Meme - *Supermarket Aisle sign*: "breakfast. soft drinks. chips"
Ian Miles Cheong on X - "Drill is not “just music.” It is a cancerous culture that celebrates crime and it is responsible for the propagation of criminality throughout inner cities."
Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 on X - "A Banksy art piece was taken less than an hour after being installed in the black neighborhood of Peckham in London. The local council has reported the missing artwork to police. Art experts estimate the piece could be worth hundreds of thousands."
Breanna Morello on X - "Why are U.S. Capitol police opening satellite offices around the country? I asked USCP to provide me with data that justifies this—they won’t. Speaker Mike Johnson’s office doesn’t want to talk about it. The only explanation is that they’re the only agency that isn’t subjected to FOIA requests. So transparency is optional."
Meme - "My roomate sucedded in giving himself autobrewery syndrome by booting yeast
So for the past 2 weeks my one roomate. Our attic one that seems to always do dumb shit, has been using a enema system to suplant brewers yeast into his colon in hopes of giving himself autobrewery syndrome. Which is where the body produeces its own ethanol for one reason, metabolic issues, or another, shoving yeast up your ass. Well now he is drunk Cant eat breat or any sugar or he gets smacked. And he forgot how much gas yeast makes. He shit himself today. All his shit is apparently like fire. Well its full ofof alchohol so no shit. And his head hurts. Im about ready to get the land lord to kick him out. He has run off naked on pcp, stole datura seeda thinking they were morning glory seeds, and now made himself into a brewery."
Earliest Mickey Mouse in public domain as ‘Steamboat Willie’ loses copyright - The Washington Post - "Mickey Mouse’s iconic status — and considerable value — made him the face of efforts to extend and protect copyrighted material, if for little reason beyond being even more broadly recognizable than Jazz Age authors and composers. Disney also has a reputation for its intense legal vigilance when it comes to protecting its properties — what Wos calls “an ironic twist for Disney, which built their empire on public-domain fairy tales” such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Jenkins calls that dynamic the “love triangle” among Disney, its Mickey protection efforts and its savviness with adapting nonprotected works... So what might be fair game for those looking to adapt Legal Mickey, who still bears more than a little resemblance to present-day Mickey? Take Mickey’s early dance style, which is jaunty and “a little more awkward,” vs. his later fluid moves, Jenkins says. “These are the kinds of generic character traits that are not subject to copyright protection. These are isolated, uncopyrightable features of later iterations.” Also not eligible for copyright, she says, is simply having your anthropomorphic mouse character talking in a high, squeaky voice: “What do you think it is going to sound like — Barry White?”"
Thread by @718Tv on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If poverty leads to crime, then how come Appalachia has a lower crime rate than the national average? Let's take a look... What comes to mind when you think of the word "poverty"? Now remove subsidized vouchers paying for modern forced Central Air (HVAC) with which to set at 85F in the dead of winter paid for by tax payers, running water and electricity. Add stoves that run on wood or coal for heat. No government supplied vouchers are sent to Appalachian families to burn said wood either. Don't cut wood = no heat Not many Section 8 vouchers either for that matter in this neck of the woods. No WIC checks, no EBT cards either. Owsley County, Clay County, Knox County and McCreary County in Kentucky. Or Wilcox and Sumter County in Alabama. Or Quitman County in Mississippi. All synonymous with "slow motion catastrophe" and "entire communities disintegrating" but no one ever talks about it. I always wondered where the reflexive disdain for "white trash" comes from, it often comes from people who've never hung out or partied with them... Truly, if anything is systemic, it is the living Hell that make up the lives in Appalachia. RW culture war guys don't like to talk about it cause they're poor. LW culture war guys hate them cause they're white and mock them in ways that defy proper description. Discussing places like Appalachia (or the Ozarks, for example) invoke grinding poverty on American soil so hardly anyone does it. Class is an underpinning of culture yet avoided by the right and grossly misunderstood on the left but through a lens of hating white people. The Mennonites have done more to alleviate the suffering here than the Federal Government and never asked for anything in return. Think about that for a moment. Moonshiners? Sure. Criminals? Of course, they're everywhere. Hilljack scrappers tearing copper wiring out of buildings before the sun comes up? Yup. And yet there is an astonishing lack of gang activity from the people living here, and the crime rate is below the national average. Interestingly enough, there are non-whites who live in abject misery that left wing of culture war avoids mentioning entirely. Indian reservations are home to astonishingly fucked up living conditions. Guess they better start transitioning to get some eyes and ears on them, too. In a more developed form, the culture of poverty explanation also informs J.D. Vance’s argument in Hillbilly Elegy, which he describes as a book about a “culture that increasingly encourages social decay” in the context of regional economic decline. Others suggest the “resource curse,” or the idea that places with a lot of natural resources are likely to be poorer because resource industries, like coal mining, dominate the local economy and prevent other economic sectors from growing. Just like swaths of the third world"
Rolf Degen on X - "The proportion of psychologists who identify with social psychology - which stands at the center of the replication crisis - is dwindling, while cognitive neuroscience is experiencing a meteoric rise."
Tech startup is finding success in the U.S. after it was shunned by Toronto - "After being pretty much outright banned in Toronto, the tech startup that caused a stir here has now migrated to the United States. People were bemused and sometimes upset by the little pink robots nicknamed Geoffrey that roamed the streets delivering for company Tiny Mile in Toronto, and the concept was soon stopped in its tracks here in Canada. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance called for robots like Geoffrey to be banned from public spaces in a 2021 brief that said such technology "creates a substantial and worrisome new disability barrier impeding people with disabilities in their safe use of public sidewalks and other paths of travel." Though there was pushback against them being removed from Toronto sidewalks, by this point you won't see any pink androids rolling around these parts. Now, they've opened up in Charlotte, North Carolina and Miami, Florida and they've been getting a warm welcome."
When you hate innovation
Man survives lightning only to suffocate to death when villagers treat his injuries with cow dung - "Binod and Gokula Podh, who lived in Pamara village in the Sundargarh district of Odisha state, had been to the market when they were hit on Sunday evening. Villagers tried to help the pair by embracing a superstition and putting a heap of the animal dung on Binod's body... Instead of helping the stricken man, this suffocated him and within several minutes Binod stopped breathing. It was later reported he died from asphyxiation... This is not the first time Indian villagers have used cow dung to try and help people who have been hit by lightning. In June 2018 people from the district of Rayagada in the state of Odisha put dung and mud on 32-year-old Sankara Bisoi and 45-year-old Biswanath Majhi. The two villagers were buried for around 30 minutes before a health worker found them and called for an ambulance. Mohan Bisoi of Kanjangmandi village said:' 'Cow dung and mud paste therapy is an ancestral practice of healing lightning victims.'... in May 2017 a young boy from Sana Litipuli village died when his relatives covered him in cow dung, reports OdishaSunTimes. His family had covered him in the manure for 40 minutes and hoped that he would recover from his injuries. The boy's two friends who had also been struck by lightning were taken to hospital and survived the incident."
Time to decolonise medicine and embrace traditional knowledge
Two Men Have Been in Jail for 45 Days for Saying Cow Poop and Piss Can’t Cure COVID - "police forcefully took a journalist and an activist from their homes and threw them in prison. They’ve been in jail since. Their crime? Facebook posts that criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party for recommending cow dung and piss as cures for COVID-19. In India’s Manipur state – a sparsely populated region about the size of New Jersey – police came at night to arrest political activist Erendro Leichombam... police barged into the home of journalist Kishorechandra Wangkhem to arrest him, too... One complaint alleged that the Facebook posts “deliberately and wilfully insulted and outraged religious feelings and sentiments” of BJP workers and family members of the deceased... anipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh told reporters that freedom of speech and expression, although protected under the Indian Constitution, cannot be misused. “In cases where security and public order is violated, the law will automatically take its course,” he said."
An appropriate response to offending religious feelings and racism! As Amos Yee's case shows, if you know posting it will offend religious feelings, that means you are committing a crime by doing so
ICBC vehicle insurance allowed with no driver's licence? - "When a B.C. man received his 21st impaired driving conviction, he did not have a valid driver’s licence. He did, however, have an insured vehicle. In August 2022, Roy Heide's blood alcohol level was two times over the legal limit. He was arrested after a motorcycle crash in Abbotsford. His passenger on the bike suffered serious injuries and Heide tried to flee the scene. On Dec.18, 2023, Heide pleaded guilty to impaired driving, driving while disqualified and driving while prohibited. “What's incredibly concerning is that this conviction represented Mr. Heide's 21st conviction for impaired driving, which is believed to be the single most conviction for impaired driving offences someone has received in Canadian history,” says Const. Art Stele, a spokesman for the Abbotsford Police Department. At the time of his arrest, Heide was a prohibited driver in B.C., yet he was the registered owner of a motorcycle"
Meme - "Sinkies no longer able to afford third world Brides The Independent Singapore: In case you missed it: "Now I don't even qualify for Vietnamese wife as Matchmaker sets $4,800 monthly income requirement for potential suitors of a Vietnamese lady,' the man wrote"
Effects of state-level policy changes on homicide and nonfatal shootings of law enforcement officers - "This research indicates that three-strikes laws increase the risk of fatal assaults. RTC laws are not associated with increased risk of assault. Missouri's PTP repeal may increase the risk of non-fatal handgun assaults."
If you know you're going to go in for a long time if you're caught, you might as well escalate to reduce the risk of getting caught
Pippin Tries To Watch The Rings Of Power - YouTube - "Pippin takes Gandalfs iPad and uses his Amazon Prime Video subscription to watch the highly criticized Lord Of The Rings series, The Rings Of Power. He soon regrets this decision"
Meme - "Home Alone
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
Home Alone 3
Home Alone (HD)
Home Alone: The Holiday Heist
Horny Moms Home Alone With Their Dildos"
Meme - "I love ripping the fishnet stockings off the slooty little oranges"
Meme - TOMB RAIDER @kala2k7: "can we please stop acting like CoD Lara Croft is a goddess when she's a massive insult to fans
*pretty, busty Lara Croft*, *ugly, flat Lara Croft*"
Fiona Daly on X - "I just overheard a woman say she uses her boyfriend's laptop to Google Christmas presents she wants so that he gets targeted ads. Communication in the digital age: a love story."
Free Speech Concerns Raised After College Chancellor Fired for Making Porn - "The firing of University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow over his involvement in pornographic videos has sparked free speech concerns. UW President Jay Rothman announced Gow's firing on Wednesday, writing in a statement that his "abhorrent" actions "subjected the university to significant reputational harm." The Board of Regents voted unanimously to terminate Gow as chancellor, but the university did not offer specific details about why he was fired. Gow believes he was fired after it was discovered that he and his wife, Carmen Wilson, a former professor at UW-La Crosse, produced and appeared in pornographic videos, he told the Associated Press. The couple starred in a YouTube channel titled "Sexy Healthy Cooking" in which they cooked meals with adult film actors. According to AP, their biographies on Amazon, where they have published several books, contained links to a pornographic website."
Meme - "TTSH Lasik doctors all wearing specs
Clin Assoc Prof Heng Wee Jin
Dr Fam Han Bor
Adj Asst Prof Tan choon Hwal Johnson
Dr Lau Koon Hin, Alex"
Meme - "I'm reading Japanese reviews of baldur's gate 3 and most of them are positive, but the negative ones are funny because they're all shocked that there is no grind, choices matter, and you have to actually role play in an RPG"
Thieves stole computers from Epstein PR guru before docs were released - "Michael Sitrick, of A-list global crisis PR firm Sitrick & Company, said crooks burglarized his company’s offices in a four-story Brentwood building on Jan. 2, but batted down any connection between the break-in and this week’s unsealing of nearly 900 documents from a since-settled 2015 defamation suit by alleged Epstein vic Virginia Giuffre... Sitrick said the thieves only stole computers that were used by employees in the accounts’ payable, and pointed out that other companies’ offices in the building were also broken into on Tuesday, he added. He also said neither his private office nor his assistant’s were tampered with. “If the thieves were after anything related to Epstein or anyone else, how can one explain why my office was not broken into?” he said, adding that there weren’t any documents at his office connected to Epstein."
Jean-Luc Brunel dead - Disgraced Epstein 'pimp' was in single cell and NO cameras recorded his prison 'suicide' - "JEFFREY Epstein pal Jean-Luc Brunel's death was not caught on camera and he was in a single occupancy cell at the time, sources said. Brunel died in circumstances eerily similar to his paedo friend Epstein as he also hung himself in prison while awaiting trial for sex crimes."
Meme - "NO LISA NOOOO *Lisa Simpson on flying Stephen Hawking wheelchair*"
Meme - Stephen Hawking: "YOU ARE ALL JUST JEALOUS I WAS GETTING MORE NUDE MIDGET ACTION THAN YOU"
Singapore kills a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys - "On July 23, 2021, an article appeared in the Tokyo-based English-language weekly Nikkei Asia Review, calling attention to the Singapore government's handling of so-called KTV lounges, alleging that decades of institutional failures in dealing with what the article called "organized crime cartels” were running what amounted to illegal brothels, which were responsible for the widespread spread of Covid-19 among the lounges’ patrons. The result was astonishing. The story got an unheard-of 1.5 million hits from amid Singapore’s 5 million-odd population virtually from the moment it was uploaded, and far more than Nikkei had ever scored on a Singapore story, by a factor of thousands. As most Singaporeans know, the KTV lounges have been an embarrassment to strait-laced Singapore for decades, widely regarded as an unregulated hotbed not only for the coronavirus but as places where prostitution flourishes openly as authorities have long looked the other way. The article appears to have generated absolute fury at the very top of the Singapore government, particularly in the office of law minister K Shanmugam. Singapore's answer to the story, which was written by a 28-year-old security analyst named Andy Wong Ming Jun, wasn't long in coming. Indignant articles appeared calling the Nikkei article “full of inaccuracies” and justifying the government’s control over the lounges and pointing out, among other things, that “Singapore has laws against organized crime, money laundering, and trafficking-in-persons” that keep the lounges squeaky clean. The government apparently didn’t turn to the courts for defamation, as usual when deeply offended although officials in Singapore’s Tokyo embassy relayed a threat to throw Nikkei's entire business operations out of the country, reliable sources say, not just Nikkei Asian Review. Wong is now in the UK, writing his master’s thesis and counting his scars, and unlikely to ever return to the city of his birth absent a political revolution. In the aftermath of the publication of the article in Nikkei Asia Review, he says, his life has been taken apart in stunning fashion, to the point where his professional and social life in Singapore have been ruined and he's been forced into exile. According to his account, as well as news reports and court records made available to Asia Sentinel, Singapore mounted an attack on him that can only be described as unprecedented. It extended even to the consulting firm boss he was working for, who will remain unnamed, but who was blackballed from Singapore by his industry and political contacts, who “implied because they questioned his judgment in hiring a Singaporean who turned out to be a political critic.” The owner of the firm was forced by circumstances to close his consultancy and leave Singapore. Three days after the article appeared, Wong and three others were arrested and charged in court with possessing or transmitting obscene materials through a Telegram chat group in an affair that had occurred 20 months before and seemingly gone dormant. Wong has repeatedly been identified as a ringleader of the group in state media reports and social media chatter as allegedly possessing vast amounts of porn on his iPhone and on his computer although in court documents he was identified as only a member of the chat group, which had 25,000 members. Never mind that according to the Straits Times, 90 percent of teen boys and 47 percent of teen girls in a survey acknowledged viewing pornography. (Downloading such materials, however, is an offense.)... Andy Wong is in company with victims of Singaporean government vindictiveness going back to four decades to the days when opposition leader Joshua B Jeyaretnam was persecuted falsely for irregularities in his party’s financial books. More recently the targets of government wrath have included citizen journalists Terry Xu and Ai Takagi, critic Roy Ngerng, cartoonist Leslie Chew, blogger Alex Au and many opposition politicians who have ended up in court facing charges and crippling fines after they called attention to alleged shortcomings in the Lion Republic. Human rights lawyer M. Ravi was recently suspended from practice for five years for criticizing government vindictiveness against one of his clients who was on death row. He had previously also represented Alan Shadrake, who was jailed for more than five weeks in 2010 for his criticism of the death penalty in Singapore with his book Once A Jolly Hangman. This process was described earlier at length in a 2017 Human Rights Watch report titled “Kill the Chicken to Scare the Monkeys: Suppression of Free Expression and Assembly in Singapore, which said that “those who criticize the government or the judiciary, or publicly discuss race and religion, frequently find themselves facing criminal investigations and charges, or civil defamation suits and crippling damages. Peaceful public demonstrations and other assemblies are severely limited, and failure to comply with detailed restrictions on what can be said and who can participate in public gatherings frequently results in police investigations and the threat of criminal charges.” More recently, just last week Amnesty International charged that officials are “continuing to silence human rights defenders and other critics ahead of upcoming elections, subjecting “well-known activists and critics of the government to further investigation and harassment…solely for freely expressing their views and opinions.” The prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ’s own brother Lee Hsien Yang and his wife, Lee Suet Fern, have been forced to leave Singapore under threat of government action after warring with Hsien Loong, as Amnesty International reported... “So, what do you do when you can’t take down a message online? You destroy the person who said it. You shoot the messenger with any convenient weaponized leverage within reach That's what happened to me,” Wong said. “An immediate campaign of character assassination was initiated against me by Singaporean state media, calling my article full of falsehoods and inaccuracies. Shanmugam even went on record in the news and televised parliamentary sessions denouncing me and calling me out as a fraud with an axe to grind against the government.” This was a sitting law minister actively interfering with public comments on an open case, despite also stating in a 2016 Law Bill that “Persons in court cases should not face prejudgment by the media or by the public, in a way which whips up sentiment and creates a real risk of interfering with their trials.” The wheels of justice spun fast. Barely a weekend after the publication of the offending Nikkei article, the Singapore Police acted on Wong’s dormant porn possession charges. He and the three other unrelated suspects were ordered to Tanglin Division police headquarters on July 26 – three days after publication.
Czech saboteurs in World War II - "Elmer Bendiner was a B-17 navigator during WWII. He tells the story of a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, and the unexpected result of a direct hit on their gas tanks. “Our B-17, the Tondelayo, was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was typical, but on this particular occasion our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I reflected on the miracle of a 20 millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was more complicated. On the morning following the raid, Bohn asked our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of our unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that, in addition to that shell, another 11 were found in the gas tanks. Eleven unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had parted for us. A near-miracle, I thought. Even after 35 years, this awesome event leaves me shaken, especially after I heard the rest of the story from Bohn. Bohn was told that the shells were sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had then picked them up. They couldn’t say why at the time, but Bohn eventually sought out the answer. Apparently when the armorers opened each of those shells, they found no explosive charge. They were clean as a whistle and just as harmless. Empty? Not all of them! One contained a carefully rolled piece of paper with a scrawled message in Czech. The Intelligence people scoured our base for a man who could read Czech. Eventually they found one to decipher the note. It was amazing! Translated, the note read: “This is all we can do for you now. Using Jewish slave labor is never a good idea.”"
Sydney Metro: From North Sydney to Barangaroo in under three minutes - "Within about 15 seconds, the computer-driven train accelerates from a standstill to a speed of 100km/h under Sydney Harbour, whisking its small group of passengers from a massive new underground station at North Sydney to Barangaroo in three minutes. Two minutes later, the train pulls up at another new station at Martin Place in the CBD. The journey will become a reality for tens of thousands of commuters each day from the middle of next year when the ribbon is cut on Sydney’s first rail line under the harbour, helping overcome the natural barrier separating the CBD from the north and shaking up the city’s public transport system."
Progress!
‘This is the world’s slowest train:’ This B.C resident took a trip on the GO in Toronto and it didn’t go well - "“It’s a train, why are we going so slow? Are we waiting on traffic?.” he asked. He goes on to say that the ride wasn’t comfortable and that it took an hour and 40 minutes to travel 45 kilometres. “Why would anyone want to commute this way? Could have rode a bike in quicker time than that,” he continues. Barber also said that people would rather sit in traffic than use a train that’s going the same speed... Barber even compared Toronto’s trains to the ones in China and claimed the differences were day and night. “300km/h through the countryside and it was so smooth my tea didn’t even vibrate,” he explained. Barber also pointed out the comfy chairs that can recline in order to nap and the major leg room available between seats... “The [GO] train is the worst experience you can have in Canada,” one user wrote. “Most people in Canada don’t realize how far behind we are in the world right now,” another said."
Metrolinx needs to communicate better about Ontario Line construction, councillors say - "Walied Khogali Ali, co-chair of the BOLD Community Coalition, told the meeting that the coalition is concerned about the Ontario Line's impact on parkland and it would like to see more details on Metrolinx's plan for the development of public spaces once the line is built... BOLD, which stands for Build Ontario Line Differently, has talked to Metrolinx officials and explained how the line will impact communities through regular meetings, he said. "We can't do this work if we don't trust each other and work with integrity. We care about the same things," he said. Coun. Paula Fletcher, who represents Ward 14, Toronto-Danforth, said the Pape and Danforth intersection will a "difficult intersection in general" as work continues in the area. She's said she's concerned about people losing their homes in an area north of Gerrard Street East, adding one rooming house has already been emptied already due to construction. Fletcher also expressed concerns about trees that will be removed... the transit agency is working to track and report on employment targets for historically disadvantaged and equity deserving groups, Indigenous and Black communities"
Why public transport is so expensive and takes so long to complete in North America