Meme - *Distracted Girlfriend meme (based on Distracted Boyfriend)*
*Beauty and the Beast's Belle ignoring her Beast to look at X-Men's Beast*
Whitney (E-Girl Ranger) on X - "girls if he knows the difference between the Ottoman and Byzantine empires just know you are the side hoe to his map video game addiction"
Commentary: To ace your first job, invest in your workplace relationships - "Being thrust into the working world with little other experiences for reference can bring rude shocks. Fresh graduates may have been in the nurturing cocoon of education for the past 16 years, where the focus is on learning, rather than performing. In education, what you need to know is spoon-fed to you, rather than you actively seeking it out. It may explain why some fresh graduates are seen to be laid-back and passive, expecting employers to take the lead in onboarding. It raises the question: Do fresh graduates lack guidance at work, or might they be less willing to ask for it?... During my first probation review, the director pointed out how colleagues mentioned that I was not sociable and approachable. She cited examples such as eating lunch alone, instead of doing it with colleagues."
Swimmers avoiding the water over fears of raw sewage on UK beaches - "Almost a quarter of the UK’s sea swimmers may not take a dip in the ocean this year because of sewage dumping by water companies, according to a poll. Sewage was dumped into waters near England’s most celebrated beaches for nearly 8,500 hours last year, analysis shows. A separate review earlier this year found there were 1,504 discharges in 2022 on beaches supposed to be free from such pollution"
Nazism and the Failure of Arab Modernity - "Arabs in particular seem to always be getting seduced by bad ideas, and how this fact has influenced the development of the Middle East over the last century... The thing about the Middle East is that it seems, of all the major regions of the world, to be the one most hostile to classical liberalism. For the last several decades, most of the ideological energy has been on the side of Islamism. The main bulwarks against this poisonous worldview are currently royal despotism, and different groups of fanatics checking one another. But before that, what motivated Arab intellectual elites and mass opinion was a kind of nineteenth century romantic nationalism... The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, for example, which has a modified swastika as its symbol, is part of the ruling coalition of the Assad regime today. It had a militia that fought in the Syrian civil war before being integrated into the national army in 2019. Arab elites looked to German unification as a kind of model, explicitly rejected individualism, and kept alive a romantic vision of nationalism long after it had died in the West the moment Hitler shot himself in the head. One branch of this thought, Baathism, was a completely homegrown ideology, and ended up taking over both Iraq and Syria. These events were among only a few instances where a revolutionary ideology that wasn’t originally created in the West (i.e., Marxism) gained control over a state in the post-World War II era... The ultimate question here to me is why are Arabs prone to accepting and promulgating such bad ideas? Moreover, is there some kind of deep collectivism in the culture that causes it to be horrified by the idea of individual freedom? Is there a biological component to the anti-liberal tendency, perhaps related to a long history of inbreeding? Or is all this historically contingent? Are Arab intellectuals and religious leaders themselves driving this process, or are they just channeling the only kinds of ideas that have any hope of gaining power in the culture they find themselves in? What is the role of Islam in all this, and what are we to make of the massive historical overrepresentation of Christians as Arab nationalist thought leaders? As an Arab who finds classical liberalism to be by far the most compelling political philosophy in human history, there’s a personal component to these reflections. And given that we still find Middle East squabbles occasionally dominating American politics, such questions will remain relevant for quite a long time. Regardless, I’m convinced that there is something unique in Arab culture, at least when reinforced by Islam, that makes it particularly unsuited to building functional modern societies. The fact that the region was enamored by romantic nationalism before it fell for Islamism provides strong evidence of that"
Soupeur - Wikipedia - "Soupeur is a sexual practice involving attraction to other male secretions, specifically bread soaked in urine, or semen. This specific meaning refers to individuals who take pleasure in consuming food soaked in the urine of others, in particular bread abandoned and later retrieved at public urinals. This practice was popular in Paris and Marseille up until the 1960s and 1970s... There existed an alternative where a public urinal is stopped in order to wait for it to fill. Then a person would enter it and submerge his penis into the urine of previous users. This was alternatively called dipping. The term alternatively describes the act of individuals visiting brothels to consume the semen left on the prostitutes by the customers. This act is also named "do dinette."... Sometimes prostitutes "fake" their performance by brushing their pubic hair with ersatz sperm made from a mixture of egg white, urine and a few drops of bleach"
Tying Allowance to Chores Could Kill Kids’ Motivation to Help Out - The Atlantic - "The practice of paying children an allowance kicked off in earnest about 100 years ago. “The motivation was twofold,” says Steven Mintz, a historian of childhood at the University of Texas at Austin. “First, to provide kids with the money that they needed to participate in the emerging commercial culture—allowing them to buy candy, cheap toys, and other inexpensive products—and second, to teach them the value of money.” These days, American children on average receive about $800 per year in allowance, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Kids, though, are usually not receiving money for nothing—the vast majority of American parents who pay allowance (who themselves are a majority of American parents) tie it to the completion of work around the house. Parents’ preference for this setup has spawned an array of apps that let them dole out allowance money once chores are completed, and even pay for an individual chore... A range of experts I consulted expressed concern that tying allowance very closely to chores, whatever its apparent short-term effectiveness, can send kids unintentionally counterproductive messages about family, community, and personal responsibility. In fact, the way chores work in many households worldwide points to another way, in which kids get involved earlier, feel better about their contributions, and don’t need money as an enticement. Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Arizona State University who studies families, is skeptical of the idea of paying kids on a per-chore basis. “How sustainable is it if you’re going to pay a child a dime for each time he picks up his clothes off the floor?” she says. “What are you saying—that you’re owed something for taking care of your stuff?”... After about 18 months on the Earth, Lancy explained to me, children almost universally become eager to help their parents, and in many cultures, they’re brought in to the processes of doing housework. They may be incompetent little things, but they can learn quickly by watching. “Praise is rare,” Lancy says, “as the principal reward is to be welcomed and included in the flow of family activity.” Gradually, their responsibilities get ratcheted up according to their abilities and strength; they may start by carrying messages or small objects, and work their way up to food preparation or caring for siblings. “In effect, they ‘own’ a suite of chores which they carry out routinely without being told,” Lancy says. And they don’t assume they’ll be paid an allowance. In an email, he made clear how this contrasts with American norms: “In our society—and I’d extend this to most modern, post-industrial nations—we actually deny our children’s bids to help. We distract them with other activities, we do our chores (meal prep) when they’re napping, we convey that their ‘helping’ is burdensome and, not surprisingly, the helping instinct is extinguished. Hence, at 6 or 7 when we think they’re ready to start doing chores or at least taking care of themselves and their ‘stuff,’ they’ve lost all desire to help out.”"
A Mosque's Refusal to Bury the Manchester Attacker - The Atlantic - "More than a week has passed since 22-year-old Salman Abedi detonated an explosive outside a concert at the Manchester Arena, killing himself and 22 concert-goers and injuring dozens of others. Still, Abedi’s remains have reportedly not been buried. This carries particular significance for a Muslim like Abedi: Islamic law requires that burials take place as soon as possible after death. The Manchester Central Mosque, one of the largest Muslim funeral providers in the city, has refused to be involved in Abedi’s funeral. Irfan Chishti, an imam at the mosque, told me its executive committee’s decision not to inter Abedi’s remains aimed to reaffirm the local Muslim community’s rejection of his actions... Such a decision is not unprecedented. In the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, a series of shootings and bombings that resulted in 164 people being killed and more than 300 others wounded, India’s Muslim community refused to bury the nine assailants, arguing that the “people who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim.” Boston’s Muslim community came to a similar conclusion following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, after which an imam at the Islamic Institute of Boston said he would not be willing to hold a funeral for one of the attackers because “this is a person who deliberately killed people. … He already left the fold of Islam by doing that.” Following the deadly attack on a church in the French town of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray last July, which resulted in the death of a priest, the town’s Muslim community also refused to be involved with the assailant’s burial. The leader of the local mosque told Le Monde, “We will not sully Islam with this person. We will not participate in the funeral or the burial.” Not all Muslim community leaders believe funeral prayers should be withheld from those who commit acts of violence. After a Philadelphia police officer was killed in 2008, one mosque leader said that the assailant, who was Muslim and who died in the ensuing confrontation, had the right to be given the funeral prayer—he just refused to be the one to do it. Dagli told me differences of opinion among Muslims may sometimes stem from differing interpretations over Islam’s stance on suicide. “There are reports that the Prophet Muhammad did not pray the Janaza prayer for someone who committed suicide,” Dagli said, “but there is difference of opinion as to whether this means that we should not do so either, or whether one still can and the Prophet did that to discourage suicide.”"
From 2017
Why India’s Muslims are so moderate - "A combination of factors explains it. Islam in South Asia has a long history, over 1,000 years, but was long dominated by Sufis who integrated closely with non-Muslim Hindus, sharing many cultural practices. In Pakistan, decades of large-scale migration to the Gulf along with close political ties to Saudi Arabia saw harder forms of Sunni Islam adopted, notably the spread of Wahhabi and Deobandi mosques, madrassas and beliefs. By contrast many Indian Muslim migrants to the Gulf, for example from Kerala, have proved less effective at reimporting harder-line forms of Islam on a large scale. Indian madrassas appear to be under more watchful eyes of the state. It is crucial, too, that India—unlike Pakistan and many other countries with large Muslim populations—has long remained as a robust and lively democracy. A secular constitution and the electoral clout of a sizeable minority helps give Muslims in India a stake in the political system. Many are also intensely proud to be Indian, even if a few support Pakistan’s cricket team. Targeted government welfare schemes to assist "backward" Muslim groups may help too... as Indian Muslims are widely dispersed around the country, they are in a small but not insignificant minority almost everywhere: that fact encourages both majority Hindus and Muslims mostly to rub along together, since extremism would prove disruptive for just about everyone... One additional reason at times given for India’s Muslims remaining moderate is that literacy rates and incomes have been low, leaving them relatively isolated from those global forces—such as jihadist websites and news of atrocities against Muslims in the Middle East—that help to spread rage elsewhere. Rising literacy, an ever-more urban population and growing wealth and information may yet encourage more extremist factions to emerge. Large migration flows to the Gulf might yet help to bring back more conservative Islamic beliefs and funds for Wahhabi mosques and madrassas"
From 2014
The Rise and Fall of Sega Enterprises - "When Sega discontinued production of the Dreamcast console in 2001 and withdrew from the domestic hardware market, it marked the conclusion of one of the most tumultuous and error-strewn periods in the company's 72-year history. Sega Enterprises' spectacular fall from grace during the course of the 1990s remains a tragic spectacle of overconfidence and woefully misguided business practice. At the start of the decade, Sega stood astride the gaming world like a colossus; it had smashed Nintendo's vice-like stranglehold in the US and conquered Europe with its street-smart marketing. But by the close of the '90s, the company's reputation was in tatters, its user-base had all but collapsed and it was driven dangerously close to the yawning abyss of insolvency... "When I first joined the company, I remember having a meeting with Tom Kalinske - who was then Sega of America CEO - and one of the questions I put to him was whether Sega saw itself primarily as a hardware company or as a software company. I said that if the answer was a software company, then why didn't it develop games for other platforms? Tom smiled at that and acknowledged that it was in the software business but, in his words, Mr Nakayama would rather cut off his right arm than develop anything on Nintendo hardware."... Okawa granted the company the vital transfusion of funds that would ultimately keep it alive. In 1999, he loaned $500 million of his own money to pay off Sega's debts - a loan he would later waiver on his deathbed two years later. When the 74 year-old Okawa succumbed to heart failure in 2001 following an arduous battle with cancer, he also gifted Sega his personal shares in both the company itself and CSK, which equated to a cool $695 million. The immense generosity of this one individual aided Sega's painful move into software publishing, and safeguarded its long-term future. These days Sega Enterprises is known as Sega Corporation, and is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings. It remains and endures, but as a much-changed organisation. It is now famous primarily for its software, and presides over a glittering catalogue that includes Sonic the Hedgehog, Football Manager, Yakuza, Total War and many other best-selling titles. The company's financial outlook is also positive; it posted a net income of ¥41.5 billion last year - around £338 million - and it ranks as one of the largest publishers of video game software in the world... "There is no future in selling hardware," replies Brogan emphatically. "In any market, through competition, the hardware eventually becomes a commodity. The future is in software. Sega's fault was to think that its core business was selling consoles, but consoles tend to be a one-time buy for most consumers, until the next version comes along. Software is a repeat purchase, so there's far more profit in it. If a company has to sell hardware then it should only be to leverage software, even if that means taking a hit on the hardware. I think some of the senior people in Sega never really understood that.""
Meme - "look what they took from us
*Apple laptops with fewer and fewer ports, from 9 ports to only 2 USB C ports*"
Meme - Pickup trucks:
1961-1979 - 36% cab, 64% bed
1980-1997 - 40% cab, 60% bed
1997-2003 - 50% cab, 50% bed
2004-2015 - 60% cab, 40% bed
2015-2021 - 63% cab, 37% bed
*The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire - crumbling columns*
Vincent Bevins on failed revolutions in his book 'If We Burn' - Los Angeles Times - "Bevins found himself in São Paulo as a correspondent for the L.A. Times in 2013, when an anarcho-punk collective of bus fare activists semi-accidentally sparked a national protest movement that brought millions of Brazilians to the streets... their movement succeeded in reducing transit costs but then spun out of control, ultimately destabilizing the popular left-wing government and unleashing, in Bevins’ telling, the right-wing forces that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power. The book takes this as a launching point, following similar movements around the world where millions of people poured into streets and squares to protest something but often ended up having exactly the opposite of the intended effect. Starting with the movements that the media dubbed the Arab Spring, Bevins focuses on places where mass protests genuinely threatened or even toppled the government, including Egypt, Turkey, Chile, Hong Kong and Ukraine. That counts out smaller movements in stronger states that were never at risk of falling (sorry, Occupy), countries that collapsed into civil war (Syria) and places where outside governments intervened (Libya). A man stands in front of a red truck, holding an AR-15 assault rifle. In each case, Bevins manages to find a handful of activists who had helped launch the movement and tracks them through the unintended consequences... The book ends by giving Bevins’ protagonists, the activists who saw their movements shift and warp in front of their eyes, a chance to reflect on what they could have done differently. All land on the idea, to differing degrees, that the anarcho-punk culture of leaderless protest hurt their causes more than they helped them. When the movements got big enough to contest the existing power structures, they were left with no spokespeople, no platform, and no clear plan for taking power. You’re unlikely to find another rigorously reported book this year that ends with its subjects advocating for movements to become more Leninist — in the sense of having a hard core ready to step into a power vacuum...
every time in the news throughout the rest of decade, when something similar is happening elsewhere, lots of people I know in Brazil would watch and say, “We hope it doesn’t go the same way that it did here.”... The people I spoke with, from Egypt to Ukraine to Hong Kong to Brazil, were interested in participating in this book because it was about the future, because it could be a way to learn from mistakes and to try to come up with an optimistic, forward-thinking set of lessons for the next generation."
Meme - "Actual female commoner in feudal Korea *ugly*
Female Commoner in Korean Historical Dramas *pretty*"
Meme - "social media is so interesting because wealthy people cosplay a simple life and broke people cosplay luxury living like there has to be a study done on this
Marisa Baldassaro @Nerdspringbreak: "Sometimes I watch this farm lady's cooking videos when they're suggested on IG.Shes got like 10 kids & always pregnant.I'm always like wow they work so hard on their farm. I googled them and her husbands father was the founder of Jet Blue, and that stove behind her is worth $35k"
Meme - "Myths aren't all they bust *Pixellated so it looks like one is jerking the other off while driving, while the other is enjoying it, from One-Hand Hyneman episode (one man steering and one man controlling the pedals)*"
Meme - "*Homer Simpson's Back Fat*
Japan
Bullet Trains
Robot Store Staff
Electronic Toilet Seats
Talking Showers
The rest of the world
Fax machines
Floppy Disks
Paper filing
Cash society"
Meme - Matt Walsh @WMattWalshBlog: "I would kill every ape in the world to save one human, because humans are more important. This is a very simple concept, folks."
K. Thor Jensen @kthorjensen: "would you suck every ape's dick to save one human"
Meme - "Imagine training hard all your life and doing crazy shit for power just to be second strongest to some orange dude Imao *Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z, Sasuke from Naruto, Bulbasaur from Pokemon, Hillary Clinton*"
Cookie Shop Owner Explains Why He Denied Free Cookies for Bride - "David Maffei, owner of Halfsies Cookie Company, shared an Instagram Reel that revealed an exchange between himself and a bride-to-be who claimed to be an influencer. She tried to set up a collaboration — which included free cookies from the brand to include in her bridesmaid bags. Maffei showed the messages between the two, where Ana Montealgre's email described herself as an "influencer," who had "collaborated with a few brands." After reviewing her profile and seeing a small, personal-sized following, he responded, "Sorry, you're not an influencer." The bride-to-be called herself a "beginner influencer," to which Maffei snarkily replied, "I'm a beginner astronaut."
Business calls out woman who identified herself as ‘influencer’ to get free products - "he claimed the term influencer is “a wild label,” before sharing his thoughts on how “beginner influencers can get started.” “You buy the products from the brands that you like and you tag them. They will probably repost you. You’ll pick up some followers and maybe other brands will see what you’re doing and you’ll eventually have an engaged following that’s interested in the products you receive but you just don’t ask in the beginning for free products,” he wrote... “I’m a middle-aged man with maybe a dozen real friends and a private account and I have more followers than her. Never in a million years would I think I’m an influencer or even ask for free stuff from a company I don’t follow,” he wrote."
New York cookie shop owner ruthlessly shuts down 'influencer' with less than 1,000 followers after the bride-to-be asked for freebies for her bridal party boxes to 'spoil my squad rotten' - "'Idk why this is in my algorithm but I’m here for it. You really are an astronaut because you blasted her all the way to the moon,' wrote Haley J Marshall. 'Haha you definitely got much more business from this post than you would’ve if she made a post on your product,' wrote another fan of the exchange."
Hindi Word Yesterday and Tomorrow - "The Hindi word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same, “kal”. When I shared this with some of my students understandably many of them were like: Seriously?!? It’s the SAME word?"
This helps explain Indian time
Dr. Eli David on X - "🇮🇹 @GiorgiaMeloni's expressions are next-level: 🇦🇷 Milei 😍 🇮🇳 Modi 🥰 🇧🇷 Lula 🤬 🇫🇷 Macron 🤮"
The guy Missouri forgot to imprison for 13 years has been cleared of new, different charges - The Washington Post - "Do you remember Cornealious “Mike” Anderson, the Missouri man who was supposed to be sent to prison, only wound up being free for 13 years before the state realized it and imprisoned him after all? Well, he is back in the news, this time because he was cleared of a different and unrelated crime. First, for anyone who does not remember, let us recount Anderson’s story: He was convicted of armed robbery in 2000 and sentenced to 13 years in prison. But then, due to a strange mix-up, Missouri forgot to actually put him in prison until 13 years later, when the state corrections department prepared to release him and realized he was never actually there... Anderson was arrested in 2013 and spent nearly a year behind bars, before a judge released him last May and credited him with time served."
From 2015
‘A Mess’: Harvard Med School Professor Plagiarized in Expert Report, Judge Says - "Harvard Medical School assistant professor Dipak Panigrahy plagiarized large portions of an expert report on possibly carcinogenic chemicals, a federal judge wrote... Panigrahy submitted a more than 500-page report on behalf of the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, alleging the company's manufacturing facility in Orlando released toxic chemicals into the surrounding area causing various injuries, including cancer. But in a March 18 court order, U.S. District Court Judge Roy B. Dalton Jr. granted a motion by Lockheed Martin to exclude Panigrahy’s report as evidence, saying that the report extensively plagiarized from works by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. “Dr. Panigrahy’s report is — put plainly — a mess,” Dalton wrote. “Indeed, the plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy’s own work,” Dalton added... “His deposition made the plagiarism appear deliberate, as he repeatedly outright refused to acknowledge the long swaths of his report that quote other work verbatim without any quotation marks at all — instead stubbornly insisting that he cited over 1,100 references, as if that resolves the attribution issue (it does not),” Dalton wrote. “The volume of references actually makes the problems with Dr. Panigrahy’s methodology more glaring, as he admitted that he did not even read the 1,100 papers in their entirety,” he added in a footnote, referring to a deposition of Panigrahy as part of the case. The report also alleges that at times, Panigrahy misrepresented the IARC’s research... Panigrahy’s testimony has been called into question in previous court cases. In October, his report in an Ohio case was dismissed after the judge determined that it was based on a “novel” theory regarding chemical markers — a topic on which “no expert has ever been permitted to offer an opinion.”"
Max on X - "Why does Rufo only go after—oh nevermind."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "Is this the "witch hunt against Black women" I've been hearing so much about?"