There needs to be a price for backstabbing - "What happened was nine Democrats stabbed the rest of their party in the back, the latest instance of backstabbing that is rapiding turning into a trend, in which patriots put their hopes in the party that has told them it will fight tyranny only to cave when the going gets tough. With Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, they are John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Gary Peters of Michigan, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Independent Angus King of Maine. Indeed, most of the Democrats in the United States Congress, which is to say all but 10 of them (Maine Congressman Jared Golden was the lone House Democrat), voted against the continuing resolution that will accelerate the president’s dismantling of the federal government."
Surely this level of unhinged fanaticism will help them in the polls!
Ocasio-Cortez tops Democrats' poll on reflecting party values - "Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were asked to name one person when “thinking about Democratic leaders today” who “best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party.” The open-ended question yielded a range of responses: 10 percent pointed to Ocasio-Cortez, 9 percent said former Vice President Kamala Harris, 8 percent said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and 6 percent said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.). Former President Obama and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) each were named by 4 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent respondents, while Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) were named by 2 percent of respondents. At least fifteen other Democrats — many of whom have name recognition from previous presidential campaigns or rumors of possible ones — were named by 1 percent of respondents. Meanwhile, a plurality of respondents, 26 percent, said they have no opinion, while 5 percent gave non-name responses and 5 percent said no one. All other names accounted for a total of 5 percent of responses. The survey reflects the lack of clarity among Democrats over who should lead the party, as Republicans control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez has been a leading voice criticizing Schumer for agreeing to a Republican spending bill that almost all Democrats opposed, due to provisions that cut programs and expanded President Trump’s power to control government funding. “There is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters late Thursday, referring to Schumer’s decision. “And this is not just about progressive Democrats. This is across the board — the entire party.” Schumer said a government shutdown would have been worse, effectively accelerating Trump’s efforts to close down government agencies he doesn’t like, but he has faced intense backlash within the party for not putting up a fight. The last time Democrats were grappling with a Trump presidency, in 2017, the list of party leaders looked very different — with only Sanders near the top of both lists. Obama led responses at 18 percent, followed by Sanders with 14 percent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with 10 percent, and Joe Biden with 7 percent."
No wonder they have record low ratings
6abfe214 on X - "Even if the causes of everything were 100% genetic, improvement is possible. Even without science. Europe managed to do it with violence.
I'm referring here to two ideas I've read
- Europe started habitually executing its lowest 1% of criminals. For hundreds of years it practiced eugenic culling.
- Near constant warfare of small armies produced a truth-demanding, militaristic and meritocratic culture/caste"
Fake Black Lives Matter Facebook page run by Australian union official – report - "A high-ranking Australian union official has been suspended amid reports he ran a fake Black Lives Matter Facebook page that solicited donations from the movement’s supporters. CNN reports that Ian MacKay – an official with the National Union of Workers – helped set up and run a Facebook page called Black Lives Matter as well as other domain names linked to black rights. The page, which was removed by Facebook after CNN’s queries, had almost 700,000 followers – more than double the official Black Lives Matter page. MacKay – who is white – did not respond to calls or emails but denied running the page when contacted by CNN... The investigation quoted sources who said the page may have garnered upwards of $100,000 in donations, at least some of which was directed to bank accounts registered in Australia. It was tied to online donations that supposedly went to Black Lives Matter causes in the US. At least some of the money, however, was transferred to Australian bank accounts... MacKay also registered other websites with links to black rights, such as blacklivesnews.com, blackkillingsmatter.com and backfists.com, among more than 100 site names in total. Domain records show that in 2015 he registered a site known as blackpowerfist.com, which operated as a Reddit-like discussion forum that encouraged donations. Historical domain registration details show Mackay used his union email address to register the site."
From 2018
Euros: Iain Dale left red-faced after dig at Spain's anthem - "He said the English players were singing God Save the King with “gusto” while the Spanish players appeared to remain completely silent during their anthem. He tweeted: "What contrast between the two teams. Every England player belted out the national anthem with gusto. Not a single Spanish player opened his mouth." But as he shared some early criticism about England’s opponents, he was quickly left red-faced. The Spanish national anthem – Marcha Real – is one of only a handful in the world that doesn’t have official lyrics. Oh my, it's awkward. The other three nations to have lyric-less anthems are Bosnia and Herzegovina, San Marino and Kosovo."
Amber Laudermilk arrest: Texas embalmer charged with castrating sex offender’s corpse - "A woman in Texas is charged with castrating the corpse of a sex offender. Amber Laudermilk, 34, was an embalmer at the mortuary facility where the body of Charles Roy Rodriguez was received"
UN Judge, Onetime Columbia University Human Rights Fellow, Found Guilty of Slavery - "A United Nations judge was convicted on Thursday of trafficking a young woman to the United Kingdom and forcing her to work as a slave. Ugandan judge Lydia Mugambe, 49, "exploited and abused" the victim, prosecutors said, forcing her to work as an unpaid maid and caregiver while barring her from seeking other employment. A jury found Mugambe guilty of multiple offenses, including facilitating illegal immigration, forced labor, and witness intimidation... Mugambe was a fellow housed within Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, whose fellows work to "address some aspect of a history of gross human rights violations in their society, country, and/or region," in 2017... Mugambe became a judge on the U.N. International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in May 2023, even though police had been called to her home in Oxfordshire three months earlier... A jury agreed with the prosecution's case that Mugambe, who also serves as a judge on Uganda's High Court, conspired with Ugandan diplomat John Leonard Mugerwa in a "very dishonest" quid pro quo. Mugerwa, the prosecutors said, arranged for the Ugandan embassy to sponsor the victim's entry into the United Kingdom under false pretenses, while Mugambe attempted to influence a judge overseeing a case in which Mugerwa was involved. "
RNC Research on X - "Tim Walz Imposed 95 Percent Tax on Zyn in Minnesota"
Thread by @eugyppius1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I would like a clear explanation, for why the Crusade Against Smoking (which is clearly bad for you) has from the beginning always expanded to include all alternative sources of nicotine, many of which (snus and zyn) are not clearly harmful at all. This makes absolutely no sense. Nicotine is a drug with useful productivity-enhancing neurological effects, if you want people to stop smoking, why hassle them over the vastly safer alternatives? It is the dumbest thing ever. Because of dumb EU regulations, proper snus are illegal to sell everywhere but Sweden, as are the tobacco-free nicotine pouches in Germany. You can buy cigarettes in vending machines and at every corner store tho."
Meme - AlJazeera Plus: "SAVE THE KOALAS!"
AlJazeera English: "EVERY COUNTRY EXCEPT QATAR, NEEDS DEMOCRACY & FREEDOM "
AlJazeera Arabic: "KILL ALL ALAWITES!"
Ben Leo on X - "Woman on radio gushing about how hard her civil servant son works. Stressed, always flat out. Then reveals he does three days in London and one from home. Three days off. THEN reveals he’s studied for and completed another degree WHILE employed! These people are mad."
Bob on X - "Muslims obligated to destroy democracy in the west and replace it with Islamic law, the argument is if to use democracy to destroy democracy or uprising intifada Jihad"
Islamophobia!
Auron MacIntyre on X - "When people hear “The Total State” they think gulags or digital surveillance, and yes all of that comes with it, but the real driver is the lie of liberation In western liberal democracies the Total State emerged because government promised, first and foremost, to liberate us from each other For most of history life was an exhausting effort to maintain a complex web of social institutions like church, tribe, and community which were necessary for spiritual health but also material needs like taking care of the poor or sick, education, protection etc. The state grew by offering to slowly but surely take over all of these tasks, making us feel liberated from the demanding bonds of community while increasing the level of government power This can be seen most strikingly in the voting patterns of men and women, whose mutual dependence formed the core building block of society: the family The family is nothing if not a nested series of dependencies, one so critical to social stability that the state has been trying to dismantle it since Plato and yet has failed to do so Mass democracy has done what no totalitarian throughout history has been able to achieve, it has turned men and women into hostile voting blocs who are racing to give the government enough power to liberate themselves from one another"
PatriciaFleming on X - "๐๐๐ฏWomen inherently submit to authority. Feminism broke them from submission to men, so they'd submit to liberalism instead. Single women are the brides of liberalism."
Yasmine Mohammed ๐ฆ ูุงุณู ูู ู ุญู ุฏ on X - "When I was in Malaysia, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. The billboards proudly proclaimed: “Malaysia, Truly Asia.” But all I saw were niqabs, Halal food, and an entire culture bending over backwards to Gulf tourists. Have you noticed similar cultural shifts in other countries? Let me know"
China’s first corgi police dog loses bonus over 'workplace misconduct' - "The small but determined canine officer lost his year-end bonus for sleeping on the job and urinating in his food bowl, sparking widespread amusement and sympathy on Chinese social media. According to domestic media, corgi joined the Weifang Public Security Bureau in Shandong province as a reserve explosives detection dog in January 2024, when he was just four months old. Despite his diminutive size, the now 18-month-old Fu Zai quickly stood out for his exceptional talent in detecting explosives, winning over his trainers and the public alike."
Medical students are being let down | The Spectator - "It’s allocation day for junior doctor jobs. Soon-to-be medical graduates across the UK find out what deanery they will work in upon finishing university. While it should be an exciting time for Britain’s future medics, recent changes to the system have sparked outrage as students hoping to work close to friends and family find out they have been sent halfway across the country instead... Since 2024, instead of academic grades guiding the process, the SJT has been binned and students are randomly allocated a rank which in turn determines which job they get. ‘The system before wasn’t great,’ a penultimate-year medical student training in London tells me, ‘but now there’s no incentive to aim for anything above a pass in your exams.’ She goes on: ‘I’d like to stay close to where I grew up, but it doesn’t really matter how I rank my choices now – we could get sent anywhere.’ That realisation has led to a feeling of nihilism among current medical students. At universities that offer a six-year degree (which includes an intercalated Bachelor of Science) as compulsory, there is a growing trend of medics opting to leave after achieving their BSc in fourth year. Instead of completing their medical degree, they will pursue jobs in health policy, management or healthcare-related tech startups. There is increasing frustration at the lack of reward work in modern medicine offers – with gruelling hours on understaffed wards and pressure from seniors to fill ever-frequent rota gaps leaving medics feeling disillusioned. Couple that with being sent miles away from a partner, family and friends – with few extenuating circumstances for reallocation – and a sizeable number of the high-achieving cohort are considering abandoning the career altogether. Today students have taken to X (formerly Twitter) to voice their upset at being sent across the UK, with one ‘heartbroken’ medic slamming the rules changing halfway through their study. ‘When I applied to medical school, the deal was that if you do well then you reap the benefits for your foundation programme,’ they wrote. ‘Changing it over halfway through was unbelievably cruel.’ Another student, who has so far got her first choice of deanery, remains glum about the process, noting: ‘With my grades, I could previously have been pretty sure about getting a good job. Despite the publication of the competition ratios for each area, you have no idea what your rank is. Even if you were to “tactically” rank jobs, you’ve got nothing objective to go off to guide you.’ It’s baffling that the UK Foundation Programme has chosen to run things this way. The NHS is facing a shortage of doctors across all specialties. There are almost 16 per cent fewer fully qualified GPs in the UK, relative to population, than other developed countries – while there has been a decrease in the number of full-time equivalent family doctors. Hospital wards, meanwhile, are overrun, A&E wait times are unacceptably high, and waiting lists remain in the hundreds of thousands. To stop this worsening – and indeed, if there is to be any reversal of these trends – more doctors are needed in the system. This requires a focus on both recruitment and retention. Medicine is already suffering from a loss of doctors to countries like New Zealand and Australia on completion of FY2. The system must better serve its future doctors if we are to avoid a fresh exodus of graduates."
Clearly, the NHS needs even more money
Christian Heiens ๐ on X - "Notice how the Constitution did absolutely nothing to shield you from COVID lockdowns, BLM riots, or the totalizing nature of the Great Awokening, but it’s always being invoked to shield the bureaucratic state at every turn?"
Meme - "Did you know that if you count everything right wingers do as "terrorism,' and nothing left wingers do as "terrorism,' then right wingers commit more terrorism than left wingers?"
Meme - Imtiaz Mahmood: "Thanks to the hijab, Muslim men won't get horny around this baby!"
Thread by @SandyofCthulhu on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1999, I was assigned to design the expansion pack to Age of Empires 2. I chose The Conquerors as the theme, and wishing to have 4 civs (as we had on Rise of Rome), I chose the Spanish, the Aztecs, the Huns, and the Mayans. The project went ahead extremely well. We were almost completely finished, 5 weeks ahead of schedule as of January 2000. I was excited to move onto Age of Empires 3. Then Microsoft called and we had an important conference call.
Microsoft said, "We want you to add Koreans to The Conquerors pack." I said, "Koreans, greatly to their credit, were not conquerors. They stayed in their lane. While they're cool, they don't fit the Conquerors theme." Here was Microsoft's argument: "Starcraft sold 3 million copies in Korea." Here was my counter-argument, which seemed pretty valid to me. "Starcraft doesn't have any Koreans in it, so those sales had zero to do with a Korean civ." Microsoft: "But ... Starcraft sold 3 million copies in Korea." I could see where this was going. Once someone simply repeats a previous argument, it's clear they are no longer functioning from logic or intelligence.
So I went ahead and we crammed in the Korean civ in the last 5 weeks we had. No Microsoft didn't give us any extra time. We made what apparently were three mistakes. We used the wrong art for the turtle ships (we used a legitimate source, but apparently Koreans didn't like that source), we named the Sea of Japan "the Sea of Japan" (it's called that in every nation except one. Yup.), and we said there was a Japanese invasion of Korea from 1592-98 which for some reason in 2000 was controversial. A Microsoft representative in Korea actually got arrested and detained for a while. And in the end, we didn't sell 3 million copies of Age of Empires 2 in Korea after all. Don't get me wrong, Age of Empires 2 sold super-well, and so did The Conquerors expansion. But Starcraft was impossible to topple from its Korean throne."
Wannabe dad, 35, dies after swallowing live chicken in tantric ritual - "a 35-year-old man in India passed away after consuming a live chicken in an alleged tantric ritual. Anand Yadav was believed to have taken this drastic measure as part of an occult ceremony to fulfill his desire to become a father... Physicians were surprised to discover that the chick was still alive within the victim's corpse during the post-mortem study of the case, which was reported from Ambikapur... After making an incision near his throat, doctors found a fully alive chick trapped in a position that obstructed his airway and feeding canal, likely leading to asphyxiation. Dr. Santu Bag, who conducted the post-mortem, expressed his surprise, saying, "I have performed over 15,000 post-mortems in my career, and this is the first time I have encountered such a case. The outcomes left us all in disbelief.""
Warwickshire slaughterhouse staff played wolf sounds to sheep and ‘inflicted immense pain, fear and distress’ - "Halal abattoir staff slammed sheep hard onto concrete floors and played recordings of wolves to the terrified animals as they were dying, footage reveals. In a string of acts captured by hidden cameras, workers also breached animal welfare laws in ways that an academic said would have inflicted “immense pain, fear and distress”. Sheep were inadequately killed, showing signs of life and suffering for up to four minutes after their throats were cut and when workers started dismembering them, an expert’s report says. But an official food standards inspector who was watching failed to act, according to the filmmaker who shot the scenes in secret... Workers resorted to conventional bolt guns on sheep that did not die when their throats were cut... The proportion of UK slaughtered sheep that are killed with stunning – which means animals cannot feel pain or suffer – fell last year, from 77 per cent in 2022 to 71 per cent, government figures show, suggesting more are being killed for the halal market."
Islamophobia!
Meme - ๐ก๐ถ๐ผ๐ต ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ด ♛ ✡︎ @NiohBerg: "In Egypt, over 9 out of 10 women have experienced sexual assault or harassment. In Afghanistan, women aren't allowed to yell when they're beaten by their husbands. Can we be serious for one minute please?"
Celine:"Nobody treats a woman better than a Muslim man, you guys just get on here and say anything"
noor @fraudnoor: "kaffir men treat muslim women better than muslim men do"
Thread by @atlanticesque on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "True Believers in the Fully-Regulated Society™ are incapable of understanding why everyone else hates them and why they kill everything they touch. Here’s a True Believer insisting it’s *no big deal* to be *forced to hire a compliance lawyer* to keep a hamster forum online. It’s like, what do you say to these people? They don’t understand the vast majority of people would rather just give up on a hobby rather than hire an attorney to ensure their hobby complies with the latest state regulations. These people need to be purged from the body politic. “Just hold a staff meeting, review the latest regulatory measures, and ensure your operations comply. Then hire an attorney to draft the appropriate deliverables for administrative review. Heck, if you’re adventurous, you could try doing that yourself!” One hears death creeping."
Hamster forum and local residents’ websites shut down by new internet laws - "Dozens of small internet forums have blocked British users or shut down as new online safety laws come into effect, with one comparing the new regime to a British version of China’s “great firewall”. Several smaller community-led sites have stopped operating or restricted services, blaming new illegal harms duties enforced by Ofcom from Monday. They range from a hamster owners’ forum, a local group for residents of the Oxfordshire town of Charlbury, and a large cycling forum. The hosts of the lemmy.zip forum, hosted in Finland, blocked users from the UK accessing the site, saying the measures “pave the way for a UK-controlled version of the ‘great firewall’”... Britain’s Online Safety Act, a sprawling set of new internet laws, include measures to prevent children from seeing abusive content, age verification for adult websites, criminalising cyber-flashing and deepfakes, and cracking down on harmful misinformation. Under the illegal harms duties that came into force on Monday, sites must complete risk assessments detailing how they deal with illegal material and implement safety measures to deal with the risk. The Act allows Ofcom to fine websites £18m or 10pc of their turnover... many smaller internet forums have said they are not willing to deal with the compliance, or shoulder the theoretical financial burden of the new laws. “While this forum has always been perfectly safe, we were unable to meet [the compliance requirements of the Act],” wrote the operators of The Hamster Forum, which describes itself as “the home of all things hamstery”. Richard Fairhurst, the administrator of the “Charlbury in the Cotswolds” forum, wrote that the Act was “a huge issue for small sites, both in terms of the hoops that site admins have to jump through, and potential liability”. “Running a small forum is much harder than it was when I started doing this almost 25 years ago,” he wrote on the site. The site has remained open but closed a debate board where people discussed off-topic issues. Mr Fairhurst, who has run the forum since 2001, told The Telegraph: “By putting all these burdens on the small sites its going to push people away from these small locally run British-owned sites and towards the American giants.” Bike Radar, the forum of the cycling magazine, shut down on Monday blaming “continually rising operational costs” without mentioning the Act specifically. The site has millions of posts. The Green Living Forum, which was set up in the early 2000s and had more than 470,000 posts, has also closed down, with the site’s administrator saying they were not willing to be liable for fines. The host of lemmy.zip, a forum for sharing links, said he would block UK-based internet addresses from accessing the site. “These measures pave the way for a UK-controlled version of the ‘great firewall,’ granting the government the ability to block or fine websites at will under broad, undefined, and constantly shifting terms of what is considered ‘harmful’ content, a message on the site said. The UK-based administrator of the site, who did not want to be named, said: “If I was living in any other country I’d be ignoring this, but because of this personal risk I can’t. I can’t deal with the possibility of an £18m fine for something I can’t guarantee I can comply with.” Ofcom has said that for small sites, the costs of complying “are likely to be negligible or in the small thousands at most”. Digital rights campaigners the Open Rights Group (ORG) said Ofcom should exempt smaller sites from enforcement. “The Online Safety Act places onerous duties on small websites and blogs that may lead them to close or geoblock UK users rather than risk penalties,” the ORG’s James Baker said. “The closure of small sites will not keep children safe but will benefit bigger sites, including Facebook and X, who are laying waste to content moderation on their platforms. “There is a simple solution – the Secretary of State can exempt small, safe websites from onerous Online Safety duties, and protect plurality online.”"
Paul Hundred, GED on X - "Only Middle Eastern societies evolved pork bans - because aridification eliminated pigs’ niche, making them competitors for human food. It had nothing to do with health. All other centers of civilization kept raising and eating hogs."
Donald J. Trump on X - "Why do we always know how the four liberals are going to rule but have to think about which side the Republican judges will go."
Clearly, this is because liberals are always right and conservatives only realise this sometimes
Kim Kardashian Thought India Would Be Like Aladdin - "“We thought we were going to more of a marketplace, like a spice market,” which is when Kim admitted that she thought Mumbai would be more like what is seen in the 1992 Disney movie Aladdin, which is set in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Agrabah. “What you see Aladdin going to and stealing the bread from,” she said. “That’s where I thought we were going.”"
Meme - "4chan is actually more welcoming than reddit"
"This post has been removed by the moderators"
Chinese Restaurant Types Explained: Differences Between "้ค้ฆ," "้คๅ ," "้ฅญๅบ," "้ฅญ้ฆ," and "่้ฆ" - "In terms of frequency, "้ค้ฆ" and "้คๅ " are the most commonly used in everyday conversation. "้ฅญ้ฆ" is also very common, especially in more casual contexts. "้ฅญๅบ" is used both for restaurants and hotels, depending on the region, while "่้ฆ" is less common and often specific to certain types of cuisine"
How Coke misled America - "Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda's health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook. For decades, the $300 billion corporation has duped consumers by promoting messages that are either misleading or flat-out false. It's used an extensive network of allies and proxy groups to carry its messages, including co-opting scientists and their research, and spent billions of dollars on ads that associate Coke with warm and fuzzy feelings represented by polar bears, Santas, and happy families. Coca-Cola has yet to face a major reckoning for its outsize role in America's health crisis. One of the dietary falsehoods that Coca-Cola spreads is the concept that a calorie is a calorie. "We don't believe in empty calories," Katie Bayne, Coke's former chief marketing officer, said in 2012. The following year, James Quincey, now the CEO of the corporation, said, "When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear — the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations — we need to have balance in the calories. And if you're taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they're coming from, a calorie is a calorie." But in the human body, not all calories are created equal — far from it. Research has long shown that a calorie of liquid sugar is not metabolized in the same manner as a calorie of whole grain, for example, or a calorie of fruit or nuts. Those calories have fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that are not present in soda. Coke also promotes the related message of "energy balance." The simplest energy balance argument posits that a calorie of food will be metabolized the same whether it comes from cashews, kale, or Coca-Cola, so consumers should focus not on the type of food but on trying to burn as many calories as they consume. Coke has been especially interested in emphasizing the calories-out side of the equation... Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders"
Left wing logic - evil companies abuse non profits and corrupt science to push their own agenda, but if you criticise non profits the left approves of, you are heartless and evil, and if you criticise science the left approves of, you are a Science Denier)
