their servants would have been present, and that the letter would have been read aloud in their presence rather than necessarily silently. There are, in fact, a couple of examples in literature. For example, the works of Matthew Paris. Monk in the mid 13th century in St. Albans, where he's talking about papal letters being, letters being received, I'm sorry, by the Pope, and that the pope would both read them silently to himself, and also have one of his nearest Cardinals read them out to him, and that people are present when this happens. So when I say that, I think there's a theater of reception, I don't just mean in a big performance of handing over the letter to the person who is the named recipient, and genuinely mean, there is an audience present and, and the performance of the letter, not just of the handing over of the letter.'"
Margarette Lincoln On 17th-Century London | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘I was quite taken by Ned Ward's colorful description of the city's coffee shops being the home of stinking tobacco and stinking breaths, often doubling up is brothels and being the home of drinking, swearing and profaneness. I mean, why did coffee shops become such a focal point of both the light and the dark side of the capitalist culture in the 17th century?’
‘Well, it's a very good question, because before there were coffee shops, people did all their business in taverns. And before the advent of hot non alcoholic drinks, like coffee and tea, most Londoners were daily inebriated because they were drinking beer all the time. And I suppose they, they, once they got hold of coffee, they learnt that actually, it was better to be sober for business. Coffee shops provided a great address for merchants who might be operating out of rented rooms. So it was like, like hot desking these days. They had a business address and they could collect their post there. And the popular conception of coffee houses today is that they will places of polite conversation and intellectual debate and sober business. But actually, the streets of Stuart London were frenetic and filthy. And coffee shops are just an extension of this experience. And it's wrong even to think of them as uniformly sober places, because people went there after drinking in the tavern to sober up. It was like the 17th century equivalent to getting a kebab, you know. And, some coffee shops actually sold spirits and and something called Cock Ale, which is a disgusting concoction of beer and parboiled chicken with spices. Um, the other thing that I think you were alluding to is that coffee shops were wholly implicated in a criminal underworld of theft, receivership and prostitution. So gangs might steal things that didn't apparently appear to have any value like pocket books or bonds, they couldn't cash in. But then when people advertised for these things to be returned, no questions asked, they could often recover them in coffee shops, you know, for a small reward, so thieves would sell, steal things in order to get the reward rather than the, the thing that they'd stolen’"
TheExhibit Israel - Posts | Facebook - "Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities. The CIA had been taking advantage of China’s own growing presence overseas to meet or recruit sources, according to one of these former officials. “We can’t get to them in Beijing, but can in Djibouti. Heat map Belt and Road”—China’s trillion-dollar infrastructure and influence initiative—“and you’d see our activity happening. It’s where the targets are.” The CIA recruits “Russians and Chinese hard in Africa,” said a former agency official. “And they know that.” China’s new aggressive moves to track U.S. operatives were likely a response to these U.S. efforts. This series, based on interviews with over three dozen current and former U.S. intelligence and national security officials, tells the story of China’s assault on U.S. personal data over the last decade—and its consequences."
S'pore most tired country in the world - "Singapore's number two position means it even beat China’s 2,174 hours and Japan’s 1,723 hours -- Asian powerhouses -- and puts it way ahead on the list of the world’s 15 most fatigued countries. This result is a little suspect, but Singaporeans can take the dubious honour of suffering from work presenteeism. Or simply being inefficient... Singapore is the winner of the most fatigued country in the world. This is despite a country like Mexico appearing to be a more tiring place than Singapore as it is on the upsurge in terms of its development."
Rob Reiner on Twitter - "We can not ignore the darkening skies. The 2022 election will determine whether we are still a Democracy or have succumbed to the Autocratic rule of White Supremacy."
"It's only a democracy if my side wins"
Meme - "The Matrix (1999)"
"I don't know how I thought they filmed this, but somehow this wasn't it."
David J Prokopetz - "“All right, so the vampire’s gravestone is–”
“Cenotaph.”
“What?”
“It’s only a gravestone if it marks the location of a body. A monument honouring someone whose body isn’t present is a cenotaph.”
“I’m… not sure that’s how it works if the body gets up and walks away on its own.“
“There’s precedent for gravestones being reclassified as cenotaphs if the body is later removed and reinterred elsewhere. There’s no rule that says the body itself can’t do the removing.“
“Okay, but the body very much is coming back. That’s kind of what we’re here to accomplish.”
“So it’s a temporary cenotaph.”
“And naturally our greatest concern here is avoiding semantic ambiguity.“
“Semantic ambiguity is how vampires get you.”"
Meme - "Rock of Detection
Wondrous Item, Common
This almost spherical rock looks mundane and unassuming bbut upon closer imagination, it has multiple detection capabilities. As a bonus action, you can hold, throw or set the rock on the ground then observe its effects.
Gravity Detection: You hold the rock then let go. The rock falls detecting the direction and intensity of any gravity.
Slope Detection: You place the rock on a lat surface. The rock rolls detecting the direction and steepness of the slope. It may fail on soft or sticky terrain.
Illusion Detection: You can hurl the rock for up to 30ft. It detects an illusion if passes through creatures or solid objects.
Invisible Detection: You can hurl the rock for up to 30ft. It detects any invisible creatures or object if its trajectory is unexpectedly interrupted
Fire Detection: You hold the rock in front of you. The rock's temperature rises when it is nearby fired
Weather Detection: You set the rock down outdoors. If the rock is cast a shadow, sunny. If the rock is wet, raining. fits white on top, snowing. If it jumps, earthquake. If it's, gone, tornado/hurricane.
The rock does not seem to be magic. This has baffled many arcanists as more of the rock's detection capabilities are discovered."
Did Cargo Ship 'Draw' a Penis Before Getting Stuck in Suez Canal? - "This is a genuine image showing the route of the Ever Given cargo ship as it waited its turn to enter the Suez Canal. However, as of this writing, there's no evidence that this ship intentionally took this route in order to make a funny GPS drawing. "
OH MY: George Takei slammed for petty, jealous insult of William Shatner after historic space flight | The Post Millennial - "Star Trek legend William Shatner, 90, made history when he became the oldest person to fly to space on Wednesday when he took flight aboard Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin... George Takei, who is notorious for trolling and feuding with his former co-star for decades, was dismissive of Wednesday's voyage. "He’s boldly going where other people have gone before," Takei told Page Six. He also called Shatner a "guinea pig" and said he's "not the fittest specimen."
William Shatner on Twitter - "Don’t hate George. The only time he gets press is when he talks bad about me. He claims 50+ years ago I took away a camera angle that denied him 30 more seconds of prime time TV. 🤷🏼♂️ I’m giving it back to him now by letting him spew his hatred for the world to see!🤣 Bill the 🐷"
No surprise. SJWs are miserable haters